I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
FWIW, as of the last LW survey women and men were about equally likely to want (more) children (though they’re not necessarily a representative sample of Western people).
Also keep in mind something people quickly discovered when they first started doing market researcher. What people say they want can be very different from their actual revealed preferences.
It’s not obvious that revealed preferences are necessarily more “actual” than stated preferences [1, 2]. In any event it takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child; how do we disentangle their revealed preferences from each other?
The question is what causes more or fewer children to be conceived. Jim argues with some evidence that a major factor is relative status of men and women.
FWIW, as of the last LW survey women and men were about equally likely to want (more) children (though they’re not necessarily a representative sample of Western people).
Also keep in mind something people quickly discovered when they first started doing market researcher. What people say they want can be very different from their actual revealed preferences.
It’s not obvious that revealed preferences are necessarily more “actual” than stated preferences [1, 2]. In any event it takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child; how do we disentangle their revealed preferences from each other?
The question is what causes more or fewer children to be conceived. Jim argues with some evidence that a major factor is relative status of men and women.