This is pretty cool. I think the fact that the cost is so low is almost a bit worrying. Because of reading this article, I’m likely to hum in the future due to “the potential non-trivial benefits compared to probably minuscule side effects and very low costs”.
In some sense you’ve just made this my default operating hypothesis (and hence in some sense “an idea I give life to” or “enliven”, and hence in some sense “a ‘belief’ of mine”) not because I think it is true, but simply because it kinda makes sense and generalized prudence suggests that it probably won’t hurt to try.
But also: I’m pretty sure this broader meta-cognitive pattern explains a LOT of superstitious behavior! ;-)
Something that has always seemed a bit weird to me is that it seems like economists normally assume (or seem to assume from a distance) that laborers “live to make money (at work)” rather than that they “work to have enough money (to live)”.
Microeconomically, especially for parents I think this is not true.
You’d naively expect, for most things, that if the price goes down, the supply goes down.
But for the labor of someone with a family, if the price given for their labor goes down in isolation, then they work MORE (hunt for overtime, get a second job, whatever) because they need to make enough to hit their earning goals in order to pay for the thing they need to protect: their family. (Things that really cause them to work more: a kid needs braces. Thing that causes them to work less: a financial windfall.)
Looking at that line, the thing it looks like to me is “the opportunity cost is REAL” but then also, later, the amount of money that had to be earned went up too (because of “another mouth to feed and clothe and provide status goods for and so on”). Maybe?
The mechanistic hypothesis here (that parents work to be able to hit spending targets which must rise as family size goes up) implies a bunch of additional details: (1) the husband’s earnings should be tracked as well and the thing that will most cleanly go up is the sum of their earnings, (2) if a couple randomly has and keeps twins then the sum of the earnings should go up more.
Something I don’t know how to handle is that (here I reach back into fuzzy memories and might be trivially wrong from trivially misremembering) prior to ~1980 having kids caused marriages to be more stable (maybe “staying together for the kids”?), and afterwards it caused marriages to be more likely to end in divorce (maybe “more kids, more financial stress, more divorce”?) and if either of those effects apply (or both, depending on the stress reactions and family values of the couple?) then it would entangle with the data on their combined earnings?
Scanning the paper for whether or how they tracked this lead me to this bit (emphasis not in original), which gave me a small groan and then a cynical chuckle and various secondary thoughts...
(NOTE: this ~falsifies the prediction I made a mere 3 paragraphs ago, but I’m leaving that in, rather than editing it out to hide my small local surprise.)
If I’m looking for a hypothetical framing that isn’t “uncomplimentary towards fathers” then maybe that could be spun as the idea that men are simply ALWAYS “doing their utmost at their careers” (like economists might predict, with a normal labor supply curve) and they don’t have any of that mama bear energy where they have “goals they will satisfice if easy or kill themselves or others to achieve if hard” the way women might when the objective goal is the wellbeing of their kids?
Second order thoughts: I wonder if economists and anthropologists could collaborate here, to get a theory of “family economics” modulo varying cultural expectations?
I’ve heard of lots of anthropological stuff about how men and women in Africa believe that farming certain crops is “for men” or “for women” and then they execute these cultural expectations without any apparent microeconomic sensitivity (although the net upshot is sort of a reasonable portfolio that insures families against droughts).
Also, I’ve heard that on a “calorie in, calorie out” basis in hunter-gatherer cultures, it is the grandmothers who are the huge breadwinners (catch lots of rabbits with traps, and generally forage super efficiently) whereas the men hunt big game (which they and the grandmas know is actually inefficient, if an anthropologist asks this awkward question) so that, when the men (rarely) succeed in a hunt they can throw a big BBQ for the whole band and maybe get some nookie in the party’s aftermath.
It seems like it would be an interesting thing to read a paper about: “how and where the weirdly adaptive foraging and family economic cultures” even COME FROM.
My working model is that it is mostly just “monkey see, monkey do” on local role models, with re-calibration cycle times of roughly 0.5-2 generations. I remember writing a comment about mimetic economic learning in the past… and the search engine says it was for Unconscious Economics :-)