The Price of a Child (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Price of a Child (2013)

priceonomics.com

50 pointsoli567930 comments

I imagine that people were largely indifferent to the loss of a child in "ye olden times" because it was expected, and they hardened themselves to the probability. Childhood mortality was atrocious back in the day.

I would think "indifferent" is a stretch, but would agree it's something that almost everyone experienced themselves or in their immediate circles.

Another difference is that generally, "pain and suffering" was not seen as deserving financial compensation. That changed at some point last century also, maybe as it became more rare and thus more shocking to judges and juries.

Pain and suffering were well established as part of compensatory damages by the early 19th century. My theory for why they became more common was the industrial revolution. In agrarian societies, it's rare for someone to get hurt in a way that could've been prevented by someone else exercising more care.

Maybe not. Listening to the History of England podcast, was pointed to the poem "Pearl" https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/03/a-short-summary... and http://www.billstanton.co.uk/pearl/pearl_new.htm which includes a father's grieving for his lost two year old daughter. So some evidence that these losses were keenly felt.

Another example are Laments by a great Polish 16th century poet (Kochanowski).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laments_(Kochanowski)

Also from the American tradition I wish my baby was born. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFpU3zslpHw

Another famous example is Wordsworth's "Suprised by joy - impatient as the wind", c. 1800. See e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/sep/22/poem... for the poem and exposition.

Are we indifferent to our parents dying later in life as we're hardened to the probability?

It might make it slightly easier having an expectation. But indifferent seems a massive stretch.

Also reproduction rates. From what I understand, in hunter-gatherer societies, children were breast-fed for a number of years, and, since women generally are infertile when nursing, children were spaced out. With agriculture infants came to be fed on porridge, goats milk, etc, and so the size of families increased greatly. And this made sense economically, since children can't hunt and are of limited use gathering, but even a very young one can pull weeds.

>since women generally are infertile when nursing

Fertility may be reduced but they are absolutely not infertile.

Source: a friend of my wife who got pregnant while breastfeeding and various doctors and midwives who repeated "you can get pregnant while breastfeeding" like some sort of chant in the weeks following the birth of our child.

They aren't absolutely infertile, but in hunter gather societies this is handled by infanticide. When it isn't possible for a mother to support two children under the age of four, the only solution was to kill one, which is what they did.

In the _Wandering God_ by Morris Berman, there is a story of a story of a girl (maybe 19th or early 20th century?) in a nomadic society in Africa. Her mother got pregnant again and was going to kill the baby, but the three year old child protested and agreed to go with being breast fed to try to save her newborn sibling. It wasn't possible to breastfeed two children at once, so her mother was going to kill the infant.

Miraculously the child managed to survive, but it was by no means guaranteed and she had to figure out to be self sufficient to some degree. It was considered such an odd occurrence that the relevant anthropologist reported the story.

I think we forget that infanticide wasn't uncommon that long ago. It was one of the major 'moral' victories of Christianity to make infanticide uncommon. And it could only do that because it wasn't necessary anymore.

You can't seriously think mother's have not mourned a dead child at all times.

Even from the logical point of view of if they don't love and miss why care for the child at all.

Yes, and another key difference between 17th and 21st century Europe is the status of women. Starting with literacy; we can record our sorrows now.

I wonder whether contemporary societies with less status for women and lower female literacy also have less formal/legal value on children. (India?)

Of course they did, but there's still a big difference between a society where child death is a rare tragedy and one where child death is unavoidable and common.

Title reminds me of https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights. (Do not endorse).

The article doesn't answer the central question of "Why did the value of a child change from worthless to nearly priceless?"

If children transformed from economically useful little people to economically useless, then the conclusion should be that they became even more worthless.

I'm not seeing a clear explanation of why children are perceived as more valuable nowadays.

A combination of rarity, utility and sunk costs.

The article seems to be wandering down the tangled nest of errors called the labor theory of value, or one of its offshoots. This bedevilled people for a long time who could not explain why a diamond was worth so much when it cost little effort to make and is objectively useless.

Modern children are diamonds. They are not that difficult to make, mostly useless but give great utility to the parent. Modern children are also rare, thanks to birth control. Most affluent societies are below replacement rate, while 1800s societies had kids everywhere. The most spoiled and indulged children are the ones who don't have any siblings.

So... - kids give their parents pride and joy (like a diamond) - kids are relatively rare compared to the prior period - the upbringing of a child is 20 year project for parents now, so the loss of effort as they get older increases the pain of loss

Most of these points are in reverse to the prior period, when you'd have 5 or 6 children in the hope of getting 2 or 3 to adulthood, which was onset much earlier. You had more, invested in them less, and everyone else had more as well.

Priceless but also very expensive :) I wonder if someone researched the cost of raising a child all the way to adulthood.

There's plenty of number floating around various source, one at random claims US$263,000[1] in the US and AU$812,000 in Australia[also 1]. Of course, it depends how much you spend (private school or public, $400 shoes or $40). A single parent on welfare in Australia will spend substantially less than a couple who have a combined income of one million. Also the single parent on welfare gets benefits like discounted healthcare (free primary care) and discounted public transport.

1. http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/cost-of-raising-c...

There's a huge compounding economics of scale effect for kids. Not only do consumables become cheaper in bulk but there's more opportunities to reuse. Three boys two years apart can all ride in the same car seats, wear the same clothes, ride the same bikes and use the same baseball gloves. I recall my brother (7yr younger) wearing shirts I wore in grade school after getting them from cousins that weren't the same cousins we gave them to. If the time between children is very little or they're not all the same gender (preferably boys, hand me down everything doesn't fly with girls for the most part) the "unit cost" goes up.

In a lot of middle class families teenage sons wind up learning skills that their fathers don't have so the net loss can go down in those years.

The way financial aid for college "works" (quotes indicate sarcasm) is you basically get told what you can pay and schools make at least a token effort (depending on the marketability of your kid, e.g black jewish straight-A D1 athlete majoring in something trendy gets more aid than an average white dude getting average grades in an average major) to try and not exceed that. If you can pay X and have Y kids in school then supposedly you pay X/Y for each kid in college. After adjusting for reality it's probably north of X/(Y+something) but the point is that it's cheaper than if you had two kids 4+yr apart and are only ever paying tuition for one at a time.

The price of raising a child in Poland seems to be 170k PLN(42k USD) from 0-19 years of age[0]. Completely free healtcare and education, including higher education, seem to keep the cost low.

[0] http://smith.pl/sites/default/files/zalaczniki_201508/dzieci...

Don't forget the extra taxes paid to provide the schooling and hospitals!

It's a good thing for these to be spread out - otherwise those who don't have kids are free riders on those that do. A healthy educated child not only supplies a lifetime of taxes paid, they also provide the labor to care for the ageing who didn't have children.

Income tax in Poland is at 19% at the moment - surely it's not a lot more expensive than anywhere else in the world?

I might just move to Poland then!

I wonder what the process of losing a child was like for mothers in the 18th century. Somehow I have trouble believing there was that little sorrow

You can capture their sentiment by reading letters sent to announce the loss of said child. You can even observe how big a change occurred in the 19th century.

In the early 19th (and before that), the loss of a child is described almost in passing. There was grievance of course, but child mortality was normal then; almost expected. By the end of the 19th century it had become unusual. And indeed, dramatic.

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