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Reply To Caplan on Kids

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Reply To Caplan on Kids

Robin Hanson
Aug 19, 2010
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Reply To Caplan on Kids

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In general, those who can send better signals should put more effort into signaling. In particular, those with a better shot at them should work harder to gain status markers. So women with better relative endowments should delay and reduce kid raising efforts; their fewer high status kids would make for more great-grand kids. And since farmer status inequalities were bigger than forager inequities, this effect was stronger for farmers.

Monday I described Bill & my suggestion that this effect might explain the demographic transition, if our subconscious minds neglect the possibility that whole societies could get and long stay rich. That is, we see that by ancient standards we live like kings, we might be fooled into thinking we have a chance at king-like status and relative reproduction success, if only we work extra hard to achieve status markers. But in fact, we can’t all reproduce like kings.

Tuesday Bryan objected:

Unless I’m deeply misunderstanding it, this “excellent” theory doesn’t even get off the ground. Like Feyrer and Sacerdote’s theory, Dickens-Hanson implies gender conflict: In the modern world, men should want more children than women, and this gap should get larger as people get richer. But in reality, men and women around the world see eye-to-eye on this question – see the World Values Survey, question D017. But doesn’t the Dickens-Hanson mechanisms work for men, too? Robin thinks it does, but admits that it doesn’t work as strongly:

I just don’t see that our theory implies gender conflict on family size. By “[the theory] doesn’t work as strongly [for men]”, I meant and said:

So men should work even harder to gain status markers. But even so, raising overt kids will less distract men from pursuing high status, and a man’s delay in starting kids will less reduce his fertility. Thus excess male status efforts probably do less to reduce overall fertility.

Since men are even more eager than women to gain status, and stay fertile longer, if men shared kid raising efforts equally they might well want to delay kids even longer than women want. But if women bear most of the kid-raising burden, that should make men more eager to have kids earlier. The net effect of these factors isn’t clear.  So I see no clear net prediction of our theory about how people should answer a survey question about “optimal family size.” (And I’m inclined to pay more attention to how many kids people actually have, relative to survey responses.)

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Reply To Caplan on Kids

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Reply To Caplan on Kids

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

Babies weren't assets per se but the potential to become assets. Historically children went to work as soon as they were able thus minimising the costs of childrearing. However there's something to said about ye olde parents not being obliged to raise their own children at all. In other words, child abandonment was quite acceptable until the modern era even if though the child would most likely perish. Then again, I heard an anecdote where some time in Ancient Rome a child had no expectation to their parent's assets and adults would choose any child (who showed promise) from the general populance and groom them to take over their business dealings.

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gwern
May 15

Turns out I did have it saved in Evernote (handy service for this sort of thing); the OB mention of the Brazil study was http://www.overcomingbias.c... and the PDF link was http://ipl.econ.duke.edu/br...

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