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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

#2 and #3 don’t obviously raise the cost of kids relative to income

I'm not convinced. Are you including opportunity costs?

Also, on a farm pre-1800, you got most of your food outside the market and aside from your money income. Food was not accounted for in your money income, but it was a huge chunk of your income in the broad sense - and much of it came from your children's labor.

As I wrote on Caplan's post, it doesn't make any sense for him to ask whether kids were "profitable" financially, or "paid" (he even asks if they are more profitable than other uses of capital). What matters is just whether the value of their labor made them a lot cheaper - not necessarily free. Obviously, I don't have to cut the price of pizza down to $0 a slice or $(-1) a slice to increase demand. We desire pizza and children inherently and so we buy at a price well above zero.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I have also long pondered this odd puzzle of the modern world. Rousseau said that you could judge whether a government was good or bad according to whether the population was increasing or decreasing, and this metric would say weird things about the present world -- or would it?

The comment about K/r is (IMHO) the only one who seems to be on track, but it fails to mention exactly how we should apply it to our case.

My present line of reasoning goes along the lines: in contemporary affluent societies human beings are competing not with environmental factors but with other humans, whereas in more traditional societies the weight of this intra-species competition was less relevant.

In any case, i think the phenomenon underlines how much what we think as "material wealth" is actually not very relevant to survival but exclusively as status signaling.

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