This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 20th,

2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Most women who want kids have fewer children than they would prefer.

What explains the gap? Clara Piano is a professor of

economics at Austin P State University. She studied the American fertility gap.

Her conclusion economic freedom has a big role to play in getting out of the way of women's fertility preferences.

We spoke last week in Dallas.

Some surveys tell us that adults in their later years would have preferred to have

more children than they have and I wonder the degree to which there is sort of a connection between when you're in the moment

preferring to have children and when you are much older and the window has closed on having kids.

And so I wonder about the degree to which that's a fair assessment, but there are clearly people seem to

prefer to would prefer to have more children than they have. Is that fair?

That's exactly right. That's what we find in a lot of survey data of fertility preferences and even of reproductive-aged women.

So these are women in those years where they can make those decisions with their

partners. They report usually around 2.5 for the United States, 2.3 sometimes and

total fertility is much lower than that of course. We're looking at

kind of 1.66, 1.63. And then when it comes to later in life this is a point that the great economist Julian Simon made a lot of the cost of kids are up front

So you bear those costs, you know the early years and then you really get to enjoy, especially probably for those grandparent years as well, you know, you enjoy a lot of the benefits down the road, so it can be hard to have that foresight.

I prefer whole children. I don't know who you're asking in these surveys about

preferring fractions of children, but I have three entire children

and they're great.

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