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I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna examine the argument that not having children is a privege tweet by tweet.
Okay, here we are at the premise of the argument: parents are making a sacrifice to better the world, and choosing not to do this is a privilege.
It's sort of funny that he heads off one of the obvious objections to his argument right away: that parents enjoy raising children, so the cost they pay isn't purely a sacrifice in the pursuit of the greater good. Parents might get as much out of it as they put in.
Why is this funny? Because he raises the obvious objection but never forms a rebuttal to it, so we're left with an obvious contradiction to his argument in our minds as we read the rest of... this.
Anyways, before we move on we should consider what would constitute convincing evidence that "not having children is a privilege" in the context of the argument that parents provide a benefit to the world at their own expense.
This is a little difficult because privilege is sort of a mutable word. I'm going to be very generous and say that we're talking about an "advantage available to a particular group." Here, that parents recieve less benefits from child raising relative to non-parents.
If we see something like "after being raised, children provide a benefit to society that is evenly distributed between parents and non-parents" we can jump and say "my god! parents got nothing out of this and non-parents were enriched!"
Even if we end up in a situation where parents are ending up with more benefits than non-parents, it might still be that parents are getting a raw deal because of the extra labor they did. So things like their enjoyment from raising children gets cancelled out by the hard labor.
How on Earth is this guy going to tally up all the joys and pains so that we can tell whether or not parents are the winners or losers here? Won't this take the work of hundreds of sociologists? Don't worry, we're never going to deal with any evidence from this point on.
Well what are we going to deal with? A tangent about pets!
This probably isn't an attempt to head off some counter-arguments to the main claim, but it does succeed in making us wonder whether non-parents are using their free labor to provide a societal good through animal husbandry.
This is pretty funny because for whatever reason he's taking time to claim that raising pets isn't as hard as rising children, but we actually don't care how much labor societal goods take to achieve.
In fact, we would much rather that someone end world hunger over a particularly productive lunch break than over the course of 50 years. So if the very easy to raise pets provide more to society for less cost, then we would rather people be pet owners.
Anyways, these pet ownership and parenthood aren't mutually exclusive, and pet ownership also doesn't actually do that much for society, so we'll just accept his claim that raising a pet isn't as useful as raising a child. Great! One extra-parental activity out of 10000 resolved.
As an aside, pet owners actually don't have trivial access to changing their plans, and also this guy is hard pressed to find time to shit.
I love this thread because this guy's subconscious is leaping at every opportunity to sabotage his arguement:
This is exactly the major argument against his position: parents DONT bear the sole cost of raising their children, non-parents pay into a bunch of stuff that exists solely to help parents.
This is the major obstacle, he must set about proving that the extra work parents provide is greater than the price society pays to help them do it! Get it! Show them the truth! Anyways, that's all he has to say about this.
You never want to make the claim that more people should have privilege. Other than that being fucked up, I have no idea why he's actively trying to convince us that what he has to say doesn't matter at all.
This is such a wild claim that you really gotta have some evidence coming in hot on its heels. Non-parents don't know that being a parent is expensive and takes a lot of labor? There's no way that's true.
This is such a bad argument because we're eventually going to get to the fact that having a child is usually a choice, and he's now trying to argue that non-parents made this choice... for what reason? At random?
Well, other than to say that this is a bizarre hill to die on, this also doesn't matter at all. Even if it were true that non-parents were somehow not aware of this, it has nothing to do with establishing that there is an imbalance in net benefits that favors non-parents.
Good god, this man's poor wife...
These are some bizaare tweets because he's really close to looping in an arguement that is valid: that women who choose to have children are systematically discriminated against. I probably would have led with this if I were trying to make his pet argument.
Then we get sort of an ironic revelation. He apparently is feeling some pressure to contribute more to parenting because of coronavirus. Presuably this is because the vast apparatus of public and private child care has ceased to function.
I'm not gonna pause on this for too long, but it is sort of funny to watch him try to rationalize why his work is so much more important than raising his children, which is supposedly this civilization saving work.
I do feel bad for parents who are actually being forced to perform double labor during this crisis, just take a moment to realize how much infrastructure there was just to support you having kids dude.
Okay, we spent a long time getting here, but it's time to start defining the benefit society gets (other than its perpetuated existence). Kids end up providing labor to us all!
Does this labor provide more benefit to non-parents than the combined benefit of pre- and post-parental gain? We're not gonna find out. But I do think there are a couple of flaws in this supposed surplus that non-parents get.
the most obvious one is that, uh, non-parents end up paying for these services. Here it's portrayed as if we're getting access to a bunch of free labor from children that is purey good for the child free, but we actually don't know if we gain much or anything from them.
It could easily be that the child-free are a massive benefit to the young, instead of the other way around. I'm sure you know that nursing care is not cheap, whereas a parent might reasonably hope to get support from their children and reduce their personal expense for care.
Anyways, we'll be generous and concede that we need young people to keep society functioning, but we'd need to know more to know whether or not non-parents recieve the a net benefit from this.
One minor point to resolve is that we also don't know whether or not people's children are actually out there being useful to non-parents. I would guess this is probably not making a huge difference, I just want to point out that children aren't guaranteed to be productive.
This guy really hates being forced to raise his own children.
You are complaining about being a parent. At the same time, you're really making the case that you find the whole experience to be a postive return on your labor, lol.
Other than this being a super funny tweet that I'm sure his children will enjoy seeing, he really wants to have it not be the case that people willingly take on the burden of being a parent.
It's just so wild because he's acutely noticing the effects of having his extensive support system removed, so on some level he knows that parenting IS a priority for society. To be fair, it actually should be more of a priorty because America does treat parents like shit.
Those last bajillion tweets all don't matter though, we don't care if parenting is super rewarding but incredibly hard, we just care whether non-parents get more out of it.
Oh I forgot this one too. This is all true, our country is stupid.
Now we can finally move on to showing what we came here to see, proof that those damn non-parents are reaping the fruit of the parent tree! Just kidding, that was the whole argument.
So what you're saying is that non-parents are taking preventative measure to prevent harm to society? Sounds pretty noble! You have no idea if your kids are gonna turn out okay.
Whoops, I lied, we still have some more things to say. So kids are a choice but parents have no choice but to have and raise them. This is a real conundrum. Also, more evidence that having kids is incredibly valuable on a personal level.
Okay here is the summary. (a) is true. (b) is worth talking about. (c) we covered before.
Ah god, this was a wild journey, but this is the coup de grace. This is the punchline. Those damn non-parents have the cards stacked in their favor and they contribute nothing.
We've already covered most of these points, but I do want to point out that men who are parents actually have traditionally had some advantages that are getting glossed over here.
This is just from one researcher, but parental men actually make more money the more children they have. But whatever, I'm happy to give the benefit of the doubt and say that this is equivalent or worse than being a non-parent.
Did we reach a supported conclusion here? Not really, we mostly ended up with a pile of claims. The man writing here did an amazing job of undermining his own position throughout, and didn't give us any reason to accept his argument other than assertions that it was surely true.
It does seem obvious that parenting is work. It's also pretty obvious that parents have a lot of support systems that the author sorely misses. We just have no idea what the costs and benefits are to parents and non-parents in the end.
We have also mostly ignored choice. A lot of our sense of injustice has to do with the choices people can and can't make, and we're especially concenred with injustice against people who had no choice but to be in the group they inhabit.
Well, that's important when we consider justice, but it's not especially important for this thread because we're not feeling very convinced that any injustice actually occured here.
I think there are a hundred other little points to make about this dumb little assertion (why not have a hundred kids? why not use your labor to advance a goal that you KNOW will better the world instead?) but we can end here knowing that we havent seen any evidence supporting it
also, see my wife's astute work on why not owning a cat is privilege.
