10 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love 448”

  1. One of his claims was, you lose some happiness having one child, and that each additional child costs you a lot less happiness, so why not go for economies of scale? Doesn’t square with my experience – after one child, we still had maybe a fifth of the freedom as before, after two, maybe a twentieth, and after the third, well, it was over. And still – we think we are happy, and would do it again. So I am sold on his conclusion, but not on his argument.

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  2. Wow, another media article about the choices of privilege. We have one child because, frankly, that’s all we can financially support. One college tuition is going to be tough enough but we’d rather give one child a decent life that we can pay for. There are far too many people up to their eyeballs in debt because they are living the lives they think they deserve instead of the ones they can economically sustain. Gosh, I sound holier than thou and didn’t mean to. But I don’t make reproductive decisions based on my happiness quotient.

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  3. “Gosh, I sound holier than thou and didn’t mean to. But I don’t make reproductive decisions based on my happiness quotient.”
    Ah, but won’t your happiness affect your kid’s? (Of course, being financially comfortable helps happiness, too.)
    “Wow, another media article about the choices of privilege.”
    I was totally expecting your comment to be about infertility.

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  4. I don’t think paying for a child’s entire college tuition is a requirement for providing them a decent life. The marginal economic costs of a child tend to decrease as the number of children in a family increases.
    I would hope most people make reproductive decisions based at least in part on their happiness quotient.

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  5. “I would hope most people make reproductive decisions based at least in part on their happiness quotient.”
    Yeah, me too. I alsothink children would be better of if we ramped down the expectations of what is “required” for a solid and stable upbringing.
    I would not have made my decision of the number of children I had on the number I could pay college tuition for, though given different circumstances my personal stake in making that available for children would have been higher.
    The article is bizarre, though, and an example of the failure of economic analysis in decision making about a fundamental evolutionary/ecological imperative. Every analysis I see vastly underestimates the incredible psychological fix (perhaps dopamine, but who knows) produced by a cuddly child who crawls into your arms in the morning.

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  6. Yes, bj, but where do you get your fix when they get older???? I am in withdrawal! I am starting to think of grandbabies and my oldest is 12!

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  9. Economics really does want to insert itself as the guiding light and prime cause for everything in the human world, doesn’t it?
    Personally, when you stretch it out this far, I think it has about as much validity as classical astrology. And I get more out of astrology. (Not least, trig practice.)

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  10. That article was by Bryan Caplan of recent internet notoriety. I would recommend ignoring anything he has to say.

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