| Abstract: |
There have been many studies of how the number of children in a family affects
the parents’ or the children’s lives. One strand of this research focuses on
the implications of fertility for the parents’ level of self-reported
well-being or happiness. It is argued in this paper that an overall “happiness
effect” is not very informative because of the presumably large variation in
individuals’ perceived gains from having children. Furthermore, it is
explained that such an effect would be difficult to estimate. Most
importantly, the highly varying ideas about how a child will affect life
quality are important for the decision about whether to have a child. Many of
those who have few or no children have chosen this because they think their
life will be best this way, and their happiness therefore tells us little
about how happy their more fertile counterparts - who to a large extent have
other preferences – would have been if they had few or no children. This
estimation problem that arises because expectations about the effects of a
certain behaviour (here childbearing) are heterogenous, and also affect that
very behaviour, is acknowledged in the economics literature, but there is
little consciousness about it in the fertility-happiness research. In
addition, there is a more “standard” selection problem: factors with
implications for childbearing desires, or for the chance of fulfilling these,
may also affect or be linked to happiness for other reasons. Unfortunately,
even the most advanced statistical approaches that have been used in this
research area fail to handle all these problems, so reported results should be
interpreted very cautiously. |