Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan

Author:Bryan Caplan [Caplan, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465023417
Publisher: Basic Books

The same goes for traditional farmers: Investing in your children is less lucrative than stuffing money in your mattress.

In modern societies, little has changed. Parents give more to their children than they can hope to recover. Take the United States in the 1980s. One research team using the Survey of Consumer Finances found that parents gave their kids large cash gifts ($3,000+) much more often than the reverse. Another researcher using the Consumer Expenditure Survey found that—ignoring child-rearing and college costs—parents on average voluntarily gave a total of $25,000 more to each child than they got back.

The lesson: An economic perspective on fertility is not useless, but it is much less intellectually satisfying than advertised. For an extra helping of disillusion, note that the decline of family size has not been smooth. In the middle of the century, the United States had the legendary baby boom: The total fertility rate soared from a little more than two kids in the early Thirties to a little less than four kids in the late Fifties. America’s total fertility rate bottomed out in the mid-Seventies at 1.7 kids. At the time, women earned 60 percent as much as men, and only 45 percent worked; now they earn 80 percent as much as men, and 60 percent work. If women’s foregone earnings and career options were decisive, children would now be rarer than ever. Instead, American fertility rebounded back to replacement.

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