One of the greatest ways I have continuity with my much younger self is that I get intensely upset about the sheer magnitude of pet and child abuse going on in the world. It’s weird to say that, since I’m sure the thought is upsetting to most people, but what might be unusual is the regularity with which my brain spontaneously reminds me of the kicked cats, the chained-up dogs, the CPS stories I’ve read on reddit – expected fraction of such cases (5% physically abused) multiplied by the number of people in the world.
I don’t endorse this, but it bothers me emotionally more than factory farming, because it’s so personal. It was like a pain signal from the skin of the universe. I felt trapped and desperate about it; there was something wrong, and I wanted it fixed. When I was younger I used to fantasize that surveillance states1 might do it, especially everyone-surveils-everyone type scenarios. (I still think they might fix widespread dependent abuse, but I don’t fantasize about it anymore.)
I was thinking about this one day, sometime after being exposed to numbers on how hereditary various things are, and realized my beliefs about the world imply that child abuse is slowly getting fixed, ‘for free’, without anyone trying particularly hard – and that the fix is long term.
The relevant beliefs
1. Child abuse is negatively correlated with having the child in a planned manner
Or put another way; child abuse is disproportionately done by people who did not prefer to have the child. Most obviously because they don’t like children, but also maybe they do, and it’s not a good life phase for them – they have the kind of job where if they come home at the end of the day to a colicky child it’ll be too much for them, or they’d be a good parent if they had 8 hours a day of someone else doing childcare a day but they won’t be a good parent if they only have 4 hours.
c.f. the differences in 20th century women artists’ relationships with their planned vs unplanned children
2. In a society with contraception, the people who have children at all will tend to have gotten them in a planned manner
Because they were (1) in a life phase where they were ready for children, (2) they had the underlying disposition of being excited to rear children lovingly and attentively.
3. That underlying disposition of being excited to rear children lovingly is somewhat hereditary
Over time, as people without this disposition do not reproduce, this disposition will become more common. Even if we have a civilizational blackout and contraception goes away, the selection effects will persist (for a while): the average parent will actively want to be a parent than the average parent 100 years ago, or even the average parent now.
Wait, but IS the trait of wanting children hereditary?
Maybe 30%, and maybe more so with contraception.
The authors find that genetic influences on fertility exist, but that their relative magnitude and pattern are contingent on gender and on the socioeconomic environment experienced by cohorts. Among females born in 1880–90 and after 1955, about 30–50 percent of the variance in fertility is due to genetic influences; these influences are substantially smaller for earlier and for interim birth cohorts. Male fertility is generally subject to smaller genetic and larger shared‐environment effects than female fertility. Because genetic effects are most prevalent in situations with deliberately controlled fertility and relatively egalitarian socioeconomic opportunities, the authors propose that the genetic dispositions affect primarily fertility behavior and motivations for having children.
The win is permanent
I like thinking about this because the win is ‘free’. As long as contraception is widely available, this will happen inexorably.
People around me worry a lot about the fertility rates crashing. Like them, I believe the short and medium term consequences will be quite harmful. But I also believe that, assuming the human race survives another ten generations, we will have a more fertile population, with happier childhoods. These concerns and joys coexist in my mind.