Small Family Campaigns and Incentives
Are there ethical and moral ways for governments to accelerate the move to smaller families in order to contract population? Ethicists Colin Hickey and Jake Earl weigh in on why this should be done, and how we might do it fairly, in order to shrink our carbon footprint.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
-
Dave Gardner 00:03
As we begin the year 2017, world population sits at almost seven and a half billion. We're adding more than a million people to the planet every week, and in the process inflicting irreparable damage on our life supporting ecosystems. Hi, I'm Dave Gardner. Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, a project of World Population Balance. You can learn more about us at worldpopulationbalance.org. Historically, some of the most infamous efforts to reduce fertility rates in order to avoid or reduce overpopulation have focused on the poorest people in the world. Many people are aware that fertility rates in industrialized countries like the US are at or even below replacement level. Meanwhile, the ten nations with the highest fertility rates are all poor nations in Africa. And those rates run between 5.8 and 7.6. But what if I told you the biggest overpopulation problem is in wealthy societies like the United States, Australia, Canada, and Western Europe? Well, my guests today are Colin Hickey and Jake Earl, two doctoral candidates and teaching associates in philosophy at Georgetown University. Hello, gentlemen.
Jake Earl 01:24
Hi Dave.
Colin Hickey 01:25
Hi Dave.
Dave Gardner 01:25
Thanks for joining me.
Jake Earl 01:26
Thanks for having us.
Dave Gardner 01:27
Great. In October of last year, 2016, the two of you along with Travis Rieder at Johns Hopkins published a paper titled Population Engineering and the Fight Against Climate Change. Now in the last Overpopulation Podcast, I spoke with Travis Rieder about the personal moral obligation to conceive fewer children. Today, Jake and Colin have graciously agreed to talk with me about the pros and cons and intricacies of altering public policy to influence family size decisions. Now, gentlemen, this paper argues that the threats posed by climate change justify population engineering, as you call it - the intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations. Now, I think we all know human overpopulation impacts many things: traffic, aquifers being pumped dry, fertile soil depletion, ocean dead zones to name but a few. You chose climate change. Why is that?
Colin Hickey 02:32
Great. Thanks, Dave. This is Colin, I think I'll step in for a second here. The central reason I think, to take on climate change with respect to concerns about population is because it's most likely the widest scale threat to human wellbeing over the next, over the next at least century beyond that, as well. It's in some ways the the sort of umbrella environmental challenge, the magnitude of the harms, the scope of the harms, how climate change is produced, implicates and exacerbates basically every other environmental concern. So it's the kind of multiplier of food shortages, water availability, public health and disease control efforts, you know, geopolitical concerns, sustainability of marine ecosystems, habitats, the things you mentioned, pollution, biodiversity, landscape preservation. So in some ways, all of the other major environmental concerns and a lot of other public health concerns are all implicated by how we deal with and how well we mitigate or adapt to the threats already happening and impending threats from climate change.
Dave Gardner 03:51
Well, that makes sense. And I guess, in many ways, that seems to be one of the most urgent ticking time bombs we face, or at least we know about, that's for sure.
Colin Hickey 04:00
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 04:01
Well, how did you guys reach the conclusion that reducing population can be a significant strategy against climate disruption?
Jake Earl 04:07
This is Jake. I think I'll I'll take this one. So we began these conversations a couple of years ago. Colin, his main research is in climate change, but I was sort of a neophyte at that time. And one of the things that struck Colin and Travis and I was that, you know, it's pretty well understood what drives climate change. And one of the main causes is just population growth. So, climate change is caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the amount of greenhouse gases can be calculated by looking at per capita emissions of carbon methane, other other warming gases. And then the number of capitas you might say, how many people are emitting these gases through their activities. One of the things that struck us was that you know, very, there's very little attention paid from the policy perspective about addressing this enormous factor that's driving global warming. So we thought, "Well, why not? And what, what could be done to address this? And would it be morally, morally advisable to do so?"
Dave Gardner 05:23
Well, we'll get a little bit into the reasons why perhaps no one was really addressing that. Which, which kind of makes me chuckle. You guys just decided to wade right in with the, swim with the sharks, didn't you?
Jake Earl 05:37
Yeah, we did.
Dave Gardner 05:38
But can you can you give us an idea of how, you know, kind of like a percentage, how significant this could be, if we were to decide to focus on reducing family size?
Jake Earl 05:49
Sure. So you know, this is a this is an issue that's been under studied. There have been a few studies though by climate scientists. One, one figure that we've that we've come across is that, you know, reducing population growth, say by changing our growth rate from the UN's median projection, which is now projecting that by 2100, there'll be slightly over eleven billion people on the planet to the low projection, which would reduce fertility by an average of point five children per woman. That would result in roughly the same number of people that we have now by 2100. If we were to follow that sort of pathway, rather than the median pathway, by 2050, we could see anywhere between fifteen and 30%, reductions in expected emissions. By 2100, we could see as much as forty to 60% reduction in expected emissions. And that's if we do nothing, nothing else to mitigate climate change.
Dave Gardner 06:48
And that's just point five, that's just a point five fertility rate reduction, which-
Jake Earl 06:53
Point five fertility rate reduction, which has huge implications over over the century in terms of the number of people. But right nota, not an enormous reduction by any means.
Dave Gardner 07:03
Well, you may have just answered my question. I was next going to ask about this swimming with the sharks comment that I made a few minutes ago that it does seem that advising people on how many children it's ethical to conceive seems to be a pretty sticky wicket these days. So I was going to ask you why not just concentrate on all the other ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Anything to say about that?
Colin Hickey 07:26
Yeah, I'll sit in, this is Colin again. In looking through this and trying to figure out, you know, whether it'd be permissible to, to take on, you know, again, this, this population concern that, you know, people have, again, been reluctant to step into. One of the things that that we think is really important is to look at the alternatives - ways of addressing, mitigating, and adapting to climate change without addressing population. And so in, in doing this, we sort of take the lead from the IPCC and look sort of at the all of their strategies that they have come up with in, you know, they've run a bunch of mitigation scenarios to try and generate proposals that wouldn't overly burden the economy, that would deal with reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to prevent the worst, most dangerous effects from climate change. And so they they propose, and we, in the paper, we call this the sort of consensus approach to tackling climate change in a way that doesn't address population in any significant way. And so the the sort of consensus approach that comes out of the IPCC involves trying to basically decarbonize the energy supply, increase energy and greenhouse gas efficiency, and in other economic sectors, taxing and pricing greenhouse gas production, trying to set up ways of altering consumer behavior and lifestyle. So you know, that might be getting a hybrid, switching to a vegetarian diet, those kinds of things. And, you know, sort of better planning of settlement patterns, transportation systems, those kinds of sort of big, systemic changes. And I take it that we have, we have a number of reasons why we're skeptical that that alone is enough, or we should rest comfortably with that sort of consensus approach by itself. And so I'll take you through some of our reasons for for having some concern and thinking that we need to at least open the door to the conversation about addressing population with respect to dealing with climate change. So the first thing is that the the consensus approach that's laid out in the IPCC at the Paris Accords, sort of agreed upon, at first sort of take the threshold for trying to prevent dangerous climate change to be at around two degrees. So they think if we can, if we can avoid two degrees warming, we'll be, you know, avoiding the worst of it. And so the first thing to note is that, and now there's there's sort of consensus coming out of a lot of political bodies and climate scientists that even if we sort of do all of the measures that require us, or that are required for us to prevent a two degree warming, but that's not really enough, that that threshold still risks far too many harms to human populations and to the environment broadly. So we think that just taking the consensus approach isn't, might not be enough to get us to two degrees. But even if it, you know, to prevent us from going over two degrees warming, but even if it could, and remember that getting there, if you sort of followed the the IPCC and the Paris Accords, getting to two degrees, even accomplishing that will require much more significant reductions than what has already been agreed upon in the international negotiations. So that's the sort of first step. The second step is that even if that threshold works, the two degree threshold works, in the IPCC, all of their mitigation scenarios to try and get us there leave as high as a 33% chance that we still cross the the two degree threshold, that we still have all of the harms that come from crossing it, even if we radically decarbonize the energy supply in all the ways that they recommend. And so we're concerned that that probability is much too high, we think we should do, we shouldn't be comfortable with it, we should do what we can to try and reduce the chance that we cross that two degree threshold. And the last few things that I'll say are that in, in estimating what we need to do without addressing population, the kind of consensus approach that I outlined a second ago relies on a lot of technological assumptions that we're not particularly comfortable with. So it relies on wide scale adoption and deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies, usage of nuclear energy. Right now, we just don't have the carbon capture and storage. And so we don't think it's a good idea to bank our sort of climate change mitigation hopes on a technology that we don't have and can't use. And then, you know, nuclear energy has its own political hiccups as well. So those are some sort of some of the main reasons. We're also, we'd like to point out that it's important to recognize the the sort of consensus approach that is outlined in the IPCC to try and deal with climate change without population, they are recommendations that are produced that usually are sort of over-optimistic because there are a lot of political pressures and economic interests in the negotiating parties that, that negotiate these international agreements. And so we think that there's a lot of room to be looking for alternatives to sort of help the cause, as it were.
Dave Gardner 12:41
Well, you mentioned political pressures and economic interests and, you know, and I just want to kind of add a footnote that, you know, the I think one of the biggest hurdles, both in the setting that causes us to set timid goals, and then makes it really hard for us to even even meet those is that we have this obsession with economic growth. And so as hard as it is to bring ourselves to start talking about overpopulation and trying to affect fertility rates and family size decisions, it seems like it's almost even almost harder for us to talk about scaling back the size of our economy as a reaction to climate change anyway.
Colin Hickey 13:23
Yeah, that's usually not not a good political talking point, given the climate as it is.
Dave Gardner 13:27
No kidding. No kidding. Okay. Well, you know, many people assume, let's go back to population now. Many people assume that any efforts to reduce population would take way too long to make a meaningful difference in time to avert disaster. And I think that's one of the things that's contributed to the to the silence, but you just, I think people might be pretty astonished at what you said about how just by 2050 or by the turn of the century, we could see a significant difference.
Jake Earl 13:54
Yeah, so one of the things that that is interesting is generally when people think about population change, people who are even very well informed, they realize, oh, there's population momentum, so the sorts of natural changes that we see in fertility that result from you know, higher incomes and increased literacy rates among women, for example, those do take a long time. But active interventions, things like providing people with birth control, providing them with reproductive care, and some of the perhaps more radical policy proposals we've considered can can reduce fertility at a rate that can, you know, significantly change what the world's human population looks like in terms of size, you know, on the fifty to one hundred year timescale, which, you know, coincidentally, is the sort of timescale that we're looking at for the critical climate changes that that we're facing. Yeah. So it really doesn't take that long to change even the you know, the size of the world's population by billions of people. Yeah.
Dave Gardner 14:58
Yeah, it could, in some ways, it could you was take nine months.
Jake Earl 15:02
Right.
Dave Gardner 15:04
If we got serious, nine months from, you know, if we got serious tomorrow, nine months later we would start to see a difference.
Jake Earl 15:09
Absolutely. Interestingly, yeah.
Dave Gardner 15:11
Okay. So you mentioned in the paper that policymakers and moral theorists alike have been reluctant to wade into discussions of population policy. So why is that do you think and what do you have to say to them?
Jake Earl 15:25
So I'll take this one. This is This is Jake, again. One of the interesting things that we found in doing research for this for this project is that, you know, there was a lot of discussion about different sorts of population control efforts around the middle of the century, you know, lots of studies, lots of political and philosophical debate about these sorts of policies. And then it all got kind of quiet after after the seventies. One of the reasons for that is that, you know, we saw in a lot of the policies that were actually implemented in places like China, India, Singapore, Peru, and elsewhere, these sorts of policy policies had a lot of negative effects. People ended up being coerced into having abortions, these policies overburdened, poor people and minorities, there were a lot of nasty side effects of these policies. And I think that this resulted somewhat in the in the policy and political discussion with an overcorrection. So, you know, we saw that, ooh, these policies result in coercion and rights violations. So therefore, no sort of policy that interferes with people's reproductive choices or influences people's reproductive choices is morally permissible. So we shouldn't talk about them, and we shouldn't address them. And I think that, that that indeed was was an overcorrection. And it's led a lot of people to overlook other sorts of ways of influencing people's reproductive decisions that, you know, are morally permissible and might have lots of great consequences in terms of public health.
Dave Gardner 16:57
That's pretty good, quick thumbnail sketch, I think for us, thanks. Thanks for that. Let's go through the four types of interventions that you identify in the paper that could effectively reduce human fertility rates, maybe you could enlighten us a little bit about the spectrum you identify and just really briefly, you know, kind of enumerate what our options are.
Colin Hickey 17:20
Yeah, so I'll I'll step in here. This is Colin, again. So yeah, so we want to, we try and draw out like a lot of public health interventions, we want to draw out ways of sort of categorizing types of interventions that we could that we could employ to achieve desired effects. And so we think that interventions basically can be arranged on a scale with respect to how risky they are for sort of amounting to or resulting in coercion. So we, we lay out, sketch out four categories that we call sort of choice enhancement strategies, which we think has have a really, really low risk of coercion. Basically, they're not going to be coercive at all. These are the kinds of things that that most people are okay with already. We're okay with expanding education access, we're, we're okay with funding family planning services, public health efforts that sort of allow people medical resources that would that would allow them to, to family plan on their own. These are the kinds of things that are sort of widely supported, don't risk being coercive, really at all. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there are the sort of really coercive interventions of the kinds that showed up and sort of tilted the historical discussion away from thinking about population policy significantly. So these are things, you know, like forced abortions, forced sterilizations, things that result in really serious harms and more wrongs. And then we think that there is a sort of a range in the middle that, if done wrongly, can risk being coercive or morally problematic in other ways, but we think aren't in principle wrong, that could be justifiable, and if designed the right way, with contextual features, paying attention to sort of local effects and, and whatnot, we think that they can be justifiable. And so we call these two categories, sort of preference adjustment interventions, and incentivization interventions. And so I'll just say a little bit really briefly, and I know we're going to talk more about about the sort of moral defense for these kinds of interventions later, but but when we're talking about sort of preference adjustment, I mean, we can think of a number of strategies to try and influence people's behavior. So we we're trying to sort of think of ways of getting people to adjust their preferences to encourage them to have fewer children, right? And so we think about this category as a sort of way of changing cultural norms and sort of influencing individual's beliefs and desires with the goal of getting them to sort of change their procreative behavior. So these are the kinds of things that you might think of as sort of mass communication strategies, right? Mass media, radio, TV content, billboards, poster campaigns.
Dave Gardner 19:54
Podcasts.
Colin Hickey 19:55
Podcasts, exactly. Thank you. You know, theater, you know, artist work, that kind of that kind of stuff, right? You know, funding for public lectures. And, you know, maybe we'll talk about this more later. But there are a bunch of different ways in which we can do that. And some of them are more and less problematic. And maybe I'll hold off and talk about some of the sort of moral concerns later. And touch really briefly on incentivization strategies because this is the other sort of middle category that we think can go wrong if it's designed improperly, can have a risk of coercion, but, but also can be, we think, morally defensible, which, again, we'll argue, sort of present the argument for a little bit later. But incentives are really about sort of directly altering the cost and benefit balance with respect to individual sort of reproductive decisions and behaviors. So there we can think of things like, you know, paying people to take a family planning class, or paying people to fill their birth control prescriptions. Those are what we call sort of positive incentives. And then on the other side, we can think of negative incentives, which we can talk about some of these distinctions later, too, but things like, you know, taxes, other kinds of policies that directly alter sort of the costs or benefits associated with with having children. Does that rise enough of a start to dive in?
Dave Gardner 21:22
Yeah, that's great. This is so fascinating. I think the incentive conversation will be probably one of the most interesting parts of this dialogue that we'll have today. So we'll definitely circle back to that. You guys being in the philosophy arena, you bend over backwards to really, seriously evaluate the consequences of any of these things and the the how ethical they are, how moral they are, how just how intrusive they are in terms of people's rights, I guess I would say. And frequently, I think in your you know, when you're explaining how you would defend some of these, you mentioned that right now, the balance of incentives really is tilted in the other direction, care to comment on that? Right now, there there tend to be, in really most countries around the world, there are financial incentives to incentivize having more children.
Jake Earl 22:19
Sure. So So one of the things that we noticed in this research and you know, looking at objections to policies aimed at influencing people's reproductive choices is that people who think that, you know, we shouldn't we shouldn't have such policies, seem to think that reproductive choices now are made in a vacuum, that there aren't strong cultural, social, religious, and even institutional pressures to have more children than one might have had were those pressures not in place. So when people level the charge against us that oh, well, these sorts of policies are going to violate people's reproductive freedoms, their reproductive autonomy. And one of our one of our responses is to point out, well look, people now it's not clear that the decisions that they make are entirely autonomous, especially especially in the developing world, where in addition to these sorts of pressures on decision, lots of people don't even have the resources to take actual control of their own reproduction. So in developing contexts, and in the developed world, we don't we don't really think that we live in a world where, you know, full reproductive autonomy is realized. And indeed, perhaps having some policies that push in the other direction could counteract some of these pronatalist policies and and cultural forces that influence and distort people's own decisions and their and their, their reproductive values.
Dave Gardner 23:46
You mentioned when you were laying out this spectrum of potential interventions, the easy, the low hanging fruit, the easy stuff that is has really low risk of being coercive or being problematic, the choice enhancement stuff, that that sounds so unobjectionable, although there, you can always find someone who's going to object to just about anything, but that just is so unobjectionable, why not just stay there? Why do you make the case for interventions that are even moderately more risky in terms of coercion?
Jake Earl 24:22
So I think the the main reason is that, you know, we, as we said before, you know, looking at the, looking at the data, looking at the projections for you know, how, how quickly would we need to reduce fertility in order for it to make a significant impact on climate change? It's just that choice enhancement isn't enough. You know, like with any other sort of policy intervention, it takes a while to get these things set up. You know, it will take time - and we don't have a lot of time. So in terms of efficacy, we think that choice enhancement, even if we could get it set up very quickly, the effects that the adoption rates would be It's too slow to be able to have a significant effect on climate change. So that that led us to look at, at these other types of policies, the preference adjustment and incentivization policies. And, you know, the closer we looked, the more that the more that we found, yeah, there are, there are good policy alternatives within these categories. And we use these sorts of policies all the time in other contexts. Colin mentioned a number of types of policies, but, you know, we, we have public information campaigns to try to get people to stop smoking or to get tested for sexually transmitted infections. We, you know, do all sorts of things to incentivize people to say, see their primary care physician, or even to go to the gym. We do all sorts of things to affect people's decisions about their bodies and about their health, in order to, you know, promote public health and even even sometimes to promote environmental values. And so we thought, well, you know, maybe there's not a big difference between, you know, these sorts of preference adjusting and incentivizing policies that we do in other contexts and using these sorts of policies to affect people's reproductive decisions.
Dave Gardner 26:15
In the paper, you guys do a great job of analyzing the kind of the differences in, you know, all the different considerations depending on whether you're talking about a developing population in a developing country or a population in the industrialized world. And isn't it true that the, the biggest greenhouse gas emitters today are in the wealthy nations, the overdeveloped nations of the world and they have less, there's less of a deficit of choice enhancement, they already have more access to education and better, better gender equity. So that would kind of force us to move farther along on the spectrum because of the urgency that you just mentioned.
Colin Hickey 26:55
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Dave, that's exactly right. That's one of the other sort of main reasons why, you know, we in the paper think that we're justified in looking beyond the sort of easier to defend choice enhance enhancement strategies. Because, as you pointed out, and you mentioned this actually, in your, in your opening in your introduction, that the the biggest effects, while there are still gaps in access to contraceptives and family planning services in the United States, in the developed world, it's the sort of bang for your buck is much smaller there than it is in the developing world. And so to get any inroads in populations where the per capita emissions just swamp out the per capita emissions in some of the developing contexts, I mean, sometimes, you know, ten, fifty, two hundred times greater emissions by the average American than some people in, you know, poorer people in developing nations, right? The way to reach them to adjust and try and change reproductive behavior in those populations where we can achieve much greater emissions reductions per child avoided, we think the strategies that would actually be efficacious sort of by necessity go beyond just the mere sort of provision of contraceptives, family planning services, choice enhancement strategies that, as you said, are already sort of, well, not perfect, decently well attained in some developed contexts.
Dave Gardner 28:23
But at the same time, you guys do a really terrific job, I think, in the paper of addressing why we shouldn't just ignore those populations that have currently very low carbon footprint, but but high fertility rate, you want to comment on that?
Colin Hickey 28:40
Yeah, sure. So I think I think, again, there are a couple of reasons for why we need to look at basically everybody, it's a sort of, you know, all hands on deck approach, and not just look at only the strategies that would affect, you know, wealthy people in the developed world. And so the couple of reasons, I think, are basically as follows. Now, we just know sort of, predictably, as a matter of, you know, the sort of empirical data that we have, that these developing nations will continue to develop, they are developing and will continue to develop. And while there's been a little bit of a tempering in some contexts of how intense, with respect to greenhouse gases, all of that development actually is. In most places, especially over the next fifty to a hundred years, that development is going to come with net greenhouse gas emission increases, right? So when you lift people out of poverty, which we think is a moral necessity, it's a moral requirement - people are facing really serious deprivation and injustice by being in absolute poverty. But when you lift them out, right, usually you have an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And we're going to see that predictably, in in wide swaths of the developing world. So it's both true that they will develop in these contexts and they should develop. I mean, life of absolute poverty is something really, really, really we need to avoid. And so while the the sort of per capita emissions avoided per child avoided are smaller initially in the near term in these some of these developing nations that have low carbon footprints right now, over the long term, they matter because these are big populations increasing in wealth. So that's, that's one part of it. The second part is just thinking sort of generally going back to our, our sort of four category spectrum of types of interventions, we think that, you know, any broader population engineering program is going to have to include developing nations no matter what, with respect at least to the choice enhancement stuff, because those are, you know, the education family planning stuff that we've talked about. Those sort of are obviously going to be justifiable to deploy in, in developing contexts because they're autonomy enhancing, because they benefit individuals in those contexts. So no matter what they're gonna get linked in by just this sort of choice enhancement stuff. And then as we'll talk about later, we think that, you know, some of the incentive categories and some of the sort of preference adjustment media campaign strategies, those also can be choice enhancement. Sorry, it can be choice enhancing. So we think that there's a sort of moral good provided for the individuals as well, as this sort of the development happens and and the more emissions developing nations take on the the bigger gains we get from dealing with population stuff there now anyway, even though emissions right now are, are lower.
Dave Gardner 31:41
You know, I want to put my spin on it. This is really just kind of repeating what you just said in a different way. If we don't plan on keeping the developing world poor, then in a hundred years, both populations are going to be significant challenge. Huge. And kind of coupled with that, boy, what if we had started working on population a hundred years ago? Wouldn't we be in a much better place today? So it's just foolish to to ignore a population with a really high fertility rate because it's gotten, you know, we know, just because of the mathematics of exponential growth, that's going that that's going to eventually be a problem.
Colin Hickey 32:21
Yeah, and I'll just, I'll just flag here and we'll talk about this later as we sort of develop what the sort of broader vision is. But just to put a little point on it here, given that this sort of question is well, so why we know we can get a lot of carbon reductions by dealing with the developed world, but and the question is why deal with the developing world too is, it's important that with respect to our proposal, that not all of the same strategies are going to apply in every context, right? So we're going to have a different sort of network of, of intervention strategies depending on the context. And so we can talk about that a little bit later, but but I think that's important to to flag here is that we think we need to address them all but we'll address them in slightly different ways.
Dave Gardner 33:04
Differently. Sure, sure. Okay, so before we get back to the, the incentives, let's talk about the other part in the middle of the spectrum, the preference adjusting interventions, you know, some people, some objectors, you know, could just object to some of that as psychological manipulation. Can you address that?
Colin Hickey 33:25
Yeah, so I'll, I'll jump in again here. Yeah. So this is good. I mean, so I think there's, there's a real worry that that people have, which is that even if these kinds of communication strategies, media efforts, even if they're not coercive in the sort of strict sense, that they might still be morally problematic, that they might still violate autonomy rights, even if they don't make people worse off or anything, they might be manipulative. And so we can sort of think, you know, along the lines of what, you know, concerns we have with brainwashing or propaganda, that, that, you know, propaganda brainwashing, they don't have to necessarily make the person that's brainwashed, worse off, right? They don't have to strictly speak and coerce them into doing something, you don't have to threaten them, you don't have to close off options and make it you know, you don't have to, you know, point a gun to their head and tell them to do something, but there still seems to be something problematic with respect to the individual making of an autonomous choice. And so while I think I mean, they're legitimate concerns about some kinds of strategies that might be sort of classified along with the strategies we're talking about that could be called preference adjusting, preference adjustment interventions. We think the things that we have actually outlined, it's pretty easy to avoid some of the sort of worst forms of interventions that might be, might be really manipulative, might sort of look more like brainwashing or or the kinds of things that we would actually have a moral problem with. So most of the really problematic forms involve deceit, trickery, false information. And we don't really think we need any of that. The kinds of strategies that that we defend, that I laid out a little bit earlier, you know, are again, really about changing cultural norms. And so, if we're talking about radio, podcasts, TV content, billboards, a lot of this and they are, you know, historically a number of cases of this through India and radio programs in Africa and Mexico, sort of telenovelas that, that, you know, sympathetically show characters changing their views about the ideal family size, or that, you know, depict family planning and, you know, sort of spacing of children apart, or restraining childbearing. Showing some of the hardships of having too many children, just sort of casting small family size in a positive light, suggesting role models or suggesting ideas and narratives that people can can empathize with, that they can identify with and sort of see these, see as an option sort of open pathways. And we don't really think that any of that looks like the kinds of concerns that would be really manipulative, this sort of brainwashing really propaganda forms that require deceit or trickery. And, sort of, you know, importantly, Jake suggested this a little bit ago that we accept these kinds of interventions in all sorts of other settings without thinking they're psychologically manipulative or without thinking they're brainwashing. So we do this with sexual health, with STD education, right, Jake mentioned, sort of anti-smoking campaigns. Advertising generally is like this. And now there might be some problems with some advertising, but if the kinds of strategies we outline all count as psychologically manipulative, then I think the worry is that way too many things would count as psychologically manipulative and sort of everything would be morally problematic along this line.
Dave Gardner 36:50
Yeah. But you don't see anyone objecting to, you know, a just say no to drugs poster or even like the Rosie the Riveter posters, you know, during the during the war effort. Everybody that was clearly propaganda designed to influence public behavior.
Colin Hickey 37:05
Right.
Dave Gardner 37:06
With no objections.
Colin Hickey 37:08
Right, I mean, well, yeah.
Dave Gardner 37:10
I was gonna say there's, let me add there's plenty of propaganda right now. There's plenty of pronatalist propaganda out there right now.
Colin Hickey 37:17
Yeah, exactly. You know, and so Jake, was sort of talking about some of this stuff a little bit earlier. And and yeah, so along the same lines, we think that in some ways these can be correctives, right? These can be correctives, to sort of, to resettle the debate. So it's a live option that people aren't, you know, immediately shamed at the prospect of not having kids or, or pressured by family, pressured by religious institutions, pressured by, you know, culture broadly, or, you know, pressured by tax code, you know, these kinds of things we think can be correctives for some of those pressures.
Dave Gardner 37:53
Okay, well, let's move on to incentives, this is going to be an exciting conversation. And let me just maybe kind of throw a, light a match here and say that, you know, it's kind of hard to engineer around the fact that negative incentives are probably, are definitely more likely to influence support than they are the rich. I'm personally not sure that that is an ethical or moral problem. But you guys seem to take a very, very kind and considerate role. And you consider all that and go through a lot of, you guys jump through a lot of hoops trying to, you don't really prescribe a specific system, but you did lay kind of lay out a framework that you think would help guide us to being as fair as possible. So, so I just wanted to throw that out as a spark to the conversation and then just let you guys kind of explain the framework, you know, what you kind of arrived at regarding incentives.
Jake Earl 38:53
Yeah, so I'll take the conversation on this one.
Dave Gardner 38:56
Good luck, good luck with that.
Jake Earl 38:58
Thanks so much. So I think that yeah, our discussion of incentives is probably one of the most controversial parts of this project, in part because, you know, a lot of the worst policies, you know, regarding population in the twentieth century involved some sort of incentive scheme, often with, you know, government officials deceiving people about, you know, the nature of, you know, what's what's required to get these incentives and what the risks involved are. You know, India, you know, has a has a tumultuous political history with with these sorts of programs. One of the things that, you know, just just picking up on, Dave, your, your remark about poorer people being more easily influenced by negative incentives. We think that that's right. That they would be more easily influenced. You know, if we were to say, uniformly tax people for having, you know, more than one child that would absolutely be a regressive tax, it would much more easily influence poorer people than richer people. We also think, though, that it carries a much larger risk of coercion, a much larger risk of actually violating people's, you know, bodily, bodily rights and, you know, and reproductive rights to place that extra burden on the poor. And additionally, we think that we can accomplish a lot of the same sorts of goals in terms of reducing fertility through positive incentives. You know, so when it comes to incentives, we've kind of adopted this, this general sort of guideline of carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich, where the sticks are understood as sort of a sort of a last resort, we think that we could go a long way with with the other policies, but really, that, you know, when when thinking about incentives, we reserve the negative incentives, those that, you know, reduce some kind of benefit that people had access to previously, for wealthier people, people who can bear the cost in some more robust way than than poor people can.
Dave Gardner 41:01
Well, you know, I know I'm gonna get in trouble for what I said, so. And I didn't say it well. I guess what I really meant to say was that I don't want to pick on poor people and I certainly don't want to come up with policies that would, that would weed them out in some kind of new age eugenics eugenics program. That's certainly not what I have in mind at all. But I, but I do feel like we need to eliminate the subsidies that socialize the cost of having more children somehow. But at the same time, I really, I mean, can can we find a way where we can really beat up on the rich people who, you know, no matter what we throw at them, it seems like, you know, Mitt Romney's going to be able to afford to have a large family? How do we influence the family size decisions of people like Mitt Romney, for example?
Jake Earl 41:46
So this is a great question. And you know, we've we've gotten this challenge before. So negative incentives would be very effective for poorer people and it seems that they would be less effective, unless we want to leverage very, very large disincentives for wealthy people. You know, again, as you pointed out, we haven't worked out all of the details. We do think, though, that, you know, incentives should be structured progressively, just because it will take fewer incentives, and generally positive incentives will be more effective, sort of the lower on the income scale you are, you know, as you move up to medium income, maybe we drop sort of all positive or negative incentives. And then as we get to the higher income brackets, that's where we start introducing, say negative incentives for higher order children. Now, granted, we know that the Romney's are a great case, right? So very wealthy families who are just dead set, for whatever sort of reasons, on having, you know, four, five, six, seven, eight children. You know, likely they will bear the costs of any sort of, you know, noncoercive negative incentives that we could offer. However, we can also get a lot of money out of those people, a lot of money that can be put toward other sorts of efforts, you know, funding reproductive health care for poorer people or other climate change mitigation efforts, globally and domestically. So in some sense, you might say that, what we're what we really think would be useful, even if we can't influence all that strongly very wealthy people and their reproductive decisions, we can at least have some sort of carbon tax, you know, their, their reproductive behaviors.
Dave Gardner 43:24
I do want to give you a chance to maybe explain a little bit about how you kind of work out something that you think would be as fair as possible to, to people who are, you know, closer to the poverty level? Can you outline that for us?
Jake Earl 43:37
Yeah, sure. So one of the things that, and again, you know, it's worth, it's worth distinguishing, talking about people who are in poverty, say, in a developed nation like the United States and people who are in poverty in various places, like Tanzania, or, or Zambia, or places like that. You know, it's a very different kind of poverty. But we do generally think that when it comes to poorer people, you know, we we prioritize choice enhancement, so giving people the tools that they need just in order to make the decisions that they want to make with regard to how many children that they have. So making reproductive health care, birth control, giving them information about family planning methods, the benefits and drawbacks of those methods, and making that available to them. Generally, you know, poorer people have much less control over their own reproduction than than wealthier people. We also think that poorer people, again, both domestically and internationally, are going to be much more influenced by the various preference adjustment media campaigns that that Colin was talking about a moment ago. These are much more effective for people who are tend to be less educated and tend to be less informed about these issues already. So we think that, you know, for all we know, and again, we're not we're not policy experts, we would like to get policy experts to weigh in on this. For all we know it might be possible that people living at or near the federal poverty level in the United States that only those policies would do enough to significantly reduce their their fertility rates or reduce them enough that we can say, "Well, now we can focus our efforts elsewhere." But then beyond that, you know, we also envision positive incentives that would be targeted at poor families to get them to make decisions that, or at least consider decisions that might be in their best interest with respect to making their families smaller. So you know, incentivizing or giving families some sort of payment for taking family planning classes, incentivizing women to see a primary primary care physician, or, or a gynecologist on a regular basis. These are sorts of interventions that we know that when they're done regularly, tend to reduce people's fertility rates. And it's one thing to make them free or lower their cost, it's another thing to say, "Well, you know, we'll give you a, we'll give you a $200 credit or something like that for seeing your gynecologist once a year, or for taking one of these family planning classes." We think that that could, that could do a lot to really change behaviors. But again, you know, something that we want to point out internationally and even somewhat so domestically, in terms of bang per buck, you know, it's, it's wealthier children that go on to produce more greenhouse gases. So in some sense, you know, if we have, you know, $1 to spend toward one of these policies and we could choose to target, say, you know, reducing fertility of a wealthier person or reducing fertility of a poorer person, we might want to target the wealthier person to see if we can lower their fertility because that'll just have a larger effect on reducing greenhouse gases.
Dave Gardner 46:47
Good points. But I guess I still want to focus one more question on the, on the poor in the in the over already overdeveloped world, because there's frequently conversations among sustainable population advocates will pop up where they talk about the fact that we've got these, you know, we've got the wrong kind of incentives in place now. Right now, we've got child tax credits, and we've got income tax deductions, and welfare payments that almost, you know, amount to, you know, have another baby get a bigger check. You know, and a lot of that's designed to make sure that the welfare of those children is better. So would you advise that we consider making adjustments to that at all?
Jake Earl 47:27
So So I think that this is a this is a really great concern. You know, one of the one of the problems with some historical policies aimed at reducing fertility, Singapore as an example comes to mind, the policies they implemented in the seventies and early eighties is that, you know, if you target behaviors sort of at the wrong point in time or in the wrong point in the lifecycle, you end up just harming children. So for instance, Singapore had a policy where, you know, if you have more than some designated number of children, then your children are going to have, they're not going to have the same access to good public schools. So they had a lottery system in place. And so you know, your your students will get a worse lottery ranking if you end up having too many children in your family. We tend to shy away from policies like that, in part because as you pointed out, these sorts of policies would hurt children who are not, you know, liable for having been born, not their fault. They didn't choose the family that they were born into. We think that one way to get around and to mitigate this sort of problem is specifically to target what we call upstream behaviors. So you know, the the positive and negative incentives being targeted at, you know, behaviors about, you know, how to reproduce, when to reproduce, how, you know, when when to get healthcare, what kind of information people are getting - before they say become pregnant. Before they decide, yeah, let's have let's have our third child. And again, you know, when it comes to talking about poorer people, the threat of coercion is much more significant, you know, a $300 penalty is going to affect, you know, a family making $35,000 a year much more heavily than that same penalty will affect a family making twice as much or three times or four times as much.
Dave Gardner 49:12
So, in a way, the answer, maybe he is obvious, but maybe not. Maybe you just wrote that paper to tweak us a little bit. Do you? Do you think we're ready for this conversation?
Colin Hickey 49:24
Good question.
Dave Gardner 49:29
And maybe you've changed your mind, just based on the reactions to the paper since it was published.
Colin Hickey 49:35
Yeah, you know, so I suspect Jake and I will both say a little bit on on this. You know, it's interesting. So I you know, I focus on climate change and global justice in my sort of central research, my my doctoral work is on that. And so often people are working climate stuff, it's hard for us to be particularly optimistic and it's easy for us to slip into cynicism. And you know, I think my honest answer is not totally sure. However, you know, even even though sort of politically, we've seen some, some discouraging outcomes recently, with respect to thinking about how to deal with climate change, recognizing its reality, much less it's magnitude and dealing with sort of morally justifiable ways of trying to avoid the most dangerous effects. So while they're sort of, you know, political obstacles, the public opinion towards addressing climate change is more positive. And, you know, when we sort of deliver over these arguments to charitable readers, people are sort of like more sympathetic than I think we originally thought we might get as responses. We've gotten, you know, plenty of climate deniers that aren't particularly happy. But, you know, but-
Dave Gardner 50:54
There's been some surprisingly positive response.
Colin Hickey 50:58
Yeah, you know, and I think I think partly, some of this might come with respect to some of the, you know, pronatalist atmosphere that we have out there that I think some people are kind of looking for this conversation to be raised again, for permission to sort of break away from some of the pronatalist norms, right? And younger people sort of making their, you know, family planning decisions right now, like, I, I think people are open, at least now to thinking, thinking through some of the pressures that existed, and for them to have more kids than they wanted. And now like, it's in some ways, for some of the people that have been in touch with us, like a kind of, you know, relief to hear people talking about, and maybe trying to shift some of these norms to use less pressure on them to have kids that make the grandparents happy and stuff.
Dave Gardner 51:47
Yeah.
Colin Hickey 51:48
But I'll just say, and I'm sure, you know, Jake, will probably chime in here, too. I mean, so I think that there's a lot that needs to happen for us to sort of fully be be ready to both have this conversation and to think about implementing some of and some of the strategies that we were talking about. And, you know, we acknowledge in the paper, I want to sort of reiterate here, how important it is that, you know, we get the input from demographers and social scientists and public policy folks. And, you know, we've sort of tried to lay some of the philosophical and moral theoretical groundwork, but in order to sort of really tackle, you know, a population engineering program with the framework that we've sort of tried to lay out that we think is like morally defensible. I mean, we we need a lot of a lot of help, a lot of data, a lot of, you know, media, a lot of further sort of intellectual investment in this issue and in these concerns.
Dave Gardner 52:47
So do you think the timing is good, then? Do you think you might have picked the right time where you didn't piss everybody off and we can move, take this dialogue and start developing it?
Colin Hickey 53:00
Yeah, go for it.
Jake Earl 53:01
I think I can say with some certainty that we haven't pissed everybody off. We have gotten a lot of a lot of very positive, a lot of very encouraging feedback, a lot of that feedback is coming from people who've been paying attention to the population issue for decades now. You know, it's been very humbling and encouraging to get support from a lot of those people. And also, we've heard back from a number of people who work in empirical fields, you know, in, in policy planning, in demography, who now think that oh, well, now I can actually look at these issues, because they're not, you know, you guys have given us an argument that they're not morally taboo. And I think that, you know, this is in some way unfortunate. I think that in one way, the public is ready, in part because the population is growing at such an amazing rate. You know, I remember, it wasn't that long ago, when Earth's population passed six billion people, and it took even less, or will take even less to pass the eight billion mark. So I think that people are seeing that, I think that people are now seeing the effects, the early effects of climate change. And unfortunately, you know, as a species, we didn't really act quickly enough to address climate change without addressing population. I think that might have been possible at some point. But unfortunately, we didn't do that. And so here we are. So I think that, you know, in some way that those members of the public who acknowledged the real, dare I say, existential danger posed by climate change, are now going to be willing to listen to what you know, some years ago would still sound like completely off the wall radical solutions to the problem.
Colin Hickey 54:48
And I'll just add in, it was interesting. So I've actually sort of taught this material in two classes. I taught this this population/climate change material in an environmental ethics class that I was teaching and in a global justice class that I was teaching. And I was I was interested and surprised, you know, so not not just the sort of people that have been paying attention to population, you know, for a long time since the seventies, or, but, you know, I have college-age students that, that I was surprised, surprised actually how receptive and sympathetic they were to the argument, you know, once we, once we worked through it. So you know, and I think there might be a number of sort of reasons, recommendations for why, you know, younger audiences are more, more receptive, and then others, you know, climate change has been a force for their whole development and, and lives, maybe it's because they're not thinking about having kids yet, but, but they sort of, you know, have often a better sense of the climate science and they're also going to have to live with the consequences for longer periods and sort of more dramatically deal with them than us or my grandparents, etc. And so that was that was encouraging to see, you know, when, when we can sort of dwell on the argument, you know, in the context of an academic setting, and sort of go through it, where it's not just, you know, a headline, you know, that's wild philosophers think that we need to change the population. When people see the arguments we laid out here, people, I think, are much more receptive and sympathetic. And so I think then, you know, part of preparing us to sort of take advantage of the moment that, you know, we've seen some good climate change mobilization, right? So we saw what happened in standing off, we saw the people's climate march. Right there, there's energy, there's great work that organizations like threefifty.org are doing to mobilize around climate change. And we, with respect to that energy, we think that if if we can, you know, communicate, educate people about the kinds of arguments we're talking about here and show some of the limitations of the non-population strategies and some of the risks that we face by not by not trying to address population concerns, I think the more exposure the idea has, the more education we can have to, to communicate that there are morally defensible ways of doing this, right? That it doesn't have to all be the sort of horror and nightmare stories that we've seen, historically, when people start thinking about population control, right? If we can change this script, change some of the the sort of atmosphere around thinking about population, to get away from some of the the horrors that were really, really serious, egregious moral wrongs and rights violations, but to show that there are alternatives that still tackle population. You know, I think people are willing to be receptive to these ideas in this in a sort of political moment, that is.
Dave Gardner 57:44
Well, definitely sounds pretty optimistic. So maybe one of my last questions for you then might be, where do we go from here? And it may be a different answer for preference adjustment than it is for incentives. Who do we need to expect to make these changes? Or how do how do we start to make these things happen? Sorry.
Colin Hickey 58:17
We've done the work, hand it off and let other people take it from here. No, no, I'm joking. So yeah, this is a tough question. I, and I'm not I'm not totally sure how to give a satisfying answer. So we're, of course, continuing to work on this issue, we've got a follow up paper, but there's only so much that you can accomplish in sort of, you know, in academic journal settings. So I think especially with respect to the, to this preference adjustment informational campaigns, I mean, in some ways, right? We, you know, we, we need information media communication services, right, to support these kinds of efforts. And we need the funding from people that would be sympathetic. I like, so, you know, there's, there's a lot of power that people in positions of, you know, of celebrity have, that people in positions of media have. And with respect to delivering over the, the sort of information and playing out the role modeling and opening up scripts where people can think of it as a possibility to have fewer children, my sense at least, is that we need a lot of help from from media and people with power in media to talk about the the incentivization.
Jake Earl 59:43
Yeah, I mean, so so one of the things about, less so with, with the preference adjustment policies that that we were talking about, and but, but still, it's still an issue, but even more so with incentives is that you know, it, it doesn't, it doesn't do much work to incentivize people to do something if they then don't have the tools that they need to do it. So you know, we can talk about, say incentives for people to, you know, see a physician, but you know, if they don't trust physicians, if they don't know how to find one, if they don't speak the same language as the physician, then you know, all those incentives are going to be for not. In some sense, we recognize that all of these policy proposals that we're recommending need to come together in some kind of package. And in some ways, choice enhancement lays the groundwork, insofar as that gives people the tools that they need to take control of their own decisions. So I think in terms of political priorities, something like, and I think that there are a lot of authors who agree with us on this for a lot of different reasons, something like a global program, aimed at giving people just just giving them control over their reproductive lives is, if not a prerequisite, then something that needs to be done in tandem, say, with implementing preference adjustment and incentivization policies. But but again, you know, to, I think Colin has said this before, you know, we don't know. You know, we're not, you know, we're not, we're not economists, we're not policy experts, we're not demographers, we're not climate scientists, we're just humble moral philosophers. So I think that the next proximate step, and, you know, we would love if someone would reach out to us, is to actually figure out all right, well, what would the what would the fertility targets be over the next few decades? And then once we have that information, you know, how much and how quickly would we need to reduce fertility? And then what kind of climate change payoff would that have? Then we can can start pegging policies and start saying, "Okay, well, here's, here's the set of policies we would need to see this kind of decline in fertility in the United States, or in China, or in in Sub-Saharan Africa, you know, in within this time period." Unfortunately, there's just a lot that we don't know at this point.
Dave Gardner 1:02:07
So if I, I don't know if I, if I hear you right that we need to just continue and step up our efforts and choice choice enhancement and preference adjustment, and that will eventually, hopefully get us to a point where it is possibly politically realistic to start talking about the incentives, which it's safe to say would be years away unfortunately.
Jake Earl 1:02:33
It may not be that far away. I mean, I'll say this for myself, I don't know if Colin there, or if Travis would agree with me, in the United States and in in a lot of other nation-states, there are pronatalist policies, policies aimed at encouraging people to have more children. I think that we could do away with those policies, or implement policies to mitigate the effects when they're not policies, but say, you know, cultural, cultural factors. I know that Russia and Singapore have recently implemented such policies. I don't think there would be much risk of rights violation or of coercion or harm to reverse those policies. I think that that's a, that that's a first step step in changing changing the incentives. But yeah, aside from those, I think that we are, you know, maybe a little ways off yet from figuring out okay, well, well, what kind of incentive structures would be just and which ones would be efficacious for actually dealing with the problem at hand?
Dave Gardner 1:03:35
Great.
Colin Hickey 1:03:35
I think that that I think that that is, is definitely more likely to be true for the incentives side for sure, too, because I think that there actually are and, you know, sort of right now prior to doing much else without very serious risks of injustices, without risk of manipulation, without risk of rights violations, I think there are things that we could do right now with respect to the choice enhancement stuff, where we don't really have to have to figure out much more research. Because the cost of the initial investment is really low. I mean, it might even be none if we convince the right people that then go out and take public stands on things, right? So, the sort of power again, going back to this, but the power of celebrity. So imagine if if we convince some of the biggest voices in, in, in super popular culture, and in the way that say Leonardo DiCaprio has taken on climate change, right, created a documentary, he goes and speaks at the UN, goes and speaks, right? If you start having, you know, campaigns coming from people that have been convinced by the argument, right, that, you know, open up these options that try and adjust norms and values, I think we can do that, you know, right now if if people are willing to take up that mantle. And so you know, I'm putting a lot on on sort of media, but of course, like any good activism, like any good strategizing, grassroots campaigns also matter, matter in, in sort of more significant ways as a matter of fact. So I don't want to sort of take any of the the power away from from thinking about organizing and trying to just, you know, educate and get people on the ground grassroots level, thinking about some of these preference adjustments strategies, but I think some of that we can do without much further research.
Dave Gardner 1:05:32
Alright Leonardo DiCaprio, did you hear that? Give me a call. You can reach, you can reach me - davegardner@worldpopulationbalance.org. We've been talking about the paper that was published last October, Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change. I want to mention that that's not one of those papers that's only existent in existence behind a paywall somewhere. That it is pretty easy to find that. My advice would be if you Google that, you'll turn it up. I don't know if you guys have a better easier way to point people to that if they want to read that.
Jake Earl 1:06:09
That's the best way.
Colin Hickey 1:06:10
Yeah, that's way. It's, you can find on any one of our academia.edu profiles if you Google it. It's also linked to on an NPR story about the work. But yeah, if you if you Google it, you'll find it.
Dave Gardner 1:06:22
Okay. And you mentioned a follow up paper. When is that going to be published?
Jake Earl 1:06:27
It's currently under review. So we don't know. But we'll be sure to let you know.
Dave Gardner 1:06:33
That's great. We will look forward to that very much. Well, thank you much, Colin Hickey and Jake Earl. Fascinating conversation and it's about time that we had it.
Colin Hickey 1:06:43
Thank you so much for having us, Dave.
Jake Earl 1:06:45
Yeah. Thank you, Dave.
Dave Gardner 1:06:46
Appreciate your time.
