Highly educated women no longer have fewer kids
voxeu.org
voxeu.org
"During the 2000s, highly educated women had higher fertility rates than women with intermediate levels of education. Importantly, this is a result of a substantial increase in fertility among women with advanced degrees who increased their fertility by 0.7 children, or by more than 50%"
"What can explain the rise of fertility among highly educated women during the period that saw the largest increase in the labour supply of highly educated women? We argue that the growing income inequality over the past three decades created both a group of women who can afford to buy services that help them raise their children and run their homes, and a group who is willing to supply these services cheaply."
They don't mention anything about birth control, which I found interesting.
We're just running fast towards our past.
Teaching unions have generally negotiated better-than-average natal leave policies and decent health insurance. With a small amount of planning and foresight, it would be possible to get pregnant such that the baby is born in the spring, and the post-natal leave extends to the summer break, effectively extending the leave period by an additional 2-3 months.
Teaching tends to not have a lot of cut-throat career advancement, compared to some other professions. Mostly, you get salary increases based on seniority and years of service, or one-off boosts, like completing a master's program.
Being a female-dominated profession, where the bulk of the other employees have been, are, or are planning on being mothers, there's likely more understanding and acceptance of child-related absences. Also comparatively generous sick-time policies.
Completely unsubstantiated, but people that choose to spend the bulk of their working hours with children might be more favorably disposed to them in general than people who choose other occupations.
I know of people that made good use of their retired parents as babysitters, and the parents were quite happy to do so (getting to spend time with their grandkids and all that).
Under capitalism, fertility is a cost to both the worker and the workplace. If 'society' wants fertility, someone has to pay for it somehow.
Somehow this sentence makes me very uneasy. Rich people start having more kids because they can pay poor people to take care of them.
This "everything as a service" trend of modern society is very scary because it relies heavily on income inequality, I can foresee a time in the near future where we will go back to feudal laws, a rich person will own a domain and have poor people taking care of it on their behalf.
Relatedly (and I'm sorry I'm saying this - I feel terrible saying this): women really really need to have children earlier, preferably before age 28.
30 years ago you saw only 7.2 deaths of mothers per 100,000 live births in the US, in 2011, despise tremendously better healthcare, it was 17.8 deaths per 100,000 births. One of the reasons for the jump is women postponing having kids. And completely separate from this, risk of chromosomal abnormalities in babies goes up very high when having them at a later age.
Men and women both need to have children early, for so many reasons. It is a great pity that it's so fucking difficult to do so in this day and age.
Elaborate.
Most 25 year old couples don't have this money, in this day and age. It would require out of them that they both work hardcore hours... but then when baby has come, who will take care of it? Babysitters? Daycare? They're expensive as hell. Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. all add up to something humongous. This is not to mention the mental toll of getting up each damn night at 3a.m. to calm crying babies.
Daycare often times costs more than what one of the parents make, it's that expensive. For whatever reason Americans want to get away from their parents after getting married (unlike a lot of Asian countries), so if you can't rely on your parents to help out it's really difficult and it'll exhaust you out before you know it.
The real killers are health care (should your kid need more than the norm in the first couple months—and many do) and childcare. Plus the less-obvious, very high cost of having to live in a decent school district or else pay for private school. Those areas are pretty much always more expensive. No more cheap rent/mortgage for you :-(
Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist. You can recover a lot of that money when you're done with the things by selling them, at a small time cost.
> Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist.
Or even better, from friends and family. :) They only need baby clothes, car seats for a few years, take it from them. And pass it on when you're done.
This is pretty easy, actually... people also actively want to get rid of clothes rather than store them; and young kids in particular fly through clothes much faster than they can wear them out.
About other stuff -- my wife & I were stubborn about avoiding all of the "default" baby purchases unless we really felt we needed them. No value judgement intended on people who buy e.g., strollers! Sometimes a stroller would have been pretty handy... But we wanted to travel a lot with our kids, light, so we needed lightweight habits at home first.
So: no upgrade from the 2-door hatchback (though we did spring for good carseats). No strollers; we learned a few good ways to tie a sling instead.
No separate kids' rooms (and no furnishings and decorations of such rooms). No crib.
No disposable diapers (we broke this rule for compostable diapers at night when each child was over 6 months or so... more pee to absorb... and much of the time when traveling). Potty-training quite early (from a few months old) with no deadlines or pressure, etc.; that worked out pretty well.
No bottles, no sippy cups. (Yes to small cutlery, though). We did use cheap glasses when they graduated from nursing to drinking from glasses, and lost a 2-3 per child as expected. The girls learned not to let them fall.
Toys: we bought very few and still ended up with a ton; family & friends give gifts, and they'd be sad if you told them to just stop. So we just tried to avoid electronic "made to be broken" stuff, generally.
Books: we have tons of books. No intention of reining this one in!
It's kind of a vicious circle.
Talking about the US or EU, I guess?
Any idea why it was that way, back then (also, when was "then"?) and not so now?
It seems like runaway costs, more than anything. Tuition and room and board have nearly quadrupled[1], while the amount of money that it is possible to earn in the kind of low-level, part-time work that a college student is capable of fitting in has sort of stagnated. I was able to earn $5-6k over the course of a summer working, which isn't a whole lot different than what my father, for instance, was able to earn in his summers in the 70s. That might pay my tuition for part of one term, whereas it paid his whole year. Meanwhile, housing costs have rocketed up as well, and the price of gas was $4/gallon, rather than $.50.
[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
It's a shame that so many of the children of these educated mothers are going to be autistic because of advanced maternal age. Not so good for our future.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...
I agree that women need to have children younger, and that society makes it difficult for that to happen.
Furthermore, your allusions to chromosomal abnormalities are a eugenic argument. That could be interesting if uncomfortable, but to present it so casually is disappointing. If you're going to go there, please do it with arguments that are well considered and framed in a way that is subject to refutation.
In general, it appears that waiting into your 30s or later to start having children is riskier than doing so earlier. It'd be nice if we could rejigger society to reflect that - if people had their children first and entered the workforce at 30, they'd still have thirty or so productive years.
I am extra skeptical of studies that prove a politically correct idea. Criticizing them upsets many people, so maybe I should be smarter and keep my mouth shut.
Edit: It's like when news articles say "Cure for Cancer found!" And then you read the linked paper and it doesn't support the headline at all.
This for example:
European Commission published a special report on women in decision-making positions, suggesting legislation to achieve balanced representation of women and men on company boards. Some countries – such as Norway, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands – have already taken legal measures in that direction.
[...]
we find, however, that while highly educated women had fewer kids than women with lesser education in the US until the 1990s, it is no longer true today.
Seems to address the question on whether there should be more regulation to help pregnant women.
Overall more education still means lower fertility rates. There's just a slight blip at the end of the graph.
What I am saying is you may have opened the floodgates for a horrifying debate where pseudo-eugenicists come out of the woodwork.
For example, almost everyone who has studied the subject? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
I think the one child policy is a great idea. The society at large will subsidize the first (one or two at most) child for any person. Anything beyond that and the parents must be prepared to meet the financial obligation themselves. (And it costs a lot to raise a child, even when you take away the cost of health care with universal health care).
I don't think this stance is unreasonable at all. It is surely unpopular though.
[footnote] People should decide for themselves if they are fit to be parent though. We have that choice now and we should always have this choice.
How do you deal with those who defy it, deliberately or otherwise?
The second idea is vile and destructive. Someone elects to have more than one child, and you come in storming to deduct from their payrolls and tax their income as if you deliberately want to wage a war of attrition against the parents' standard of living for raising a child.
That is the reason for this whole exercise. We'd create a subsidy to encourage more people to have a first child or first two children. I acknowledge that society needs children. I just think that we're better off if 80% of people have one kid vs 10% of the people have eight kids or something.
If you want more children, you must pull your own weight. I did say there has to be some kind of exemption for natural twins and so on.
At least in the US, we provide a credit for each child someone claims as a dependent on a tax return.
> The second idea is vile and destructive. Someone elects to have more than one child, and you come in storming to deduct from their payrolls and tax their income as if you deliberately want to wage a war of attrition against the parents' standard of living for raising a child.
Uhh, that's how tax policy works. You tax things you don't want people to do, and provide deductions or credits for things you do want them to do.
I interpreted you as arguing in favor of it.
The child should have known his birth would have significant tax penalties.