After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years, I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast,

but I wanted to leave loyal listeners with some favorite episodes that I hope ring true and relevant to our current moment.

This is one of them. Thank you for listening.

This is the Cater Daily podcast for Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown. The decision to have a child is a big one. What about the decision to have two, or three, or five? What should we appreciate about the women who decide to go way above replacement when it comes to childbearing. Catherine Pakaluk is author of the book

Hannah's Children, detailing the stories of dozens of women and their decisions to have several kids

and the real world costs and benefits involved. We spoke last week. Before I had kids, I did not

consider myself a natalist. You know, you look at the data on demographic trends and you think somebody should be out there having more kids. If you care about those trends or you think that it is important to worry about. And now that I've had kids, I can call myself a cultural natalist

and not give up any of my libertarian credentials, but appreciating something that is, I think,

incredibly valuable about children and the process of raising them and how humbling, sometimes humiliating that process is,

but also deriving in the short run, and I hope the long run, just tremendous joy from it.

And it's what my former professor Russ Roberts would call a wild problem, which is there's a

huge information asymmetry between not having kids and having kids. And so the decision to have one is

probably the most important one. Do you view that as generally true? Absolutely. I think the,

we'll say the personal lifestyle regime change from zero to one is the most significant change.

And because children are in the sense experienced goods, maybe that's another way to put it

in informational asymmetry. We don't know

fundamentally what it's like until we have them. And actually, until a long time after we have

them, right? I think in my experience, it was months and months, you know, until I've sort of fully

appreciated what was so great about it. And so you have this enormous hurdle

where your whole life has to be rearranged to have that first child. So I think the move from

zero to one is definitely the most significant one and the one that, and I think policymakers are

going to struggle to deal with. The lie that I hear most often, quite often from people who don't have kids or what I've heard termed momnesia or gramnesia, which is grandparents trying to explain to you about raising children and having long forgotten the being in the in the combat as it

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