Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

by Bryan Caplan

—Paul Romer, “Economic Growth”

  Whenever a baby is born, at least someone has a reason to rejoice. What about the rest of us? Should we join the party, or mutter that the birth of another human being is nothing to be happy about? In practice, we tend to celebrate every particular baby, but grumble about the consequences of babies in general.

  The classic grumble is that population growth leads to poverty. When a stranger crashes a party, the invited guests get smaller slices of cake. Similarly, the argument runs, the birth of a new baby, eager for his cut of the world’s resources, helps impoverish those of us who are already here.

  This complaint is true in a trivial sense: Babies rarely hold steady jobs but still have to eat. A birth adds a consumer to the world without adding a producer, so as a matter of arithmetic, any child’s arrival reduces average consumption. Still, your infant’s unemployment hardly gives neighbors, countrymen, or the world much reason to complain. Unless your family is on welfare, it’s your problem, not theirs. Parents, not society, give up fancy vacations to pay for diapers, formula, and Onesies.

  In any case, babies don’t stay unemployed forever. Those who see more people as a source of poverty are missing half the story: Over the course of their lives, human beings do not just consume, they also produce . Kids eventually grow up and pull their own weight. The world economy is not like a party where everyone splits a birthday cake; it is more like a potluck where everyone brings a dish.

  If this seems like wishful thinking, consider: The total number of people on earth and the average standard of living skyrocketed over the last two centuries. The world has never been more populous or more prosperous than it is today. Never. By historic standards, almost everything is cheap. You may wince at the price of gas, but have you looked inside a WalMart lately? They’re practically giving stuff away.

  These would be amazing coincidences if population growth were an important cause of poverty. Indeed, it makes you wonder: Is our population a cause of our prosperity?

  The answer is almost certainly yes. The main source of progress is new ideas. We are richer today than we were 100 years ago because we learned so much. We learned ways for one farmer to feed hundreds of people, we learned how to fly, we learned how to make iPhones. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas puts it, the world’s expanding prosperity is “mainly an ongoing intellectual achievement, a sustained flow of new ideas.”

  The magic of ideas is all around us. As a little boy, I typed my first words on my mom’s electric typewriter and corrected mistakes by hand. Now I use Microsoft Word, and I haven’t touched a bottle of Liquid Paper in twenty years. If you put this book down for a moment, the fruit of new ideas is probably right in front of your eyes. If you’re wearing contact lenses or had Lasik surgery, the fruit of new ideas is actually on your eyes.

  The sweetest thing about ideas is how cheap they are to share. A million people—or 7 billion—can enjoy the latest discovery almost as easily as a solitary hermit. In fact, ideas often become more useful when more people use them. The Internet was so-so when only one person in 100 had a modem; now we can’t live without it.

  Our future depends on new ideas. So how would you respond to a precocious five-year-old who asks: “Where do new ideas come from?” You don’t have to dodge the question out of embarrassment. Feel free to blurt out the scandalous truth: New ideas come from people—especially smart, creative people. When you get more people, you get more smart, creative people; and when you get more smart, creative people, you get more new ideas. In the words of economist Julian Simon, “the human imagination” is “the ultimate resource.”

  If seven castaways wash up on a desert island, how many will be creative geniuses? On Gilligan’s Island, the answer is one (remember “the Professor”?), but few groups of seven random strangers would be so well-endowed. As the population of the island grows from seven to 7,000 or 7 million, the chance that Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Beethoven, or the Professor resides there sharply improves. Once you hit a population of 7 billion—as Earth soon will—the island will be home for 7,000 innovators who are literally one in a million.

  Now consider: If you had the right stuff to change the world, you might not bother. The market has to be big enough to make creativity worthwhile. If, like the Professor, you have only seven potential customers counting yourself, most innovations won’t pay. Suppose the Professor could spend a year of his life working on an idea worth $1 per person. As long as he’s stuck on the island, he’ll be working for $7 a year. He’d be better off picking coconuts. If the Professor could escape the island and bring his idea to a world market of 7 billion customers, though, it would amply repay a lifetime of research.

  It takes a whole planet to sustain the progress that we take for granted. You need smart, creative people to get new ideas, but they’re not enough. You also need armies of customers to turn creativity into a paying job. Creative geniuses are the most dramatic characters in the story of progress. Without a cast of billions of extras, however, the story would be less exciting. Indeed, without the extras, there would be no story to tell.

  When you look at languages, the link between population and creation is obvious. There are a lot more books, movies, and TV shows in English than Romanian. One major reason has to be that English speakers vastly outnumber Romanian speakers. There’s a lot more English-speaking talent—writers, directors, actors. But just as important, there’s a much bigger market for works in English. Legions of foreign directors move to Hollywood to win a global audience—and a bigger paycheck.

  For English versus Romanian, the advantages of the larger community are obvious. The world of today is better than the world of yesterday for the same reason: We belong to a much larger community than our ancestors did. The result is the modern world, where great new ideas pop up nonstop.

  If you make a kindergarten’s worth of children, you might impoverish yourself for a while. But your fertility does not impoverish the world. Maybe your child will be one of the smart, creative people who enrich us all. Even if your child isn’t the next Edison, though, he will almost surely grow up to be a productive member of society whose dollars inspire smart, creative people around the world to do their thing. Either way, your fertility is enriching your fellow man, not pushing him into poverty.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO RAISE THE AVERAGE TO PULL YOUR WEIGHT

  Eighty percent of success is showing up.

  —Woody Allen

  When asked, “Does the birth of another baby make the world better—or worse?” I suspect that many secretly answer, “It depends on the baby.” If he grows up to be a scientist, they think the world’s better off. If he grows up to be a janitor, they think the world’s worse off. The implicit dividing line, apparently, is that people make the world a better place if and only if they raise average income. If our average income is $50,000 a year, the birth of a future janitor supposedly impoverishes us by pulling down the average.

  To modern ears, this “eugenic” perspective sounds true but cruel—like pointing out that someone is fat or ugly. But it’s usually not even true. Eugenicists mistake arithmetic for injury. A “burden on society” isn’t someone who produces less than average; it’s someone who consumes more than he produces. The birth of a future janitor is nothing to worry about as long as he’ll be self-supporting and peaceful. The vast majority of janitors are.

  When Danny DeVito enters a room, he reduces its occupants’ average height. But he doesn’t cause anyone to “lose height.” Shortness isn’t contagious. Neither is low income. A janitor earns less than average, but his existence doesn’t impoverish his fellow citizens.

  Does the world really need another janitor? Absolutely. If janitors weren’t useful, employers wouldn’t pay them $20,000 for a year of their time. Many think there’s no place for unskilled workers in the high-tech economy of the future, but someone has to do their jobs. When there aren’t enough unskilled workers to wash dishes and collect garbage, skilled workers pick up the sl
ack—and their other talents go to waste. If Bill Gates spent half his time cleaning his own office, making his own meals, and watching his own kids, he’d discover far fewer new ideas to enrich us all.

  KIDS AND CHOICE: WHY EVEN MISANTHROPES PAY TO LIVE IN MANHATTAN

  No, all you say I’ll readily concede:

  This is a low, dishonest age indeed;

  Nothing but trickery prospers nowadays,

  And people ought to mend their shabby ways.

  Yes, man’s a beastly creature; but must we then

  Abandon the society of men?

  —Jean-Baptiste Molière, The Misanthrope

  Imagine you’re an introvert, a loner, or an outright misanthrope. You’re trying to decide where to live. Two possibilities come to mind. The first is Hays, Kansas; population, about 20,000. The second is New York City; population, about 8 million. In Hays, you can buy a decent house for under $100,000. In New York, that’s the cost of a closet.

  If you’re the opposite of a “people person,” the decision seems like a no-brainer: Hays is a lot less crowded and a lot cheaper. Yet the total number of introverts, loners, and misanthropes in New York far exceeds the number in Hays. After all, it has 400 times as many people. Antisocial New Yorkers presumably know that places like Hays exist. So why do they pay exorbitant rents to live near millions of strangers?

  “Choices” is the obvious answer—choices about where to work, live, eat, shop, and play. In Hays, you soon run out of stuff to do. Before long, you’re bored and wonder why the locals didn’t leave long ago. New York, in contrast, is the legendary city that never sleeps. Despite its drawbacks, the Big Apple’s got something for everyone—misanthropes included.

  A New York misanthrope might be tempted to quip, “This city would be perfect if it weren’t for all the people.” But the quote is self-refuting. New York doesn’t have more people and more choices than Hays by coincidence. The extra people cause the extra choices. Stores need customers, firms need workers, and hobbies need enthusiasts. The more people there are, the more stores, firms, and hobbies have the customers, workers, and enthusiasts they need to flourish. As the number of choices goes up, so does their diversity. Options too obscure or eccentric to make the cut in Hays pass the market test in New York City.

  Fans of urban living might simply conclude that the city is better than the country. But an analogous argument applies globally: Population growth makes the whole world more like New York, and less like Hays. Physical proximity is not essential. As long as there’s communication and trade, more population means more choices. A football fan in Hays is hours from the nearest NFL stadium, but thanks to tens of millions of fans around the world, he can watch games on TV and read about his favorite athletes in the newspaper.

  The Internet is the clearest illustration of the dependence of choice on population. Think about all your options: If you can imagine a product or activity, it’s probably a Google search away. With almost 2 billion users worldwide, there is a critical mass for the most obscure interests. In third grade, I was literally the only fan of Greek mythology I knew. Now, thanks to the vast population of cyberspace, I could talk about Zeus and Hercules all day long.

  KIDS AND RETIREMENT: WHO’S GOING TO CARE FOR THE CHILD-FREE

  In narrowly financial terms, as we’ve seen, kids have always been a bad investment. You shouldn’t be surprised; after all, children have no legal obligation to repay their parents. Yet in most advanced countries, the young are legally obliged to support old-age programs like Social Security and Medicare. You can disown your parents, but still have to pay your taxes.

  Selfishly speaking, there’s a crucial difference between requiring children to support their parents and requiring the nation’s young to support the nation’s old. If your kids had to support you, they would virtually be money in the bank. Programs like Social Security and Medicare don’t work that way. Your benefits don’t depend on your fertility. When the child-free retire, they collect as much as the Duggars.

  Governments could conceivably change the benefit formula to reward fertile families. Until they do, however, having kids is effectively a charitable donation to future retirees and the taxpayers bound to support them. The selfish can neglect these future benefits when they plan their families, but altruists should give early and often.

  Big families have subsidized retirement since the dawn of government retirement programs. But as family size shrinks, every child counts more. When the average family had four children, families with one more child did roughly 25 percent extra to support the elderly. Now that the average family has about two children, families with one more child do roughly 50 percent more to support future retirees. In Hong Kong, where families average less than one child, two-child families contribute more than twice the usual amount. If you care about tomorrow’s retirees, or the workers expected to support them, having another kid is a good way to lend a hand—and the smaller families get, the more every hand counts.

  When the elderly depend on programs like Social Security and Medicare, it’s easy to see how fertility helps future retirees: Children are the taxpayers of tomorrow. But retirees’ well-being would depend on fertility even if governments stayed out of the retirement business. Imagine if we stopped having kids altogether. In three generations, everyone would exceed the retirement age—and a lifetime of retirement savings wouldn’t buy much. To get by, most of the elderly would have to spend their seventies working for people in their eighties.

  This nightmare won’t happen, but we’re moving in its direction. In 1940, the United States had almost ten working-age adults (age twenty to sixty-four) to shoulder the burden of every retiree (age sixty-five and up). Now it’s about five workers per retiree. In about fifteen years, it will be only three. In other words, the average American worker used to support 10 percent of a retiree, now supports 20 percent of a retiree, and will soon support 33 percent of a retiree. If you care about the elderly, ponder that before you decide that your family is complete.

  By the way, thanks to unusually high fertility and immigration, the United States is doing better than most advanced countries. Japan, to take one of the worst cases, already has fewer than three working-age adults (age fifteen to sixty-four) for every retiree (age sixty-five and up). By 2030, they expect only two workers per retiree. To cope, the Japanese will have to make tough choices—like sharply raising their retirement age.

  Many communities across the United States now advertise themselves as “fifty and better” or “sixty and better.” Families with younger members need not apply. While I respect seniors’ right to live among their own kind, they’re kind of insulting the hand that feeds them. Kids may be noisy and mischievous, but ultimately they’re the people who make retirement possible. Seniors might not want large families in their neighborhood, but they should definitely want large families in their society.

  KIDS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: DON’T THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER

  Crowing about the riches of the modern world occasionally backfires. Many grant the point, then retort, “Our standard of living is the problem.” As they see it, the environment is going from bad to worse because we are simultaneously prosperous and populous. As biologist Paul Ehrlich argues, it is precisely because people in the United States are rich that “the addition of each person to the American population, whether by birth or immigration, is many times the disaster for the world as a birth in Kenya or Bangladesh.”

  While this rhetoric won’t convince many to embrace childlessness, it does inspire admiration of greens who practice what they preach. Take the case of Toni Vernelli. At the age of twenty-seven, she had herself sterilized to protect the planet. “Having children is selfish,” she explained. “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of overpopulation.” Is she right? Would you really be doing the planet a favor if you chose to be childless? If
so, wouldn’t I have to be a jerk to discourage readers from following in Vernelli’s footsteps?

  The effect of population on the environment is more complex than the effect of population on the economy. Powerful arguments show that more people make us richer. Mankind’s long-run effect on the planet is less clear-cut. Still, it’s important to remember that claims about the environment are factual questions. If we angrily dismiss those who question whether we’re heading for disaster, we might wind up taking drastic actions for no good reason. Drastic actions like . . . sterilizing ourselves.

  As it turns out, Vernelli should have been more skeptical. Many—though not all—of the problems on her list don’t add up. Basic economics says that scarcity means high prices and abundance means low prices. But despite Vernelli’s widely shared fears that we’re running out of things like food and fuel, resources have been getting cheaper for the last century and a half. Not every day or every year, of course—prices bounce around. We went through a rough patch a few years ago—remember $4 gas? Yet adjusting for inflation, average commodity prices have fallen about 1 percent per year since the time of the Civil War.

  The one clear exception is people’s time, also known as “labor.” Time has been getting pricier for centuries. Everyone nowadays has labor-saving machines, but only the wealthy can still afford personal servants. Strange though it sounds, if we’re “running out” of anything, it’s people.

  While resource depletion is only one of many environmental concerns, there is some good news on other fronts, too. Most notably, air and water quality in the Western world improved substantially in recent decades. Around the globe, there’s a standard two-stage pattern: As countries go from dirt poor to poor, pollution gets worse; as countries go from poor to rich, pollution gets better.