Bryan Caplan señala que tener hijos nunca ha compensado desde un punto de vista económico, tampoco en la sociedad pre-industrial, al contrario de lo que se cree comúnmente.
One popular story about the decline in family size over the last two centuries goes like this: Back in the old days, having kids paid. Children started working when they were quite young, and provided for their parents in their old age. Then industrialization and/or the welfare state came along and changed everything. Young children ceased to contribute much economically to their families, and once Social Security, Medicare, and so on were in place, people stopped supporting their aging parents.
It turns out that this story is only half true. Yes, in the modern era, people give little financial assistance to their elders; even in late adulthood, old-to-young transfers remain larger than young-to-old transfers. The flaw in the story is the assumption that things used to be different. In an eye-opening 1996 JEL piece, Ted Bergstrom summarizes evidence showing that even in pre-modern societies, kids did not pay.
Entonces, ¿por qué tenemos hoy menos hijos?
Robin Hanson cita las 5 razones de Wikipedia:
1. Parents … need not require so many children to be born to ensure a comfortable old age.
2. Urban living … raises the cost of dependent children to a family.
3. The cost of children to parents is exacerbated by the introduction of compulsory education …
4. Lower … acceptance of childbearing and motherhood as measures of the status of women. Working women have less time to raise children.
5. Improvements in contraceptive technology are now a major factor.
En su opinión, solo la #4 se sostiene:
Bergstrom undercut #1, and fertility fell lots before contraception tech, saying #5 is minor. #2 and #3 don’t obviously raise the cost of kids relative to income, or to kids’ value to parents. That leaves #4, some unexplained feature of how kids give moms status.
Lo que nos lleva a una entrada reciente sobre el status de ser madre vis a vis tener una carrera laboral exitosa: Maternidad con status.
