Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

by Bryan Caplan

  I had to estimate deaths from war because (1) standard U.S. statistics exclude overseas deaths, (2) military statistics combine deaths from overseas hostile action and other causes, and (3) available military statistics are less detailed than civilian numbers. My raw numbers come from the Office of Medical History’s Battle Casualties and Medical Statistics: U.S. Army Experience in the Korea War, Table 15, and Richard Kolb, “Korea and Vietnam: Comparing Participants and Casualties,” Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine (June–July 2003), pp. 21–23 (for 1950), and the Congressional Research Service Report for Congress’s American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, Tables 5, 11, and 15 (for 2005). For 1950, these sources have separate tables for deaths by year, age, and cause of death. For 2005, these sources have separate tables for deaths by year and age.

  To estimate war deaths for 1950, I assumed that the age and cause of death breakdowns were constant over the course of the Korean War. During 1950, 14,650 soldiers died in the Korean War, 78.3 percent of the Korean War dead were fifteen to twenty-four years old, and 92.3 percent of deaths in Korea resulted from hostile action. My estimated number of war deaths for those fifteen to twenty-four years old for 1950 was therefore 10,588.

  To estimate war deaths for 2005, I assumed that the age breakdown of military fatalities was constant between October 7, 2001 and April 5, 2008—the endpoints of the Congressional Research Service Report. During 2005, 739 soldiers died in hostile action, and 48.8 percent of those killed in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom were fifteen to twenty-four years old. My estimated 2005 war death count for this age bracket was therefore 361.

  To the best of my knowledge, there is no available year or age breakdown for war deaths in 1900, so Table 4.4 does not include war deaths for 1900. This has almost no effect on the results. In 1900, America’s only military conflicts were the Boxer Rebellion (1900– 1901) which caused a total of thirty-seven U.S. combat deaths, and the Philippine-American War (1898–1902), which caused a total of 1,020 U.S. combat deaths. If combat deaths were constant over time, and 80 percent of the dead were fifteen to twenty-four years old, there would have been 178 war deaths for those in that age group in 1900, raising their mortality rate from 586 per 100,000 to 586.7 per 100,000.

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  ENLIGHTENED FAMILY PLANNING: HOW MANY KIDS DO YOU WANT WHEN YOU’RE SIXTY?

  Nothing I’ve ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

  —Bill Cosby

  IN 1992, GARY BECKER WON THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS FOR one big idea: “Economics is everywhere.” He saw economics in discrimination; employers hire people they hate if the wage is right. He saw economics in crime; crooks rob banks because that’s where the money is. He saw economics in education; students endure years of boring lectures because they’re fascinated by higher pay after graduation. Perhaps most important, Becker saw economics in the family. Human beings plan their families on the basis of enlightened self-interest. Parents look at the world, form roughly accurate beliefs about the costs and benefits of kids, and make babies until they foresee that another would be more trouble than he’s worth.

  I’m a devotee of Gary Becker. Once when I was visiting the faculty club at the University of Chicago, he unexpectedly sat down for lunch. I barely stopped myself from blurting out, “Oh my God, you’re Gary Becker!” Still, my idol doesn’t always get things right. One pillar of his family economics is the assumption that the fewer kids you have, the better they’ll be. Becker matter-of-factly speaks of the “quality/quantity trade-off.” A central lesson of behavioral genetics, as we’ve seen, is that the trade-off is often illusory. Parents who believe otherwise base their family plans on misinformation. Is this merely one admittedly large oversight on Becker’s part, or has the ability of enlightened self-interest to explain the family been oversold?

  CAN ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST EXPLAIN THE SHRINKING FAMILY?

  Be nice to your kids, they’ll choose your nursing home!

  —Popular bumper sticker

  The greatest perceived triumph of the economics of the family is its explanation for the global fertility decline. In the second half of the Fifties, American women had a total fertility rate of almost 4 children. Fifty years later, it was 2.1. We see similar patterns over most of the globe. During the same period, France went from a total fertility rate of 2.7 to 1.9 kids, Germany from 2.3 to 1.3, Japan from 2.2 to 1.3, Mexico from 6.8 to 2.2, and China from 5.5 to 1.8. Becker and the many economists who extended his work are confident that enlightened self-interest explains the worldwide downsizing of the family.

  Their position is appealing. When I see a change of this magnitude, I too presume that self-interest is the cause. A few people sterilize themselves to save the planet, but most of us are too selfish to make big sacrifices for what we see—rightly or wrongly—as the common good. Do you feel like giving up your car to fight global warming?

  Still, a presumption is not an explanation. Why specifically would it be in our self-interest to have fewer kids than before? The answer people often spit out is that big families are no longer affordable, but the opposite is true. Big families are more affordable than ever, because we’re more than three times richer than we were in 1950. You can see our mounting riches in our homes. Compared to the tiny dwellings of the Fifties, modern families live in castles, with air conditioning. Why hasn’t the size of our families grown in step with the size of our houses?

  Becker knows how rich we’ve grown, so he tells a subtler story about why self-interest implies fewer children. He promisingly begins by focusing on the people who do most of the child care: moms. The women of 2010 give up more to have a child than the women of 1950. Back when women’s wages were low, staying home for a few years to raise another kid was a small financial sacrifice. Women earned so little that they didn’t have much to lose. Now that working women make good money, staying home for a few years to raise kids can stop mom from earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  This explanation sounds good, but it’s not as smart as it seems. Women lose more income when they take time off, but they also have a lot more income to lose. They could have worked less, earned more, and had more kids. Since men’s wages rose, too, staying home with the kids is actually more affordable for married moms than ever. If that’s too retro, women could have responded to rising wages by working more, having more kids, and using their extra riches to hire extra help.

  A variant on the rising-women’s-wages story claims that family size shrank because women’s bargaining power increased. Since women pay most of the cost of bearing and raising children, it was supposedly in their self-interest to use their newfound leverage to negotiate for fewer kids. But this story falsely assumes that women want smaller families than men do. When the World Values Survey queried men and women around the world about “ideal family size,” the sexes saw almost eye-to-eye. In the United States, the average woman wanted .1 children more than the average man. Why would women use their new bargaining power to demand changes that they don’t desire?

  Another selfish explanation for lower birthrates points to birth control: We always wanted sex without children—and now we can finally live the dream. A tempting tale, but it’s not as sexy as it looks. Condoms have been widely available since World War II, when the U.S. military started issuing them to soldiers. Families in the Fifties had the technology to keep their families small. Returning veterans and their wives opted for a baby boom instead.

  Perhaps the most popular selfish explanation for smaller families, though, claims that people used to have children to support them in their old age. Now that the government provides for retirees, children are obsolete investments. But this story’s key assumption is wrong. Money primarily flows from old to young. It’s long been true and remains true today. Anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer societies have found:Children consumed more food than they caught at all ages until age 18. Grandparents continued to work hard to
support their grandchildren and produced more than they ate. At almost no time in their adult lives did adults produce less than they consumed.

  The same goes for traditional farmers: Investing in your children is less lucrative than stuffing money in your mattress.

  In modern societies, little has changed. Parents give more to their children than they can hope to recover. Take the United States in the 1980s. One research team using the Survey of Consumer Finances found that parents gave their kids large cash gifts ($3,000+) much more often than the reverse. Another researcher using the Consumer Expenditure Survey found that—ignoring child-rearing and college costs—parents on average voluntarily gave a total of $25,000 more to each child than they got back.

  The lesson: An economic perspective on fertility is not useless, but it is much less intellectually satisfying than advertised. For an extra helping of disillusion, note that the decline of family size has not been smooth. In the middle of the century, the United States had the legendary baby boom: The total fertility rate soared from a little more than two kids in the early Thirties to a little less than four kids in the late Fifties. America’s total fertility rate bottomed out in the mid-Seventies at 1.7 kids. At the time, women earned 60 percent as much as men, and only 45 percent worked; now they earn 80 percent as much as men, and 60 percent work. If women’s foregone earnings and career options were decisive, children would now be rarer than ever. Instead, American fertility rebounded back to replacement.

  THE TRIUMPH OF HINDSIGHT BIAS

  There is no shortage of popular explanations to account for the drop in fertility. In Athens, it’s common to blame the city’s infamous air pollution; several years ago a radio commercial promoted air-conditioners as a way to bring back Greek lust and Greek babies.

  —Russell Shorto, “No Babies?”

  Human beings tend to rationalize the past as inevitable. Psychologists call this hindsight bias. Case in point: Since we know that family size has fallen, we instinctively treat this decline as the only possible outcome. Every major social change seems like yet another reason for parents to want fewer kids than they used to.

  What happens if we strive to overcome hindsight bias? Let’s pretend we don’t know how the story turned out, then mentally review the last fifty years. On reflection, modern parents have serious self-interested reasons to want bigger families than ever.

  TECHNOLOGY VASTLY IMPROVED

  Think how much work a child was back when moms had to launder diapers by hand and cook every meal from scratch. Parents shopped in a dozen different stores to feed and dress their families. It’s remarkable that our great-grandparents chose to have any children at all. Compare that to the modern world of disposable diapers, washerdryers, microwaves, dishwashers, WalMart, and Amazon. I can see progress between 2002 and 2010; my third son’s Kiddopotamus swaddling blankets are far superior to his brothers’ old-fashioned rectangular wraps. Raising kids is not yet easy, but it’s way easier than it used to be.

  WE’RE MUCH RICHER

  Our real incomes have more than tripled since the 1950s. Back in the bad old days, parents might literally worry about “having another mouth to feed.” Now most of us have the resources to feed, clothe, and shelter the Brady Bunch. Today’s parents have money to throw at problems great and small. Need a night out—or help around the house? There’s much more to spare for babysitters, nannies, and housecleaners. Too tired to cook? Restaurant budgets are much bigger than they were in the bad old days. Need a little peace and quiet? You’re more likely to find them in a McMansion than a duplex.

  FINANCIAL BENEFITS ARE PROBABLY NO WORSE THAN BEFORE

  A stubborn believer in the kids-as-pensions theory might admit that kids were never a good investment but insist that they’re now deeper money pits than ever. They are probably wrong. In the old days, elders died too young to receive much of their “pension.” When Social Security began, thirty-year-olds could expect to survive to age sixty-eight. Today the average thirty-year-old makes it to about eighty. So even if parents get a lower level of annual support from their children than they used to, they collect for many more years.

  NONFINANCIAL BENEFITS ARE LONGER LASTING AND BETTER THAN EVER

  Thanks to rising life spans, modern parents enjoy their children’s nonfinancial assistance for many more years. Your kids rarely buy you a palace in your old age or even pay your bills. But they usually include you in their lives and help with emergencies great and small. When trust is an issue, kids are a better bet than hired help—and the more bets you place, the better your odds. One careful study of elder care found that each additional child substantially cut the chance of ending up in a nursing home.

  Back when people died at sixty, this flow of services didn’t last long. Now you can expect to collect for decades. Furthermore, in our rapidly advancing world, the younger generation’s time is more valuable to elders. Two hundred years ago, parents didn’t need their kids’ help to upgrade to high-definition TV or install the latest version of Windows.

  Once we get past our hindsight bias, the downsizing of the family is deeply puzzling. In terms of objective conditions, there’s never been a better time to have a lot of kids. If you asked parents in the Fifties to imagine raising their four children with the help of the technology and wealth that we take for granted, they probably would have cheered. Why are so few couples taking advantage of this historic opportunity?

  VALUES, SELF-IMPOSED RULES, AND FORESIGHT

  I fear the disapproval of Gary Becker. I want my idol to like me. Still, given his legendary candor, I have to think that he prefers heresy to insincerity. My confession: Although I’m familiar with standard enlightened self-interest stories about the incredible shrinking family, three nonstandard factors strike me as more important: changes in values, changes in self-imposed rules, and changes in foresight.

  CHANGES IN VALUES

  If you look at the General Social Survey, the decline of marriage and religion explains much of the last four decades’ fall in family size. The simplest interpretation is that values changed: Marriage, religion, and “bringing souls into the world” are intertwined, and average Americans take none as seriously as they used to.

  A connection between changing values and smaller families isn’t a reason—selfish or otherwise—to have more kids. This book tries to show you better ways to get what you care about, not tell you what to care about. I acknowledge changing values to avoid overstating my case. Intellectual error explains much of the decline in family size, but not the whole story.

  CHANGES IN SELF-IMPOSED RULES

  Thanks to the growth of technology and wealth, parenting has never been less laborious or more affordable. If objective conditions were decisive, the modern family would be bigger than ever. Still, we can partly salvage the self-interest story of declining family size by casting a wider net. Instead of stubbornly searching for countervailing objective conditions, let’s redirect our attention to subjective conditions—the burdens we impose on ourselves.

  With modern resources, almost anyone can be a good parent by the standards of 1950. But we don’t want to be good by the standards of the Fifties; we want to be good by the standards of today. During the last half century, we picked up a list of self-imposed rules—of “stuff we gotta do.” These rules are awfully strict. As we’ve seen, the time that parents spend on child care is way up, even though more moms have jobs and families are smaller. Imagine combining the standards of today with the family size of yesterday.

  I could almost sell this to Gary Becker, but there’s one sticking point: My story is self-interested, but not enlightened. Given all the rules, small families are the prudent choice for Today’s Typical Parents. But that’s not saying much. The rules are a choice—and child neglect is not the only alternative. What do parents, or kids, get out of these rules? According to twin and adoption studies, not much.

  CHANGES IN FORESIGHT

  When I was a child, people often accused others of “breeding lik
e rabbits.” The picture’s not pretty: Rabbits get pregnant four times a year, have litters of half a dozen, nurse their young for only minutes a day, and boot them out of the nest after a month. The point of the rabbit analogy is that we expect more from human beings. We ought to use our heads to calculate how many children we can comfortably support and take care not to exceed that number. If you don’t use your head, you will not only be a bad parent and a burden on society, but you will also ruin your life.

  You don’t hear the rabbit analogy much anymore. At least in developed countries, people have too much foresight to breed like rabbits. Many babies remain the fruit of impulsive, unprotected sex, but few parents stick to the rabbit strategy once they have one or two unplanned children. Look at thirty-something American moms who never married: 45 percent have just one child, and 26 percent have two. Married moms in their thirties, in contrast, are much more likely to have two kids (41 percent) rather than one (22 percent).