Thomas Friedman’s recent piece on Musk and tech capital as a solution to the climate crisis is a jarring poke in the eye for those who decry more geoengineering as a solution to a crisis created by geoengineering. But Friedman missed the crucial history, and issue, at play. Fundamentally, climate change flows from the failure of world leaders to adopt sustainable family planning policies in the Twentieth Century that would have used nature as a limiting factor.
The solution? Embrace a new family model based on equity and ecological restoration, and use the wealth bubble at the top of the pyramid – the one that buoys up the uber-rich of the world – to fund the transition as a matter of ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life.
Urge @tomfriedman to get it right.
What is Fair Start?
The Fair Start Movement is the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice to ensure every child a fair start in life. Let’s stop counting people, and start making people count. How? Move wealth from the top of the economic pyramid and into incentivizing better family planning and more equitable, sustainable families. That wealth was made through poor family planning policies that put costs on women and children. Redirecting that wealth is how to do the most good for children, animals and the environment, and the only way to make people truly free.
Without giving every child an ecosocial Fair Start in life we never come from a just place. Changing that is the first obligation, for all of us, and as such it is achievable by all means effective.
How did we end up in a world with massive wealth in the hands of a few and ecosystems crashing as our climates degrade? The answer is surprising. Rather than invest in early childhood development, at the crucial phase in the middle of the Twentieth Century, world leaders chose population growth and the creation of mass consumers, cheap labor and large bases of taxpayers.
Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always coming from an unjust place.
Today many are fighting to change this, get the wealth back, and use it to most effectively reverse the crises we face. We can separate those people from the politicians, fake charities and others protecting the wealth bubble at the top – and hurting our kids – with a simple language test.
It’s not about counting people, it’s about making people count. The borders of just and inclusive nations are not lines on a map; they are comprised of people who trust one another, and engage in consensual and inclusive governance.
For example, if environmentalists claim to be protecting a river, force them to account for the way population growth will drive the climate crisis in ways that will degrade the river and increase demands for its use. Many environmental and animal protection groups raised millions to protect natural spaces that they knew would be destroyed by population growth, growth they were helping promote – furthering the Anthropocene. If child protection advocates claim to be investing more in kids with tax policy for example, as them why they permit children to be born into poverty in the first place, rather than incentivizing better – and even equitable – family planning. If groups claim to promoting democracy, ask them to account for how poor family planning and population growth is diluting our individual roles to the point of meaningless, and degrading the civil qualities of the people around us. But the first norm has to be to simply to create normative people, which can best be visualized as a functional constitutional convention of principles – free people – not representatives, and not with the expectation that the norms will require coercion or incentives because they are not truly reflective of the people involved.
Our world is the way it is because we never held those claiming to promote values to actually account for the truth: People are the most important factor in all policy, and people don’t fall from the sky. If officials or groups do not prioritize giving all kids a #fairstart in life, they are part of the problem, not constituting us as free and equal people (and hence preconstitutional or “precons”) and protecting the bubble of wealth at the top of the pyramid in ways that will hurt our kids.
We are at a fork. The choice is clear. Let’s take what our kids deserve and build truly consensual governance. Now, how?
To constitute ourselves as free people means to limit and decentralize the power people have over one another, and we do that by promoting a simple discourse in which intending parents agree to planning caring, and sustainable families in exchange for their future children’s entitlement to #fairstart funding and incentives taken from the top of the wealth pyramid. That’s a true, or physical, social contract, which is inclusive of the majority of persons – those who will live in the future. It reflects the alleviation of power differentials, the sort rich have over poor, parents have over children, and we all have over our natural ecologies. That is what it means to be sufficiently other-regarding, or empathetic, to constitute ourselves as free people.
We can take the wealth at the top of the wealth pyramid – as matter of the first human right, one that overrides government processes and property rights – and use it to bend the arc of the future to create greater welfare, equity, meaningful democracy, and nature. Or we can leave it at the top and have a future with greater inequity, less nature, and bloated democracies that don’ work. We can become free people, and defeat the precons. The wealth bubble at the top is big enough to bend the arc, and incentivize, the future we deserve. Let’s move that wealth forward.
Take Action
Moving wealth from the top of the economic pyramid to incentivize better family planning and equitable families is the best way to do the most good
Support a federal executive order – the Tell the Truth order – that would require the disclosure of corporations and nonprofits role in the scam described above, so that we can hold people accountable.
Who has the most at stake when we have children? The children, given the impact on their lives. One would think, then, that in designing family planning systems our governments – which undertook that task in the mid-20th Century – would make them child-centric. They did not – largely because that would have entailed investing heavily in each child, and cooperatively giving each child a fair start in life, or things like minimum levels of well-being, equity relative to other children, an effective voice in their democracies, and a natural world.
Instead governments, and the interests that control them, lied and intentionally misinterpreted Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the right to have children. They treated the act of having children as something self-determining for the parents, rather than other-determining, for the children we have. They did so, employing the concept of privacy, not to protect people but to protect their concentrations of wealth from collective obligations to invest in all children.
Governments and special interests opted to ignore basic values and the needs of future generations, and embrace a strategy that would ensure population-based economic growth, exploiting children as consumers, workers, and other forms of economic input. They used people to create profits. The move converted politically empowered citizens into consumers, workers, and taxpayers with almost no influence over the systems they are subject to. These concentrations of power used people against people, filling the word with uneducated and vulnerable followers wiling to give up values, like democracy, for higher incomes. These concentrations did not produce actual and objective value as much as they exploited patriarchal policies mass producing people in violation of human rights, including the right to participatory systems from which we could reasonably asses values, costs, and benefits. Every crisis we face today, from the population-driven climate crisis, to the overcrowding and poor public health that causes pandemics, to massive political and economic inequity, flow from this maneuver, or the scam one Nobel Laureate recently described.
Empirically, the most just and effective response to these crises is to target the growth-based concentrations of power, and their modern adherents and beneficiaries, to limit and decentralize their power into future generations, through Fair Start distributions of wealth as ecosocially equitable family planning incentives and entitlements. We can go into a future ridden by climate and other crises with more and more unprepared and unequal people, or with fewer and highly prepared people. There is no real choice to make here.
How can do we we proceed? How can we bend this arc of growth?
We all grew up with the myth that we were abstractly “constituted” in nation states by founding fathers in the past. That is inaccurate. For human rights and democracy to make any sense, it is more accurate to say we are constantly and physically constituting, as new generations join the dynamic “We the People” of us. For those things to make sense, we have to correct the self v. other determining lie, discussed above. Again, think a switch to child-centric and values-based family planning, or physically constituting through a just creation (or re-creation) norm – the norm which no other norm can precede.
Think getting past the systems of coercion and incentive that the scam described above maintains, the systems by which we are determined by others. Instead, imagine reaching the self-determination/actualization of democracy where our voice matters and we trust the people around us. In this process we find a binary distinction between those free people sufficiently other-regarding to constitute democracy through child-centric collective family planning, and those who are not – people who in the end we we would reasonably exclude from constituting, or precons. A classic example would be those who reject the values above and who see people as a resource, rather than an end in themselves. If the creation of persons represent the truest border of human power – to follow a “one border” thesis – we can envision precons on one side, and free people on the other. And whether someone or some group embraces child-centric and fair family planning is the test.
Government and its rules derive from people, who derive from their creation. A just creation norm is the ultimate obligation, and there are no just systems without it. Put another way, to be free people we have to first orient the formation of power relations around the justice of child-centric and fair family planning, over the inevitable resistance of the precons described above.
This is not an abstract proposition. Imagine a group of people, in quantity and quality, you would need to host an effective constitutional convention. That is what a truly free and equal “We the People” means, and falling fertility rates globally signal a sea change in our species that makes a shift to a qualitative, people-not-population, and Fair Start revolution feasible. Bending the arc of growth around this change, towards values and equity, is an act of self-defense, defense of others, and liberation.
These facts are indisputable: 1) Many benefitted from the scam describe above by placing costs – ecological and social – on others, in violation of multiple universal human rights that allow us to constitute as free and equal people. 2) In order to most justly and effectively compensate future generations, who should be treated as a majority and whose rights matter, for those violations we have a fundamental right to target those most responsible and who benefitted the most from blocking the process of constituting. They hold power over us and future generations because people with guns defend the status quo, and not because it is just. 3) We best do that by taking and using portions of their concentrated power and wealth, measured against the relevant fundamental baseline, to constitute free and equal groups of future people via the effective vehicle of Fair Start incentives/entitlements.
In other words these entities, like Exxon, should pay for the costs they externalized on others. And they must do so by complying with the first human right – Fair Start.
Take action: Fair Star will be urging the Biden Administration to issue an executive order that would require U.S. firms to disclose their past, present and future role in promoting that Ponzi demography and the harm it caused. Contact info@fairstartmovemeny.org to participate.
And yet people like Matthew Yglesias and the media outlet Vox continue to push women to have kids. Many have said that we should punish climate change deniers for blocking policy reforms that could have mitigated the crisis. But all climate emission flow downstream from the increase in demand population growth creates. It is the fundamental driver. Aren’t the people actually making the crisis worse, usually to grow their investments, just as bad as the deniers? Did Ygelsias pushing women to have kids actually have an impact? The proposals to change federal child tax and care subsidy policy to encourage population growth that followed his advice suggest it did.
Let’s hold him and others, like Lee Raymond, accountable. We have a right to take the resources of wealthy people like Lee and Matthew who profited from poor and unsustainable family planning but never paid that costs that growth imposed on the environment, animals, women, and children. Why? Because every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start is the first human right, and it precedes and overrides any other obligation, including property rights.
It’s time to pay up. Those that really profited owe future generations – more than most.
What is Fair Start? It’s about people, not population. It’s about shared values and thinking qualitatively about the future, not using poor and unsustainable family planning to grow economies. Read the Allegory of the River, and why Having Kids talks about constituting democratic communities instead of framing our work around the concept of population, to understand more. Let’s make family planning truly inclusive, and geared around creating democratic communities where everyone has a voice.
It’s simple: Fair Start family planning means smaller families sharing resources to invest more in every child. For some, the closest analog for this new model would be responsible family planning incentives. But Fair Start resources are actually entitlements held by future children, and funded through non-traditional means. Those opposed to remodeling favor our current system of unsustainable families, unearned privileges, and undemocratic influence, over giving kids a fair start in life.
All kids have a fundamental human right, ecologically and socially, to a #fairstart in life. It’s the first human right. Help us secure it against those who threaten our future.
Groups and individuals from around the world are signing on to an effort to change the old model that focuses on what parents want toward a new model that focuses on what all kids need. The new model, called Fair Start family planning, is the beginning of real social justice. The reform can begin with the United Nations secretary general simply acknowledging the need for change.
Sign on, and urge any organization you support or can influence — nonprofit or for-profit — to also sign on. Sign here, or contact us at info@fairstartmovement.org for more information.
Congress Could Have Recognized Children’s Right to a Fair Start in Life. Instead It’s Treating Them as Cheap Future Labor.
The Senate’s debate of stimulus legislation that includes significant child-care and tax changes is an opportunity for the United States to recognize every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, ecologically and socially, and radically transform the way we plan families.
Instead, per the New York Times and Forbes, the Senate is pushing what one Nobel Laureate called a population growth Ponzi scheme. The legislation does not eliminate the massive wealth gap between black and white families or encourage sustainable family planning that does not severely exacerbate the climate and other ecological crises. Smaller families can have 20 times the impact on the climate crisis as other measures.
Fair Start, the better approach, would pivot to: • Cut all benefits for wealthy families and dramatically expand them for poor families, making the rich pay to offset the unearned privileges their children enjoy in life. • Incentivize better family planning, and smaller and more sustainable families for everyone, through things like delaying childbirth until parents are really ready. • This is key: These moves can make the legislation antiracist and regenerative and can lay the groundwork to eliminate child abuse and recognize our fundamental human right to nature.
We can do better than pushing women to have kids. Let’s restore nature and level the playing field at birth for all kids. That’s how we create a legitimate society. It’s called Fair Start. It’s the first and overriding human right, and as such, we may achieve it by all means effective. Here is an example of that type of better approach, one that Sen. Cory Booker can easily promote as the Senate debates. We should use funding to fundamentally change the way we plan families to maximize investments in future generations and to compensate them for the harm we have caused.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Mormon with five wealthy children, is using the excuse of child poverty to push population growth as means of creating cheap future labor, increased consumption, and a bigger tax base that will benefit his privileged kids. It’s similar to the Ivanka Trump approach to families and the future.
The current proposals do nothing to ensure all children some minimum level of well-being, equal opportunities in life, a safe and natural environment, and an effective voice in democracies or systems of self-rule. The proposals further the exclusion of people from their own governance, rather than inclusion, and are setting the stage for further political violence in the future as the gap between rich and poor, in a degraded environment, worsens.
What You Can Do Today
Call Kamala Harris and these four key senators today, and make your case for every child’s right to a Fair Start in life:
Want to take action to support this effort, and ensure all children a Fair Start in life? Right now the Senate is debating legislation that seeks to fund child care, and alleviate poverty.
But it:
Does nothing to seriously address the 1/10th wealth gap between black and white families in the U.S.
Does nothing to promote smaller and more sustainable families, which is a move with 20x more impact on the climate crisis than many alternatives.
Does nothing to end child abuse – instead, it will exacerbate it with a one-size-fits-all approach to family planning incentives.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency, as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?
We tend to see politics this way because of mistakes that were made in the design of our constitutions and political systems, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently complex, dynamic and intergenerational concept, we tend to focus on the static symbols that purport to represent a nation of hundreds of millions of people – like the presidency. And instead of empowering future generations through real family planning policies, our leadership has exploited population growth and those cognitive dissonances, vesting more and more power in themselves. As the United States population has ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people have remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or the one person meant to to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another as effective citizens through good parenting. Driven by poor family planning, representative democracy replaced the possibility of real democracy, where each person has meaningful control over political outcomes.
For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and also the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow, diluting the impact each person could have in mitigating the crisis. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce, through violence, their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent. This is iconarchy, not democracy.
Our mostly male political leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the centralizing of their power by encouraging growth and inequity, and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies. In other words, they used crowding to disempower individuals. That constant growth and alienation from one another has ensured reliance upon strong, top-down, leaders. Today, many want to continue to exacerbate this process in order to use families as a means of driving economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation as matter of right because of the population growth it creates. Yes, our archaic legal systems generally protect the right to procreate an unlimited number of children into abusive conditions and state institutions, but no right to be free in nature. This is the antithesis of freedom, and represents those at the top of our systems using everyday people to oppress one another.
To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?
The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct the fundamental mistakes and build our family planning systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we can instead think about having and investing more in kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want, and deserve, in the future.
Understand this: The constitution is not what you might think it is, We were not constituted by god-like men in the past, and subjected to a system over which we have almost no influence, We are constantly constituting legitimate communities or deconstituting into illegitimate forms with each child born, depending on how we plan our families. If power and legitimacy ultimately comes from the people, it necessarily first derives from their creation, and we constitute legitimate societies by limiting our power over future generations and decentralizing the power we do hold into the children we will have.
We can start by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, this is the only way to achieve it – through actual people. We may engage in this process – of physically constituting democratic communities where each person matters – by taking resources from concentrations of power, and using those resources to incentive smaller families that fully develop their children.
Ready to make real change? Joe Biden is doing the same thing Trump and others have done to promote population growth over investing more in children, and building smaller and more sustainable democracies where each person’s voice matters. What’s a better idea? Let’s use the child tax credit program to create a progressively scaled family planning incentive system that promotes parental readiness, smaller families, and a fair start in life for every child. Nothing would go further in fundamentally solving our social and ecological crises.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?
We tend to see it this way because mistakes were made in the way we designed our constitutions and political system, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently dynamic and intergenerational concept and instead of empowering future generations, past leadership vested the power in themselves. And as the United States population ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or one person who is supposed to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another. Representative democracy replaced real democracy where each person has real control over outcomes.
For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the underlying population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow and become less equal, so that the average person has less and less of an impact on national policy. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce through violence their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent, while the fundamental state of democracy and freedom degrades. This is iconarchy, not democracy.
In fact, our leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the process of centralizing their power by encouraging population growth and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies, ensuring chaos, and with it our reliance upon strong leaders instead of one another. Today, many want to exacerbate this problem in the name of creating economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not clearly protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation because of the population growth it creates. This is emblematic of our history of trading self-determination and freedom for chaos, greed and consumption, and the exploitation of future generations.
To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and then empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?
The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct these mistakes and build our systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we must instead think about having kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want and deserve in the future. We can do so by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, that is the only way to achieve it.
At Having Kids, we are trying to move systems in that direction by decentralizing the power at the top of what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called a population pyramid and investing that power in future generations.
Ready to make real change? Here are several actions you can take to join the fight to give the people control of their own futures.
