Why People Don't Want More Kids, and What It Means

I think you are sampling the wrong people. The main reason my wife and I decided not to have more children, was all about cost. Those “time” constraints are what makes being a parent so rewarding.

There may be another dynamic at play. The most socially acceptable reason for not having more kids may be the timesink argument. It’s less selfish than saying that you cannot afford it, especially if you clearly can if only you give up the summer home. As a childless, Canadian ex-pat, the basic reason that we decided not to have children after moving down here were (in descending order):

1/ Lack of family care (i.e. free and available), since our families were in Canada
2/ The ungoldy cost of higher education in this country.

While we are probably in the top 10% of income earners in this country, the thought of spending $150k of our retirement to educate each of the kids stopped us cold in our tracks. My top-notch education at the University of Toronto (fairly equivalent to the Ivy League tier of schools) cost me $1400 per year in 1990.

Because reason 2 makes me sound selfish, I always cite reason 1 when someone is rude enough to pry into my personal life that deeply.

Lowering the time costs of having children would certainly encourage more children, and lowering the money costs would too. I teach personal finance at the University of Arizona, and I can tell you the costs are very substantial for people around the median of income and wealth. Another daycare bill is a big deal for them.

There are enormous positive externalities to (well reared) children, although I know Libertarians hate that externalities exist, and are enormous, because they mean that Libertarian fantasy economics is in reality far less efficient and wealth creating than allowing a government role in the economy.

The more children who are well educated (or even moderately educated and law abiding), the faster science, medicine, technology, and economic wealth will grow in the future. This is true largely due to enormous economies of scale, especially for idea/information production. As acclaimed growth economist and Nobel short-lister Paul Romer said in an excellent interview with Reason magazine:

It’s so striking. Evolution has not made us any smarter in the last 100,000 years. Why for almost all of that time is there nothing going on, and then in the last 200 years things suddenly just go nuts?

One answer is that the more people you’re around, the better off you’re going to be. This again traces back to the fundamental difference I described before. If everything were just objects, like trees, then more people means there’s less wood per person. But if somebody discovers an idea, everybody gets to use it, so the more people you have who are potentially looking for ideas, the better off we’re all going to be. And each time we made a little improvement in technology, we could support a slightly larger population, and that led to more people who could go out and discover some new technology

A huge time cost of children is just the daily shuttling around, driving them to and from school, then to and from after-school and weekend programs and activities. This is often ridiculously inefficient on so many levels, because if all of the parents in the community could get together and hire a bus or shuttle company to drive the kids it would save enormous time and pollution, but it doesn’t happen so often because, first, there is a big coordination problem, getting all of those parents together to agree on this and its particulars, and then collecting money regularly.

A private company could try to do this, but there are big economies of scale to be had here, and a private company would run into problems reaching this scale – and if they did, they would have a great deal of monopoly power which would bring inefficiencies. In addition, a lot of parents might not trust a private company whose managers and/or owners have incentives to make a short-term buck by hiring less competent drivers and checking their criminal backgrounds less thoroughly.

Libertarians like to pretend that it’s always profit maximizing to do what’s best for the customer in the long run, but it should be obvious after what we’ve seen lately that often that’s far from the truth. Often, it’s hard for the customer to know, and often you can make so much in the short run that it’s worth going out of business eventually, and perhaps then just re-forming under a new name. Plus, very often the owner, or managers who run the business, will retire, or be at another job, long, long before the costs to the customers become well known, if they ever even do become well known to the public – information, in the real world, is far from perfect or costless in money and time, and people will often do risky sub-optimal things to avoid short-term pressures and costs, or to gain short term rewards.

So, for many reasons, this is clearly an area where government may be able to create great efficiency and net value, by running high economies of scale shuttle systems to school and many of these organized activities children engage in today. Parents will not have to spend many hours per week driving (and creating excess pollution and congestion). Government can enforce the economies of scale by requiring all parents to pay for it with taxes and then providing it for free to all parents.

I decided to stop at 3 because my wife was completely frazzled and short-tempered and seemingly unable to cope with all the demands on her time (many of these were created by herself – she insisted on homeschooling, and she has a very hard time staying focused or organized).

Money was definitely not the issue. And I didn’t have any particular objection to more except for her struggles. So I would say that if there had been a way for the kids to be well-cared for while significantly reducing her stress, I must agree with Bryan.

What externalities? I benefit from all of the scientific research that went into electronics, computers, phones, etc., but these are not *external* benefits that I am enjoying, these are things I paid for.

That doesn’t come close to fully internalizing the benefits. So much of scientific and technical advancement cannot practically be patented, or price discriminated, and how are the benefits to future generations internalized. There are gaping flaws in the free market internalizing system here.

Richard,

Efficiencies on the level of today’s elementary and high schools?

And when you say forcing all parents to pay for it, do you really mean that literally, or are you just assuming everyone is a parent? And if not, do you have pay if you don’t use it?

I have always believed that the birthrate is falling in the advanced economies primarily because people don’t expect to have to depend on their children for support in their elderly years.

Can you provide examples Richard?

And while I’m at it let me point out that libertarian economists are not anti-government or categorically opposed to the government getting involved in creating technology. In enterprises which would be enormously beneficial but which would not yield a profit for those undertaking it (such as lighthouses or certain natural monopolies) I don’t see any serious libertarian economists opposing the government getting involved. However, we generally prefer the use of markets to the greatest extent possible, not for dogmatic reasons but for efficiency reasons.

But many times these problems are created by government intervention or the lack of government support to the economy (such as guaranteeing property rights). Take drug companies. It makes no sense for a drug company to create a drug that cures cancer, because they would have no hope of making a profit off of it. Why? Because either the government would force the company to sell the drug at a less-than-profitable cost, OR foreign countries would reproduce the drugs themselves in defiance of patent law. This is a case where either too much intervention (price controls) or too little support for property rights and the other institutions the market needs to function, creates a problem that only government can solve.

So much of what is wrong in the economy today is of this nature. Enormous regulations, often procedure-based rather than results-based, in various sectors of the economy leads to enormous inflexibility and inhibited competition (because of the high price of entry into the industry), making the only viable short-term fix *even more government intervention*, since true deregulation in the US is virtually politically impossible, rare, and often trivial when it happens.

But about those externalities, you were saying……

I’m a father of five daughters. Any time I have the 5 of them with me and we’re out and about, I get comments from perfect strangers. “That’s a lot of weddings.” “Five for college, and then weddings.” “Start saving now.” That sort of thing. And folks that I know, but not well, ask how we think we can do it financially. When people think about someone else’s large family, they apparently think about how much it costs.

Financial matters are unusual. Knowing someone well may make it less likely that you’d have an open discussion of money. I make lots of decisions based in part on money, and yet when I explain those decisions to friends, I don’t often talk about money.

Don, do you want to go back to the days of no Social Security and Medicare for our seniors? The cure would be much worse than the disease. In those days poverty was common among seniors; they were the largest group in poverty, and you had to walk by many of them living in the street — talk about a negative externality.

Jacob, “libertarian economists are not anti-government or categorically opposed to the government getting involved in creating technology.” — there’s a lot of Libertarians who would say these economists aren’t Libertarian, and a lot of Republicans who would say this is not Republican. Republicans and Libertarians fight high return government investment in technology all the time.

By the usage I’ve seen commonly, you and your “libertarian economists” are not Libertarian but center right — or left, considering the extreme positions of the Republican party and machine today.

I think a potential reason is that leisure time becoming more valuable. We have so much wonderful things to do with our free time. It’s dumb to be stuck by kids. Actually, having a young kid to take care, some even normal activities will be very difficult, such as shopping, eat out, hang out with friends, etc. Time is a real constraint. When a society requires a mom to behave like a mom, even those really rich can not get much substitute.

Ok. It’s very the same as what CK said above. But I think the recently hot behavioral genetics will deliver us.
Since the nature is the dominant factor in child development. We can actually reproduce out of the traditional family institution. Government can take that job. Higher level of specification can be developed. They can, or through funding private companies, hire women’s wombs to bear children. Every pregnancy can have multiple births. All children can be taken care by specialists.
It will be more efficient. The quality of the population will be higher, and the quantity will that we want exactly.

Parent and related words will be obsolete.

“Don, do you want to go back to the days of no Social Security and Medicare for our seniors? The cure would be much worse than the disease. In those days poverty was common among seniors; they were the largest group in poverty, and you had to walk by many of them living in the street — talk about a negative externality.”

And that’s why Bill Gates will collect Social Security.

Richard, it’s very entertaining to see you set up straw men who deny the existence of any market failures, and then knock them down. Your faith in government to solve the problems of the market, though, is every bit as foolish. It’s true that real markets often fall short of their theoretical ideal, which means that in theory a government might improve efficiency. But governments often fall short of their theoretical ideal, too.

if someone figures out how to sharply reduce the per-child workload, that is a big reason in favor of having another kid?

That is *exactly* the reason that we have 4 children, and not any more. We would have more except for that it’s already completely exhausting at the amount we have. We talk about adopting after our youngest child (3 years old) is more able to take care of himself. If there were a way to make child rearing easier today, I would be interested in it. And if that lowered the amount of childcare below our lower bound, I think we’d consider additional children (probably through adoption).

What I don’t understand, though, is why people are so resistant to reversing this argument.

People are resistant to this? Really?

I think a lot of you are missing the key factor: working women. To maintain their social position, and to have any chance of putting the few kids they produce into the “right” social group (by raising them in an appropriate neighborhood, sending them to suitable schools, etc.), most “middle class” couples now have to put both parents out to work. Then they don’t have time (mom doesn’t have time) to care for kids, so they have to put them in daycare, which has the well-documented effect of making the kids themselves much more pushy and whiny (they develop such behaviours in the struggle for attention and dominance at daycare). Of course the daycare is very costly,[1] so the burden of children seems magnified. Extremely rich people can hire educated nannies, but merely top-two-quintiles people can only afford illegal aliens, so if they go that route they end up disqualifying yourself from future government jobs and getting kids who want to talk to their folks in a language they don’t actually speak (plus there is the “Lupita’s gangster boyfriend” problem).

Since women are expected to work now, that means parents have to push their daughters to get a lot of education so they can get “good jobs,” so those daughters delay marriage and childbearing. Older parents have less energy to spend on children, and they have more habits of life developed without children– so again the hassle children present seems magnified. If you have your first kid at 24 you have fewer habitual pleasures to subordinate than if you have your first kid at 35.

I can’t think of any rapid, politically-feasible way to return society to the much-wiser “one adult wage worker may support a family without loss of social class” model.

[1] Current government “subsidies” to daycare are mostly counterproductive. The subsidies are rigged to redistribute wealth from earners to moochers. Nothing can be more galling to married “middle class” wage earners who need daycare to have both children and jobs (which pay something more than daycare costs), than to confront the Federal Income Tax which surtaxes married workers (though the surprisingly stiff “marriage penalty”) and people who earn more than the median income (through “deduction phaseouts” and such), then uses the money to subsidize one-earner couples and workers who earn less than the cost of daycare. In a reasonable world no one would get a daycare subsidy to help them hold a job which pays less than the cost of daycare! Then the skewed subsidies drive up the price of daycare by giving extra money to some parents, against which unsubsidized parents must then compete for slots.

Since daycare costs are business expenses, in the “cost of producing income” sense, they should be fully deductible (without “phaseouts” or other limitations). Under such a model no one would work for wages less than the cost of required daycare. All other daycare subsidies should be repealed. Daycare providers would be better-off too, since the parents of their little charges would be people capable of earning more than the price of daycare for their kids, therefore more pleasant to deal with.

(Yes, I would even allow parents to deduct wages paid to nannies, though only if said nannies were fully taxed as employees (FICA, Medicare, income taxes withheld, the whole nine yards). That’s actually a current legal requirement– look at the Kimba Woods case).

It was understood that we had to fill our own time in our own ways within boundaries. After age 7 or 8, neither parent could even tell you where I was when I wasn’t in school- I just had to be home by a certain time.

That would get your parents sent to jail today.

I’m not approving of the change in society, mind you. Children are seen more some kind of hobby or investment than they are as individuals and that’s a shame.

Don,

I didn’t say pure government is best for everything, and I didn’t say the pure free market is best for everything. What optimizes total societal utility and what optimizes growth in science, medicine, technology, and economic wealth is a mix.

You seem to favor a mix too, so I don’t know if you fit the definition of a Libertarian, certainly not the definition of a lot of self-identified Libertarians.

And, clearly I don’t favor Bill Gates getting social security, or anyone anywhere near that wealthy. But I do favor it going to anyone even close to middle class or poorer, and that will create an externality as you point out, but one worth creating given the severe problems of the alternative.

If another kid means a lot of work, that’s a big reason against having another kid.

The dependence is not linear. Elder children can help a lot. The step from 1 to 2 is bigger than from 2 to 3 or from 3 to 4.

IMVO money and advertising are more important.

I don’t want to have children either. I think if the woman is going to be the one giving birth and feed the child for the next 18 years… I think is should be the woman who decides if she wants to have children. I think people around you, church leaders, relatives should not have a say in this matter. I am 27 years old I work with children and as the days go by I don’t want children. I notice that children sometimes are treated like toys, some mothers even joke that they have children so they can use them in their taxes… it sounds funny but at the end children are the ones that suffer. I think is selfish from people that have children because they love each other and they feel is time. I know so many Mormons that they can barely support themselves and they are planing to have children. I have seen mothers that have four or six children you can see them struggling.

The opportunity cost of having another child IS astronomical… as Mr. Caplan mentioned, three additional years for a new car, etc. Financially and time-wise, many more things will have to wait with an addition to the family. I think this is a huge part of the reason families are rejecting the idea of another baby.

I’m just glad we live in a democratic country with no government intervention in family planning as of yet. The positive effects of China’s one-child policies will become apparent within the next few generations (not immediately due to the population momentum conundrum) but I think that that idea is only relevant to their nation. China also based that policy on a vast majority of indigenous people; immigration contributes to 25% of U.S. population growth. So regardless of any kind of federal family planning intervention, child-limiting policies, etc., the U.S. “population” would be in constant turmoil due to the amount of people entering and leaving the country.

Then again, would we experience outmigration if that policy were to be the case? I heard every McCain supporter and their mom back at the end of 2008, “I’m packing up and I’m goin’ to Canada.” No, you’re not. But would they? With such a huge limitation as how many children a couple can have, which ultimately a decision that I believe is between a husband and wife (however you’d like to define that), would we see a mass exodus to Canada or other nation in which multiple children per family has not become taboo? And if so, could that almost be HELPFUL for us?

In terms of the environment, the Earth’s physical and economic carrying capacity is unknown, but some experts say we overshot it back at 2 billion. (The numbers also go as high as 40 million.) One American baby is estimated to have the environmental impact equivalent to that of 250 Bangladeshi babies. (Given that current fertility rates don’t help balance out the impact, because there probably are many, many babies born in countries like Bangladesh for every one American baby.)

So no, I really don’t see any way around this.