I haven't read the book, but I've been reading Caplan's blog for years, so I think I'm sufficiently familiar with his positions to comment.
It seems to me that the elephant in the room here are the peer effects. I don't think even the strongest hereditarian theories would imply that it doesn't matter for your kids' future outcomes if they socialize with peers who display low-class or antisocial habits and behaviors.
Now, if you live in North America, making sure your kids are isolated from low-class kids is extremely expensive. If nothing else, you must be able to afford a house in a nice neighborhood. Unless you are extravagantly wealthy, or perhaps enjoy some very unusual combination of an upper-middle class income and high job security, this means getting into an enormous debt, which you won't be able to pay off for decades, and living a stressful and anxious existence on the edge of solvency, in which a fit of bad luck can easily send you into ruin. And this latter possibility doesn't mean just falling back to a more frugal but still respectable lifestyle -- it means being thrown, together with your kids, right into the dreaded underclass in which all sorts of frightful social p...
The question is: if peer effects are important, why don't they show up in adoption studies?
Generally speaking, when I search for literature on peer effects, the information is sparse and confusing. I'm not too surprised, since such effects are much more difficult to disentangle than heritability and shared environment.
My working hypothesis is that:
Peer effects matter a lot, but only up to a certain threshold of peer quality, and this threshold is basically what people intuitively perceive as sufficiently respectable company for their kids. So, basically, underclass peers will ruin your kids, but upper-class or genius peers won't improve things relative to the company of ordinary middle-class kids. (Just like downright abuse will ruin them, but helicopter parenting won't improve them.)
In order to quality for adoption, people must pass through sufficiently strict checks that they are highly unlikely to provide an environment below this threshold. So there aren't any good natural adoption experiments that expose kids to underclass peer groups.
I'd be curious to hear about any contrary evidence, though.
...I sometimes get a very "politics" vibe from your comments
In the contemporary North America, buying a house definitely looks to me like a raw deal.
So, perhaps this is a sign of how brainwashed by the status quo I am, but I don't see how this is obvious, nor indeed how it could be obvious, given that everyone who is renting a house is renting it from someone who bought it, who is presumably not losing money on the deal. (Or is that a false presumption? Do landlords typically spend more to purchase and maintain their property than they make in rental income? How could that possibly be true?)
So I would love some more explanation here. Is the idea here that buying a house N years ago was a good idea, but buying one in 2012 is not?
[E]veryone who is renting a house is renting it from someone who bought it, who is presumably not losing money on the deal. (Or is that a false presumption? Do landlords typically spend more to purchase and maintain their property than they make in rental income? How could that possibly be true?)
You can also ask a different question. If you borrow money to buy a house, you must find a lender willing to lend you at some interest rate. The interest rate is nothing but the price of renting money. So if it costs less to borrow (i.e. rent) the money to buy a house than to just rent the house directly, then how can the lender possibly be willing to lend you the money instead of investing it into a house himself and earning a rent higher than your interest?
When I make this argument, people usually try to argue that somehow you profit from buying by building equity with time. But if the money rent, i.e. interest, is equal to the house rent, then to build equity, you must make payments to the lender above this basic rent/interest rate -- otherwise you'll just keep renting the same amount of money indefinitely. And if you rent the house instead of making these higher payments, you can sa...
Here are some complicating factors:
The renter is paying the landlord to assume the risk of tenant mobility. That is, if the renter needs to move, they can do so and the landlord could be stuck with a vacant unit. On the other hand, someone who owns a home and needs to move, needs to find a buyer for the old place, and incurs material (~7%) transaction costs. People who want to stick around for a long time have no reason to pay a premium for an option they won't use, so longer-term residents tend to buy and not rent.
On the other hand, as long as they can make mortgage payments, homeowners almost never get kicked out of their homes. If you want to bring up kids and build memories/accumulate sentimental value in one place over your whole life, a rental is probably not for you. If you want to customize your home and/or make capital improvements, a rental is also probably not for you.
There's a kind of pooling equilibrium, and very little incentive to live in the "wrong" arrangement.
It's also a mistake to compare nominal rent with nominal mortgage payments, as you also have to consider tax deductibility, maintenance costs (which people often underestimate), heating/cooling/electricity/water bills, real estate taxes, and mortgage amortization.
Honestly, I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, these tax issues are way over their heads. (I have no confidence that I understand them myself. In finance, reliable and accessible information is very hard to find.) So I think that such considerations, while not completely irrelevant, are easily trumped by the combination of peer pressure, deeply ingrained but obsolete folk wisdom, the sheer emotional appeal of home ownership, the intuitively appealing but fallacious view that renting means giving away money while paying a mortgage means saving it, and the irrational optimism about future trends in house prices (which has abated in recent years in the U.S. but is still rampant in Canada).
On the other hand, the counterargument about asset diversification seems to me unassailable. Putting all your eggs into one basket is correctly considered as a crazy financial strategy, and a fortiori, putting a bunch of borrowed eggs along with them is crazier still. Yet houses are somehow considered an exception.
[Edit to add: Looking at this a bit more, I realize I didn't even know there was such a straightforward tax deduction for mortgage interest in the U.S. However, this only strengthens my point, since no such thing exists in Canada, but people still think and act the same way.]
It would be mere anecdotal evidence. I kind of feel you are trying to tell or signal something other than offering to eventually share with us the results of a long term experiment.
I think you are being unfair when you imply that I identify poor people (i.e. those who are merely not affluent) with the underclass (i.e. those social groups that display high levels of dysfunction). In a place where poor people are generally non-dysfunctional, so that a drastic fall in economic status means only that one will have to live frugally among others doing the same, clearly none of what I wrote applies. However, in a place with a large dysfunctional underclass, a similar fall in economic status is a much more dreadful prospect for someone who is used to the norms and customs of the middle class.
Now, I probably should have omitted the "above a pond full of crocodiles" part in the above quote. It came out when I was looking for a vivid metaphor for the situation of people who struggle to keep themselves above a certain level of economic status below which bad things will happen, with the crocodiles symbolizing a general feeling of fear and danger, rather than being a straightforward metaphor for underclass people. Now I realize that the way I wrote it, the latter reading is natural, but it wasn't my intention. (It also suggests incorrectly that the main problem with falling into the underclass is the physical danger of crime.)
I'm saying that she has an obligation, whatever she does, not to think about her society as a pit of crocodiles
If my society is a pit of crocodiles, I want to believe my society is a pit of crocodiles! I'm sure German Jews in the 1930s, or Cambodians intellectuals (or short-sighted people) in the 1970s would agree with me.
Society is affected by its members' perception of it, and if everyone just wanted to maximize safety for themselves and their families... why, that society would be utterly helpless!
Nowadays the standard way of solving coordination/tragedy-of-the-commons problems is through the government; for example Singapore has quality public housings that house 85% of the population and have ethnic quotas to prevent self-segregation.
Singaporeans and Americans probably both want to maximize safety for themselves and their families, but the incentives in Singapore mean that sticking to "people like you" is not as attractive a strategy as it is in the US.
[Murray] has argued that the middle-class' efforts to separate themselves from the underclass make the situation worse, not better, because they make it harder to middle class culture to spread to the underclass, and he has advocated attempting to close the chasm in various ways. By contrast in your original comment you seemed distressed that it was so financially difficult for the middle class to separate themselves from the underclass and I got the impression you wished it was easier. Do you disagree with Murray, or was I drawing an incorrect inference from your comment?
Well, even if we assume for the sake of the argument that it exacerbates the problem, this still doesn't mean that it's irrational for individual middle-class people to separate themselves from the underclass. All that this assumption would imply is that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons effect. But this doesn't change the perspective and the incentives faced by individuals at all.
I am reticent about voicing my personal opinion on the accuracy of your description is because I'm afraid I'm skirting the edge of political discussion already.
Don't worry. As long as your comments are polite, well-argued, and made in good faith, you won't break any social norms here. Especially if the discussion is about general and long-standing social issues, and not about the ongoing political controversies from the headlines.
This seems to have been alluded to in some other comments, but I'm going to make it a bit more explicit and point out that observing the parenting of adopting families is likely to impose a rather strong filter on the parental environments under observation. Adopting families are not only very much in the minority, they're likely to have a systematic tendency to differ from the majority in specific ways.
I suspect that families who adopt are likely to fall into a particular cluster of parenthood values, but I'd be hesitant to actually try to detail those values without reference to any actual study. I would speculate though, that they might be less invested in seeing their children grow up to be similar to themselves.
I'd further speculate that adoptive parents have on average more prior interest in raising children than biological parents.
It's a great book, thanks for typing this up. One thing I took from Caplan's book that I think gets missed a lot in the reviews, is that his main goal isn't to encourage people committed to childlessness to start having kids. The real goal is encouraging people to have more kids at the margins. The book is really talking to middle class (esp. upper-middle class) folks who have small families (1-2 kids) because they have an inflated notion of what normal, minimally responsible parenting requires.
You really do see this a lot: parents obsess about getting their kids into "elite preschools", worrying about trace amounts of chemicals in their environments, pushing them to take violin/foreign language/team sports, scheduling "play dates" with pre-approved kids who live on the other side of town, etc. Parents who don't manage to do all of this can expect to hear about it from their neighbors: "Oh, Timmy isn't learning any instruments? Isn't he almost 9? Susie has been taking piano lessons since she was 6! Aren't you worried about his mental development?"
The problem is that it is unclear how much of this amounts to status competition and how much of it is from genuine concern with the child's well-being. If it is mostly status-competition, there is no obvious reason the book will change parental behavior, because the social cost of dropping out of the rat-race is still very real.
I've commented more extensively on the scientific and logical basis for Caplan's ideas elsewhere, including my serious concern about his reliance on separated-at-birth twin studies, but I'll limit my comments here to something a little more subtle.
While some of his data about intelligence and physical health seemed pretty sound, I remember his conclusions about personality and happiness seeming a lot sketchier. Which makes sense since the psychological health of any given individual is extremely difficult to quantify (much less the effect of one person's psychological health on another's). But I think it's these aspects that good parents are most concerned with: Will my child live a life that is largely stress free? Will I pass on my bad habits? How can I teach my child to be able to form strong and healthy emotional connections to others?
When I (non-scientifically) observe the reasonably sane parents I know, my general fear is not that they're making their children stupid or that they're sabotaging their child's future health. My fear is that they're passing on a host of much more insidious problems - body image issues, co-dependency, repression of anger, etc. When adults go into ...
Of course, twin and adoption studies only measure the effects of broadly mainstream parenting behaviors - should you read to your kids or not, for example. They tell us little about the effect of unusual parenting methods, or on the effect of parenting methods on unusual kids (like the ones on LW.)
Caution: this is a fully general argument.
Interpreting Adoption Studies
This is supplementary.
Understanding some key facts about twin and adoption studies helps make their results seem less counter intuitive.
The data discussed here is primarily on children and parents in first world countries who are non-poor. This data does not help answer questions about parenting effects that are very different from typical first world non-poor parenting styles. The data does not help address the effect of growing up in malnourished or without access to education. Indeed, twin and adoption studies with adopted kids in extremely poor households show that nutrition is an important predictor of life outcomes (link)
It also doesn't address extreme parenting styles. Not many people raise their kids in the woods cut off from the rest of society and this kind of variable is not included in the regressions, so the data has little to say about this kind of parenting.
If adopting parents treat their adopted children with “less intense” parenting than their biological children, then adoption studies will understimate the effect of parenting. In the extreme case, if all adopting parents treat their adopted children the same as other adopting parents...
Not directly related to the book, but a question I've been thinking about lately is: If I don't feel any desire to raise children and I believe it would have a strongly negative impact on my quality of life, are there any reasons why I should still consider doing so? Either moral reasons or self-interested ones (ie. the possibility that I'm wrong about the net utility to me). Another factor is that it's quite likely that I could end up in a long-term relationship with a (female) partner that does want children, and refusing could either result in the end of the relationship or a decrease in the partner's life satisfaction.
This is entirely anecdotal, however I once was entirely against the idea of having children. I had many justifications; personal, selfish, environmental, social, etc. Though, in hindsight, I probably just didn't want kids.
Right now all I want to do is go home and lay on the floor with my babbling, drooling, high maintenance alarm clock/poop machine. I can't say that meeting my wife made me instantly want kids because we knew each other for a few years before dating, but at some point in time I went from not wanting kids to wanting kids. The conscious choice to have children happened slightly more than 18 months ago, our daughter in now 9 months old. And I should emphasis it was a conscious choice.
I would strongly discourage having children unless you really want them, the negatives will be magnified and the positives will be reduced. For example, going to work after a week of only sleeping 2 hours a night is a lot easier if you can look forward to a happy, two-toothed smile when you get home. If the presence of said smile holds no intrinsic value, then you are in for a long day at work. Likewise, the shear enjoyment of seeing your baby crawl for the first time is soiled if it is accompanied by, "Oh great now we have to baby-proof the lower 3' of the house".
I will grant that I have an incredibly small about of data from a very narrow range of the existence that is parenthood.
Nisbett claims that heredity is much less important for IQ than thought (see also counterclaims posted below).
Heredity, per se, is irrelevant to the argument.
The question is how much family environment and particularly effort matters. Nisbett's title ("schools and cultures") suggests that he is not arguing for parental input. The quote about parents' time suggests otherwise. Shea admits that Nibett admits that there are declining returns. The quote "smaller (but still potent) effects" is a substantive disagreement, but it's pretty w...
I like the summary given by one reviewer:
...It says that REASONABLE parenting, with love, affection, attention, and fun times spent together is sufficient to let your child make the most of their potential. You do not have to be a SUPER parent, just a loving attentive normal parent, to achieve the same results.
What the book IS saying, is that in the LONG RUN, into their 30s and later, THAT is when your upbringing with begin to fade away. It doesn't matter how you bring up your kids, they're likely to end up with roughly the same earning power, roughly the s
You don't even have to be a "reasonable" parent. Parents in the 1960's were "bad" by today's standards*, and the kids turned out fine.
*The book talks about how parents spend far more time on childcare today than they did in the 1960's.
Twenty years ago was still a very different time in this regard. (Anecdotally, I notice that people who are in their mid-twenties and older have childhood memories very different from what is considered acceptable nowadays, both informally and legally.) See the "Free Range Kids" blog for numerous stories illustrating the modern mentality and jurisprudence about leaving kids alone and unsupervised.
In any case, even if you can still find some occasional examples of people allowing unsupervised play in some situations, it's definitely unacceptable to simply send the kids out and tell them to be back for dinner, the way it was normally done some decades ago.
I fail to see from this review how the idea that raising kids effectively is less difficult than commonly assumed (or at least that many of the stressful and time-consuming things parents do are less effective than assumed) necessarily leads to the conclusion that one should have more kids. Surely the conclusion ought to be 'you should have more kids if you want to have more kids'.
Instead of "father", people around here say "father figure"
Out of curiosity, I did a search for "father" here and got about 1,030 results.
I did a search for "father figure" and got 3 results, one of which was a comment of yours.
I did a search for "father figures" and got 4 results, all of which were about fictional Heinlein characters.
That seems to suggest that people around here say "father" quite a bit more often than they say "father figure."
So, can you summarize your basis for t...
I'm currently reading "The Nurture Assumption", that goes into more details on the research showing the small effect of parenting styles, and the bigger effect of genetics and peers. There's still some stuff I'd want to research more (specifically, some parenting choices have effects on peer groups, like choosing where to live and where you send your kids to school; if Harris is right about the importance of peers I would expect that to show up as an effect of parenting style, but I haven't seen it discussed yet).
The lesson I get from all this is...
"On the margin, you should consider having more kids. If you were planning to have zero kids, consider having one. If you were planning to have 3 kids, consider 4, etc." Wait, I thought happiness research indicates that the step from zero to one is a decrease in happiness whereas the step from, say, 3 to 4 would be only a negligible decrease in happiness. So there's that asymmetry, if I remember one of Caplan's blog posts correctly.
I haven't seen anyone mention the other issue with having large families. There are already more people than we can sustain at US living standards, Every extra child adds to the pressure on pollution, the environment, raw materials, land, water, and energy.
In my case we stopped at 1 child.
Partly because as one of four I felt I clearly missed out in ways that would have made a huge difference to my life. I did not want that to happen to my children.
Partly because I wanted to do other things with my life as well as raising children. Until you have children y...
For one thing, the overall economic and environmental impact of one child in the developing world far outweighs that of one child born in poorer countries.
This also holds true for their positive impacts too. Not much good science is conducted by Africans in Africa.
I'd say that our pace of innovation is still very obviously struggling to keep up with the pace our reproduction.
That's not "very obvious" to me at all.
Adoption studies indicate that differences in parenting styles have mostly small impacts on long term life outcomes of children, such as happiness, income, intelligence, health, etc..
What exactly is "parenting style" understood to mean here? I have a feeling it's something seriously counterintuitive, as many of the findings cited, e.g. parenting having "a small effect on adult drinking, smoking and drug problems" diverge radically from every other source on the subject I've ever seen. The top results of my ten-second Googling were fa...
You put the phrase "say "father figure" in the context of discussing family structure" in quotes, but I don't see where that phrase appeared in the comment I replied to. Is that the phrase I supposedly deleted, or was it some other phrase? If it was, where did I supposedly delete it from? If it was some other phrase, what phrase was it?
Edit: Ah! I see... it appears later in the comment, nowhere near the line I quoted. I get it now.
In any case, if your point is that we use the phrase "father figure" and not "father" ...
"Father figure" seems to me to permit either position, "father" not so much. It's always troublesome when someone declares that you can only be properly impartial by agreeing with them.
What age were these people adopted at? If the basic personality of a child is strongly determined by anything that occurred before the adoption date, (not just genetics,) then you wouldn't expect subsequent parenting to have much effect.
Given that many developmental psychologists (John Bowlby 1969, Hazan and Shaver 1987, Grossman and Grossman 1991, Quinton Rutter and Liddle 1984... and so on) found evidence to support the ideas that, among other things, infant attachment styles predict later friendships, later happiness in love, and eventual parenting st...
Caplan is drastically overinterpretting evidence for heredity of features, and his main thesis relies on them far too much.
If you want your kid to learn the violin so they’ll have fun right now, it may very well be worth it, but don’t do it because you think it will increase their future income or intelligence.
Maybe the standard good parenting advice is simply wrong. Having a kid who learns the violin is about status. It's not about intelligence.
If you want your kid to be more intelligent it might be more straight forward to get them to play dual-n-back regularly.
The same goes for helping a child to learn vocabulary for a foreign language. Testing them directly by reading ...
Maybe the standard good parenting advice is simply wrong. Having a kid who learns the violin is about status. It's not about intelligence.
On the other hand, maybe parents know that, and correctly expect that status will help their child more than intelligence.
This is silly. Having kids is absurdly expensive*, and you STILL have to parent them somewhat. You can't just pop out a baby and have it be fine 30 years later if you don't touch it. Even if the impact of the outcome of each child on each other child is marginal, the impact on YOU is still large.
The argument is not that kids are costless, but that people overestimate the cost of having kids. If you don't get much utility from kids then this isn't going to sway you, but if you like kids enough to have one or two, this might make your life easier or convince you to have more kids than you otherwise would.
Unexpected data: I have a moderate desire to be a parent at some point but my vague impression of what parents should do required a significantly higher level of effort than this suggests. But honestly, if I spent less time fighting kids to do things which would not help them I would probably try to teach them calculus or programming just for kicks instead as long as they were willing to play along.(And martial arts, so they don't become the kid everyone picks on because they know calculus I guess...)
Sadly this book basically convinced me I cannot have children with my current partner. We would need to adopt and my partner is very smart (singnifigantly more inteelgent than myself and I have 1570/1600 SAT and a PHD in pure math). Even if you adopt from mainland China the IQ of an adopted child is unlikely to be unusually high.
I personally would not care about the IQ of my children. I personally have a very strong aversion to nudging or pushing anyone (unless they are a violent criminal). I am fairly certain a lack of educational success would not other...
removed unnecessarily harsh comment, the basic message of which was supposed to be "the evidence you presented is imaginary", but which ended up being too much of a personal attack
Maybe this is wholly refuted by the adoption study, but from its summary, Ferber method sounds like it would lead to anxious attachment style in adulthood
Adoption studies are biased toward the null of no parenting effect, because adoptive parents aren't randomly selected from the population of potential parents (they often are screened to be similar to biological parents).
Twin studies I think are particularly flawed when it comes to estimating heritability (a term that has an incoherent definition). Twins have a shared pre-natal environment. In some cases, they even share a placenta.
Plus, the whole gene vs. environment discussion is obsolete, in light of the findings of the past decade. Everything is gene-environment interaction.
Thanks for posting this, I am going to be a parent in a few months, so this type of thing is frequently on my mind.
I wrote a lot of words but deleted them and instead decided to simply say, without a concrete definition of what the author means by "parenting" I can't help but find the conclusions nearly meaningless. What is parenting? How is parenting measured?
The statement "differences in parenting have no effect on adult weight" is almost on face absurd. What if I make it my primary mission as a parent to enforce optimal nutritio...
What is parenting?
Reading to kids, driving them to soccer games, making their food, helping them with homework.
How is parenting measured?
Time use surveys.
What if I make it my primary mission as a parent to enforce optimal nutrition for my child, and to lecture the child for five hours a day on nutritional science, and to give the child phobias of all sugary foods and taste aversion to sucrose?
It might stick. Or your kid will forget about it once they get older. Or they'll rebel against your indoctrination and become even fatter than if you hadn't lectured them.
This is a review of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Co-written with Walid.
Adoption studies indicate that differences in parenting styles have mostly small impacts on long term life outcomes of children, such as happiness, income, intelligence, health, etc.. This means that parents can put less effort into parenting without hurting their children’s futures. If you think kids are neat, then you should consider having more.
Note: We think this is a pretty useful book, and it has changed our minds on how many children we want to have, though neither one us has any children yet. Also, neither of us are experts on twin or adoption studies.
Caplan argues that parents drastically overestimate their ability to improve the adult lives of their children. His argument is driven by adoption studies, which suggest that there is very little that parents can do beyond techniques employed by the average parent that would get them better results with their children. Specifically, the following areas are identified as areas where differences in parenting don’t seem to matter:
But that is not to say that styles outside of the average do not matter at all -- there are a few areas where parenting differences do seem to have an effect:
So how do adoption studies lead to these conclusions?
Adoption studies (If you have a link to a better overview or discussion of adoption studies, we'd appreciate it) help find out the influence of parenting differences on adult outcomes by comparing adoptees to their adopting family. If adoptees systematically tend to be more like their adopting family than like other adoptees along some measure (say religiosity or income), that implies that parenting differences affect that measure.
When an adoption study finds that parenting does not affect outcome X, it does not mean that parenting cannot affect it, just that the parenting styles in the data set did not affect it.
The evidence Caplan talks about is primarily long run life outcomes. Shorter run life outcomes often do show larger effects from parenting, but these effects diminish as the time horizon increases.
Caplan references twin studies in showing that genetics have relatively big effects on all the measures previously mentioned. This explains why we see strong correlations between parents’ traits and children's’ traits. He specifically uses it to call out attributes that we would commonly ascribe to parenting, but may actually have a much larger genetic component.
Once Caplan has argued for the stylized fact that parenting has only small effects on major life outcomes, he explores some of its implications.
One big implication is that you should put less effort into trying to make your kids into great adults and more effort into making your and your kids’ lives more fun right now.
For example, parents probably spend too much energy convincing their children to eat their vegetables and learn the piano, given that it won’t affect whether they will eat healthy as adults or be more intelligent. No one likes fighting. If you want your kid to learn the violin so they’ll have fun right now, it may very well be worth it, but don’t do it because you think it will increase their future income or intelligence. If neither you nor your child likes doing an activity, consider whether you can stop doing it.
Adoption studies provide good evidence that most activities don’t have a much of a long term effect on your children, so you need good evidence to start thinking that an activity will be good for your kids future. The odds are against it.
Focusing more on making your and your children’s lives more fun means that overall, having kids should be more attractive. If having another kid no longer means fighting about finishing their broccoli every night, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. On the margin, you should consider having more kids. If you were planning to have zero kids, consider having one. If you were planning to have 3 kids, consider 4, etc.
In much of the rest of the book Caplan gives common sense advice for making parenting easier for the parents. A couple of these, such as the Ferber method for dealing with infant sleep problems, are empirically based.
Here are some other topics Caplan discusses in his book:
We wholeheartedly recommend reading the first 5 chapters (121 pages) of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids as these have the most useful parts of the book; the rest of the book is less valuable.
There are a number of criticisms relevant to Caplan’s arugments. For example: