And what does this mean for aspiring do-gooders? (Work in progress.)
The puzzle
If you care about having a lot of impact, should you have kids? Naively, it seems like having kids would be bad for impact & career success. Kids take up time, energy, focus, all of which could be directed towards working harder.
But in the last few years there’s been a bumper crop of babies, among a bunch of people I respect for their work:
- Scott Alexander & Megan
- Holden Karnofsky & Daniela Amodei
- Paul Christiano & Ajeya Cotra
- Sam Altman & Oliver Mulherin
And many other figures I look up to, have had kids for a while:
- Bill Gates & Melinda Gates
- Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston
- Dustin Moskovitz & Cari Tuna (?)
- Elon Musk
Then, zooming out to some reference classes of successful people:
- Billionaires. On the Forbes list, the top 25 (as of June 2025) all have children.
- US Presidents. It’s been more than 100 years since a president didn’t have children.
So: if having kids is bad for impact, how come all the most successful and impactful people do so anyways?
Some ways to reconcile this?
- Maybe this was a “selfish” choice, and in a counterfactual world where they didn’t have kids, they could have done even more good in the world
- Maybe success leads to having the resources to have kids, because kids are a desirable consumption good; but it’s not that having kids leads to success.