This is an excellent post, in tune with the One Billion Americans argument. My main worry is that we should not lean too heavily on preferences people state on surveys about the number of children they would like to have. Survey responses do not really match the real decisions people take about irreversible, long-term decisions like having a child. There are many plausible ways in which these could differ, e.g. if people describe how many children they would like to have, but their partner wants to have fewer children. Or they would like to have children, but they find it hard to find a partner who meets their standards. Or they would like to have children if their parents could help with childcare, but their parents actually cannot because they live far away or are still working. All of these would lead me to apply some discount factor to the number of children that
Of course, these are social constraints that we should ideally lift. Women being forced to have fewer children than they would like because of economic worries shouldn’t happen. But there’s only so much that philanthropists can do, so in this view we have to accept that the “optimal” number of children that can be promoted by advocacy/education is not the same as the “ideal” number of children that these people would like to have.
This is an excellent post, in tune with the One Billion Americans argument. My main worry is that we should not lean too heavily on preferences people state on surveys about the number of children they would like to have. Survey responses do not really match the real decisions people take about irreversible, long-term decisions like having a child. There are many plausible ways in which these could differ, e.g. if people describe how many children they would like to have, but their partner wants to have fewer children. Or they would like to have children, but they find it hard to find a partner who meets their standards. Or they would like to have children if their parents could help with childcare, but their parents actually cannot because they live far away or are still working. All of these would lead me to apply some discount factor to the number of children that
Of course, these are social constraints that we should ideally lift. Women being forced to have fewer children than they would like because of economic worries shouldn’t happen. But there’s only so much that philanthropists can do, so in this view we have to accept that the “optimal” number of children that can be promoted by advocacy/education is not the same as the “ideal” number of children that these people would like to have.