Matthew Yglesias: Children as Public Goods

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Children as Public Goods

Is it wrong to describe children as public goods? Discuss. Would the objection be met by saying the following? "Things aren't fully reducible to economics. Nevertheless, for certain purposes it's necessary to analyze things in economic terms. In economic terms, children should be thought of as akin to public goods whose producers and caretakers deserve public subsidies rather than as consumption commodities." I think that works, and that it produces the right way of looking at political issues. Now what you don't want to say is that this manner of looking at people captures everything that's morally or politically important about them. Certain classes of disabled or elderly people are, in these economic terms, pure drains on society (public goods with negative value), but one doesn't want to say that the severely disabled should be killed in order to reap efficiency gains. Well, "one" might want to say it if one were Adolf Hitler, but decent people do not.

April 8, 2005 | Permalink

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What is the world? No, children are not public goods. A casual reference to the definition of public goods would demonstrate this. On another note would somebody beat Matthew with an economics-clue-by-four please? Repeatedly (for example a public good ... [Read More]

Tracked on Apr 8, 2005 12:09:22 PM

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Comments

One might describe the disabled as nothing more than a drain on society if one were governor of Texas and one were singing a bill to disconnect people who can't pay for life support too. Culture of life indeed.

Posted by: bunny | Apr 8, 2005 11:39:17 AM

Anything to share with regards to the The Guck?

Not delving into the comments on the CT post, I think the 'bitch' part of bitch phd gets in the way of a common understanding. There is no controversy here. Everyone agrees except on the semantics.
I am open to the argument that in many cases we reduce things too much into economic terms. As far as the general understanding of the economic argument that it is in the public's interest, economically, to invest in children because they will be the economic producers in the future, I do not think that has been oversold. Probably the opposite.

Posted by: theCoach | Apr 8, 2005 11:46:29 AM

Is it wrong to describe children as public goods? Discuss.

Yes, children are part of the public, not goods. They may provide goods (or costs), but they are not, in and of themselves, goods or costs.

Would the objection be met by saying the following? "Things aren't fully reducible to economics. Nevertheless, for certain purposes it's necessary to analyze things in economic terms. In economic terms, children should be thought of as akin to public goods whose producers and caretakers deserve public subsidies rather than as consumption commodities."

Nope. In terms of economics, children remain actors, not goods. They may receive or provide goods, but there is no reason to think of them as goods.

I think that works, and that it produces the right way of looking at political issues.

I'd be interested in hearing why you think that that "works" other than that it happens to justify the policies you'd want to justify -- which can just as easily be looked at if you look at children as actors and look at the goods and harms they receive and are likely to cause, with and without proper care and support, which has the benefit of actually being consistent with how you treat any other actor in economic analysis.

To me, it just seems lazy and sloppy.

Now what you don't want to say is that this manner of looking at people captures everything that's morally or politically important about them.

Or even that it is necessary, justified, or makes any kind of sense.

Certain classes of disabled or elderly people are, in these economic terms, pure drains on society (public goods with negative value), but one doesn't want to say that the severely disabled should be killed in order to reap efficiency gains.

And if you just stop looking at people as goods or harms in themselves, but as actors who are both part of the public and recipients and providers of goods and harms, then you won't be as likely to make that mistake. You've proposed an analytical shortcut that is unnecessary to your apparent goal, and has all kinds of bad side effects. So, why not just forget about it entirely?

Posted by: cmdicely | Apr 8, 2005 11:53:35 AM

Are children public goods? No. They don't even come close to fitting the definition.

Posted by: Steve | Apr 8, 2005 11:55:51 AM

Reading Capitolism and Freedom? Shame on you Matthew

Posted by: chicago boy | Apr 8, 2005 11:56:39 AM

Here I go again.

The status of children develops rather paradoxically through their stages of development. During their first years they are strictly a cost to the parents and the taxpayers. As soon as they get an allowance or hold odd jobs, they become economic actors, usually in a rather insignificant way except for migrant workers and Britney Spears. But they're still not legally autonomous so they're really mostly functions of their parents.

Thus, the childfree theory that children are an expensive luxury. And in truth, for a parent as an economic unit, children are mostly money out -- actual money spent, but also a lot of opportunity cost (because of lost work time and opportunities lost because of lack of mobility, etc.) And children are no longer fungible, so except for parents of the rare Britney Spears or Michael Jackson, children are most comparable to a losing lottery ticket, because you never get anything tangible back. (Or perhaps a concert ticket -- imagine someone making enormous sacrifices, going into debt, and spending 40% of their uincome attending concerts.

So basically parents are wastrels and fools, sort of like Deadheads or gambling addicts.

Alternatively, you could say that parenthood is a charitable activity, when two parents give almost all of their disposable income to one ore more entirely different people. Because at age 16 / 18, with emancipation, children are no longer under their parents' authority, and no longer have any legal or economic obligation to them. Whatever obligation they have is the kind of sentimental, customary, communitarian, traditionalistic obligation that economists and jurists routinely scornfully debunk.

Another way of looking at it, a non-economists way, is to point out that what a family produces, is not commodities, but new economic actors. (Reproduction as opposed to production). Without childraising activities, in the course of thirty to sixty years the economy would extinguish.

Economics is mute on the production of economic actors; call that a big blind spot. Theoretically labor -- human effort -- is a factor of production -- and workers are at economic agents making contracts exchanging their labor for money. Economics doesn't have to ask where labor comes from, any more than it has to ask where iron ore comes from -- it takes the amount available as a given. But the fact that economics says nothing about where economic actors come from means that the economy doesn't make sense except as part of some larger human agent-producing system system.

You could say, the family produces citizens. But citizenship is not an economic concept at all. Or you could say, human souls.

The reason for the flawed "public goods" analogy (criticisms of that analogy should emerge here) is basically to try to figure out a way to say that childraising is in a significant way a more meritorious and necessary activity than going to Greatful Dead concerts or playing the lottery. But I really think that what you have to do is get outside economic thinking. Learn NOT to think like an economist.

The reason we have to argue this at all is that free-market economics at the pop level has produced an infestation of fanatical free-market ideologues who cannot imagine any valid non-economic interpretation of human life. (This not to say that major economists themeselves are never part of that swarm).

Childfree fanatics often present themselves as heroes of environmentalism and population control, but in most cases this is completely bogus. A high-spending childfree couple is environemntally the same as a family spending the same amount, and the idea that childraising is a meritorous activity does not mean that every family needs to have children, nor that every family should have as many children as possible.

Some little-government types argue that before Social Security, aging parents did depend on their children, and childraising was not economically irrational. That's true; that's the kind of traditionalistic society we have escaped from. Anyone who admires the Strong Family System should take a look at traditional China, where children were ate their father's disposal as long as the father was alive. Besides not being conducive to individual freedom (sons could be effectively "minors" into their fifties), this kind of system also leads to extreme cautiousness and an almost total absence of venturesomeness, since there is no safety net at all.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 12:19:15 PM

"Everyone agrees except on the semantics."

Not true, Coach. The childfree ideologues really do believe that raising children is a wasteful, self-indulgent form of luxury spending. They're savage and loony, but not at all rare.

Amd there are many problems with the "public goods" argument. Matt pointed out one of them. If Steve elaborated, he's probably be able to point out several more.

You really have to get outside economics in order to describe childraising as anything but charitable or luxury spending.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 12:23:40 PM

Public good? Subsidy for children? What kind of liberal are you? Don’t you know that one of the cheapest and most efficient way to turn third world poor people into industrialized developed country citizens is immigration? And I thought you were an internationalist humanist. If we increase births to attain more young people, we put a high demand on resources (medical, educational, and chronological) for at least fourteen years before we can get any productivity out of them. If we really need more young people for unskilled labor, we can import them.

Posted by: TheJew | Apr 8, 2005 12:26:18 PM

John, did you forget to consider children born into traditional economic systems? At quite and early age they are contributing labor necessary for the family's subsistence. Infact by their early teens, they are so valuable that in some cultures a bride price must be paid to the family of a female who is "getting married" to compensate the birth family for the lost value of her labor.

Now Matt, silly. Unles we start cloning beings for spare parts, then yes such clones would be a product, I guess.

Posted by: Keith G | Apr 8, 2005 12:32:49 PM

Keith G -- I was assuming that our system is not, and should not become, a traditional economic system. I did mention China.

Traditional economic systems are usually in many, many senses economically irrational, and they are certainly not conducive to personal autonomy or freedom.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 12:36:12 PM

We are confusing BAD WRITING with policy.

Whoever wrote that children are "public goods", had his brains turned off.

He meant to say that they are "A Public Good", much in the same way that public primary school is a "a public good", so even those who do not need/want it are made to contribute.

To take bad writing, and claim that it declares children are property is disingenuous.

Posted by: Matthew Saroff | Apr 8, 2005 12:39:44 PM

As soon as they get an allowance or hold odd jobs, they become economic actors,

They are economic actors before then. They have utilities, and they act to maximize them, and they forgo things that might have utility in order to secure greater utility from other actors -- often their parents.

Now, the fact that the particular kinds of exchanges involved are not the kind that there are good economic measures for does not mean they aren't economic actors (though perhaps farther than most from being rational actors) interacting in a kind of market.

Anything that produces subjective utility is a good; anything that reduces it a cost. And any time those are passing between people as a result of deliberate actions, you've got some kind of economic activity.

Posted by: cmdicely | Apr 8, 2005 12:44:11 PM

Well I'm sort of a Kantian, ("Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.") So, I don't approve of treating people as pawns in some sort of utilitarian chess game.

I'm inclined to agree with Dr. B.

And in economic terms, are people ever really goods? (It's painful, but read the comment threads.)

Posted by: Abby (who longs for a cool blog posting name) | Apr 8, 2005 12:59:32 PM

CMDicely, you're just hypothetically extending economic description to the breaking point, on the theory that all human activity is a priori economic. I've seen Becker's attempts do describe the family in contractual terms, and it was ridiculous.

What rights children have do not include the right to make enforcable contracts. Many of the rights they have seem to involve moving them from parental custody to state custody in cases of abuse. They are not the rights of free agents.

I would say that activity which cannot be analyzed by an economist is not an economic activity. I can imagine a family based entirely on exchange, with the mother and father setting up a system of obligations, cash payments and incentives for each other, and the child being roped into an implicit contract which he's not able to turn down or negotiate on, but that would not much resemble the system we have now, and to me it looks horrifying.

Perhaps I should just say that, while childraising is an economic activity, it's a terribly irrational one, somewhat like playing the lottery. You can always allege that there are intangible benefits to childraising, but you can say that of the lottery too.

Someone who liquidates his whole net worth, gambles it on one throw of the dice, and loses everything, can of course be assumed to have gotten a $100,000 buzz out of it, but most would think that he's irrational.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 1:08:39 PM

Hah! I just finished a post on this very subject. Good instant ammo for comments:

Bitch, phd. is really outraged that we're even having this discussion, that we're reducing human beings to numbers. But the thing is, nobody is suggesting that we make couples do an econometric calculation of their acturial likelihood to come out ahead in the childrearing game before they have the kid. The point is, they don't. They won't. They will almost always base their decision on non-economic factors. But should we take advantage of that?

Imagine saying to a soldier, "you should be defending your country out of patriotism and selfless sacrifice, not filthy lucre. Therefore we're cutting your pay to subsistence levels to reflect that." Or to a doctor, "because the human life is priceless, your job is too important and noble to be calculated in dollars and cents. We only want doctors who'll do surgery for that nice, warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you know you've helped a fellow human being."

But every single day we say to parents: "If you don't get enough rewards from how emotionally satisfying it is to raise children, you really shouldn't. If you ever worry about how bringing up that adorable little bundle will affect your financial future, you don't deserve one. The value of children to society is way too precious to be calculate in dollars and cents, therefore you won't be recieving any compensation for your efforts."

Posted by: battlepanda | Apr 8, 2005 1:22:26 PM

I agree: having children in the developed world is irrational act that can only be analyzed in biological/psychological terms.

Posted by: abb1 | Apr 8, 2005 1:26:14 PM

People don't have children for economic reasons (at least in the rich countries). Then to turn around and ask for other people to subsidize their kids on economic ground seems rather suspect to me.

Posted by: Niraj | Apr 8, 2005 1:58:18 PM

Not an "economic ground", a "public good" ground.

Not all "public good" is economic, as much as the Friedmanites want it to be.

Posted by: Matthew Saroff | Apr 8, 2005 2:04:31 PM

While there are no good economic motives for childraising, there are certainly economic costs. The argument here is that childraising is an expensive, meritorious activity of public concern.

The phrase "subsidizing their kids" begs the question and makes it seem that you haven't been paying attention.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 2:24:20 PM

BitchPHD has got it wrong. Whether children are a public good is an interesting and useful discussion.

The argument that children are a public good is made to justify a public subsidy for all children (regardless if parents are rich or poor). There is an argument to be made for children being a public good, but I think it's a bad argument.

I think children are no more a public good than puppies, and the gvt should subsidize children to the same extent it subsidizes puppies (also, employers should accomodate parents to the same extent they subsidize puppy owners. All life choices, whether puppies ownership or child creation, should be respected equally.)

There is still, of course, an argument to subsidize poor children on equity grounds -- just like we ought to subsidize all poor people. And education, despite what Freidman says, is probably a public good, so the gvt should pay for universal public education.

But society shouldn't pay for parents to have children, nor should it make special accomodations for child-rearers.

Posted by: Ikram | Apr 8, 2005 2:26:31 PM

BitchPHD has got it wrong. Whether children are a public good is an interesting and useful discussion.

I think children are no more a public good than puppies, and the gvt should subsidize children to the same extent it subsidizes puppies (also, employers should accomodate parents to the same extent they subsidize puppy owners. All life choices, whether puppy ownership or child creation, should be respected equally.)

But I can't see why society shouldn't shell out to people with children just because they have children.

Posted by: Ikram | Apr 8, 2005 2:29:50 PM

"I think children are no more a public good than puppies."

Ikram, you can't just assert that. I don't think that the "public good" amg;e is a good one, but what everyone on the other side is arguing is that children are more important than puppies.

No one has mentioned a flat subsidy to all parents. The argument is just that expenditures that help children are a good thing just because children are more important than puppies, and in particular that children are not the parents' property, but future citizens and workers.

Posted by: John Emerson | Apr 8, 2005 2:32:14 PM

Abby (who longs for a cool blog posting name):

How about "Pure Drain"?

Posted by: SqueakyRat | Apr 8, 2005 2:34:55 PM

See:

http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Public_good

Merely reading the definition illustrates that children are not a public good, since children can (and routinely are) produced by individuals for their own reasons (or causes). But children do produce positive externalities.

I don't think there's any reason bitchphd and the economic line of reasoning need to disagree. Children are both agents and the system and the producers of positive externalities (by virtue of eventually becoming productive members of society). The relevant question is: are there enough positive externalities to justify robbing Peter to pay Paul, Jr.? Of course there are.

Posted by: anton | Apr 8, 2005 2:37:34 PM

The argument about whether children are more important than puppies is a separate one. This thread was about whether it was "wrong" to think about children in the public good framework.

Answer: No

Second, are children public goods (meaning that in a competitive equilibrium, a socially sub-optimal amount of that good is produced).

Answer: No.

One can still argue for subsidies to people with children on other grounds. Equity. Desire for a genetically-similar future society. Whatever. But if people are arguing for subsidies on the grounds that children are a public good, I think they're wrong.

(I think 'a future society with about the same population made up of people with genes similar to today's genes' is a public good. It's just not clear to me that this is a public good we ought to purchase).

Posted by: Ikram | Apr 8, 2005 2:52:59 PM