Fertility is inversely correlated with income, the problem isn’t that people don’t have enough money, the problem is that in some sense they don’t want children. I think a better approach would be cultural changes that make it high status to have lot’s of children.
I don’t think that is a correct summary of the essay at all, which is really pointing to a problem with how we think about coordination.
True, his point that Bayesians should be able to overcome these coordination problems by doing X, Y, and Z. Except neither him nor anyone else has should any interest in actually making an effort to do X, Y, and Z.
Seems to me the costs of having children are mostly (1) time, i.e. opportunity costs, and in USA (2) education.
Education is probably expensive because although formally presented as a source of knowledge, it is actually a costly signal of… something (social class? willingness to sacrifice a lot in the name of “education”?)… and costly signals, by definition, are costly. If you would make a cheaper and more available option, some people would signal their superiority by not taking this option, and people who take this option would be perceived as not good enough.
Opportunity costs of time are obviously higher for people with more and better options, such as smart people.
But if education costs are very important than I would expect that at the top percentile the people with more money, who can afford to send more children to college get more children.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Fertility is inversely correlated with income, the problem isn’t that people don’t have enough money, the problem is that in some sense they don’t want children. I think a better approach would be cultural changes that make it high status to have lot’s of children.
True, his point that Bayesians should be able to overcome these coordination problems by doing X, Y, and Z. Except neither him nor anyone else has should any interest in actually making an effort to do X, Y, and Z.
Seems to me the costs of having children are mostly (1) time, i.e. opportunity costs, and in USA (2) education.
Education is probably expensive because although formally presented as a source of knowledge, it is actually a costly signal of… something (social class? willingness to sacrifice a lot in the name of “education”?)… and costly signals, by definition, are costly. If you would make a cheaper and more available option, some people would signal their superiority by not taking this option, and people who take this option would be perceived as not good enough.
Opportunity costs of time are obviously higher for people with more and better options, such as smart people.
While the US does have higher education costs than Germany it also has a higher birthrate. I don’t think those costs are the major factor.
Depends; what are the birthrates for the parts of population with university education?
Unfortunately, I don’t find data for how birth rate correlates with income in Germany. Only for the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/
But if education costs are very important than I would expect that at the top percentile the people with more money, who can afford to send more children to college get more children. That doesn’t seem to be the case.