All of RafaelF's Comments + Replies
Larks, as much as you consider the provided cost-benefit analysis to be "naive", I am afraid the same applies to several of the counter-points you mentioned. Could you please give some sources that support (a) your claims and (b) are broadly generalizable or generalizable to a degree they should support policy? Specifically, I think some of your assumptions you just take as given even though there is a lot of high-quality evidence to the contrary. I was also a bit disappointed that you did not want to answer on the below issues when you made that identical...
Dasgupta's work is very valuable and the approach in his paper that you linked is potentially powerful because they might give policy makers a way to create new adequate policies and allocate budgets and manpower. I believe his core point to be spot on, namely that nature provides very valuable services which are not properly factored in by modern economics. However, as a first issue, it runs against certain other beliefs which are strong and widespread among self-identified EAs like a general support of "growth" (often without distinction which kind of gr...
Very happy to see family planning being worked on!
Two questions:
- How does your approach differ from that of Population Media Center?
- Have you considered doing analysis/research of positive downstream synergistic effects of family planning? I know that this is far from your focused strategy but there might be a chance to gain much more support for family planning if there was greater knowledge of the positive synergistic effects that family planning has on individuals, nations/societies and even the planet as a whole.
I ran the numbers for 3 or 4 countries and
I think that biodiversity and ecosystem conservation are tremendously important fields and deserve much more attention from the EA community as a whole, so I am very happy to see someone else being interested in them as well!
(To those wondering why these fields are important: Biodiversity is an important protection against zoonoses and a big cornerstone of general global biosphere and ecosystem service resilience. Various ecosystems provide services directly or indirectly to humans, like pollinators or the Amazon basin which sustains big parts of the water...
Do you think that this has a net-positive balance, i.e. do you think that more people generally contribute, on average, more to solutions or more to pollution, CO2 emissions, animal suffering, etc.?
It is indeed a very tricky question. Of course, there is a chance that each newly born child becomes a climate researcher, politician, social worker etc. - but what are the odds? And do they outweigh, as you mentioned, all the "bad" (for lack of a better work that encompasses suffering and future issues) points?
My personal view on this, as I mentioned in my reply to Larks is that, until a certain point (namely the point where there is neither conflict about scarce resources within human society nor intense suffering caused by human society to other sentien...
Reducing population size in richer countries has an even bigger net-positive effect on several issues, especially that of climate change. Per-capita emissions in developed countries are simply much bigger. Obviously, thus, I completely support population size and/or growth reduction in developed countries as well.
The difference between developed and developing countries, however, is the dimension of the unmet demand for contraception. Developed countries are usually able to provide those who want to prevent further pregnancy with affordable and effective m...
Fair points that I ignored the benefits of larger populations - you are completely right. I didn't do this, though, for the sake of brevity and because that is not something people need to be convinced of, generally.
If you claim, however, that there are large benefits to larger populations, then why bother with access to contraceptives in the first place - if people feel blessed with more children? Also, does that mean that societies should become arbitrarily large? It would almost follow from the points you raised.
Also, if you think that generally the ben...
As you might have seen, Project Drawdown is not my primary source. I came to my conclusions from various sources, which mostly agree on the general idea: Reducing population size and/or growth is a very effective means for positive change in several other cause areas. This does not rely on one single source.
Regarding the cost for providing contraceptives, the costs of less than 10 USD p.a. per user are well established. See, for example, this publication by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA):
...Average direct costs to provide one year of method use are highest fo
Thanks for those links - pretty interesting!
I especially liked the "ROI analysis": "Through research into the most cost-effective development policies, the Copenhagen Consensus recommended expanding access to contraception universally as the third-best policy with a return to investment estimated at $120 per dollar spent [10]. [...] Family planning may have large benefits and ripple effects on various sectors, and is a large problem at scale."
Hi Ula,
thank you for your post and I am very happy to see this being worked on!
Family planning services and providing unmet contraception needs are, in my opinion, great interventions to pursue. Not only for the immediate effects on the women affected, but also on poverty outcomes (at the individual level, family level, and country level), for enabling countries to profit from the Demographic Dividend, and for reducing total human activity footprint and resource needs locally and globally. As you stated, it also has positive effects on farmed and wild anim... (read more)