Dead millionaire convinced dozens of women to have as many babies as possible (2015)
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
I really like this guy. Humor is a slow play and if you can play your hand even after death then you have mastered humor.
I had an uncle like this, I hated him as a kid but he made me a man that does not take everything too serious. Unfortunately he passed right as I was becoming a man so I only realized his life lessons in reflection.
Now, that would be hilarious to watch!
For example, Catholic, Protestant an Jewish leadership of any city, given those terms, would have little problem finding a project to spend that money on. Either one of numerous charities or here [1] to start.
I think the title of the article, is not informative either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_Center_of_New_York
Not sure why that would be hilarious?
I imagine the 3 would quickly reach agreement, but they'd also agree to keep your views (atheist) out of the announcements. Can't advertise good deeds of that nature, of course!
But I found the whole story depressing, many people take creating more people so lightly and often their belief system embraces a blanket "more is always good/better" stance.
It might be the ultimate endeavor. Right now we live in relative scarcity, so resource gathering dominate our culture. But imagine a thousand years from now when robots produce everything, and material is plenty. What do we do then? What's our purpose as a species? A good candidate is striving to maximise healthy and dignified earthly life across the universe.
A nice video that goes in depth about how people just don't have an intuition about exponential growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqcHG7QUK9k
Of course it is true that in a finite universe, exponential growth can only continue for a finite amount of time.
But that time could easily be far longer than you or I will live to see. We could be centuries, millennia, maybe even millions of years, away from the peak.
The peak of human civilisation might be the point at which every inhabitable (or feasibly terraformable) planet in the galaxy has been colonised. (That assumes that intergalactic travel will never be feasible – an assumption which is probably true, but we can't be certain about it.) Peak galactic colonisation could easily be several million years hence–if we ever get there. Of course, we could quite easily annihilate ourselves a whole lot sooner than that, or interstellar colonisation could turn out to be permanently technologically or economically infeasible, or a bunch of other possibilities. But that's the thing, nobody knows where the peak is, worst case scenario is we could be living in it right now, best case scenario is it could be millions of years into the future, and lots of possibilities in between those two extremes.
Also, aesthetic.
Also, reduced chance of extinction (before each given point in time).
I am simply talking about when humanity reaches peak exponential growth. Staying on the one planet, it has to happen a lot sooner than if we colonise other planets in the solar system and then go on to colonise other star systems as well. With galactic colonisation, the peak could easily be millions of years away. Without it, the peak has to be a lot sooner than that.
History shows that whatever our “purpose as a species” is, those with more power will want to take more from those without. This is incompatible with “maximis[ing] healthy and dignified earthly life” for most of the population. And there is nothing to be optimistic about; this won’t change in a century or a millenium.
Huge mistakes were made some time ago and there's no recovery in sight.
While there is less research into men's fertility and education, in developed countries evidence suggests that highly-educated men display higher levels of childbearing compared to less-educated men.
Education however reduces women’s fertility.
The people that built the modern world voluntarily phase themselves out.
People seem to understand that if you move a factory from one country to another you haven't decreased its pollution, especially if the new country has laxer environmental regulations. If you offshore population growth, you haven't decreased population growth either.
I'm not that optimistic either, but hope we learn from examples like Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgMNhMRgkHE that nations can manage populations voluntarily, increasing stability, peace, and abundance per person -- no eugenics, One Child policy, or racism. More like the opposite.
Heinlein was a mixed bag. Mostly nuts. But his meta concepts and storylines were way ahead of his time(50-70s)..and some would say even by today’s standards. Still..one of favourite early sci fi authors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_families
[..] The Howard Families are a fictional group of people created by the author Robert A. Heinlein.
According to Heinlein, the Howard Foundation was started in the 19th century by Ira Howard, a millionaire dying of old age in his forties, for the purpose of extending human lifespan. Howard himself did not live to see the outcome; he simply endowed the experiment with his own fortune, and the trustees of the Howard Foundation used the limited scientific knowledge of the time to create a selective breeding human program to encourage, financially, people of long-lived ancestry to have children together. The Howard Foundation is greatly enriched during the Great Depression by knowledge gained through time travel so that they get out of the stock market before the crash and invest in gold rather than cash and are able to reinvest in stocks that rebound after the crash.[1]
The novel Methuselah's Children is focused on the Howard Families and their quest for acceptance on Earth and other planets. [..]
> But some mothers who had more than nine kids still weren’t allowed a shot at the prize. Pauline Clarke was one of them; she had 10 children within the timeline — the first five with her former husband and the second five with a different man, one she lived with after her separation from her husband. Middleton was not impressed. “‘Children,’ when used in any testamentary document, always means legitimate children,” he wrote in his judgment. Instead of $9 million, Clarke was eventually given a settlement of just over $200,000, and that came only after a lengthy lawsuit.
However, it seems clear the judge used that definition to change the rules of the contest, which makes no sense.
One could read it as a donation to the largest single Toronto family, i.e. a PR(family)G for a likely quite destitute household.
Although, I suppose, there would not really be a reason to delay for ten years in that case. (It could be 'most in the ten years leading up to my death'.)
At some point, we have to ask ourselves..why does the human species want to procreate?
It's not zero, because of their later life. But it's certainly not infinite, because of their early dependence.
I suspect on average we're pretty good at arriving at the (ever-changeable) optimum, or close to it, naturally. Maybe it's just as simple as 'as many as you can afford the childhood of'. But then, what's 'afford'.
But then, that still varies according to poor a childhood you're willing to let them have (and to live yourself for the duration).
"In some countries, most notably Norway and Hungary, parents are actually happier than non-parents."
The fact that having children makes people unhappy only tells a truth about societies being wrongly structured, rather than anything about the happiness of having children.
If course this is a evolutionary perspective, if you're talking about what is strictly rational for maximizing happiness, you should go with zero kids: https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-...
I wonder what kind of equilibrium this system would come to. For now I'll assume that females have no preference for Mx over My or vise-versa.
For reductio-ad-absurdum, let's imagine what would happen with p=1 and h=1. Then Mx fathers have only daughters, and after one generation, the population is entirely My and F. After two generations, it's only My, and there is no third generation.
Next let's see what would happen with p=1 and h=0. Again, Mx fathers have only daughters; My fathers now have 50% My sons and 50% Mx sons. Starting from a population that is 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, the second generation is again 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, and with all parents having an equal number of offspring. So at a glance that looks like a stable population, but we'd need to look deeper to see whether any initial small unbalance between F, My, Mx returns to that equilibrium or diverges, and also whether there's any advantage to a higher "h" or a lower "p" that could gradually cause those traits to spread. For example if some kids with a "p=0.5" gene have an advantage over p=1, then over time the Mx and My distinction will get wiped out and we'd just end up with M and F.
I'm too lazy to analyze it but it would be an interesting system to simulate!
I’d also be curious to see this broken out by economic situation. I’d wager parents who don’t feel financially burdened by children score far happier than those that are stressed financially.
it's just: here's a graph, here's a significance test, here's a narrative. no attempts or tests to try and evaluate while controlling for any other things e.g. income.
don't let this analysis influence your thinking too much.
IMO: Two if you aren't into kids and have just a boy and a girl. After that, it's all about you and your spouse's personal preference.
If you want more kids, start young.
What if this force could be used for good? Is there a way I could write my will to convince a large number of people to solve climate change, for example?
> While there were a few mentions in the press early on, news coverage of the Derby didn’t really pick up until 1932, when the Ontario government tried to have the will nullified and the money given to the University of Toronto. After a huge public outcry — the Toronto Daily Star accused the government of resorting to “communism in the raw” — the government’s claim was withdrawn. At that point, several other women seem to have realized that their family size put them in contention and started to compete as well.
that is such a strange accusation
First thing communism did in my country in 1947 was deposing private property by force. And people who fought against that were imprisoned, killed and called "enemies of the people".
It shows how (the vast majority of) people can be so easily manipulated if only you cater to their self interest and greed.
This hardly counts. You would probably be surprised how many people have this level of assets - liquid or in property. All those houses you can't afford because people were grandfathered in with low property tax rates? Yeah you probably don't want to know.
these aren't the same edible rich people that the populist furor is being made towards
Pensioners are living for 30+ years these days.
Index funds, real estate held for 30-60 years, an inch of entrepreneurial effort to make any of those properties cash flow, maybe a couple actual wins.
It's not that improbable. The only problem is that people want to do all that before they are a 70, not when they are 90.
When you walk through a city, like Toronto which this article was about, and see any block, or apartment building, remember that there is an actual human that actually owns that. Each and every one. Even in the run down parts of town, all that stuff has a book value of at least $1 million and is liquid enough to borrow against at the lowest interest rates for further investment. Start counting.
It is a lot. As in, not rare. Not exceptional. Not the same as common, or most. A lot.
It should be evident enough for you not to need a dissertation to modify your worldview.
B) even the person from OP’s article owned business interests in various properties
But most city apartment buildings aren't owned in full by a single person.
The numbers are even more stark for more recent [0]
[0]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties....
Much of the benefit of commercially owned real-estate comes from being leveraged. Paid-off property will cash flow better per door, but usually not per million of equity.
> He wanted to give that wealth away. But he wanted to do it in as roguish a way as possible.
As opposed to what it actually was. A rich scumbag brutally preying on and abusing poor people, performing a sadistic social experiment for his own amusement. This man was a monster and then some. They probably should have checked his properties for murder subjects.