This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 23rd, 2004.

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 Pacaluck is author of the book,

Hannah's children,

detailing the stories of dozens of women

in 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?

...