Saturday, June 19, 2010

Capla-con indeed

Bryan Caplan makes a valiant, but well short of convincing, case for having more kids in today's WSJ.

He gives three basic reasons why people should have more kids:

1. In happiness research, the big negative hit comes from having one child. Once you've passed that, the extra unhappiness from having more is fairly small.

2. Parents have little to no influence on how their children turn out, so you can relax, not bother to read to your extra kids or make costly "investments" on their behalf.

3. The more kids you have, the more grandkids you might get and everyone knows grandkids are *awesome*!

NB: I am not making any of this up!

3 comments:

ardyanovich said...

How would you make or break his case?

Matt Gilliland said...

I think it might be better to just let that one flounder in the abyss and start over if one wanted to make that case or its opposite. His article sounded more like the lame things you say to your buddy who knocked up his girlfriend in a half-hearted attempt to make him feel better.

Angus said...

Thank you Matt!