
Children aren’t worth very much–that’s why we no longer make many - prostoalex
http://qz.com/231313/children-arent-worth-very-much-thats-why-we-no-longer-make-many/
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jseliger
_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.

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wodenokoto
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.

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cpursley
> 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.

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

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snowwrestler
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.

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meric
"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.

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recondite
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.

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sjp2705
Rambling, at times incoherent, and largely unsubstantiated. Fine work
gentlemen.

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mooreds
That was a sobering look at parenthood.

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kjs3
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.

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Rapzid
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.

