Tag: children

Sperm donation and millions of kids

An article in the NYT yesterday about sperm donors fathering hundreds of children left me with a lot of questions. The first of course being where’s Jack Shafer when you need him? The article is, unsurprisingly, bereft of information. Despite its length, it fails to report average numbers of children fathered or any indication of how widespread the phenomenon is or even what a sperm donor earns for his ‘donation.’

Regardless, I think it brings up some really fun questions about demand for children and demand for certain traits in our children as well as throwing the marriage market for a little loop (Clearly, I’m teaching demand this week in principles). In general, literature about the marriage market indicates that humans engage in both positive assortative mating and negative assortative mating, depending on which traits we examine. For instance, we positively assortatively mate (or choose partners that are similar to us) when we look at traits like education, intelligence, attractiveness, income and wealth. It seems that we have the best chance attracting and keeping a mate who is similar to us, at least when it comes to those qualities. This wasn’t always true, at least on factors like education, and things like in-home and out-of-home work skills. In fact, there is an entire book written about negative assortative matching on certain qualities and how that contributes to our understanding of marriage and gains from specialization. Even where we do see negative assortative matching (where people choose dissimilar mates), there is often an underlying similarity that is driving the match. For instance, a debate into which I unwillingly stumbled the other night revealed that marriages between people raised in Jewish and Catholic traditions were more successful than marriages between those raised in Catholic and Protestant traditions. The argument is that the group rituals associated with Jewish and Catholic faiths are more similar in terms of fostering interdependence than rituals among different sects of Christianity, imbuing people with differing levels of individualism and thus compatibility.

But I digress. When parents, for whatever reason, choose to have a child with the help of a donor, either egg or sperm, that process of pairing biological parents through matching on similar qualities no longer occurs. Instead, we have a situation where we commodify those traits we were formerly matching on. Without the matching mechanism (regardless of how strongly you think it predicts mating patterns), the best prediction of who gets the most attractive, educated, intelligent person to provide the other half of a child’s genes is now not the most attractive, educated or intelligent person, but rather just the one willing to pay the most money.

And so, even if the proliferation of kids from a single donor is rare, it really should come as no surprise. There are likely premiums paid to sperm donors for such traits, if not, those guys really need to get their act together. If I were going to pick someone to biologically father my children, irrespective of and also ignorant of his character, attitude and ability to provide for those children, I’m sure that I’d choose the 6’2″, athletic, handsome, 150 IQ physicist over the 5’6″, dumpy, overweight, tv watching, 90IQ burger flipper. It could be that the latter would be a much better father and provider, but merely as a gene donor, I’ll take the former. And probably so would most women, and probably they would also be willing to pay more for it. I have no idea whether physicist with 150 IQs donate sperm, but even so, it’s likely that there are donors that are more in demand than others.

I realize that all of this may seem very obvious, but I’m not sure that anyone has actually looked closely at it. Of course, it may be that no one has looked at it because it’s a pretty small issue (hence my wish for Jack Shafer to call it out), or because it’s rather difficult to measure. The article itself mentions that even many sperm banks do not know how many children are actually born as a result of their work, so accurate, aggregate numbers might be hard to come by.

In college, a friend who was struggling financially looked into selling her eggs. She decided not to do it–having one’s eggs harvested is extremely hard on the body–but not before finding out that her potential offspring were quite valuable. Young, athletic, blond and wicked smart, the agency was sure they could all do quite well with her eggs. I think the only thing she could have done to increase the price of her eggs was be Jewish (apparently there are relatively very few Jewish egg donors, thus driving up their value).

Ultimately, the high demand for sperm from certain types of people is likely more easily met than demand for eggs from certain types of people; that’s why we’re talking about men fathering hundreds of children, not women. And we don’t exactly know what the consequences are of having so many children from one parent are, but this brings up a collective action problem as well. Likely, it would be better for everyone–the child himself, society as a whole, the potential half-siblings, etc–if you didn’t choose that best-qualified sperm donor. Variation in the gene pool is important for evolution, not to mention the risks (as mentioned in the article, though they are likely small) for unintentional mating between half-siblings. But it’s really best for you individually to choose that best sperm donor, especially if you don’t know that his sperm is also going to spawn 200 other children, in which case, this is really a problem of imperfect information.

I think I did too much economics this week.

Ploughs vs. sticks

There is small strain of the economics literature that deals with religion and culture and tries to take these things at face value. While much of economics (and economists) take culture out of the picture when creating models, there are whole conferences devoted to how culture influences our decision-making.

Much of the reason that culture is often excluded from economic models is that it is, or at least seems, endogenous. Culture determines our decisions which determines our culture, so we have a chicken-and-egg argument. You could say, then, that the point of the field of Economic History—which aims to bring economic reasoning to historical events and data–is to tease out which came first, the culture or the decision, the tradition or the allocation.

A recent paper by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn tackles this chicken-and-egg question by comparing places where the plough was readily adopted and places where more labor (digging with sticks, weeding by hand) than capital prevailed as the dominant agricultural tool. They argue that fertility, or how many children one decides to have, was influenced on a societal level by the adoption of the plough. The reasoning is rather straightforward. The plough, as a labor-saving device, reduced the need for women and children in the fields, thus creating a less egalitarian culture–where women stayed at home instead of working outside the home–and one where women had less children.

They note the fertility result as surprising; their original hypothesis had been that a plough would increase fertility as it increased the time mothers would have to bear children. I don’t find it particularly surprising, knowing it takes a lot of hands to run a farm, but I do think it’s an interesting attempt to identify the source of cultural norms.

Turning around the war on girls

A new book about the infamous “missing women” by Mara Hvistendahl is gathering quite a storm, at least if you look at it from the perspective the Wall St. Journal (subscription required, my apologies if you can’t read the article), twitter, and my inbox. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the book itself yet, as I haven’t read it (don’t worry, I will!), but there is a lot of fodder provided by the book review’s author, Jonathan V. Last, and the literature in economics.

The question of missing girls as a result of sex-selection is not a new topic, by any means. Amartya Sen, a revered development economist and Nobel Prize winner, sounded the alarm more than 20 years ago now with an essay in the New York Times claiming that 100 million women were missing in the world, mostly in India and China, countries known to show strong son preference. He showed this by pointing out that while in the US and Europe, we see women outnumbering men, this does not hold true in much of the world. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, and the ratios are becoming worse. He doesn’t get much into the evolutionary science that guides the numbers, but he reminds us that boys outnumber girls at birth, but girls babies are more likely to survive, leaving countries like the US (where son preference is present, but perhaps not enough to encourage sex-selective abortion or infanticide) with a few extra women per one hundred men. Despite the fact that girls seem to be a bit hardier than boys, many developing countries–particularly in Asia and particularly those with a history of government-backed population reduction initiatives–are experiencing an outsize number of male births and an increasingly imbalanced sex ratio in older cohorts. Instead of a few extra men for every one hundred women, we start to see 110, 115 or more men for every one hundred women.

Emily Oster made waves and a career when she (erroneously, it seems) claimed that Hepatitis B, not sex-selective abortion, infanticide, femicide, or the systematic discrimination against girl children, was the root cause for much of the case of the missing women. (Note to budding PhD economists, write your job market paper on a really controversial topic). Women who had contracted Hepatitis B, the story went, were more likely to give birth to boys, thus skewing the ratio of boys to girls. Her arguments have been shown to be rife with problems in a number of papers and the question of missing girls remains a hot topic in economics. Last year, a colleague attended a conference in which her session was only for papers on “Sex-selective abortion in India.” For reference, most sessions at large conferences bring together diverse papers for sessions on “Topics in Education” or “Monetary Policy”. Rarely do we see four papers on the same subject.

Without reading Mara’s book, what’s interesting right now is that there should be natural economic consequences, right? A skewed sex imbalance means that women are suddenly a scarce resource and we should see that scarcity leads to higher prices in the market. Unfortunately, this does not always translate into desirable outcomes when we look at the big picture, and it does not necessarily mean that women are suddenly more valued (culturally), just more valuable (financially, opportunity-cost wise). In the marriage market, we might expect to see dowry payments dropping, or even reversed, where men are paying a bride price instead. We should see increased wage rates for work that women tend to do. The lack of women available to do “women’s work”, should push other individuals–either children, men or older women–into that work. Older women working is probably not sustainable. While putting more children to work is certainly not a desirable development goal, it might end up being the eventual outcome for communities with strong social norms against men doing women’s work. To some extent, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of all these scenarios playing out in various communities.

An extreme sex imbalance also creates a serious problem with regard to who can get married and may even lead to increased violence. In the case that women now have more bargaining power in a relationship because they can earn more money, they are perhaps more likely to delay marriage. In the case where women don’t have more bargaining power and cultural norms dictate marrying them off anyway, we might see younger women getting married to older men (perhaps men who have gained enough standing to ‘earn’ one of the scarce wives), which reduces the pool of marriageable women for men of their age. Regardless of which scenario (or an alternate one) plays out, the lack of women entering the marriage market has the ability to create, in all these different ways, a group of young, directionless men who are more apt to engage in criminal, or merely unsavory, activities or take out their aggression on women.

One email I received concerning the book suggested that we should try to change cultural attitudes about the value of women in these societies. Perhaps, she suggested, we could provide cash payments to women who give birth to children or other incentives. It’s an interesting idea, but one that could easily backfire.

Before we can talk about incentivizing the birth of female children, we have to figure out whether the sex imbalance is hurting or helping women, whether it is hurting or helping societies and what exactly would happen to those girl babies if they were born. As for hurting or helping, I think the general consensus is that it’s hurting, but I don’t know that we know that much about the outcomes associated with sex imbalances, yet, and it may be different in different places. Sex imbalances are still, I believe, much more skewed in younger populations than older ones, so we’re still not seeing the full effect on the marriage and labor markets of the lack of brides and female workers. Even if they are in place, there’s certainly not a consensus on what they are.

If we’re going to pay people to have girls, that raises all sorts of policy issues. On the one hand, though perhaps unlikely, it does run the risk of tipping the imbalance in the other direction. It may be that we have to wait for cultural norms to play themselves out to see a natural increase in the value of girl babies as dowry payments decline. Alternatively , there is evidence that social norms marketing sorts of programs have indeed altered some social norms and could have an effect on the value of girls, which may be more useful than paying parents.

The saddest part of just paying parents to have the girl children is that we might see more infanticide and general neglect of girls. Much of sex-selective abortion has been shown to be a substitute for infanticide and neglect of girl babies. Though certainly not relevant in every case, this also not a situation in which we can restrict abortion in order to repopulate the world with women. Cultural norms and attitudes are what economists would call ‘sticky’ and how best to change them, if we even should change them (there’s another benevolent dictator argument to be had here), or let them run their course, is a complicated question. It’s certainly one for which we don’t have all the answers.

Things we don’t know

I’m sure that many medical scholars and psychologists and psychiatrists have studied the effects of “Ferberization” or helping your kid learn to self-soothe by letting him cry at bedtime. It’s a pretty well established process that parents in America go through, although some are becoming more vocal in opposing it. Regardless, I think it’s a great example of something we don’t know about families and could be potentially insightful in evaluating children’s eventual outcomes. Perhaps even more important is that it might give us insight into parent-child relationships in and of themselves.

A significant problem with trying to analyze how our relationships affect our decision making is that there is likely a lot of endogeneity in relationships. That is to say, we make decisions that determine our relationships that determine our decisions. I don’t know if pinpointing the earliest nodes of a relationship between a parent and a child will do that much, but it does serve, if we can show it has an effect, to clear up some of that endogeneity. If we control for what happened before the relationship formed (and I know that’s simplifying perhaps to an unacceptable degree), perhaps we can isolate what is an effect of the relationship itself.

Different Kinds of Famlies

The NYT is running a series profiling the lives of New Yorkers. Today’s story was of some interest as it reflects the rapidly changing demographic that is the ‘family’ in the US today.

The article is not particularly well-written, in my opinion, but the first page or so offers at least a picture of how a non-nuclear family is working. It highlights the need to figure out new ways to measure and count households and individuals and couples and families. In addition, we have all of these extra relationships to examine. I’d certainly think that your relationship with your non-romantic (ever), gay father of your child is going to affect your decision making, and probably differently than would your relationship with your romantic partner/father of your child.