Fair Start is bottom-up democratic override using the first human right, rather than top-down authority.
The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction (“cli-fi”) novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation’s.
In contrast, the Fair Start Movement looks back toward the base cause of the climate crisis (and buttressing crises like deadly inequity): The failure of world leaders in the Twentieth Century to implement the Children’s Rights Convention and zero-baseline modeling as the standard for family policy, and as the first and overriding human right – a right that would override property rights of entities like Exxon, because such property rights can only be legitimately assigned after we have physically constituted functional democracies where people have influential voices through fair family policy.
Being free entails changing the way we create power relations at birth.
We then use a simple test to see who among us is continuing that failure, versus truly free people who are targeting concentrations of wealth and power to limit and decentralize that influence into functional systems of democracy. Limiting and decentralizing how? It involves taking back the costs that were imposed on women and children, described above.
* Special update: After writing this open letter Professor Philip Pettit of Princeton University called the claims in it “home truths” and allowed us to share his good words publicly. Take action below to urge Gerken to admit the fallacy in her work and support Fair Start legislation that moves us towards the first condition of being free.
Dear Dean Gerken,
This is a great headline: “‘You cannot be an academic or a lawyer and not believe in free speech’: Dean of Yale Law.” And the points you make are compelling. Yale Law School (YLS) is clearly taking a position on the value of free speech in the context of elevating controversial speakers, including some who might reinforce unjust hierarchies based on the history of colonization (Elon Musk leaving South Africa during apartheid with the wealth his family made under it would be an example).
YLS and its alums will have intimate knowledge of what concentrations of wealth and power – like working on or with the Supreme Court – look like, even when those concentrations are totally attenuated from the citizens over which they have authority. Would YLS take a position on ensuring liberating power relations through family reforms that should precede free speech forums, especially if the changes needed to ensure that would – by empowering people with meaningful voices in participatory democracies – would long-run mitigate the climate crisis?
And from your work on democracy, I will assume you want those relations to be formed bottom-up, in which case there seems to be only one pathway:
Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle influences like climate emissions, the slow dilution of democracy, the concentration of wealth, power and control in a few, and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them. They will not allow themselves to be subject to political systems where they are not actually empowered. How do they do this? Fair Start family reforms, like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance using an inversion test, ensure that people are actually empowered long-run – in places like town halls – to make the ultimate rules under which all must live.
This evades the undemocratic concentrations of power that – as Robert Tsai saw – prevent people from constituting true legalities by creating relationships between people that are more empowering than disempowering, relative to a neutral point, like Rawl’s original position. It evades the aborted version of freedom Joseph Raz exposed.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development does and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based. Each person chooses to commit or evade the fallacy in every normative claim they make by accepting or rejecting particular forms of supreme political obligation like written constitutions and choosing to orient from a relatively just or unjust place. If they did not the idea that governmental authority derives from groups of people, the authority of which depends on the individuals in those groups, would make no sense. This is about the creation of power relations and relative self-determination more than “population.”
From your work I will assume you see the U.S. Constitution as supreme, perhaps limited by some form of international law. Could a more supreme norm exist in the form of whatever norm would best account for creating the people from whose authority these other norms derive?
One can imagine this process simply as using good democratic representative ratios to move toward what many see as optimal world population ranges. If government is to derive from the people, there must be a first election in which the people decide who is in their polity. Immigration/emigration might have determined that “first election” at one point, but how can we ignore family policy as a more primary form? We cannot and remain in a preconstitutional modes, choosing things like the creation of large populations in the hopes of geniuses magically emerging rather than seeing the genesis of efficiency as actually developing each child to their full capability, as long as we make that mistake.
Fair Start family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people. Wealthy people, and the unscrupulous politicians and charities that shill for them, will hide the fallacy, and its overriding nature.
But without these reforms people will continue to try to wrongly empower themselves through acts of violence., and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of their wealth and refuse to change course. They will harm innocents, rather than those extracting personal power from collective freedom by crowding people (including the future majority) out of town halls and into the shopping malls, the move that fundamentally created the climate and other deadly crises we face today.
Freedom requires forums of speech, like democracies, be bounded by objective norms of human rights, the first of which is the right to have children.
Help us make that right ecosocially fair, to decolonize the future and become sufficiently other-regarding to actually constitute just communities.
But that process was designed before the climate crisis, surely a threat to human freedom as it represents the imposition of others influence upon the natural (or nonhuman) background world that buffered us from one another for millennia.
Can we do more than family planning interventions designed decades ago? Yes – we can use this crisis as a chance to become – existentially – free.
These reforms correct something called the constitutive fallacy: Ignoring the way our creation and development do and (assuming we use baselines like the Children’s Rights Convention) should – fundamentally – constitute actual power relations, between humans, and between humans and the nonhuman world or nature upon which freedom is based.
Family reparations override because being just in who we are precedes being just in what we do. And we cannot assign things like property rights that derogate from our being (or constituting the fundamental power relations so that we are) free and equal people.
Without these things people will try to wrongly empower themselves, and against the wrong targets rather than the people responsible for or who benefitted from the family policies that externalized the costs of wealth by crowding people out of town halls and into shopping malls, through acts of violence.
TAKE ACTION: URGE CALDER, @vanessabcalder, AND CATO TO TAKE FREEDOM TO THE EXISTENTIAL LEVEL, APPLYING THE INVERSION TEST TO MAKE FAMILY POLICY FAIR AND LIBERATING.
The Council for the District of Columbia made history recently by moving towards #birthequity with baby bonds. Why should only rich kids get trust funds? Isn’t freedom about equality of opportunity?
TALE ACTION: Urge the Council to adopt Fair Start, and you can also work from the bottom up – urging relatively wealthy residents of the Washington D.C. area to lead by example and support Fair Start moves by donating in ways that all children get a fair start in life.
Given that the majority of people will be those who live in the future changing behavior, might be best thought of as having and raising kids well. What the heck does that mean? In the Twentieth Century, based on significant developments in the fields of child development, civil society came largely to agree – in what would eventually be called the Children’s Rights Convention – on the birth and development conditions children deserve. These resources would create a world we should all value – filled with nature, equality of opportunity, and democracies where each person would matter.
What went wrong? Governments and big businesses colluded to reinterpret human rights regimes to ensure population-driven economic growth, rather than child-centric family planning consistent with the human rights regime. That move – over time – created the world we live in today – beset by the climate crisis and massive inequity. The men that engineered this scam robbed us of true/participatory democracy, and the freedom of consensual governance, in order to build concentrations of wealth and power.
They used poor family planning and growth to slowly push and crowd people out of town halls and into shopping malls, robbing us of our freedom.
We might be inclined to resist such forms of protests because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that are those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.
We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do – including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.
We can think of the child described above as we engage them – and anyone who opposes giving kids a fair start in life – for they are fundamentally to blame for what happened to that child. They reject a change in the way we plan families that would have prevented the child’s death, in order to ensure and exploit growth.
Children are the future. Isn’t that what everyone says? It is a lovely sentiment. Sadly, very little is done to secure that future. Without a fair start to life, millions of children are doomed. This is where Fair Start Movement comes in.
We believe that all children deserve the same rights; they should all be born at the same starting line. This line is more of a zig-zag, though, as those in power invest in keeping the wealthy at the top and everyone else to fend for themselves. And as we have seen, this method is only making things worse for the rest of us.
Fair Start Movement focuses on two things: (1) push for family planning practices where would-be parents wait until they are mentally, emotionally, and financially ready to have children, (2) educating people on why sustainable families are better for the individuals and society as our planet’s resources are depleting quickly, and (3) advocate for policies that invest in programs and services that help all children, not only those born into wealthy families.
For as long as I can remember, the message has been “having children is your purpose, and the more children the better!” I made a choice of not having children because honestly, I do not want to bring a child into the world as it is, especially with the environmental issues we face. But there are millions of families out there who will continue to have children and we need to change things for them.
What we have been doing as a society is not working. When one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with around 720 BILLIONAIRES, how can we justify unhoused, starving children? Things need to change.
What is the most good we can do? This is a question effective altruists (EA) grapple with. And that community, which is large and comprised of many viewpoints, answers the question in a variety of ways.
But doing the most good is a question that has already largely been answered by the Children’s Rights Convention, which acts as a binding assessment of the ecosocial conditions in which children should be born and develop in order to comprise just communities. These conditions include a restored climate, and relatively equal opportunities in life that are currently out of reach (see the chart above).
In other words, while we may wish to do good, we have a primary obligation to protect future generations, and in compliance with the Convention. EA is limited by this human rights regime and deontological population (or really, power) ethics, because while many in EA value economic growth, that growth is conditioned on our complying with human rights norms that – in instruments like the Convention – show how to empower people. We need to first use human rights standards to create people for town halls, rather than the utility-producing shopping malls many in EA favor, because the latter are only legitimate if they are regulated by functional – human rights-compliant – versions of the form.
For example, some in EA might assume a good use of corporate profits would entail charitable donations to things like animal welfare reforms. The reality is that if we do not use human rights to assess the true costs of those profits on people and future generations, we actually end up doing more harm than good to humans and nonhumans, as measured against things that override EA principles, like biding human rights instruments. Instead of a focus on stripped-down welfare, a human rights-based approach enables consent to power – a more basic value the precedes and allows us to truly do good.
Invest more in kids.
Admittedly the Convention has not been applied as a standard for family planning, but it could be, using family planning incentives/entitlements geared as climate reparations for future generations, with distributions/fees scaled inversely to wealth as a means of promoting climate restoration as well as parental readiness, birth equity, and sustainable families. How can we possibly be effective, or efficient, without developing each child to their full potential, in the freeness of nature that Henry David Thoreau described as the fundament of economy?
The climate and inequity crises we face today fundamentally flow from denying the eco-social conditions promised by the Convention (denied to them per one Nobel Laureate to ensure the growth the enriched a few), because in self-governing communities where authority flows bottom up, our fundamental power relations and development becomes the exclusive reason for such outcomes.
The fossil fuel industries currently being targeted at COP27 seem like ideal targets to urge to first fund this transition from parent-centric to child-centric planning. And using the Convention, perhaps reinterpreted as requiring that we take democracy seriously by applying this inversion principle, would avoid what might be called the constitutive fallacy, or treating anything other than a fair creation norm that empowers people (from whom the legitimacy of things like state constitutions derive) equitably – per the inversion – as the ultimate obligation. How can we separate our values from ourselves, and our creation?
Without ensuring minimum levels of welfare for future children, and the autonomy of the nonhuman world that is part of that welfare, EA is simply using its platform to exploit the most vulnerable entities. They were committing a simple baseline error – randomly assigning costs and benefits without first being a group of people who can inclusively engage in such analysis.
If we reject the fundamental fairness described here, we end up with a system that does not allow people to meaningfully participate in creating the rules under which they must live, a system that is thus backed by violence rather than consent. And we would force people to live, disempowered as such, amid massive and growing inequity and in an increasingly hostile environment.
We can use the great concentrations of wealth that growth created (wealth now defended by systems of violence) to fund incentives/entitlements to bend the arc of our existence away from that future, and towards a biodiverse future where each child gets what they need, and participatory democracy – or freedom – is the reality. It would be wrong not to shift that wealth, by all means effective, given that its true costs were externalized on the women and children the incentives/entitlements would go to.
If we do not, and the situation degrades as described above, many people in that situation will turn to self-defensive violence, free people who through effective leaderless resistance models will limit and decentralize the violence-backed power (like the property rights EA now relies upon) others have over them, in part by taking the resources necessary to invest in young women’s constituting true democracy through better family policies.
TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO PROMOTE TRUE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE. CHOOSE ONE NOW.
Kudos to Scott Mortman, a brilliant attorney and thought leader with Fair Start, who nailed the issue of what we owe the future in his letter to the New York Times below.
The climate crisis and worsening inequality are a threat to children everywhere – with effects being felt most by those communities least equipped to endure it.
We can change course. Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning.
Fair Start helps shift unjust concentrations of wealth and power towards funding policies that instead empower all children with equal opportunities in life and a natural, biodiverse environment, by incentivizing and entitling well-planned, well-located, and more equitable families. In short, we promote fundamental justice and freedom by actually accounting for, and improving, fundamental power relations between people, and between people and their ecologies. This is something almost no other group does, and it’s the best way to avoid failed families and parental regret.
Per our Newsweek piece and multiple peer reviews, it is physically impossible for us to orient our lives and actions from a just and empowering place – or for governments to create obligations like property rights – without first ensuring through Fair Start planning truly fair, inclusive and participatory communities that can actually consent to such rules.
Now Take Action: Urge Exxon to move from the Paris Agreement to Fair Start as the standard for climate mitigation: https://fairstartmovement.org/earth-day-2022-climate-reparations-existential-justice-and-our-open-letter-to-exxon/
The alternative is the international law regime set up after World War 2, the one designed to prevent nations dominating one another. That regime is just missing one piece: A just system of family policies that would prohibit the growth, and exploitation of future generations, the Benzel and Kotlikoff article highlights.
A just families system would replace growth-based national dominance with the goal of ensuring equitable families that raise children consistent with the Children’s Convention. That would move us away from a superpower, and towards the ideal of human rights: Sustainable and participatory democracies composed of people who truly have equal opportunities to thrive. Rather than vie for supremacy, we should urge the United Nations to do its job and help change family systems to create that future.
