While cruising through an otherwise bland and unexceptional discussion of how we in the west have tended to disregard positive economic trends in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and much of Africa Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution hits a reef.
Expounding on his latest New York Times opinion column he says
1. Babies are pretty cheap to feed. In the short run, if your economy grows, and at the same time produces more infants, the adults are still better off.
Hmm… any unstated assumptions in that assertion? My own experience of babies was that my partner’s economic productivity was radically curtailed for approximately six months each time — three months before birth as she became less and less able to work, and three months after while feeding the baby and regenerating her body.
So yeah, assuming you’re a working Ozzie Nelson with wife Harriet and Ethel the Maid staying at home with the children then the marginal cost of one more baby is low. In much of the world — outside, say, suburban northern Virginia where Cowen lives — babies don’t come out of economic black-box vending machines, they come out of economic contributors, a.k.a. working human beings. Point being the cost of pregnancy to women isn’t limited to the cost of feeding babies.
Seriously. “Babies are pretty cheap.” Yeah, they’re cheap if and only if one artificially limits or (as with Cowen’s brand of economics) completely ignore women as economic contributors instead of domestic baby factories.
Question: if “babies are pretty cheap” why is it so many women in Africa, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere prefer to take contraceptives when they’re available and affordable rather than not take them? By Cowen’s thesis they should be “better off” limiting pregnancy only when the cost of feeding babies exceeds the cost of the contraceptives themselves. By his thesis the cost of feeding babies should, in fact, be the only consideration when women assess whether they wish to use birth control. Right? And yet we find… nothing could be further from the truth.
Seriously! I mean, seriously!
Babies are cheap? What planet
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-03 12:53.Babies are cheap? What planet does this person live on?
Even if you assume only a few homemade toys (eggs cartons, boxes, old pots and pans, homemade playdoy), library books, used clothes and paraphenalia,, and homewashed diapers (not trivial with utility costs these days) or even the old style Chinese split pants, and babyfood homemade from cheap groceries, I don’t know who would say that it is cheap to feed a baby!!
What about medicines? Or the medical costs of having the baby delivered if one doesn’t have insurance? Or the costs of either formula and rubber nipples or a breast pump?
What about the costs of keeping baby clean and with safe water in places where such things aren’t as “convenient” as they are in the first world? What about the costs of daycare? Or the required fees for school in many African countries where public school isn’t universal? What about the costs of even trying to protect a child from malaria or other diseases in much of the world?
Or trying to keep children from getting HIV from their mothers is a common problem in so many parts of Africa and some other parts of the world? What about the fact that African mothers (in places where the job description of a “house wife” includes farming and carrying water for miles) might have to walk all day to take a child with malaria to even a clinic that will treat it on a charity basis?
What about places where the issue of a dowry or bride price is raised the minute a girl or boy is born?
No this guy is a cavalier idiot! One doesn’t have to be a Western consumerist to spend a lot of money on a baby. He probably thinks that people who can’t afford health insurance are just lazy malingerers too.
[And even all that’s overlooking what I noticed most when my partner was pregnant that (remember, we’re talking about “just economics”) had an economic impact on our household: morning sickness in the first (and much of the second) trimester made it harder for her to work in the, well, mornings. Her food consumption went way up especially in the third trimester and the first three months after giving birth and nursing. Edema, backache, interrupted sleep, energy diverted to lugging the extra burden of pregnancy, plus plain old ungainliness made it much harder for her to work in the third trimester. Same with the three months after each child was born — even though she was gearing up for work, and interested in returning to it, it’s not like you can do it without further and potentially severe health impacts. Therefore you’re either out reduced paychecks, increased doctor bills, or in extreme cases funeral expenses. So yeah, like I say, if babies came out of vending machines instead of economically productive human beings then… if you’re also willing to ignore all the post-partum items you enumerate then they’re very cheap. Thanks, Red. —fl]
I’m going to guess that the
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-03 19:31.I’m going to guess that the logic behind this is that poor families in a lot of third world countries manage to have a lot of kids without any “real” form of social welfare, so it obviously can’t be that expensive to have babies. If so, that’s completely wrong. In such places, having a lot of offspring is a semi-decent form of social welfare once they get older and are able to help out, but that doesn’t mean that they’re cheap during pregnancy or for years after birth.
Nor, since he was talking about developing countries, is it the case that children are the best form of social insurance over the long term. In agrarian and/or non-developing countries, especially ones with low mortality, then maybe. But for counterexamples even of that see also the fate of widows in, say, undeveloped parts of India, or the parents who have had only girls in, say, rural China. You can still end up screwed no matter how many children you have. But again he said developing countries, not traditional. But you’re right that he may have been thinking about something else, which is why I expect it was probably just a brain fart and not anything worse. Thanks, Nightfall. —fl]
Babies are cheap to feed,
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-03 19:57.Babies are cheap to feed, sure. Try having a baby and literally just feeding it and see how far that gets you with CPS, let alone the actual growth and development of a human being.
But the real question is the economic pros and cons of a large population of adults. Whatever babies cost, they aren’t going to be babies for nearly as long as they’re going to be adults, and working out economics based on the cost/benefit of infants alone is like buying the “small” size carrier for a Great Dane puppy. Sure, it fits now...
[Yup. He did say “in the short term” but that’s just economics blind spotting. Again I’m guessing that he means something like “in the short term, before you get it that your local economy is developing sustainably and you no longer have to “invest” in as many pregnancies as possible in hopes of surviving your own old age.” He didn’t say it, but that’s what he might have meant. Thanks, Holly. —fl]
Taking this silly argument at
Submitted by Reader (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-03 23:59.Taking this silly argument at face value: babies are cheap, but then children are hideously expensive. It’s a cost that goes up on a year by year basis up until the point the person is able to lead an independent life, which in most places is closer to two decades than one. Given a certain population of productive adults, there’s a limit to how many two-decade scroungers can be supported without adversely affecting the productivity of a society.
[Interesting assertion but not one we see born out that much, at least in economies where productivity can rise faster than the population grows. Consider that in the middle 1800s what we would now consider preschool-aged children were forced into the workplace because “there was a limit to how many four-year-old scroungers could be supported without adversely affecting the productivity of a society.” —fl]
Actually, dependency ratio —
Submitted by Reader (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-04 11:24.Actually, dependency ratio — the proportion of non-working people (for any reason) that to working people IS a major predictor of the thriving or failure to thrive of a nation’s economy. Ireland’s boom coincided with a large drop in the dependency ratio and if you look at many African countries, particularly ones where the economic situation is getting markedly worse, you see a large and increasing dependency ratio.
You can see it smaller-scale in companies like British Airways and GM where the dependency ratio is adverse owing to the number of retirees drawing company pensions relative to the number of people working and paying in.
[Though see also Japan. And, as I suggested, the post-industrial-revolution West where elementary-school-aged children no longer have to work in factories or on farms to help sustain families at subsistence level. For that matter see also the 40-hour work week for adults (which in the 1800s would have been unthinkably “unsustainable” even for most progressives.) Dependency ratios matter, yes, but so does individual productivity. So, just to be clear, yes, if productivity fails to rise at or above the rate of dependency — as might happen in under conditions waived at by the original poster — then assuming nothing else changes economic conditions are more likely to worsen. —fl]
Uh-oh, as usual: lots of gas
Submitted by Me (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-04 09:17.Uh-oh, as usual: lots of gas out of own misinterpretation.
That is about macro economic STATS, man, meaning GPD divided per capita, so, as babies are cheaper to feed the country with a lot of kids gets even better ratio per person than it shows statistically. What’s more – as women are losing some income, that makes the author’s point even stronger: the more babies – the bigger the difference between per capita stats and the actual income per person.
And nothing else to get all pissed off about.
[Good to know, Me. I’m glad you straightened that out. I’d feel as cheery as you seem to if I didn’t think the assertion still masks considerable drag. —fl]
Which actually illustrates
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-04 12:57. Which actually illustrates the point. Certainly a lot of dependent kids and more women who at least officially aren’t working may make per capita income statistics misleading as to what a “household breadwinner earns”. But if a working man somewhere in Asia or Africa is making the equivalent of $1,000 a year (very, very optimistically) it may be more than you’d expect based on per capita statistics. But if the wife only works in economically marginalized ways and they have eight kids too feed…................ So basically that argument only holds up if you want to only look at male breadwinners and ignore the costs of a large family. Because either that “higher than expected” income would have to feed a large crew, or we are talking about a culture where it’s OK for husbands to spend the money on motorcycles, booze, and worse while the women are growing potatoes and struggling to find ways to keep their children clean and put them in school. Secondly even without those flaws most of the developing world has something that does much more to make per capita incomes misleadingly high: Gross economic inequities. And this consists of both differences between certain prosperous urban and to a much lesser extent rural/semi-rural areas, and some very seriously economically marginalized areas largely rural but sometimes less prosperous towns and cities. But also you have massive economic inequities within the same area. If you’ve ever been to poor countries there can be a huge gap between very wealthy area, the modest middle class, and some of the most horrific slums imaginable. Then you have issues such as the fact that in many places there is a big gap between the people who have access to municipal tap water sources versus those who buy it from water sellers at ridiculous prices.