This post relies heavily on the claim that on average, US women want more children than they have.
I was skeptical of this claim because it’s not in line with my personal experience or common sense (it seems like most people could have more children if they really wanted)
Stone 2018 seems to be the only reference for this. It’s a non-peer reviewed blog post on the Institute for Family Studies website. IFS seems to be a conservative think-tank with a strong agenda.
Good point on the bias of IFS, but I’ll push back on this claim not being in line with common sense. Why do you think most people could have more children if they really wanted? It seems like financial constraints, infeasibility of finding childcare, and increasingly tight marriage markets (as represented by older age at marriage) are all factors holding people back.
If you surveyed people on whether they “want to speak another language” I think most people would say yes. But do they go and do it in practice? No, because of the enormous amount of time/money/work. That doesn’t seem like a tragically unmet “want”.
I think that analogy proves too much. You could also survey people on whether they “want to go to the doctor more often than they do”, and if they said yes, you could shrug and say “well they don’t do it because it costs a lot of money, that doesn’t seem like a tragically unmet want”. What’s the limiting principle behind “if people don’t do something because they are responding optimally to their financial/effort costs, then public policy doesn’t really need to help them do it”?
This post relies heavily on the claim that on average, US women want more children than they have.
I was skeptical of this claim because it’s not in line with my personal experience or common sense (it seems like most people could have more children if they really wanted)
Stone 2018 seems to be the only reference for this. It’s a non-peer reviewed blog post on the Institute for Family Studies website. IFS seems to be a conservative think-tank with a strong agenda.
Good point on the bias of IFS, but I’ll push back on this claim not being in line with common sense. Why do you think most people could have more children if they really wanted? It seems like financial constraints, infeasibility of finding childcare, and increasingly tight marriage markets (as represented by older age at marriage) are all factors holding people back.
If you surveyed people on whether they “want to speak another language” I think most people would say yes. But do they go and do it in practice? No, because of the enormous amount of time/money/work. That doesn’t seem like a tragically unmet “want”.
I think that analogy proves too much. You could also survey people on whether they “want to go to the doctor more often than they do”, and if they said yes, you could shrug and say “well they don’t do it because it costs a lot of money, that doesn’t seem like a tragically unmet want”. What’s the limiting principle behind “if people don’t do something because they are responding optimally to their financial/effort costs, then public policy doesn’t really need to help them do it”?
You can look up the survey data and check yourself. I relied on IFS for doing the work of graphing it and explaining it clearly.
So for instance here is information from Gallup up to 2013.
Here is data from GSS.
I don’t take these polls very seriously because it’s ambiguous if the “ideal number of children” includes the financial/work/time costs.
Lots of people have a different idea of what the “ideal” is vs. what they want in practice.