Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, is a father of one, pushing 40. So am I. So Matt probably knows about the snot sucker.A few minutes ago, I drew snot from a baby’s nose by sucking through a plastic tube. Jeremy hates that even more than he hates shrunken cloth diapers or wearing pants. But he loves throwing yogurt on the floor, turning pages and playing with his dad. So all in all, it was a good morning.Now he is down for the morning nap and I can write. My son spent nine long months growing inside my wife. It wasn’t easy on her. Jeremy then raced through ten brief months since being born. In those ten months, more people have been born than died. So 60 million more people are now alive than were when Jeremy was born. The size of the population is growing.In Jeremy’s lifetime, that will change. If Jeremy lives as long as demographic tables predict, he will live into the 22nd century. By then, the average woman is expected to have less than two children. Globally, that figure is about 2.5 today. So, Jeremy will live to see a world in which each year ends with fewer people alive than the year before. Demographers predict that a few years after 2100, the human population will begin to diminish. If fertility rates do not reverse trend and begin increasing, then there will never again be so many people alive. I will not live long enough to see a population growing smaller, and you may not either. But Jeremy probably will.The prospect of a shrinking population is surprising. In the 1960s, the worldwide population was growing faster than it ever had before – and more than twice as fast as it is growing now. Thoughtful people learned that there was an “overpopulation problem”. Sixty years later, many people still think so. The narrative of explosive population growth has endured long after the facts have changed. So we have accidentally ignored the hard question that we now need to answer: is the coming downsizing of the human population good, bad or something else?How many people there are matters for many reasons. One is the environment: more people create more pollution. Another is economics: more people create more innovation, more technology, more art. They produce more and they consume more. Of course, more people must come from more pregnancies. So we cannot evaluate declining fertility statistics without considering the wellbeing, opportunities and inequalities facing the women who would be mothers.Each of these is important. Yglesias’s new book covers each of them in the citation-laden detail of the policy journalist that he is. His argument is that it would be better if there were many more people living in the United States. He didn’t have to convince me. I already agree.It is a good thing that he didn’t have to convince me. Because he didn’t.Yglesias wants a decades-long national programme to increase immigration and fertility rates. He wrote nine chapters about how to do it. Only the first 4% of the book is spent arguing that we should try to increase the size of the population. Yglesias would think that if we just bring our reasonableness and focus on the question, then the fact that we should do this will be obvious. The argument, in its entirely, is that this will help the US compete with China.Maybe so. But competition with China (about which I don’t know anything) seems to me to miss the point of what makes life worth living. Instead, I want to raise a question that might be the hardest question about population. It is surely the most neglected – and not just by Yglesias. This question is the focus of this essay: Is the opportunity to live a good life – rather than not exist at all – a good thing? If a life would full of great experiences – if those great experiences much more than outweigh the bad – then would it make the world a better place for that life to happen? Should we be grateful that we get to live, and might future people be grateful, too? If so, then one of the consequences of the coming population decline will be to make the world worse in one way: worse because many good lives will never be lived. Yglesias would need to write an even more ambitious book.Let’s call the possibility that good experiences in good lives make the world a better place it’s good to be alive. Is it? By itself, answering this question would tell us only some of what we need to know as population decline approaches, but answering it is one needed way to start. This is not a question about facts, such as how much an extra baby would eat or smile. This is a question about what is valuable, about what is good. Statistics can estimate how much greenhouse gas an extra baby will add to the atmosphere. Statistics cannot tell us whether the extra happiness of the baby’s experiences counts as a good that we should promote. Is it good to be alive?Also read: Why Do We Treat Internal Migrants Differently From International Migrants?Maybe Jeremy will be a parent, too. What will his children think about belonging to a species that is getting smaller? I personally suspect that it is good to be alive. We miss the opportunity to make the world better if we ignore this aspect of how the future could be good. I might be wrong. I admit that it is an unusual question to ask. But before we turn to my reasons, there is something to stress.Even if it is good to be alive, this would not be the only way that population size matters. Consequences for women’s lives and equality, for the environment, and for the economy could be more important. In case you are impatient, I am eventually going to argue that access to reproductive healthcare is essential; that climate change is urgent; and that public investments in healthy pregnancy, parental leave and day care are excellent ideas. Yglesias agrees with me on every point. But whether you agree or disagree with those proposals, deep unknowns remain. Population decline is coming, but it is so ignored that the research does not yet exist to answer even basic questions about what we should do. One of these important questions is about what we value. It is time to start asking.The more the merrier?To be or not to be: that is the question. Is it good to be alive? There are almost eight billion people alive today. Everybody agrees that any policy that made all 7.8 billion of us better off would be worthwhile. So would any policy that didn’t quite help everybody, but that helped some people, reduced inequality and did not hurt anybody.What about a policy that did not hurt or help any of the 10 billion people who are projected to be alive in 2050, but merely added an extra billion people who would have good lives? So instead of 10 billion people, there would be 11 billion, and nothing else would change for the 10 billion. This is highly imaginary. Jeremy has changed my life. All of those billion babies would have mothers, each of whom would have a different life than she would have had without the extra baby. The extra billion people would consume and produce, create and pollute.Matthew YglesiasOne Billion AmericansPenguin Random House, 2020But let’s assume – hypothetically – that the consequences of the extra billion people balanced out good and bad for the mothers and everyone else. Imaginary questions can be useful for figuring out what we value. In his conclusion, Yglesias reminds us that the US Constitution aspires to “promote the general welfare”. Would the extra billion people, assuming they lived enjoyable, fulfilling lives, add to “the general welfare” that the Constitution says that laws are supposed to promote?The simple answer is that if the new lives are happy, on net, then adding them makes a world with more happiness, more good experiences, more good. The simplicity of that answer is powerful. There are also un-simple answers. In the scholarly literature, this question turns out to be a niche topic at the intersection of economics and philosophy. Journal articles and peer-reviewed books are full of formal proofs that look like advanced math. Some of these are as compelling as they are radical.It is no surprise that professors, who are paid to generate arguments, disagree about the details. But many of the experts in the debate agree that, to some degree or another, adding extra happy people – holding everybody else’s life unchanged – would promote the general welfare and makes the world a better place. As long as the good experiences in the extra lives outweigh the bad, the world is a better, happier place. I won’t detail every argument in the library, but it is useful to think through some examples.Gambling with your children’s futureLike many 21st-century parents, I first saw my baby on a TV screen, as interpreted by an ultrasound machine. A speaker played the ludicrously fast beat of his developing heart. Listening to the sound, I lost track as the technician listed all of the body parts she checked and tests she made. At prenatal visits, new parents must choose among many prenatal tests. But none of them tell you what you really want to know: Is my baby going to be happy? Is my baby going to have a good life?My wife and I had a hard time deciding whether to have a baby. For much of each year, we work in India, trying to help babies there have a healthier start to life. Babies in Uttar Pradesh are exposed to disease from air pollution and poor sanitation. We knew that it might not be an easy life for our own baby. We wondered whether we should bring a baby into our world – a world of climate change and social inequality, but also a world of unprecedented prosperity and rapid improvements.Every new baby is a risk. Most people in rich countries can reasonably expect that their future children will have good lives – but they might not. This realisation is the starting point for one argument that it can be good to be alive. The reasoning begins by noticing that anyone would agree that, at least in imaginary principle, there could be a life that would be so terrible, so full of suffering and devoid of peace or happiness, as to be better not lived. So we already know that the quality of a life matters to whether or not to create it. You cannot credibly claim that the quality of a life is unimportant if you agree that a life could be too full of suffering, at least hypothetically, to be worth living.The next step of this particular argument is to notice that any act of parenting is always a risky gamble. You never know in advance exactly how your child’s life will turn out. Unfortunately, any child could turn out to be a person with a terrible life not worth living, even though in most cases the chances are small.If adding a good life were never good – if it did not ever promote the general welfare – then every act of parenting would be an unacceptable moral risk. The extra life might make the world worse and might make no difference, but would never make anything better. Heads a loss, tails no gain. Such a gamble would be morally unacceptable. But parenting, in any normal case, is clearly not a morally unacceptable gamble. So, it must be false that there is no benefit of a new life.We know that adding a good life can make things better, because we know that the probable chance of a good life outweighs the small risk of a bad life – a risk that we accept with every new baby. It must, therefore, be good to be alive. This reasoning illustrates a theme has emerged when different philosophers have considered the question of whether it’s good to be alive: a coherent theory that accepts that it is normally ok or permissible to create a new life tends also to wind up concluding that, at least sometimes, it makes things better to create a very happy new life.It’s good to wake up to be aliveAnother line of argument looks for situations that are similar to creating a new life. Nothing is quite like creating a new person, of course. But if we use our imaginations, we can get close. Creating a life can create new, good experiences. So can extending a life. Of course, making an existing person live longer might have other benefits that creating a life does not – benefits to other people, or to the completion of life-long projects. That is why we need creativity.The last few days of my father’s life were lived unconsciously in a hospital bed. He was dying of cancer, which had spread to his brain. He did not know it, but his family was there with him, loving him and hoping for the best. The hospital moved him to a room large enough to hold children, grandchildren, and machines. We were there because what happened to him mattered to us, even if he no longer knew it. But because we were there, my father’s death is not a useful case to learn from. To learn about whether it’s good to be alive we have to imagine a different case – a case where family members are not waiting around the hospital bed, so any consequences are concentrated on the patient.Also read: How a Bengali Book in Broken Hill Sheds New Light on Australian HistoryImagine a person in a coma after an accident. In this person’s coma, we happen to know, he has no experiences at all. Medical science, we imagine, can guarantee that if the person wakes up, he would live a normal life span. But he would have no memories of his prior life, his prior name, his prior identity or goals. Although far-fetched, assume that doctors can be certain that he has no family, but nevertheless has the money and other resources to live a good life. Or, if doctors do not wake the person from the coma, he will die painlessly.Would it be better if such a person were to wake from the coma and live a few good years? I think so. But who would it be better for? Not for any family or friends. Not for the person who fell into the coma: nobody will ever again remember being that identity or feel like that person felt. Nor is the comatose man, having no experiences, wishing to wake up. If he is woken from his coma, he will have good experiences which nobody would otherwise have. Those experiences make the world a better place. They add to the general welfare.If you agree that it would be better if the person woke up, you can ask: What does this example tell us about whether it’s good to be alive? There is no reason to think, on the one hand, that waking the comatose man up would add to general welfare but, on the other hand, adding a new person would not. So, we conclude that adding a new person does, too. We conclude that it’s good to be alive. Bioethicists have dreamt up exotic, science-fiction examples that come even closer to approximating creating a new life. Such examples claim to teach us that adding new good experiences is already something we value.Other arguments are more technical. Some hinge on what it formally means for the world overall to be “better” or “worse.” An influential line of reasoning holds that it is logically incoherent not to conclude that adding good enough lives would increase the general welfare.But I prefer to set aside these technical arguments and concentrate on the simple ones. A world with additional happy people is a world with more good experiences in it, on net, a world with more joy. That fact tells us something important. Is that fact enough to make it a better world – a world with more general welfare? If so, what does recognising this mean that we should do?Could everybody be wrong about the general welfare – again?Most people ignore the question that I am asking. Many parents decide whether or not to have a child only by thinking about whether they want a baby – not by also thinking about whether or not it would be good for the baby to be alive. Most policy analysis implicitly assumes that it’s not good to be alive – that adding additional good lives would not increase the general welfare. We can see that in familiar newspaper articles where economists and policy analysts focus on averages (like GDP per capita) or fractions (like the poverty rate). Such measurements take stock without counting how many people are being measured. But maybe this standard practice is wrong. Maybe we are all ignoring opportunities to make the world a better place.If you are among the many people who cannot entertain the idea that your impressions about what is valuable could be incomplete – if you cannot imagine that your ideas about who counts towards general welfare could leave anyone out – then you have a history of predecessors as long as it is undistinguished.History is a series of revisions of what and who counts towards the general welfare. Do slaves count? Women? People of color? Dalits, who are ranked at the bottom of India’s caste system? Migrants from another country? What about people in the far future, who we will never meet, but whose lives will be shaped by climate change? If the answers to these questions are obvious to you, what about non-humans? Does the general welfare include the wellbeing of intelligent mammals, such as dogs and pigs?There have been influential people unwilling to consider the possibility that each of these interests counts towards the general welfare. Slowly, ideas change. Slowly, people begin to broaden their concept of what counts – of what advances the general welfare. Sometimes broadening happens because of good arguments. Unfortunately, broadening rarely happens without a fight.The possibility I am exploring is that – because good experiences are good – if we expect a new person to have all-in-all good experiences, then those experiences count as a reason in favor of creating her. More broadly, if we expect that future generations would live all-in-all great lives, then those good experiences count as a reason in favor of having larger future generations.This may sound radical. (Even the mere fact that population will soon decline may be surprising.) One response is to weigh the costs and benefits of population decline, including the possibility that it is good to be alive. This is a pragmatic response and depends on the details. But another response is to reject the possibility out of hand merely because it does not match with how you are accustomed to thinking about the general welfare. This response has bad historical company. Prevailing opinion has been wrong about who and what should be valued in the general welfare many times before. Sometimes, we have been lucky enough to eventually change our minds. Maybe the population decline of the 22nd century and beyond will be another occasion.Are there too many people already?Maybe it is good to be alive – but aren’t there too many people already? Perhaps – many have thought so! In 1950 there were 2.5 billion of us. Today, almost 8 billion people are alive. With plastic in the ocean and greenhouse gas in the air, it could seem that any sustainable population would be a smaller one.But if so, that would not mean that more good lives would not be in and of themselves an improvement. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Ice cream is a good thing. Charlie Brown says that happiness is two kinds of ice cream. Sadly, I’m getting to an age where I can eat too much ice cream, and the result is not happiness. But that does not mean ice cream is not good! I just have to be thoughtful about it.Extra people would have good consequences and bad consequences for everyone else. On the one hand, they could add to crowding and pollution. On the other hand, they could invent new technologies or write new songs that everyone could enjoy. In fact, many macroeconomists think that the innovative potential of a growing population is a deep explanation for the fact that people in 2020 are so much richer than people in 1720.Also read: Book Review: How Migration Shaped Our Nation StatesNot only is today’s population unprecedentedly large, it is also unprecedentedly rich and healthy. According to World Bank statistics, less than 10% of people are now extremely poor, down from over 40% in 1980. Almost everyone alive 200 years ago would meet today’s definitions of extreme poverty. Global life expectancy is 72, up from 52 in 1960 – mainly because babies are now so much more likely to survive childhood. All of this has been achieved in a population that includes many more lives than before. We under-appreciate the goodness of longer, richer lives if we ignore that so many more people now get to enjoy them. Today’s prosperity and longevity are certainly not what the overpopulation alarmists of the 1960s expected for a world of almost eight billion people.Many people believe that climate change demands that governments implement policies to reduce fertility rates and stop population growth. Demographic science, however, suggests that population policy is unlikely to help solve climate change.For one, population growth already is slowing. The number of people alive grew at over 2% per year in the 1960s. In the decades since, a richer, healthier, better educated world – and especially one where women have more control over their own reproduction – has meant a world with lower fertility. The global population is now growing at only about 1% per year. It is expected to peak at around 11 billion people shortly after 2100. Most of the projected population growth will be in sub-Saharan Africa. By the 22nd century, Asia, North America, Europe, and Latin America are each expected to have populations about the size of today’s or smaller.So even if high fertility harms the environment, fertility rates are already falling. But would it be better if they fell even faster? Would lower fertility rates help prevent a climate change disaster? Realistically, is further accelerating fertility decline even feasible in the short run?The problem with using population policy as climate policy is that population size changes too slowly. Climate change is urgent. Humanity is exhausting its carbon budget quickly. Preventing extreme climate change will require emissions reductions in the next few years and decades.“The next few decades” is too soon for fertility reduction to make a big difference. The reason is population momentum, demographers’ term for the fact that today’s young girls are going to grow up to be tomorrow’s mothers. Because there are more girls at each age than adult women, the global number of women of childbearing age is bound to increase for the next few decades. Today’s girls will grow into motherhood – even if fertility rates were to fall dramatically. The next decades are what matters for climate policy. So fertility reduction policy is not going to be the solution to climate change. Even if policy-makers had magical powers over fertility rates (and they do not), climate change is simply too urgent, relative to the pace of population change.Here is another way of seeing this. The US population would have to grow by 1.5 per year to reach Yglesias target of one billion by 2100, assuming it took a few years to get started. Assuming we started on that path soon, by 2030 – the urgent target for climate policy – the US would have increased only by the population size of Little Rock, Arkansas or Boise City, Idaho. This will not be the hinge on which climate policy turns.Climate change is going to cause a lot of harm. But over the next century – hopefully sooner – humanity will decarbonise. We will eventually switch out of fossil fuels and into sustainable energy. Coal, for example, is already being outcompeted in the marketplace by alternative energy sources. This needs to happen faster, especially in India where air pollution is a deadly threat. Once decarbonisation happens, we will still have a polluted atmosphere and a warming earth to deal with. These will be serious challenges. But it will no longer be the case that a larger population would cause greater climate emissions. What should we do then?Eventually, the global population will begin shrinking. Fertility rates in the US are already at a record low: the average woman has 1.8 children over the course of a lifetime, so without immigration the US population would be diminishing. The average woman in China or in south India has even fewer children than in the US. Population shrinkage in the 22nd century will not reduce carbon emissions, because there will not be any carbon emissions. But population shrinkage in the 22nd century could reduce the number of people searching for environmental solutions, depending on the educations and economies that they will have. Indeed, perhaps Yglesias should simply be patient, and wait until then to promote population expansion. If 22nd century lives are good – and they will almost surely be better than many lives today – then population shrinkage will mean that many good lives and good experiences will never happen. Does that matter?Voluntary parenting: Better for parents, better for babiesMary and Maja are babies. Both babies were born to married, working parents who took some years to decide whether or not to have a baby. Both couples worried about how parenting would change their lives. Both couples wondered how they would balance their new responsibilities with their old responsibilities. Both had a little trouble getting pregnant. And both eventually became parents.Mary’s parents live in the United States. Her dad used a couple of sick days when Mary was born, but went back to work. Her mom had six weeks of unpaid maternity leave. She tried to negotiate half-days, but the fact that the emails never really stopped when she was on leave meant that she didn’t expect much. She didn’t get it either. Mary’s mom is now lucky enough to earn enough to pay for Mary’s daycare, but it isn’t easy.Also read: ‘Population Explosion’: The Myth that Refuses to GoMaja’s parents in Sweden. Both of her parents were able to take months off of work when Maja was born. Paid. Maja’s mother was able to recover from pregnancy and childbirth while she and Maja’s father concentrated on learning how to be parents. When it was time to go back to work, Maja’s daycare was publicly subsidised and inexpensive.None of these people actually exist outside of statistical patterns. But the difference is real between the help that parents receive in some European countries and the costs they face in the US. So are the statistical consequences. Economists are increasingly busy documenting the benefits for parents and children of parental leave, maternity benefits, and child care.When new mothers get time away from work, babies are better-off. Professor Jenna Stearns studied the statistical consequences of a court case that required paid maternity leave during and after pregnancy in some US states. She found that paid maternity leave reduced the chances that a baby would be born underweight and reduced the chances of a premature birth. Researchers Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater investigated the economics of a 2012 policy change in Sweden that let fathers more flexibly decide how to use parental leave when a new baby was born. Fathers could combine leave days and work days within the same week, and be home with postpartum mothers. Medical records show that new mothers’ physical and mental health improved. Fathers were able to support their recoveries.These are big benefits. Birth weight, in particular, turns out to be an important economic indicator – not the weight of one baby, but as a statistical average over a whole population. That is because whether babies have a healthy start to life shapes the health and productivity of the next generation – what economists call “human capital”. That means that it is not merely just good social policy to invest in babies. It is good economic policy, too.There is another statistical difference between Maja’s family and Mary’s that is small but potentially important. Because parental leave and child care made it possible to fit parenting into their lives and careers, Maja’s parents had another child. Knowing that they would have to go it alone, Mary’s parents thought hard about having another baby, but stopped at one.Statistics show a small effect of parental leave on fertility decisions, especially for having a second or third child. Economists Rafael Lalive and Josef Zweimüller studied a policy change in Austria that increased the duration of maternity leave from one year to two years. They found that increasing parental leave increased the chances of a younger sibling: “three out of 100 women gave birth to an additional child within ten years after the birth of the first child who would not have done so with short leave.” It makes sense that there would be a statistical effect on fertility: parenting can be hard and costly. And it also makes sense that the effect would be small: having another child is a big decision, so only for a few parents would such policies tip the balance.To be sure, other researchers have questioned the econometrics that tie family-friendly economic policy to higher fertility rates. The best argument might be the simplest: fertility is pretty low in rich democracies in Europe and Asia that have more progressive policies than the United States. Sweden, where Maja “lives,” has fertility rates that are higher than America’s – and are the second-highest in the EU – but are still low enough to produce a shrinking population.After you read Yglesias’s book, turn next to Stuart Gietel-Basten’s 2019 book about population policies in Pacific Asia. People there tell researchers that they would like to have more children, just like Americans do. But pro-fertility policies have had little success in raising birth rates. In 2018, the average woman in South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan had about one child, in part because women are getting married later. Culture – and especially gender inequality – is as important as economics and policy. Yglesias and Gietel-Basten might turn out to agree on most of the facts. But if so, Yglesias should not be misunderstood merely to recommend a bit more pro-family legislation. Transforming the calculus of parenthood would require a package of political, economic, and cultural changes.Also read: The Earth’s Carrying Capacity for Human Life Is Not FixedLet’s assume such a package is feasible. There would be much to like about it. Investing in parental leave makes babies better-off, makes mothers better-off, and quite possibly makes the taxpayer better-off, by improving the health and productivity of the labor force. But let’s set all of those benefits aside, and let’s concentrate on Maja’s little brother. The small effect on statistical fertility rates is a big effect on him: it is the difference of a lifetime. But is this effect also a benefit? Is it good for Maja’s brother to be alive?“It is good to be alive,” I hope you are thinking if you have read this far, “but that does not mean that I should be forced to have a baby.” Certainly not! Nobody should. Yglesias reminds readers throughout his book that many Americans tell surveyors that they wish they could have more children, if it were easier and less expensive. Nobody forced Maja’s mother to have her or her brother.Our question is whether additional good lives are valuable. But whether we answer yes or no, parenting should be a free choice. For starters, governments have historically proven awful at forcing people to make major life decisions that they do not want to make. When governments try, they usually fail in their goals and harm people in the process. Fertility-reduction policies of the 1970s, such as forced sterilisation during India’s emergency, were coercive and destructive. Setting aside what governments can do, this is something that they obviously shouldn’t: involuntary parenthood would not promote the welfare of children, would not promote the welfare of parents, and would not promote the general welfare.So, babies should be wanted. That means that reproductive healthcare should be available to anyone – including contraception, including abortion. It is no contradiction to say, on the one hand, that all babies should be born to mothers who are ready to have them and want them and, on the other hand, that all mothers who want to have a baby (or an additional baby) should have the support they need to make parenting a good option. In fact, both of these policies would be good ways to promote the general welfare.Parenting is hard, but it could be easierThere are many benefits of being a parent, but there are also many costs. This is especially true for women. Policy-makers are increasingly suggesting solutions to combine being a mother and being a worker. And yet, the costs are not only to paychecks or careers. Growing a baby is hard! Some women glow in pregnancy (or so I’m told; my family had a different experience). But some women spend 40 awful weeks caught between extreme nausea and extreme hunger.Then they have a baby. Babies have needs. Starting in pregnancy and lasting for years, parenting means keeping track of tasks and appointments – even for families with adequate childcare. Whose job is it to make it to day care on time? Who cleans and finds the snot-sucker tube? (Who inhales through it?) These costs and more fall upon parents. In the world as it is, sociologists have documented, such mental work is more likely to fall upon mothers than fathers.This could be different. Some of those costs could be lessened. Some of those costs could be shared.Policy could help. Alongside recommending more immigration, changes that “take family seriously” are the core of Yglesias’ policy prescription. Parental leave; public child care; research and development to make pregnancy less taxing; new social norms about parenting and work. These are all things that we could accomplish together. In many cases, governments could help coordinate – could change incentives and costs without forcing anyone to do anything they do not choose to do.If we are smart about it, such an agenda would be a win-win for the general welfare. Parents would be better off. Children would have a healthier start to life and development. Taxpayers would reap the benefits of the greater human capital of the next generation.And, sometimes, these changes would tip the scales for parents who are weighing whether or not to have an additional child. More good lives would get to be lived.Perhaps we should not do this yet. Perhaps climate change and global poverty tell us that now is not the time to start. But even if so, it is time to start understanding our options and better understanding what the general welfare is. The population decline of the 22nd century will be here before we know it, but moral ideas change slowly. Expanding the general welfare beyond white, male, humans has been the ongoing work of centuries. It is not too early to begin talking about the next expansion.What might our babies grow up to believe?Baby Jeremy is awake now, and thinks that he should be the one pushing these keys on my computer keyboard. “Pbbbbbt!” he explains, flapping his arms towards the buttons. Whatever dad is doing looks too fun to ignore.He would know about fun. Jeremy is the happiest person I know. He bounces. He giggles. He squeals with delight. He cries, too – but now that he is sleep-trained, never for very long unless we’re snot-sucking. My wife and I are lucky in many ways. Every parent has different experiences. In our case, we have much to be grateful for: we seem to have won the baby lottery.I hope and I believe that Jeremy will be an adult in a world with a more inclusive understanding of what “the general welfare” means than has ever been the case before. If so, maybe people will believe that one way to expand the general welfare is to add new lives – to increase the number of people who get to experience joy, discovery, satisfaction, and friendship. Maybe more people will believe that it’s good to be alive.For that to happen, many people would have to change their minds. Others would have to think about a question that has never occurred to them before. Debates among professors and experts would continue. Citizens would disagree, too. Those disagreements are where new ideas about the general welfare have always come from.My job as a demography researcher is to study professorial debates about population and the general welfare – the math proofs, the detailed arguments. Baby Jeremy shows me each day that the best argument may be the simplest, hardly an argument at all. As he bounces and squeals, his smile grows as large as his little face. He bears delight – where a year ago there was no joy or anything else at all. Of course, Jeremy’s delight is far from the most important factor in promoting the general welfare. But he refuses to let me ignore it. His happiness counts. It’s good for him to be alive. He has increased the general welfare by one.Dean Spears is an economic demographer and development economist, and executive director of Rice Institute.