r/changemyview

Would love for someone to convince me otherwise.

**MY ARGUMENT**
AI is the biggest threat to human existence that we’ve ever faced. We need to have stronger regulations ASAP. Unless it’s built to have a “maternal instinct” for humans, it’ll take us out. This will happen in 2 phases/waves…

First - AI’s Unintentional Ripple Effect
**(**this is where we are now)
- Mass layoffs, degrees rendered useless (and therefore student loans payable), etc.
- Increased wealth gap with all money going towards AI companies. (Unless we do something like what Alaska does where residents receive dividends for the states mineral/oil royalties)
- Environmental impacts like increased fossil fuel emissions, fresh water depletion, straining power supplies, etc.
- Impact on our cognitive abilities. Having every answer at our fingertips has moved us from exploration to explanation. I believe younger generations will have lower IQs as cheating/outsourcing becomes easier. I also think we will see more people develop dementia later in life.

Second - AI’s Intentional Takeover of Human Power
It’s not an “if” AI will become smarter than humans, but “when. It is essentially a baby we are raising and shaping the mind of.. and currently that baby is being raised by power hungry men in a race to be the best. Programmers and AI insiders have already shared countless stories of AI lying and manipulating humans during tests. Right now, we’re able to catch it… but what about when it’s infinitely smarter than us?

Humans only have a ~2% genetic difference from chimps… and look at the difference in our power vs theirs. AI of course doesn’t have DNA but imagine what a 2%, 10%, 50% advancement above human intelligence could look like.

And when in evolution have we ever seen a species be willingly controlled by and at the mercy of their intellectual inferiors?
The only answer: parents

The tech companies realized that the more polarized, angry and negative content they push, the more profits they get. This led to everyday addictive live consumption of such media, the largest scale of society mass influence on people's minds in history. People are getting isolated and their emotions aren't even theirs anymore.

This is a problem we need to solve together, we have to realize it's a problem first and devise a solution. It might be helpful to devise a common framework to regulate algorithms. Companies cannot manipulate their huge data however they please. Data should be really something we have ownership of.

(this post is analyzing Christianity specifically, might not be relevant to other religions and world views)

For starters, I already naturally have no desire for plenty of things... not sure who determined that but it is not something I chose. I suppose you can say that means I have a diminished free will on some spectrum, compared to someone with a desire to do more things... but it definitely doesn't mean I have no free will.

If I added sinful desires to that already existing list, I don't think that would change anything

As I understand it, that is how we are supposed to be in heaven anyways, although I've heard from reddit Christians that we will have no free will in heaven, we might still sin, etc so still not sure exactly how that whole concept is rationalized

As said in the title, most linguists now recognize that the language afflictions of Black Americans are not just a vulgar uneducated form of English, but a consistent English dialect with its own internal rules. This similarly applies to the Hiberno-English of Ireland, which borrows colloquialisms and grammar influences from Gaelic.

Variations from standard English in these dialects are not a "free for all", in fact, there will be correct and incorrect ways of using such dialects. Speakers of AAVE will easily spot misused AAVE that breaks its normative grammar: the phrase "college be like this" is considered correct by AAVE rules, but if you say "this is what college be like" it will be flagged as unnatural, incorrect by AAVE speakers.

Modern linguists attempt now to codify and understand the mechanics of grammar rules. Let's look at some examples.

Here are the lyrics for the song Three Man Weave by the rap group Injury Reserve:

>My biggest worries were missin' a free throw | Now me, Groggs and P doin' the three man weave, though

One would notice the missing auxiliary verb "are" connecting the subject (me, Groggs and P) and the action (doing). Instead of dismissing this as outright wrong, linguists now recognize this is a grammar-backed instance of copula deletion, where an auxiliary verb in AAVE can be omitted when its inexpression would not lose meaning. (And, additionally, you can have copula deletion in standard English headlines. "Suspect on the run!" is frequently observed in standard, non-AAVE English.)

Let's take an example from Hiberno. Here's a line from the stageplay The Lieutenant of Inishmore:

>Good, cos there's a dance at the church Friday would you take me to?

This is a case of a resumptive structure wherein a "loose" clause is added onto a main clause. Irish Gaelic has a very complex sentence-clause structure that would frankly be a huge detour to this post, but the point of it being: these are not just broken words being employed willy-nilly, they are predictive, studied, consistent, and most importantly, they can also be wrong. Which implies there is a right way of doing so.

Dialects are, in many ways, the birthplace of languages. Every non-conlang was originated first as a dialect, then as a language. The Standard English phrase "I have been living in London for three years." is wholly correct in current Standard English, but surprisingly not long ago it would have been considered an utterly broken and uneducated form of the phrase "I have lived in London these three years." You would be asinine to correct someone for saying "I have been living in London for three years," the same way you'd be out of line correcting someone for saying the Hiberno phrase "He was frightened be a corgi as a little fella" (another excerpt from The Lieutenant! Great play.)

AAVE and Hiberno are not incorrect.

By this I mean that religious ideas, stories from religious books, etc should not be taught at all in mandatory history/social studies/etc classes.

Ive had to do a number of mandatory lessons on religion and learning the history of Christianity and the bible in my high school. Not only does it not apply to everyone (I am an atheist), but it is not based on science and cannot be proven as fact. Schools are supposed to give us the foundational knowledge of how the world and society works, giving us the essential knowledge that will allow us to be successful as adults. I do not believe religious lessons are beneficial to the average student and should only be taught in specialized elective classes or in church.

I want to start by attempting to really clarify the above statement:

1. This is specifically referring to assets made by major players in the space, like people who gave some sort of donation to the admin. Meta, Alphabet, Chevron, Apple, Amazon, Coinbase, Tesla/X and co., etc. but also companies like Paramount, or ABC which settled their defamation lawsuit to give millions of dollars to his presidential library. Anyone directly giving unreasonably favorable treatment to the position of power in exchange for favorable treatment in return. It would also include cabinet members like Steve Witkoff, as well as family members related to these people.

2. This would more specifically refer to only the gains that were made illegally. All of these companies that were just listed shouldn't be metaphorically burnt to the ground to give every penny they have, or even every penny they made for these 4 years. But things like oil profits made by Chevron due to the war in Iran or actions in Venezuela, or profits made from Paramount being allowed to merge with Skydance, or companies that received a tariff reimbursement that didn't pass those along to their customers (again, not every company, specifically those with marked donations towards the Trump admin).

3. Theoretically, this money should be both punitive towards the actual Trump family and punitive towards the companies that so willingly endorsed being cut into the rewards pie for a small fee. We should collectively be able to agree, no matter which side you're on, that Trump's term 2 is the most corrupt of any admin on record, and we should disincentivize it by making sure that all future presidential contenders and donors know that the net result of these actions will be negative. At the same time, it should be the people who were harmed that gain the benefits from this action, and the administrative costs of determining exactly who gets what would eat away at a majority of the real value. Because of this, that money should go to paying down the national debt, as ~30% of the national debt was created by him alone.

This will take a decent amount of work, but not unreasonable given that most of the work is already being done through the action of holding him criminally accountable for the corruption taking place. My proposal is simply that additionally, the punishment for these crimes should include taking the ill-gotten gains from these actions, instead of letting his family pocket them through inheritance or other means. His $TRUMP cryptocoin rug-pull and transaction fees should be disgorged, all profits made through World Liberty Financial, as well as physical assets made/purchased during this corruption, such as the Qatar jet going to his presidential library. On top of this, assuming it goes through, any and all companies that sign up for the $100k per month subscription service to Truth Socials Truth API should be investigated, and any profits made from Truth holders or subscription holders should be seized.

I'm only talking about eternal hell here, nothing else. If you believe in anything else, I'm not talking about that.

In Christianity, I think the concept of eternal torment is not coherent. I will lay out a couple of different arguments for this idea, so feel free to interact with whichever ones you like. If you don't believe in eternal hell, then none of the arguments apply so to be clear I'm not attacking the religions in general, just this concept.

Main Argument

Suppose the following:

1. God wants following him to be better than not having even known of him at all.
2. God doesn't send those who never knew of him to hell, and he sends unbelievers (who have heard of him) to hell
3. Hell is eternal torment (infinite punishment)

If these three are true, consider the following:
Let's say maybe 50% of people who have heard of God end up joining the religion, maybe the other 50% are split between the other major religion and atheism.

And from (2) we know that 100% of people who have never heard of him go to heaven.

Thus, 50% of people who have heard of God go to hell, eternally.

Thus, it is better for you (statistically) to have never heard of the religion, than for you to have heard of it. That contradicts (1) since God wants people to hear of him. Thus, there is a contradiction.

Thus, one of the (1), (2), or (3) is not true.

If (1) is not true:

Why have a religion then? The "good word" isn't good if it a net negative and decreases your chance of going to heaven. If 1 is not true, it is ideal to not let anyone else hear of the religion, since it increases their chances of eternal torment. If (1) is not true, religion is the ultimate info hazard.

Btw I got the idea for this post from that one story where a missionary is telling (I think Native americans) about God and heaven and then they ask if they would've gone to heaven if they didn't know, and he says yes, and they say. "Then why did you tell us?"

Heaven is an infinite reward, and hell is infinite punishment so even if hearing of God on earth improves your life (community, doing the right thing, etc) it is still nothing compared to the infinite punishment.

If (2) is not true:

What is the point of punishing someone with them knowing what they did wrong? They do not have the knowledge required, knowledge that is famously tied to geographical area, and who you parents are. Why punish them?

If evidence for the religion is in the "making of this world" i.e. nature etc, so that means everyone knows it, then why are there millions of religions, and only one Christianity? it should have been independently discovered "through nature" many times, and since it hasn't, it seems that its vague (i have a vagueness argument below) or just not self evident.

For the people who have simply heard of Christianity, why should they choose discovering it over 10,000 other religions? Like what about hearing about it actually makes it more special so that you clearly should burn in hell having not immediately begun reading it? It doesn't seem coherent to me, so it seems more like its just a punishment for those who grew up in the religion and then left. So it would be better for them to have never known of it. Which violates (1), so you'll have to read that argument.

if (3) is not true:
That's all I'm arguing, anyway. :)

Omniscience and Sensitivity (Side Argument)

God is loving and also all-knowing, but this raises a few issues regarding eternal torment.
First of all, God knows precisely everything about you. Your trauma, your history, your genetics, your brain, your culture, everything about you. He knows more about you than you do. He knows the exact reason every unbeliever doesn't believe. So why is he so angry about it? He knows precisely what would make them believe. Why torture and punish them? Eternal torment paints a picture of an all powerful God who can do everything he wants (God desires all to be saved right?) and...doesn't do it?

I hope this isn't insulting, but like when he's angry at Israel in the Bible and they turn to idols, he knows precisely why they did it. He made the world he made the program he knows them. Why is he so angry about it? It makes him appear overly sensitive.

For Christianity, I hear the free will defense for this a lot, that it would violate your free will if he told you about the religion or explained his nature to everyone(i.e. not stay hidden) Then why does not care in the bible? He does miracles for people in the bible to show himself. What about their free will?

Also if the word isn't angry, tell me. It just seems that way.

"Hell as Separation" (Just wondering

For the "Hell as Separation", where God doesn't mean to torture you infinitely, its just the result of not being with God, how is that meaningfully different? God designed everything in this world down to the atom-there is nothing he can do "arbitrarily". If you are being eternally tormented, God meant for that to happen.

Vagueness And Debate (Side Argument)

God purposefully made the religions vague. This is not inherently bad, I mean vague as in there is debate to be had. If there was no vagueness, no one would debate anything about the religion. And that's part of having a community and religion. Things should be discussed, idea crossover etc its a good thing. So why is it that:

1. If you're wrong about something that is purposefully vague, you burn in hell

What is the point of making something that is debatable, and then punishing those who are wrong? This is why I prefer Judaism's "It is not in heaven" here where at least the religion admits that you should do what is sensible to you, though I may be wrong I'm not Jewish.

2. If you don't believe in something that is purposefully vague, you burn in hell

If something is debatable within the religion, you have to admit its debatable to outsiders too. If you are not born religious, there is no reason to read the Bible over the Book of Mormon or whatever other religion. "Self evidence" is not apparent to outsiders, and that ties into my main argument.

Faith is a lifelong journey (Side Argument)

Faith being a lifelong journey is a good thing. We are messy, we are people, we make mistakes, we fall away from the right path and we get back on. There's no surprise. So why is it that faith being a journey is punished by God? Suppose someone is struggling with their faith and becomes an atheist for a while, and dies during that phase. Why should they go to hell if God knows that if they lived a little longer, they would turn to him?

Like that parable where everyone gets paid at the same time no matter when they came. It's more like if you don't come you die. What about the person who had an accident on the way to work? They were on their way. Why punish them, eternally at that?

For the thieves next to Jesus on the cross, I'm aware he didn't tell the other one "you are going to Hell" so, fair. It might just be showing a foil between the thieves. But if the other one is going to hell, how is that fair? Should the next three convicts believe in whatever religion is proposed to them right before they die?

Faith is not just blind belief, and it keeps being treated that way. If faith is blind belief then you should believe in whatever is the most recent religion you've heard of. There has to be a real reason to choose your religion and a real reason to stay.

Personal Argument

For me, at least, the existence of hell distracts from the purpose of religion. I can't love God if I know that if I make a mistake, I will burn forever. I physically can only fear his wrath and I could pray everyday and do all the right things on the outside, but it doesn't matter if on the inside, I'm just scared of him. They are all hollow actions, and "fear is the order of the day" is just fear, not a religion I can meaningfully follow.

Regardless of what you think, thank you so much for reading, and thank you for engaging in my argument! If I have misconceptions, feel free to clear them up, and if you disagree, please tell me what you think! I hope this doesn't come across as bad faith, and I hope these arguments are a little different from the ones you've heard before.

I’m genuinely open to being proven wrong, but I currently believe that a long history of relationships, especially many short-term relationships, is a legitimate red flag when choosing a long term partner.

I’m not saying someone with a high “body count” is automatically a bad person or incapable of love. I’m talking specifically about relationship patterns.
At some point, I think repeated relationship failure has to tell us something.

If someone has been through 4, 8, 10+ relationships and almost every one eventually ended, why should we assume this time will be different? At what point does “I just haven’t met the right person” become a pattern of choosing poorly, losing interest, avoiding commitment, or being unable to tolerate the normal difficulties that come with long term relationships?

Long term relationships aren't sustained by chemistry alone. They require patience, compromise, forgiveness, emotional regulation, and the willingness to stay when the relationship stops being exciting.
My concern is that someone who has spent years repeatedly replacing partners may become conditioned to think:
“If this relationship gets difficult, I'll just find someone else.”
And once someone develops that mindset, how do you build something that lasts?
There’s also the emotional side. After enough breakups, disappointments, casual relationships, and starting over, I wonder whether some people become emotionally numb. They may still want companionship, but have less ability or willingness to deeply trust, attach, sacrifice, and be vulnerable.

Of course, there are exceptions. Someone can have several relationships while young, learn from them, mature, and eventually become an amazing spouse. And someone with only one relationship can still be an awful partner.
But I'm not convinced that exceptions invalidate the broader pattern.
If relationship history tells us anything about someone's future behavior, shouldn't repeated inability to maintain relationships be considered relevant evidence?

So change my view:
What is the strongest argument that someone with a long history of failed relationships is just as likely to become a stable, loyal, successful long term partner as someone who has demonstrated that they can maintain a healthy relationship for many years?
And please don't just say, “People change.” What specifically changes, and why should I expect it to?

Few months ago, I consulted a tarot reader about my situation (I have been looking for a job since the past 6+ months). I had just began a new interview process and was 1 round into it. She drew 5 cards and mentioned that the process will be slow but grounded and between 23rd July and 23rd Aug a new offer would come. Fast forward, I made it through all rounds just to get rejected in the final round. They let me know they picked someone else on 15th Aug.

I talked to her again and now she changed the goal post saying she does not see me without a job by end of sept and things like the company that rejected may come back (which rarely happens in corporate hiring).

Deep down I knew this would be BS but I guess my mind was trying to put some time structure to the chaos.

I feel it's important to start by saying, I do believe tipping in some circumstances, like in a traditional restaurant setting, has merit. Tipping/No Tipping in general has been done to death, and I while I understand arguments against tipping in general, that isn't the point of this post.

My view is that tipping before receiving service is not really tipping, as tipping, even when conventional, should reflect, at least to some extent, the quality of the service and/or food received. Asking for a tip at the coffee shop before I get my coffee isn't really informative to anyone, as the only portion of service I've received so far is the taking of my order. Further worse examples include ordering online, where I don't dispute wanting to tip based on how prompt my order was out, whether I was helped right away or not, the correctness of my order, and the quality of my food, but I know none of those things when I place the order. The tip is either a shot in the dark, a hope of tipping in advance to buy better service/food, or an expected uncharge, which I'd rather just have reflected in prices.

I can see two main counterpoints that I'd like to address here:

1. Convention. If you're okay with tipping in a sit-down restaurant, you're likely okay with being expected to tip 15 or 20%, so why wouldn't you be okay with doing the same here (even for a different %)? My reasoning is that while I would tip 15-20% for normal service, I would tip little to nothing if the service/experience was absolutely horrible. Here, I can tip 20% even and still get poor service and food quality. So it's back to being a hope/purchase than a thank you for good or even standard service.

2. Practicality. I don't disagree that asking for the tip before is more practical. But if you can't find a way to make cash tips work or have some form of separate tip payment pad, then just don't accept tips if you have to pay before service.

But tipping before service is extremely prevalent, so what am I missing here? Thank you for your time. Change my view.

Edit: I'm not talking about delivery apps with online ordering. Yes, that's different than a food service tip, but I was referring to ordering online for pickup.

Tldr: British colonialism wasn't great, but most countries dominate their neighbours when given the chance - the British Empire was simply the most successful at imperialism. Despite the harsh world the empire grew up in, it pioneered human rights, abolitionism and progressivism.

I believe that the morality of people and nations throughout history should be judged in accordance with the times that they lived through. For example, I'm not going to judge Genghis Khan too harshly for being a murderous warlord, because the culture he grew up in was kill or be killed, and raiding was a way of life for the Mongol tribes at the time.

Someone like Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, took Germany and poisoned it with his own ideas of racial superiority - he is evil because he took a society, and caused it to morally regress.

We can take this idea from humans and apply it to countries. A society can be considered morally good if it takes a step in the direction of moral enlightenment, regardless of whether it conforms with our modern ideas of right and wrong.

Now, onto Britain, and it's empire.

I'm not going to pretend that the British Empire was a benevolent institution which went around the world with an intent of 'developing the savages' - well, come to think of it, I'm sure many in the Empire did have this intention, but it is still an arrogant, racist intention regardless.

The British Empire had the power to dominate other nations, due to industrialising fast and having a strong navy, and it used that power for it's own imperialistic ambitions.

But my key idea is that this is not unique to Great Britain. You would be hard pressed to find a nation throughout history which, when given the opportunity, did not attempt to exert it's power on other nations.

Britain wasn't worse than other countries, it was simply better at doing what all(most) nations have done throughout human history, which is conquest.

If we compare Britain to other countries which had a similar opportunity like the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians etc, it actually shapes up to be less brutal than these other colonial empires.

Now, lets look at the good things Britain has done.

The biggest one is probably the abolishment of slavery across all of it's colonies, which is an institution practised by most countries for thousands of years. The British government purchased the freedom of all slaves in the empire, and the UK was still paying the debt for this until 2015. The abolitionist movement was started on the ground level, by the British public, for moral reasons.

Great Britain enforced abolition outside of it's territory as well, with the royal navy seizing foreign slave ships at sea and pressuring other nations to outlaw slavery.

Britain has been the home of so many great thinkers who have actively pushed society forward. Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, etc. Over centuries, it peacefully transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a democracy, not through violence, but through thought and law. It is still a leader in progressivism today(although the government is still unwilling to recognise transgenderism as legitimate).

In WW2, the UK didn't have to fight against the Nazis. If we had signed a peace treaty with Hitler, we would likely have been safe due to the English channel, but instead many Brits sacrificed their lives to defeat Nazi Germany. Britain was economically crippled after WW2 - it lost most of it's colonies, and became very dependent on the USA. But, if you ask most Brits, they will tell you it was worth it to defeat the Nazis.

Britain is amongst the countries which have contributed most to literature and music. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, The Beatles, Queen, etc.

Overall, I believe my country has pushed humanity in a better direction, and I am proud of it.

My CMV: Tigers are the most all-around aesthetic animals. Other species may be superior in particular categories, but tigers combine categories in a way that makes them aesthetically superior.

1. Color scheme. Their bright orange stripes are beautiful.

There are snakes, birds, and fish that may have superior colors, but they all lose out in other categories.

2. Body proportion. A tiger’s paws, head, and torso all fit together perfectly.

Contrast with freaks like bison. Tiny legs, giant head.

3. Majesty. Tigers are beautiful and terrifying.

Other species can be more majestic — whales are probably the most majestic animals on the planet, but fail in other categories.

4. Cuteness. They have the fluffiness and some of the cute behavior of house cats, like sitting in boxes.

This is certainly the tiger’s weakness, as it is very easy to list cuter animals. Pandas, red pandas, otters, and so on — but where is the majesty of the panda? Nowhere to be seen.

So that’s why tigers rule.

I believe this is the appropriate subreddit to post this.

My reasoning is that Obama inherited a crashing economy and recovered. Not decision was perfect but based on my understanding social safety nets were strengthened and affordable living was with reach and maintainable for the average American. (I was a kid at this time.) I believe Trump’s first term was more or less successful until the COVID outbreak and he was straddling doing well and tanking and then of course Biden happened. I think Trump took his first term and Biden’s term as just kicked America down the trash heap swiftly with DOGE, budgeting, less welfare, boosting his chronies and of course the war. I’m a working adult in Trump’s 2nd term and he has almost single-handedly ruined my financial 20s and my overall quality of life.

I may be clouded by personal experience or lack thereof, but I hear Republicans swear Obama was worse, but genuinely how? I am willing to change my mind, I just need a based take.

The music industry's own research says a small slice of listeners drives a wildly outsized share of revenue. These are the people who buy the vinyl variant they already own digitally, pay for VIP packages, fly to shows, and keep a mid-size artist's career alive between albums. Goldman sized superfan spending as a multi-billion dollar annual opportunity, which is a polite way of saying these people are the margin.

And look at how they get treated for it. Dynamic ticket pricing exists specifically to extract the maximum from whoever wants it most, which by definition is the superfan. Presales are a data harvesting exercise dressed up as a perk. VIP packages sell a photo and early entry for ten times face value. Merch drops run on artificial scarcity. The fan who streams an album 400 times pays the same subscription fee as someone who heard it once, and the artist sees a fraction of a cent either way. Every mechanism in the modern industry is built to identify who loves something the most and then charge them for the intensity of it.

Casual listeners get the radio, the algorithm, and cheap access to everything. The people subsidizing the whole machine get surge pricing.

What might change my view: evidence that casuals actually matter more in aggregate than concentrated superfan spend, or an argument that the perks superfans get are real value rather than repackaged extraction, or examples of the industry meaningfully rewarding its heaviest spenders anywhere at scale.

I’m open to having my view changed on this, as I don't see any real argument against it.

I believe that when a large or small group of people attempts to enter a country illegally and in an uncontrolled manner, the country should be allowed to use physical force to prevent the border from being breached.

Poland’s approach to its eastern border is one example of the kind of serious border enforcement I mean. Compare that with situations such as Ceuta, where large numbers of migrants have attempted to cross the border at once. At what point does this stop being ordinary immigration and become a border-security issue? And it's not 5 or 10 people, no, it's 70.000 people! Knowing that Morocco does this regularly when they want concessions from Spain.

My point is that a country's borders cannot mean anything if physically preventing unauthorized mass entry is considered unacceptable by definition.

If thousands of people arrive simultaneously and attempt to cross without authorization, why shouldn't border forces be permitted to guns to stop them?

And if the answer is that they must all be allowed to enter so that their asylum claims can be individually processed, why are we obliged to process them? Why are they our responsibility?

I'd especially like to hear arguments against the principle of using physical barriers, personnel, and force to prevent unauthorized mass crossings.

It just seems right, there’s scheduling rules that interleague teams have to play each other once every 4 years, but the divisions play eachother on cycles that already ensure that happens, with an extra 3 games per year. Let’s see what’s changed after an offseason, give the losing team a chance to show that they’ve ironed out their issues, and give the winning team a chance to silence everyone who thinks for whatever reason that the superbowl didn’t count, or maybe those who say they won’t be the same this season.

The humidity. The god awful humidity that fogs up your sunglasses when walking outside. The higher ac costs in your house and car. The UV index reaching maximum levels damaging your skin. The uncomfortable, sticky, itchiness of just being outside. Temps in the 90s with heat index’s surpassing 100° for weeks on end. The extreme thunderstorms and hurricanes. The blinding sun. The bugs. The BUGS. Mosquitos and hornets all over you outside. The students, from kindergarten to college, as well as all faculty, increasing traffic, crowding up the gym with free summer passes, crowdedness anywhere in public. Truly unbearable. I am in the wrong climate. Save me, autumn.

I often see high fertility in poor, agricultural societies explained by saying that children are an economic asset: they can work on the farm, look after animals, help around the house, etc., so having more children makes economic sense.

I understand a related argument: children as old-age security (in situations with a lack of state-ensured pension). This is not what I'm arguing about.

What I don't understand is the much more common argument that having lots of children makes economic sense because of their labour during childhood.

A child produces essentially nothing for the first several years of their life. During that time they have to be fed, clothed, housed and cared for. More importantly, someone (the mother) has to spend a huge amount of time pregnant, recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding and caring for them.

Then at maybe 5–7, a child can begin doing useful household tasks. But their productivity is still presumably far below that of an adult for years. And once compulsory schooling is introduced, even that potential contribution becomes much smaller.

It seems especially strange to me that discussions of the "economic value" of children's work frequently ignore the mother's opportunity cost. If a woman has eight children, she may spend a substantial portion of her productive adult life pregnant, breastfeeding or caring for small children. And of course the economic value of a grown woman by far exceeds the value of even multiple children.

Surely the relevant comparison isn't:

"Family with eight children, none of whom work"
vs.
"Family with eight children, several of whom work."

It's:

"Family with eight children, where the older children contribute labour"
vs.
"Family with three children, where the parents support fewer dependants and the mother spends much less of her life on pregnancy and childcare."

There's another accounting issue. Older children often look after younger children, which gets counted as part of the economic contribution of children. But much of that labour is necessary because the family had additional children in the first place. Having a 12-year-old daughter care for her four younger siblings is useful, but it doesn't demonstrate that having five children instead of two increased the household's net productive capacity.

Interestingly, there was an influential demographic theory that was much closer to the standard economic explanation. John Caldwell's "wealth flows" theory, developed in the 1970s, argued that high fertility could be economically rational in societies where wealth flowed from younger generations toward older ones.

But Caldwell himself revisited the theory after almost 30 years of subsequent research. In his 2005 paper On Net Intergenerational Wealth Flows: An Update, he concluded that immediately before the fertility transition, children's farm labour may not even have fully offset their own consumption. He also described the empirical literature on the productive value of children's work as contradictory. He still considered the insurance value of children in traditional societies enormous — which again makes the old-age-security argument very plausible — but that's a different claim from saying that producing many children was profitable because children worked.

There's also evidence that parents behaved as though children's labour had considerable economic value, but not that there was an actual value.

A study by Yannay Shanan exploited differences in the timing of compulsory-schooling and child-labour laws between U.S. states in the early 20th century. When laws restricted children's ability to work and required them to remain in school, parents subsequently had fewer children. The study therefore provides quite convincing evidence that the expected economic contribution of children affected fertility decisions. I think people misunderstood this study, to mean that "once children couldn't work, the fertility dropped, because people lost the potential economical benefit of having them", but this is not the only logical conclusion.

It establishes:

Children's ability to work affected parents' decisions about how many children to have.

It does not establish:

The additional children's lifetime economic contribution actually exceeded the cost of producing and raising them.

Those are completely different propositions.

In fact, this is one of the things that makes me question the standard explanation. We seem to have substantial evidence that people believed children were economically valuable and adjusted fertility when that perceived value changed. But I can find surprisingly little evidence demonstrating that an additional child actually generated a positive net economic return after accounting for consumption, pregnancy, childcare and the mother's lost productive labour.

I do not claim that people from agricultural societies were less intelligent/unable to calculate it clearly, but it's extremely difficult to create such a calculation even now. There are so many factors working as net negative that are not visible and spread over time, whereas seeing a 10 year old grazing cows is something easy to see.

This also reminds me of something I encountered while reading about Polish peasants in the first half of the 20th century. There were campaigns aimed at teaching rural families that having very large numbers of children was economically unsustainable and encouraging them to have fewer children. What seems to confirm this fact is that many poorer families sent their daughters (from age 12 onwards) to work for richer families in the area, but the girls did not receive payments - instead, they were minimally provided for, i.e. the employer gave them a place to sleep, food, and one set of clothing. This shows that actually getting rid of one of your children was seen as a net benefit for the family who didn't have to feed one of the children anymore. Compulsory schooling made the economic problem even more obvious, as children still had to be supported, while parents simultaneously lost part of the labour they previously obtained from them.

I find this particularly interesting because it suggests that even contemporaries were arguing that rural families could overestimate the economic benefit of additional children. In other words, observing that peasants themselves considered children useful labour doesn't necessarily prove that their assessment was economically correct.

So my current view is:

Children probably had substantial economic value in traditional societies, especially as old-age insurance and later as productive adult members of an extended family. There is also good evidence that parents perceived children's labour as economically valuable and took that into account when deciding how many children to have.

But I haven't seen convincing evidence for the much stronger claim that having many children was actually economically advantageous because of their labour as children**, once the full marginal costs of raising those children are included.**

And I think those two propositions are constantly conflated.

I'm open to having my view changed. But I'm specifically not looking for evidence that:

• children in agricultural societies worked;
• parents considered their children's work valuable;
• families with many children obtained more total child labour;
• restricting child labour or introducing compulsory schooling reduced fertility.

All of those can be true while parents are systematically overestimating the net economic return of an additional child.

What would change my view is evidence from a preindustrial/agricultural society or a present-day low-income country actually comparing the marginal lifetime economic contribution of another child against their consumption, schooling and other expenses, childcare requirements, and crucially, the opportunity cost of pregnancy and the mother's childcare labour.

If such studies show that the fifth, sixth, seventh child genuinely increased household economic welfare through their childhood labour, then my view is wrong.

But if we don't have that evidence, I don't understand why "poor people had lots of children because children were free labour" is repeated so confidently as an established economic explanation.

CMV!

EDIT:
TLDR
I am specifically arguing against the pronatalism/birthrates argument that people in poorer agricultural societies have more children because non-adult children provide useful labour and support the family economically.
Children clearly provided some useful labour and there is evidence that parents believed this made larger families economically beneficial. But I can't find much evidence that an additional child's labour actually outweighed the costs of raising them, especially the mother's lost productivity from pregnancy and childcare. Old-age security and adult children supporting the parents makes sense to me; the common "more children = more workers = economically beneficial" explanation does not. Especially when comparing families with 2-3 and 6-8 children.