Read on Twitter
Shots fired at everyone by me this morning in @thedispatch : Is It Really Too Expensive to Raise a Family? https://thedispatch.com/p/is-it-really-too-expensive-to-raise
Obviously it IS for too many people, and that's important. But that number is a lot smaller, I'd venture, than most advocates of various family policies think. More to the point, the expense of raising kids is a much less important factor in explaining the decline in fertility.
I use two very similar surveys to track late-Boomer and Millennial women from around age 20, when each group was asked how many kids they expected to have, until their mid-30s, when we can look at how many they had had by that point.
Millennial women are MORE likely to be meeting their fertility expectations from young adulthood than late-Boomer women were at the same age. 44 percent of the former but 48 percent of the latter had fallen short. Let me deal with some objections.
"How many kids you expect to have isn't how many you want to have." True, but the data for the late-Boomers lets us look at what young women said when asked how many kids they WANTED, and the figures are essentially the same as the "expect" figures.
"Since marriage occurs later among Millennial women, comparing both groups around age 20 isn't apples-to-apples, because more late-Boomer women were married." True, but the late-Boomer women were asked the same questions three years earlier. Results basically the same.
"Still, you find that 44 percent of Millennial women don't meet their fertility expectations!" I'll partly cede the point if family policy advocates stop claiming it's become *harder* to afford a family (as opposed to it STILL being hard to do so). But only partly.
In the late-Boomer data, the women are all past their childbearing years, and while 49 percent in their mid-30s had not had as many children as they had said they'd wanted at ~20, eventually all but 42 percent had.
Especially since marriage is often delayed now, we can expect that that 44 percent figure among Millennial women will look significantly lower once they've reached their 50s. Furthermore, these expressed preferences at ~20 are fairly crude attempts to get at true preferences.
They don't pose trade-offs, or ask about how deeply these preferences/expectations are held. If I look at how many women fell short of their expectations by more than one child, that was true of only 25 percent of Millennial women, and that will go down in the next 20 years.
"But @lymanstoneky says you're wrong." You're talking about https://americancompass.org/essays/escaping-the-parent-trap/ or https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Declining-Fertility-in-America.pdf?x91208? Or maybe https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want, which is the where the numbers originally came from?
Lyman shows a recent divergence between intended and ideal fertility, but he is comparing estimates from one survey to those from different surveys. I don't think he's controlling for age in there either--might be mixing, eg, late-Boomers and Millennials at a point in time.
But he's definitely NOT comparing how the same women report their ideal vs their desires, at least during the recent years when the divergence opens up in his data. The "ideal" trend in those years is also for responses about societal ideals rather than their own personal ideal.
In at least one place, Lyman equates what people say is "the ideal number of children for a family to have" with the number of children they personally want. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html
I think the bigger issue is probably not controlling for age. Anyway, I think Lyman is also skeptical that if this divergence DID open up, that affordability is the issue--he blames delayed marriage.
Finally, please don't tweet this piece at me: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-having-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html. This is a survey that shows that many people WHO DON'T HAVE AS MANY KIDS AS THEY WANT cite financial factors.
That's not relevant for my question about trends both because one would need trend data for this particular survey question (or one like it) and because the reporting is already carving off the people who HAVE achieved their desired fertility (or overshot it).
Obviously this is all relevant for the child allowance, parent tax credit, child tax credit debates. I approach all of this with low-income families most in mind, partly because experience tells me that the middle class is nearly always doing better than people think.
It's obviously good politics to offer the middle and upper-middle class tax breaks, but that doesn't make it good policy. Maybe it is, and there are some good justifications for helping middle-class parents.
But I don't think the evidence will bear out that the supposed increase in the cost of raising a family has meaningfully reduced fertility. I think we should get the antipoverty policy right, and especially the upward mobility policy right,
and even more especially the upward-mobility-for-African-American-kids policy right.
Good day!
Good day!
