Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

A fascinating fight over the children broke out last week. A post on the Bucks blog of The New York Times on the costs of parenting, followed by a post on the Times’s Motherlode blog on the benefits of parenting, generated more than 700 comments from readers, mostly aimed at one another. The exchanges reveal intense disagreement about how to define the costs and benefits.

Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.

They also testify to a persistent tendency to frame decisions to rear children as mere consumption decisions, similar to decisions to bring home puppies. If you want children, you should make them or adopt them and happily pay for the flow of psychic benefits you hope to receive. You should probably reach for at least an approximate estimate of the cost, if only to ensure the future well-being of those you care for.

Missing from this emphasis on individual decision-making is any serious consideration of the impact of child-rearing on the economy as a whole. Most of those who focus on unintended or “spillover” effects seem to concentrate on the public bads, insisting that child-rearing itself has a negative impact on environmental sustainability, regardless of the rate of population growth or level of other forms of consumption.

The Motherlode author, KJ Dell’Antonia, along with some readers responding to both blog posts, noted that children grow up to contribute positively to the economy in general and to the care of the older generation in particular. As she put it, “Capitalism, that masterful force, can’t function without fresh people on which to exert its incentives.”

I would put this a bit differently. Capitalism, that masterful force, would have to pay much more for workers if families weren’t willing to pony up most of the time, money and effort necessary to raise them, train them and educate them.



Imagine a world in which businesses could largely rely on highly customized battery-powered robots but would require some humans to design, build and program them. In a competitive market, the price of robots would be determined by the cost of producing them, including the wages demanded by their human producers.

What a boon it would be to businesses – and to their consumers – if some humans so loved the process of creating robots that they were willing to do so for free, happily lavishing their own resources on the production of evermore beautiful and skilled models. Their love and commitment would obviously lower the cost of robot production, and businesses relying on robots would have to pay little beyond the costs of recharging and minor repairs (analogous to the cost of wages and health insurance for human workers).

Set aside, in this science fiction scenario, the issue of how human workers would obtain resources in a world in which there is little demand for their labor (heads up, fans of “I, Robot”). Note, only in passing, the tragic irony of human workers contributing to their own obsolescence, as it seems likely that they will eventually devise robots that can reproduce themselves (heads up, fans of “ Battlestar Galactica”).

Focus, instead, on how human motivation to raise children creates benefits not only for children themselves but for all those who rely on the labor those children will provide or the taxes they will pay.

Our standard economic accounting system ignores the value of goods and services that lack a market price – including clean air and a stable climate, as well as the health and well-being of our human resources.

Nature instructs us in the danger of ignoring the value of unpriced inputs into the output we label gross domestic product. Efforts to assign a dollar value to ecosystem services are analogous to efforts to assign a dollar value to the work parents do and better estimate the costs of children.

Sometimes it seems to me that science fiction is the only way to drive this point home.

Consider the following strategy for cutting the deficit and speeding economic growth. End all public spending on health, education and retirement. Export all our children and elderly to low-wage countries where they can get cheaper care. Open our borders to the healthiest and best-educated immigrants of the world with the proviso that they will be deported when they get pregnant, sick or old.

How mean and stupid we could be. How rich we could become.