Moderate foresight is wrong. You shouldn’t extrapolate from the present moment forever. Instead of moderate foresight, you should try full...
Moderate foresight is wrong. You shouldn’t extrapolate from the present moment forever. Instead of moderate foresight, you should try full foresight. Let me quickly solve one of the great questions of life: How many children should you have? Some parents of young ones secretly suspect that the optimal number is zero. Soon after my twin boys were born, my sister called to ask how things were going. “Well,” I said, probably splattered in vomit, but too exhausted to realise it, “if anyone thought they were going to be in this phase forever, they’d have to be a psycho to enjoy it.” I used to push the double stroller down the street, eyeing the childless people sprawled in front of cafés with envy and rage.
It’s a feeling that Bryan Caplan, economist at George Mason University, must know. The poor guy is also the father of twins. As he writes in his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, “moderate foresight tells you to stop having kids. If one infant makes you tired and cranky, why have another?”
Yet, Caplan goes on to say that moderate foresight is wrong. You shouldn’t extrapolate from the present moment forever. Today, he says, you might be living with “dirty diapers and lost sleep”. But that won’t last forever. Instead of moderate foresight, you should try full foresight. Rather than just obsessing about the next few years, you should work out how many kids you will want at every future stage of your life. Caplan explains:
Suppose you’re 30. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your 30s is one. During your 40s, your optimal number of kids will rise to two — you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your 50s, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by?
And so on. By your 60s, when you’ll probably have been forced out of work, you may well wish you’d had five kids just to raise the frequency of visits and grandchildren. And from your 70s onward, as you limp around in adult nappies rarely leaving the house, the more kids you had, the greater chance you have of anyone dropping by, ever.
Caplan’s point: Take the average of the number of children that you’d want at the different ages of your life. In the above example, that average is about three, which is good news for me. Five years ago, when I already had three, my optimum number was one. Today my optimum is probably two. In other words, I’m nicely progressing along Caplan’s schema.
Then I read in the paper about the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, who has been fined £75,000 for breaking China’s one-child policy. And he broke it big-time: not only did he have three kids with his wife Chen Ting, but Chinese reports online said he had fathered as many as seven children with a variety of women — a figure that Zhang denies. However, this man is clearly pushing the Caplan theorem to the limit. If he lives to about 120, his strategy may not even be entirely insane.
Yet, Caplan goes on to say that moderate foresight is wrong. You shouldn’t extrapolate from the present moment forever. Today, he says, you might be living with “dirty diapers and lost sleep”. But that won’t last forever. Instead of moderate foresight, you should try full foresight. Rather than just obsessing about the next few years, you should work out how many kids you will want at every future stage of your life. Caplan explains:
Suppose you’re 30. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your 30s is one. During your 40s, your optimal number of kids will rise to two — you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your 50s, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by?
And so on. By your 60s, when you’ll probably have been forced out of work, you may well wish you’d had five kids just to raise the frequency of visits and grandchildren. And from your 70s onward, as you limp around in adult nappies rarely leaving the house, the more kids you had, the greater chance you have of anyone dropping by, ever.
Caplan’s point: Take the average of the number of children that you’d want at the different ages of your life. In the above example, that average is about three, which is good news for me. Five years ago, when I already had three, my optimum number was one. Today my optimum is probably two. In other words, I’m nicely progressing along Caplan’s schema.
Then I read in the paper about the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, who has been fined £75,000 for breaking China’s one-child policy. And he broke it big-time: not only did he have three kids with his wife Chen Ting, but Chinese reports online said he had fathered as many as seven children with a variety of women — a figure that Zhang denies. However, this man is clearly pushing the Caplan theorem to the limit. If he lives to about 120, his strategy may not even be entirely insane.
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