The idea of antinatalism came up in a conversation with an old friend. I said I prefered existing, she said she would rather have not and mentioned that the majority of Chinese people in their 20s to 30s probably think the same as her. After thinking for a moment I realized that this would actually make an interesting index on a population.

We can use a simple scoring setup where we have people who would rather not have existed be rated as -1, people who would rather exist be rated 1, and people unsure be 0, then just sum it all up and divide by the number of people surveyed.

And the survey question could look like this:

If the natalist index is greater than 0, the society is somewhat existentially “happy” overall; if it’s less than 0, it’s somewhat existentially “unhappy.” I think it's reasonable to say that if your country has a negative natalist index there must be something deeply wrong. It would mean that the majority of people in the country would rather not exist. It's probably also a decent predictor of all kinds of stuff. The first that comes to mind is fertillity rates. People who would rather not have been born themself are unlikely to bring children into this world.

I’d bet that the natalist index of China and America would be below 0, while in somewhere like New Zealand or Australia it might be above +0.3. Of course, in practice we’d have to settle with a random sample of some subset of the population and wouldn't be able to survey everyone, so we can comfort ourselves by saying that it might not be completely accurate, although we will also probably be able to settle with applying some statistical methods to ensure soundness. Some more insights could also be made adding things like normalization by income, or tracking changes over time or making some variations to the question and what not.