Children aren’t worth very much–that’s why we no longer make many | Hacker News Reader

Children aren’t worth very much–that’s why we no longer make many

qz.com

24 pointsprostoalex13 comments

Making a new “person”—on which the state has claims, but you do not, and toward whom you have (class-dependent) obligations—is a much less economically attractive proposition than making a new slave.

I'm surprised Perry doesn't reference Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. His argument is book-length and thus not easily summarized, but he observes that:

a) Contemporary Western middle- and upper-middle-class people obsess way too much over costly child interventions that may not do much;

b) Because of a, kids can be less work than is commonly assumed in the media;

c) Parents actually have less influence on their kids, at least according to the data that he (voluminously) cites, and

d) Parents underestimate the amount of pleasure kids can be, especially over longer time horizons.

I think the idea that investment in a child's education is more to the benefit of the general society than the benefit of the parent is a good point, but the author obstructs himself by saying that the state claims the child's future earnings.

The state doesn't make particular claim to the child's future earning. It makes equal claims to the parent's earning. So either, this argumentation goes down a path about taxes vs. no-taxes, which should be irrelevant to the overall topic or the argument should stick with the claim that a productive members is useful to society in a broad sense, but doesn't directly pay back the cost of raising it to its parents and just leave it at that.

> The state doesn't make particular claim to the child's future earning.

Not true in the United States at least. Children born as Americans are taxed based on citizenship regardless of where they live and work.

Only for the small number of people who don't pay taxes to the country where they live.

My point is, it is the same for the parent.

If you're looking for a root cause for children, it's sex, and that's just going to happen regardless of economics.

So the decline in fertility can usually be traced directly to the technologies available to women to prevent or abort pregnancies, since they could not avoid sex. Note: not economic or social emancipation, just the technical capability.

For example the author refers to the decline in fertility in Japan in the 1940s...it just so happens that abortion was made legal in Japan in the 1940s. Not a coincidence.

So a big error in this essay is to treat having children as a choice to be evaluated. That is only recently true.

"individually-owned “goods” (children) are brought under national ownership, and returns from children flow to the country as a whole (through tax-based entitlement programs), rather than individually to their previous “owners.”"

Reminds me of 1984 where children are educated by the government to betray their parents where necessary.

1984 was mistaken, parents then wouldn't choose to have children.

This should read "why developed societies no longer..."

The population growth rate in developing and 3rd world countries is still pretty high, despite what the author claims in the first paragraph.

Rambling, at times incoherent, and largely unsubstantiated. Fine work gentlemen.

That was a sobering look at parenthood.

As a parent who studied economics, I files these (and there are a lot of them) "analyses" under "technically correct, but missed the point". There's a bit in there that may describe why we have less children beyond the old "less of them die" chestnut, but it utterly fails to address why we do have children in the modern first world. That answer isn't based in economics.

I've read that more than half of pregnancies in the US are unintended. That indicates that the reason more than half the kids are born are because of sexual urges("Duh!"). I'm guessing the less than half group have various reasons. But this article is about why we now have less, so I'm not sure it failed to address why some do. It just didn't address it.

> That answer isn't based in economics.

of course it is. Economics is not about money, it is about wealth. And wealth is ill defined, because it can be all sorts of things (gold, food, a tropical island, lots of children)

As long as humans have a desire for something, it can be analyzed with economics. Because as soon as we have a desire to get something, we must make a choice in order to get that.

Opportunity cost measures everything we choose to get in terms of things we could have gotten otherwise and labels that as its price.

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