So why should women have more kids, according to Jeff, who criticized Meghan and Harry for declaring they would stop at two kids for environmental reasons? Jeff, who himself only has two kids, had this helpful bit of information:
The Talmud records that when the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt grew unbearable, their leaders advised couples to stop having babies — why raise more children to face a life of slavery? Eventually one of those leaders was persuaded he was wrong, and that childrearing should go on even in the teeth of murderous oppression. So he and his wife had another baby. That baby, named Moses, became the liberator who led his people to freedom.
Jeff goes on to claim that the solution to population-driven climate change is to create more people in the hopes that one of the children will have a solution to the problem. He then credits population growth for a lot of modern advancements. In reality, progress comes from investing in people, not just creating as many as possible and hoping for the best.
Not All Women Will Be Mothers
Regardless – the point is this: Jeff is ensuring a culture where women are pushed to be mothers. He’s doing it for religious reasons, while hiding behind nonsense arguments, and at a time where doing so is a manifest threat to the welfare and freedom of future generations. That goes beyond free speech to something worse than climate change denial – towards encouraging the exacerbation of a manifest threat to our species.
Parents who care about their kids should stand up to mouthpieces like Jeff. What does he tell his kids, Caleb and Micah, about climate change? Does he tell them that the destruction of our atmosphere is God’s will? Does he tell them that child abuse, vast inequality, and levels of education that bring down democracies come from above? Jeff should answer these questions. Why? Because he’s forcing his view on your kids future too. What we do now will impact the wellbeing of future generations in ways not seen before.
Ask Jeff to answer these basic questions by tweeting him at @Jeff_Jacoby or message him on FB at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeff-Jacoby/123656506578, and stand up to the men who push women to have kids, and thereby endanger our future.
But if the Washington Post values democracy over economics when it comes to education policy, why does it reverse that stance when it comes to family planning?
If we value democracy, we have to ensure that the conditions in which people are actually born and raised foster democracy. Downstream and after-the-fact approaches are a farce, and build inequality more than democracy. Yes, education matters for democracy. But not family planning matters even more. Why? The point of education is to ensure free and equal citizens, but family planning – more than education – determines the people we become.
We can break our temporal myopia, and change the way we see the world.
Take action: Urge Washington Post’s editor @PostBaron to embrace democracy at its source, and abandon its promotion of economic-growth based family planning.
Are Stossel and Fox News ok with the 41% of U.S. kids living in or near poverty and the life long harm caused by disadvantages early in life?
HOW INEQUALITY HURTS KIDS
There’s no question – inequality is harmful to kids. Studies have documented examples of rising inequality decreasing child welfare:
Here are the facts on childhood inequality:
Inequality affects kids for life. Unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach the age of five. 3
Children who grow up poor are more likely to be poor as adults. Furthermore, the likelihood increases with each year of poverty that is experienced. – PBS Frontline
The impacts of inequality are more damaging the longer it is experienced. The longer a child is poor, the greater the risk of poverty in adulthood, and of experiencing lifelong health problems and involvement in the criminal justice system. 4
The longer you grow up in poverty, the harder it is to graduate. PBS Frontline
The growing divide between low-income children and their peers reduces opportunities for low-income children throughout their lives. 6
The child poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics is more than double the rate for whites and Asians. Higher unemployment rates and lower earnings contribute to the gap. – National Geographic
We all believe in fairness, whether liberal or conservative. But some fail to recognize that the playing field is not level. The reality is that socioeconomic status is inherited.
The rich are getting richer, and it gets passed onto their kids.
Kids born poor stay poor, and social mobility is declining.
Although overall poverty is declining, poverty is increasing among infants, especially for black and Hispanic children. Social mobility is declining and the condition of those in severe poverty is worsening. That is why a more equitable system to ensure a fair start is as important as ever.
Source: Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
“The proportion of U.S. children who go on to earn more than their parents has dropped sharply since 1940, when the rate topped 90 percent.” – Equality of Opportunity Project
The bottom line? Inequality harms kids and it’s getting worse.
As 2020 candidates propose solutions to inequality, will the response from the right be to deny that inequality is a problem? Inequality must be addressed to give kids a fair start. Fair Start family planning offers a real social contract that brings reasonable people on left and right together.
This can be accomplished with a cooperative family planning framework. Fair Start family planning brings us together to invest in all kids, to improve equity and create a better society.
TAKE ACTION We can do something about inequality. Help get a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) for kids in Washington D.C., where inequality is higher than any other state in the U.S. GMI that is tied to family planning is even more effective. Ask D.C. Mayor Bowser, @MayorBowser to pursue GMI tied to family planning to give kids a fair start.
What can you do to protect yourself and the ones you love?
Understand that you have a fundamental human right to resources to ensure your child a fair start in life. Choosing to have a smaller family is, without comparison, the best way to mitigate the threats of climate change. The right to nature and a fair start in life is the first and supreme human right. If you are willing to plan responsibly, you have a moral claim against those that are able to pay – including the government and wealthy individuals.
Having Kids means caring for the future, and that means taking effective action now. Let’s change to conversation from what parents want to what kids need.
Most of the world’s legal systems, and the cultures they shape, treat family planning like this: It is each individual’s personal or private right to decide how many children they want to have, the conditions in which those children will be born, and the opportunities in life those children will have. It’s a model focused exclusively on what would-be parents want in the here and now. That approach to planning our families derives from acognitive dissonance called temporal myopia that leads us to ignore the long-term consequences of our actions. There is also nothing inclusive about that system. Nothing about it deliberately includes future children in their community, in any meaningful way that would ensure their voice is heard. It is less than ideal, for lots of reasons.
It isolates parents from their communities, creating a wall between the two.
It prevents both communities and parents from working together to ensure that when children are born they get what every child needs. That includes even basic things like basic nutrition, health care, and a loving home. These basic needs are expressly or implicitlyguaranteed by the Children’s Rights Convention. But because of the way we plan families, where the community is alleviated of its obligations in the planning process – many children never get them. Downstream solutions, like state protective interventions, are an insufficient band-aid.The Turpin family – and the long-term torture of the thirteen children – provides a jarring example. They abused over a dozen kids under the nose of their community, for years. That is isolation parenting. The Turpins not alone. Roughly 700,000 children are abused in the U.S. annually.
The isolating way we plan our families also ensures (and was designed to ensure) massive inequality.Poor kids become poor adults, and rich kids become rich adults, with the latter inheriting both obvious and subtle benefits they never earned. Racial and ethnic disparities that have persisted are a consequence of that. Elites, in turn, create policies that ensure larger families and population growth, bringing more and more children into the world to fuel a system of workers, consumers, and taxpayers that benefit a small percentage of people at the top in what many have recognized as aPonzi scheme pyramid. The United States was founded on opposition to birth-based hierarchies, like the British monarchy. How is it then thatwe are controlled by someone like Donald Trump, who was born in a such dominant positioning to others? Isn’t that odd? It’s not if you begin to examine and question the way we plan families, and how it perpetuates inequality and injustice.
The isolation model of family planning did something else, something at the most fundamental levels of society. It ensured that our societies, and the legal constitutions upon which they are based, would be positioned to treat both future children and non-humans – the most vulnerable entities in the world – as property.In the almost universally-accepted isolation model, would-be parents would have total control over future children (think the Turpins again here), and over the nonhuman world, which is treated as a human resource to be colonized and used. The nexus, between the human and nonhuman world, is property to be taken and controlled. If we don’t reform family planning systems, we never address that fundamental problem. In contrast, more ethical systems, replace the contradiction of procreative autonomy with more accurate values. With a better family planning model we can liberate both future children, as well as animals and their habitat, at the same time, and stop the former from being used to colonize the latter.
It’s time to change the isolating parent-focused model to one that includes the needs of future children and the community, and integrates the two together.
What’s that? It’s simple: Smaller families sharing resources to give every child a fair start in life. This child-centered model fixes several mistakes in the parent-focused model, and centers family planning around inclusivity and equity. It is nonpartisan at the most fundamental level, derived from fundamental and widely shared values, and it is designed to capitalize on falling fertility rates, steering them into better qualitative outcomes. Fair start family planning is fairness and inclusivity, on caffeine.
There is resistance, of course. Those at the top of the pyramid, and the politicians that represent them, are leaning on women to have more and more kids in order to create consumer demand, a class of cheap future labor, and a larger tax base. That is exactly whyTrump and his family were behind barely-noticed reforms to theChild Tax Credit in 2018 that were expressly designed tourge women to have more kids. Let’s be clear what this means. Congress will pay you for each kid you have, regardless of whether you neglect and abuse those kids, or simply have them in to totally failing state systems out of which charities are struggling to pull kids every day. Why? Kids equal economic growth, and that equals money for elites. People who oppose family planning reform are godsends for companieslike Unilever that will profit from the growth to come.
What is one way elites, who benefit from the constant flow of consumers, cheap future labor, and compliant taxpayers produced by poor family planning, keep the system in place? They fear-monger by intentionally conflating better family planning with many of the horrible reproductive rights violations of the past, like eugenics. They elide thecomplex intersectionality at the heart of family planning. But do you really think Fox News cares about equity? They and manyother reactionary entitiescreate endless propaganda to keep discussions of family planning taboo, and this lever for real social change hidden.
Doing effective social justice work means considering where people come from, the conditions in which they are born and raised, and whether the process that brought them into the world and provided for them is just. That is step one. If you don’t work on reforming family planning systems you are missing what could be the most influential factor in your work, others will be busy controlling that process, and what they do will have nothing to do with justice.
Why would the usually thoughtful New York Times, which seems to appreciate the dangers of climate change and other environmental crises, publish an article lamenting Japan’s population decline?
“Like Japan itself, the imperial family has a demographic problem. Just as Japan’s population is shrinking and aging, so is the royal family’s.”
Here’s the problem. Even though we may value those things, we have a moral blind spot when it comes to family planning. We assume that because we grew up in ever expanding nation-states with constant economic growth, that way must continue.
Our kids’ future will be defined by the people with whom they will share the world, the people being born and raised every day. Will our kids will live in a crowded world filled with billions of people who did not get what they needed growing up; a world of massive inequality and pollution? Or will they live in a safe, healthy, sustainable world, with equity and democracies where their voice matters? The world could go either way.
What environmentalists are doing to reduce consumption, child welfare activists are doing to protect kids alive today, and human rights activists are doing to universalize rights are all laudable. But what really matters – what has the greatest impact – is people, and how we make and shape them.
Studies have shown the media have a crucial influence over the way we will go. Recent eye-grabbing headlines from People magazine are not helping: “’Unprepared’ Kim Kardashian and Kanye West ‘Are Both Very Excited’ About Baby No. 4.” Really? Promoting large families as climate change and inequality worsen is a bad idea. Downplaying the idea of preparation makes it even worse. Ignoring the ways this uber-wealthy couple differ from most families that might follow their lead, makes the article simply irresponsible. Other news outlets are doing a better job of promoting a better future, showing more sustainable families sharing resources to invest more in every child.
Urge People Magazine to consider the impact it is having in limiting our kids future and driving an unjust future when reporting on celebs, and their family choices.
To put those worries out of mind, ask yourself a simple question: Is the remedy for climate change, to the extent we find one, more likely to come from North America or New Zealand? Obviously, the wealthier and more populous America is a more likely source of technological innovation, even though it is also a more significant source of greenhouse gases. So if you think progress in this fight is possible at all, you ought to be betting on the more populous nations. By having more children, you are making your nation more populous — thus boosting its capacity to solve the problem.
Yes, he’s arguing we should randomly have more kids, and thereby intensify all anthropogenic impacts on the planet (including ocean acidification, mass extinction, increased risk of social conflict and competition for scarcer resources), in the hopes that one child might one day develop a solution. Forget taking more sustainable steps, like encouraging smaller families where children get more individual investment to be better equipped to solve our greatest problems. Let’s just roll the dice, grow our numbers, and hope for the best.
Tyler Cohen is actually not that stupid. But he is intellectually dishonest. Why would an economics professor who does not appear to have kids himself, make silly arguments like this? Because he and other elites are stuck in a mindset of unsustainable population growth, or the Ponzi scheme of creating wealth and growing economies by simply adding more people. Tyler does not think that randomly having kids – as opposed to improving educational systems – will solve the problem. He just wants you to have more kids because that fuels the unsustainable system, which is designed to hide and externalize its costs, upon which he and so many misguided economists have built their careers.
Twenty-one year old reality tv heiress Kylie Jenner has been called a “self-made” billionaire by Forbes Magazine. Given the wealthy family in which she was born and other massive unearned privileges, many are laughing at that claim. The key to being rich is being born rich, as evidenced by the lavish #StormiWorld amusement park party in which her one year old received her first Chanel purse.
Tweet Kylie at @KylieJenner, and urge her to give a child in a need a fair start, relative to her start in life.
Source: David Leonhardt, NY Times
Climate change is now exacerbating this inequity as it disproportionately affects impoverished communities and drives up the painful costs of being poor. Is the playing field so slanted that it’s finally time to take bottom-up direct action to level it?
Solutions like the Green New Deal fall short for the same reasons that all other new reforms fall short. They make the same mistake we have made for centuries – by failing to see the responsibility we have to future generations. This is not some abstract duty – it involves ensuring every child born a fair start in life. But we have made, and continue to make, that mistake in part because of built-in cognitive biases against long-term (and especially effective) planning. Those biases blocked thoughtful, sustainable, and cooperative family planning that – had it been instituted decades ago – would have prevented the climate change, massive inequality, and failing child welfare systems that threaten us today.
All of this stems from the fact that our understanding of the social contract that legitimates our system of government is deeply flawed. How does it account for the fact that United States, through its climate change policies, has become a national security threat to itself? Our social contract is only valid to the extent it ensures we remain free and equal people. That includes preventing the dystopian future of a degraded environment, massive inequality, a weaker voice in democracy, and the consolidation of power of the few over the many – the path on which we are heading.
What then are we doing to protect those future generations, today?
The Fair Start family planning model, corrects that shortsightedness and legitimates the social contract by putting children’s interests first. It does so by making the beginning of the social contract a simple two part agreement: Communities ensure that parents have the resources to plan families and guarantee that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start in life. And parents delay having kids, and have small, sustainable families that put less demand on our shared resources and our world.
That agreement creates the first term of the social contract – the first human right, the “we” in “We the People”. It creates an ecologically sustainable (if not regenerative) society of people who receive a fair start in life. It builds human rights-based democracies from the ground up by ensuring all kids get what they need growing up, or a truly level playing field, and is simultaneously the most effective way to mitigate the threat of climate change and other environmental crises. It is, hands down, the most effective way, to protect kids, animals and the environment.
Unlike the current version of the Green New Deal, the real deal of child-first Fair Start planning appeals to the ideals of the most thoughtful conservatives and libertarians, as well as liberals. The model recognizes that 1) long-term planning and ensuring the actual development of each child is the most effective way to addresses our greatest threats, 2) that both Big Wealth and Big Government have utterly failed their obligations to ensure that development, and 3) that the assets of both should would best be redirected – by the people – towards Fair Start funds, in an override of any claims people like Kylie might have to unlimited wealth, as well as any obligation to pay tax dollars that may simply be wasted. That’s the real deal – one between us and future generations to build democracy from the ground up – out of the actual people that will comprise it.
Non-partisanship aside, this is key: Because Fair Start family planning is lexically prior to all other rights in the social contract (the first term), it overrides anything with which it conflicts. We are before we do. All kids have a fundamental human right to a fair start in life – which can be secured by any means effective. What does all of this mean? The right to a fair start in life, as the first human right, overrides both private property rights and tax obligations. The Fair Start model is a non-partisan real deal for conservatives and liberals to both make concessions. Big wealth and big government both need to decentralize influence and use resources to empower future generations and make them resilient.
Our world, and future, is defined by the people in it. But they are mostly defined by the conditions in which they were born and raised. Fair Start family planning ensures that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start – not a head start for a few, like Kylie. Fair Start family planning is a real deal – focusing on the creation of future generations, and it should be the foundation of modern attempts to revise the social contract, like the Green New Deal.
What would you do to protect future generations and ensure they get what they need? What have prior generations sacrificed to protect us, and ensure our freedom? Could the resources of the elite be put to the best use preventing climate change through the most effective means possible – better family planning? The ground to encourage and ensure Fair Start family planning lies everywhere in this country. Every person is a potential freedom fighter to create a real social contract. Kylie, and especially those bad actors like Exxon that have profited from creating the threat of climate change, should not underestimate what parents will do to protect their kids once they learn to question the legitimacy of unlimited property rights and other unquestionables that the elite take for granted.
Someone like Kylie, who has colossal influence should openly endorse better family planning to help ensure other kids a fair start in life relative to her own and her daughter’s. Furthermore, the taxes that she and the rest of the ultra-rich are paying could be partially shifted into Fair Start funds. Ensuring all kids a fair start in life should not be a morally controversial thing. Together we can work together to make it happen – a much preferable scenario to the alternative.
