Why don’t more people have more children?

Me neither, Harry.

I’ve never been sober.

What counts as drunk?

kindc

I don’t know. Good question. I have drunk (and do drink) small amounts of alcohol very infrequently, so it is not pure teetotalism (I was pretty much teetotal well into my thirties).

It’s a good thing for you. It says less about your rejection of booze, and more about the fact that you are able to more directly cope with problems than sinking into a stupor, at least for people who get drunk in adult years.

In youth it could be written off as peer pressure and curiosity, but to carry on the occasion regularly into the thirties is generaly an expression of situational misery.

I make enough of a fool out of myself when I’m sober. I really don’t want to find out what I would do if I became intoxicated.

That’s interesting, Harry. Going into college, I considered adopting a policy of never drinking (my patrilineal line has a history…), but alcohol is such a part of society that I figured there had to be something more to it than looking silly, which made me curious, and I have never had the fortitude to withstand my own curiosity.

Apparently Yuri Andropov was a (mild) Stalinist and anti-alcohol crusader.

Your post invites the question: To what extent is child-bearing a result of getting drunk?

(And I bet actual data are available if one looked.)

(At least for short term effects-I don’t know about effects of drunkeness on marriage rates and stuff.)

The thing that shocks my students more than anything else I can (honestly) tell them is that between my mid twenties and early thirties I didn’t have a television in my home….

As an impending parent, I’m hoping this topic shifts away from drinking and over to parenting. I can say that I was very conscious of the fact that for me the costs of parenting are very real while the benefits have to be imagined. I hope it turns out to be worth it!

But none of this is visible unless you are intimate with other families with children, something that few of us are in that in-between phase of life after leaving our childhood but before entering parenthood.
Yeah, but there are those of us who’ve hit our 30s, have friends with kids, enjoy playing with the kids, and are very happy to return them at the end of the day. ;)

Just sayin that I don’t think it’s only that there’s no exposure, since in my experience, as the single and childless person, I’m the odd woman out just about everywhere.

So far as drinking goes, I’ve never had a hangover (so as far as a lot of people are concerned, I’ve never been good and drunk). The thing that raises eyebrows around here is hearing I’ve never experimented with illicit substances. They just blink when I quote that “rhetoric is a more than sufficient tool for inducing extraordinary states of mind.”

Kids.

;)

I got drunk for the first time when I was 20, which was pretty old considering the people I went to high school and college with. Since then it has been something of an annual occurrence, but I didn’t have a hangover afterward until I was 24.

Now that I’m 27, I hope I’m past the making-up-for-lost-time stage, and find it a lot more pleasant if I stop right at that point where I’ve almost had enough and anymore would be unwise.

God could I use a baby right now. Take the edge off.

I came from a family with many children–there are many children in my immediate and extended family. But there is also poverty in my immediate and extended family. I loved my siblings and cousins but I didn’t see any way to have lots of children and keep my parents’ hard-fought battle to move up the ranks of society.

My (very) speculative idea is that it has less to do with our inability to imagine the pleasure of children and more to do with the higher personal cost of having a child. The cost paid by the individual–the social, the professional, the economic and other costs–over time have increased for each child at the same time that women have become less able to bear the costs to them. The dismantling of the welfare state and the loss of industries one could build a life on only contribute to this but there’s more to it I’m sure. Having lots of children is more than most people are willing to bear if they want to maintain their class status or if they want their children to share it. If they want to be upwardly mobile, having children carries even more risk than just maintaining. (I’m not sure how much downward mobility there is. But it might not matter, since all that people need is the perception that downward mobility is a danger. And everyone has that.) Middle and upper middle class people now need more people than ever to work except the educational demands have gotten longer and longer. (We could solve this problem if we could figure out a way to put the kids to work early, like at 12! Maybe as test marketers or as web designers.)

And there’s the price you pay as a woman. I’ve found that the time issue is offset by my husband’s involvement. But there’s little I can do about people’s perceptions. All my friends went into motherhood a bit terrified of what it would do to them professionally. I know many women who lost out on jobs, etc. because they are mothers. One graduate student friend told me that the graduate students involved in a hire explicitly decided not to vote for the mother since they worried she would be distracted and so less helpful to them! I think I cried a little bit after she told me that. It’s so untrue in my own case.

This isn’t to say that you aren’t right that there are some issues of the experiences we in the U.S. seem to value. People in less industrialized countries appear to enjoy children much more than here, both their own and others. That’s probably an absurd stereotype but there’s some truth in it.

My fears about my income and my career, etc. and the negative cost of a child seemed very reasonable until I actually had one. And then I felt duped. What hadn’t been conveyed to me was that it would be so wonderful, it would be worth the cost. It seemed sad, first that the choice had been surrounded by little else but fear and second, that I hadn’t done it sooner. I hope it’s not too late to have more but I literally can’t afford it. How absurd is it that unless one is somewhat wealthy, having more than two children is deemed irresponsible? Moreover, people will doubt my commitment to my career. And yes, it is quite likely we will be less well-off, maybe a lot less well-off than we would have been otherwise. Still, I’d now give up a lot to have a larger family and I’m currently trying to balance this against what’s best for the kid I have.

My second (& last) child just finished her first year at college, so mhy wife and I qualify as empty nesters. God, do I miss those years of child raising. The first 2 years were not hard, we were in grad school then. The next few, after we no longer outnumbered them, were difficult, especially the first two, but for us, this period lasted unusually long due to several unsuccessful attempts to have more, during each of which my wife was quite ill.

Until my son turned 14, (lasting for 18 months) and again a rough period of about a year when he hit 17, it was wonderful. Raising my kids was the most emotionally intense and enjoyable and fulfilling and satisfying experience that I have ever had, and I don’t expect anything will ever come close.

I don’t recommend it for anyone who doesn’t think it is for them. But it sure was for me and my wife. I may be unusual – years later, college girl friends and former roommates told me that I used to talk about having children in the future, something that is/was apparently uncommon among young men in their late teens and early twenties, at least in my circles.

”
Ok, now to the question. How do fertility rates correlate with “marriage” (reasonably broadly defined) rates in Europe and in the US? In other words to what degree are people making less babies because they remain single (for longer periods of time) vis-a-vis because couples are choosing to have less babies?
”

There is a claim that the relevant variable is not marriage (sorry religious nuts) but how well society implicitly (as opposed to legally) treates women. Societies that give women legal choices but retain a culture that treats them badly (Spain, Italy, Japan) have women rebel/cope by avoiding children as much as possible.
I’m not in a position to evaluate this claim, and I am sure that other variables (eg how many people are packed into each small space, leading to a generation of people saying “as god is my witness, I’ll never have less than 600sq feet again”), that aren’t as sexy to those who want to rebuild society according to their particular morality, play an important role.

Harry, how can you be a proper Englishman and never get drunk? I work with English clients and my greatest difficulty in dealing with them on a personal level is that I can’t keep up with the drinking. Socialising means a few rounds at a pub and then off to dinner with a half-bottle of wine per person. Then fall into a cab and meetings next morning. (Some of the younger ones will head out to an after-hours club for a couple of fancy drinks first). I can’t manage it but they seem to do it twice a week. I’m too far in age from American college students to know what they’re like but English business people can drink their American counterparts under the table.

UR a []

Just kidding. And as far as people who want kids detecting other people who want kids, I believe there was something in the Economist on it recently.

I’ve never done coke. Does that count for anything?

I’ve been drunk. I’ve been so drunk that there are two bars in Canada I’m banned from for chucking all over them. I once got tanked at a company party and… no, I’m not going there. Let’s just say I’m not a pleasant drunk.

If there is any fun in being drunk, I managed to miss it. I discovered early on that whatever charms I have with women all involve coherent speech. That took most of the fun out of being drunk right there.

But I can tell you that fat, ugly middle aged Europeans in Ibiza are not any more attractive than “a forty year old woman licking salt off a guy’s neck and coughing up big phlegm balls from the smokes”.

Now, as for child raising: I doubt very strongly that these fun-loving middle-aged childless folks are having that much fun. There’s this sense that hits, somewhere in the early 30s in my case, that you’re just done with that stuff, and it’s time to have kids and move on. It starts to feel pretty pathetic to keep trying. Considering all the kids I saw the last time I took one of those quickie vacation to somewhere warm, I don’t think Ibiza is really something folks give up with kids these days.

But you might be onto something indirectly. Having children is a huge economic liability for someone young and starting their career. Later on, if you’re a professional anyway, it’s not such a big liability. You’re already skilled. Your employment may well be secure enough that children won’t interfere with it. Yeah, maybe having a kid will keep you from ever being a Senior VP, but how likely was that anyway? You can still afford to take the rugrats to Morocco for some sun, and nowadays the hotels hire professionals to play with your kids while you get sloshed at the beach bar. I know, I see ads for them at the unemployment office.

But how many kids are you really going to want later on? How much will greater age diminish your fertility? Clearly, the mean age of childbearing has risen both for men and women. It strikes me as a more likely explanation.

We have few kids in the West because we can. Personally, I don’t think there is one over-arching reason for this. It is rather a set of reasons that plays out towards lowering fertility rates: birth control, gender equality, the welfare state, proper health care, careerism, to name but a few. I don’t have kids myself due to lack of great desire to have kids, demanding career, lack of partner pressure, and, perhaps most important, the gift of reliable birth control. I can’t really see the downside of low birth rates. Kids are wanted, loved and properly cared for. The sustainability of Western lifestyles is more likely if world population decrease. The wealth per capita goes up with lower birthrate, all other things equal. And nobody forces you to not have kids, at least not outside China. What’s not to like?

I got drunk in college, ONCE, purely as an experiment. The appeal of being simultaneously outspoken AND incoherent was lost on me, and alcohol ruins the flavor of anything you add it to, so I didn’t repeat the experience until after my divorce, when I rediscovered the classic truth: Get drunk with a problem, and you wake up with a problem and a headache.

Why don’t people have more children? We’re not evolved to have a drive to reproduce, we’re evolved with a drive to have sex, which in the natural state of affairs leads to reproduction. Having reproduced, other instincts kick in to inspire us to raise the resulting children.

Contraception and abortion severed the link between sex and subsequent birth, leaving us with a gap in our instinctive behaviors which culture so far seems insufficient to bridge. I suspect we’ll work out SOME kind of fix before we go extinct.

Never been drunk, Harry?!! I’m drunk right now. No, really. I am. We’re celebrating our 9th anniversary, so this comment will be short (or excessively long and rambling).

I love your point about the benefits of children being nonintuitive. The benefits are something that are only sort of understood by being around other people with kids, but really are only understood when you have them yourself. I have a hardcore city friend with pink hair and a big fish tatoo over her right breast that had no love of kids, until she had one of her own and now she’s a big mushy mom.

Well, I will admit that, like you, I have no social radar. I dated a guy for a year and a half who I’m fairly certainly has officially joined the other team.

Never been drunk. Still having a hard time getting past that one. Am I going to turn this post to the dark side and have everyone admit to their “first time?”

Going to APSA this year, harry?

never been drunk? thats what friends are for. I would expect a confession about the sort of people you associated with to come next.

I will be referring to your post when I get around to responding to Amanda Marcotte’s slightly defensive rant against having children.

mijnheer:
do you suppose it is just possible that some people are born with a receptor that detects they are in an environment with too damn many people and their baby drive [but not their sex drive] just shuts down in response?

I’m an only child; my husband is the only child of an only child. Sometime around the Industrial Revolution our families figured out that the way to move up in the world was to cut down on having kids–so we don’t have many relatives.

As a child during the Baby Boom, reading _Cheaper By The Dozen_ and watching the family sitcoms of the period I was miserable. I felt left out of all that family fun. My fantasy was having a huge family. I wanted (at least) 7 kids but it didn’t work out so we only have 3. The trouble was that I didn’t much like taking care of kids, particularly little kids–I just wanted to be part of a family.

I loved it when the kids were kids. I dressed them up in tee-shirts that said “I’m the big brother,” “I’m the little sister” and “I’m the middle child.” We live in a suburban house and did all that family sitcom stuff I so envied as a child–I loved every minute of it. It was what I’d dreamed about all my life–a real Dick-and-Jane family. Now the last kid is about to go away to college and I’m sad because family is over.

The bottom line though, which I don’t think anyone has mentioned, is what do you do when you’re old if you haven’t got kids? I suppose it’s less of a problem in affluent European welfare states with ample social safety nets. But without those guarantees you have to have kids as insurance. Even apart from money, you need kids for social insurance or you end up old and alone.

I simply don’t understand how people can take the risk of not having kids to look after them. Not having kids is very risky–having kids is selfish.

Dear LogicGuru,

Perhaps I’m misreading, or overreading, your post, but Cheaper By the Dozen is hardly a baby boom book, since it takes place in the very early 20th century, and the protagonist is a major social scientist/ industrial engineer in spite, or maybe along with, her twelve kids. In many ways it’s kind of a reproach to the baby boom. (I should note that I read it in my 30’s when I was already a parent.)

My own experience with Europeans and the low fertility rate of the last thirty years is interesting (if a little based on after-the-fact speculation). When my daughter was not quite a year old my wife and I took her (and no money!) to Italy for an academic year, and the single most memorable thing was the number of instant grandmothers she acquired, women maybe fifty to seventy who fussed over her interminably — and often gave us unsolicited parenting lessons (usually “fa freddo” and feed her more). It occurred to me many years later that what we were seeing was the beginning of the large decline in the Italian birthrate and our little girl was a surrogate grandchild for (mostly) women who didn’t have grandchildren of their own.

Coming in late, alas.

Unfogged is doing a reading group on Montaigne’s “On Drunkenness”. Y’all come on by.

Montaigne drank very little but sometimes wondered whether he should drink more.

On childraising, the costs are very considerable and very tangible, and the benefits are unquantifiable and intangible. Without enormous social reinforcement it doesn’t happen as much. It really isn’t a very good deal. I was glad I did it but I grew up with many younger siblings and just ended up likeing kids.

greensmile: If someone doesn’t want children, that’s fine with me. But I doubt that overpopulation is the real reason anyone decides to stay childless. The birth rate in Western nations is already below replacement level, and having one or even two children yourself keeps you below replacement. More than that, a child born to well-educated, socially and environmentally aware parents is likely to do more good than harm in the course of her/his lifetime. So it would be a foolish person who said, “Having a child would be so fulfilling for me, but my environmental duty tells me I mustn’t. Darn!”

Re: drunk

The first time I was drunk was at age 35, at my old high school best friend’s wedding. Open bar, not much food. I avoided drinking as a young person because I have an alcoholic parent. However, I do have a drink every now and then, because I am far too cheap to get drunk with any regularity – booze is expensive!

Re: parenting

I didn’t plan on becoming a parent, but I got pregnant when I was 18, and was a wife and mother at 19. Before I had my daughter, I didn’t want any kids. I had several younger siblings, and my parents were poor role models, at best. I didn’t know that I could love someone as much as I loved that little girl. I didn’t know that I could rise to the challenge of providing what a child needed.

Turns out I could, with help. We couldn’t afford daycare, so my husband and I traded off staying home – I was home with her while she breastfed for a year, and then he was home with her for the next 3 years while he finished school.

And I couldn’t have done it without my family. I had to set aside old grudges, and my parents had to make some adjustments in their lives, but they helped me out. My sister helped me. If I hadn’t had my daughter, I probably would have happily lost contact with my family, but I wanted my girl to know there were a lot of people out there who cared about her.

She’s 17 now, and she’s amazing and incredible and will probably change the world in some way.

I had a different experience with my second. My second child was much harder, even though by all outward appearances, everything seemed better – we had a house, we both had good jobs, we were more settled. But I find it harder to juggle parenthood with work now, and since we get our medical insurance through my job, I kind of have to work. I would like to go back to school myself, but I can only take one class per semester, so it will be decades before I finish. Our American society, for all it’s talk of family values, does not have policies that actually help families.

Cheaper By The Dozen was first published in 1948 and there was a movie made of it in 1950. I’m curious why it would be a reproach to the baby boom: maybe I’d get a different message if I read it now.

The spin of the book was definitely post-war baby boom. You didn’t get the idea that Lillian had a career–at most there’s a hint that she took an interest in her husband’s work and may have helped him out occasionally. So of course you don’t get a hint of how she handled it–with a full staff of servants. You also don’t get the idea that they were very rich.

Being a father is my favorite role in life, and it is truly a miraculous experience. I knew that I’d enjoy it. I was a full-time caregiver for the first 8 months of our son’s life.

What I was not at all prepared for was how it changed my perception of OTHER people’s children. My tolerance of aggravating behavior skyrocketed. A new appreciation for the energy and wonder of kids developed. Even my perceptions of adults changed, because I was more likely to consider the fact that the a-hole that just cut me off was once somebody’s kid, and probably deserves slightly more consideration than I’d otherwise be inclined to offer. I remember reading about Marco Pantani’s funeral, where his mother exclaimed tearfully over his coffin “Goodbye my son, goodbye my beautiful boy!” and just being utterly gutted–crying even– in a way that could NEVER have occured prior to becoming a parent. (I fear that I instead would have laughed at his mom calling him a beautiful boy.)

As such I don’t think that, if you take away your love for your own child, what you have left is the difference between fun, and no fun. However, that point occasionally SEEMS utterly, direly true. There are times that all I really want is two consecutive days without a child, and neither cognizance nor recollection of my parental status. To just, er, go to Moab and ride my bike, or regrade my backyard, or whatever. Things that are very hard to do while juggling childcare. And I only have two kids. I have NO idea how parents of four or more do it, they must be totally mental.

It is beyond easy for me to see why some people don’t want children, and good for them. I feel sorry for those parents who realize they’d have been happier without children, and even worse for those kids.

“Well, the birth rate ebbs slightly in the spring, and peaks in the fall season (Sept.-Nov.)…”

This is in the U.S. In France the birth rate is highest in the late spring. This is presumably mothers planning for their two-month maternity leave to coincide with the nicest part of the year.

You know, so many people are so straight here that a little message from William Blake might be in order:

The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.

On a more sober note, I have always believed in moderation (two children, for example), and I was always leery of anything that has to be injected (although not always “leary” of what might be swallowed).

As for having or not having been drunk, well, let’s say I’ve only been seriously drunk three for four times over the past 5 decades, which seems to qualify me as being a moderate person.

Had to pretty much give up psychedelic substances with advancing age and responsibility, but now that the children are grown and retirement looms, I think I should be permitted to cultivate my morning glory garden hereafter without guilt.

It’s true that having children creates a whole new set of opportunities and obligations that you never expected. The person who observed that you enter a new universe was not far wrong: if it is not a new universe that you confront, you are faced with a new set of epistemological values.

How you respond to this new world says a lot about who you are. Far too many of my friends (and we’re talking about the last generation of the fifties) turned into little Bushes and Stepford wives under the mistaken impression that they were insuring a safer world for their children. They weren’t.

I’m late to the party. But I just want to make the point I always make. Here are the total fertility rates for the UK for the last 45 years.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=951&Pos=2&ColRank=2&Rank=224

They fell with the introduction of the Pill and have remained more-or-less the same ever since. We don’t have to hypothesise any change in the national attitude toward children to explain this. When it became possible for people to control their fertility they did so, and there has been no real change since then.

At least as far as the UK experience goes, you’re trying to explain something that doesn’t exist and that therefore doen’t need explaining. Women are having kids at the same rates as they did 30 odd years ago. Any change in the birth rate is just the compound effect of multiple generations having fertility rates below 2, not because of changes in the numbers of children per woman, and therefore not because of people’s attitudes towards kids changing.

mijnheer(38) – Being with other people’s children isn’t the same at all. Not even close. I think you’ve kind of missed the point here. Being with other people’s children isn’t the same, of course, but it provides invaluable information for people deciding whether or not to procreate, as my wife and I were a few years ago. Our best friends were the first of our circle to have kids, and we spent a lot of time not only watching them grow and develop, but also watching our friends reorganize their lives, and got a pretty clear picture of what was involved, upside and down.

Even without the immediate bonds and late-night obligations, this experience was pivotal in our eventual decision to try to get pregnant. We have a daughter now, with another on the way, and I can’t tell you how helpful it has been to have our friends’ experiences (and ours with them) to draw on. If you don’t know anyone with kids, than it looks like you are going to have to figure out the whole thing by yourself, which is daunting, and adds to the universal uncertainty of “can I actually take care of a child?”

Now I find myself in bar conversations (yes, I still go out and have a drink with my friends occasionally. I suppose that means per wickedpinto(10) that I am “situationally miserable.”) where I am answering questions from married friends who don’t have kids but are thinking about it. Simply stating haughtily that only parents understand is a bit of a self-administered pat on the back, really.

maynard (56) – Your children will care about you when you are old, if not actually care for you, because they love you, and they are members of a family that has become important to them over their lives. If you are an abusive, drunken asshole, you will probably die alone whether you have kids or not. This is a lot more complicated than simply stating “if they want to help you, great!” I don’t think that anyone was suggesting that the transaction was a commercial one about who owes what to whom, but rather an observation of, you know, the actual world, wherein many many people are involved in the care of their parents.

Your dramatic righteousness is really very out of place in an America where lots of people (like, for example, me) are planning for a parent’s old age because they know perfectly well that that parent cannot afford nursing home care at any level. Expecting your kids to get involved is not unfair to them in any way – it’s life. The fact that your kids didn’t choose to be born is an abstract dorm-room irrelevancy in the context of family life as it is actually experienced. What other consequences do you derive from that fact? Years from now, should I decline to interfere with my 16-year old daughter’s attempted suicide because she didn’t “choose to be born?”

To me the lesson is that if people can have sex without pregnancy, and if women can live without a husband, and if old people can rely on savings, investments, and pensions in their declining years (rather than on family), many of the reasons for having children are gone. You might add the weakening of the extended family and religion, both of which tend to pressure people into parenting.

I’ve been saying for a long time that one of the defects of economics as an overall picture of society is that it can’t explain where workers come from. The work of childbirth and childraising isn’t economically organized or economically rational — new workers are just assumed as a kind of “free good”. I believe that this is one of the major reasons why women, who are still the main ones responsible for childraising, are undervalued and underrewarded in our society.

Of course, a sophisticated form of economic rationalization can explain childraising by “intangible benefits”, but if you let ME invent “intangible benefits” freely I will be able to prove pretty much anything I want to about anything. (In any case, all the evidence is that the freer women are, the fewer children they have).

In normal economic terms, opportunity cost and direct expenses make childraising a big loser for both parents, especially the mother. we have a vague idea that raising children is less wasteful than scratch off lottery tickets or making little bonfires of cash, but it’s hard to prove it. Your not going to have to bail a cash bonfire out of jail 20 years down the road, for example.

Harry: “incurious about such things as other people’s private lives, what experiences like drunkenes s feel like, etc—I’m intellectually curious, of course!”

I don’t mean to be difficult, but I really don’t see the distinction. You mean, you are curious about what is between the covers of books but not about things that aren’t? I realize that is a gross oversimplification of what you are saying, but how can one be intellectually curious without being curious about actual, unmediated experiences?

jr (36):

I’ve long heard of an (apocryphal?) culture in east Africa that sends its boys away when they hit puberty. They are allowed back either after they have killed a lion, or after a certain number of years (3? 4?) have passed. If they’ve survived that long, presumably they’ve learned to shift for themselves and not piss off others they run into so much that they die. There were numerous times when that child-rearing practice had strong appeal for me. We made it safely past that stage, and my two kids occupy most of my heart.

I’m pretty cynical about economics too.

From a descriptive, scientific point of view, though, I’d think that economists would be concerned about the degree to which the economy is dependent for labor on irrational behavior. Now that fertility actually has declined, immigration seems to be the new answer — outsourcing childraising.

The tangible costs of childraising (opportunity cost and direct cost) can be pretty well quantified, and they are large. There’s also an intangible cost in lost leisure time (or leisure opportunity cost I suppose you’d say — parents have less fun.) To make parenting behavior rational you’d have to show that the positive intangibles of raising a kid (minus the negative intangibles of childraising) are weightier than the combined tangible and intangible costs of childraising.

Overarching reason for fewer children is when hedonism replaces religion in a society.

One advantage of many people going childless is a decline in the proportion of people who try to apply economic analysis to their personal lives. Obviously true, if this is somehow genetic. A bit more tenuous, if it is based on training. Just have to remember (mangling Shakespeare – Henry VI part 2 Act IV, Scene II) “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the economists” to ensure that no more are so trained.

I am puzzled about what arguments there might be that tie being a religious practitioner and having “more” children. What is it about being a religious believer that makes one want “more” children? Or is this just an observation lacking explanation?

sutton

are you taking what I say a little too seriously? What I’m saying is that I’m not a gossip, and not interested in gossip. Or not much. I may even be exaggerating.

ingrid; the point about the way risk aversion feeds into this is very helpful. I sort-of-agree with the point about close contact not helping very muhc, but it helps a bit, especially if you see a lot of different kinds of people parenting different kinds fo kid (of course, even if you get to know yourself well you don’t know what kind of kid you’ll end up with). Also, the fewer kids there are around the harder it is to raise them (and the harder it looks from the outside) as Laura suggests in her original post.

For those who would like to see US data, here is a simple chart showing fertility in the US for the 20th century.

And some may be interested to learn that at least a few researchers believe that the decline in fertility was caused, at least in part, by social security.

And those who think that drunkeness leads to child bearing may want to contemplate the high birth rates in many Muslim countries where, at least formally, alcohol is forbidden.

Nik, how is the decision to have kids usually made? It’s an irreversible one and can’t be unmade. How often do potential parents think about the alternative of not having kids?

In point of fact, the more freely and informedly people (especially women) choose, the fewer kids they have.

I might mention that my target is not childraising, but economic rationality, and economic models which assume a labor supply without accounting for its “production”. Economically rational people need someone else to have the kids, and economically irrational parents make great sacrifices do unrewarded work for the sake of people (their own children, but also their children’s future employers) who pay them nothing.

No, nik, I was granting that the decision to have kids might often be genuinely irrational. No hard feelings.

What a completely self-centered discussion, isn’t it wonderful!

1. I think there is some confusion about what economically rational means. Doesn’t it just mean that you can order your preferences and that you will try to arrange them in ways that to maximize your preferences at the least cost?

No where does that seem to rule out preferring pain over pleasure; that’s folk psychology not economics. If one person prefers children to all other choices and another person prefers not having children to all other choices, that is no statement about economic irrationality, its only a statement about the relative elasticity of the demand for children.

2. I’ve met a few people that I thought should have fewer children, but I’ve never met anyone that didn’t want to have kids, that I thought was making a poor choice. They always seem a little shorted on soul.

3. The degree to which hedonism is asscociated with rationality in most comments here is astounding – doesn’t anybody distrust their body anymore?

4. Its so quaint the social pressure some people here express about class status and job satisfaction. Keep up the hard work!

5. People who think there is no drive for children outside of sex, must explain the big bucks infertile couples shell out for fertility treatment.

6. If the preference for children remains the same among educated women, in the long run the world will be made up of women with an 8th grade education and a per capita GDP of about $5,000.00. Look at the statistics and do the math.

If that doesn’t please you blame mother nature and the math not those in other cultures that it pleases just fine.

7. The best thing about being drunk is that it reminds you that you are a thing.

Thank you, Martin, for reassuring me about economics’ capacity for rationalization. And the quality of your condescension is really high too.

So just what is it that makes childraising more rational than making cash bonfires?

How about “not fungible” instead of “intangible”?