(and by extension, I too)
Not for the first time, I have to turn around and criticise someone I praised a day before. Gaurav is now claiming that people who have lots of children do so for economic reasons, i.e. so that they can send them to work and supplement the family income.

Come on! Now this is confusing effect with cause. He is actually saying that though they have access to contraception, people choose not to use it because they want the extra income from their future children.

This is beyond belief, because all children are “cost centres” (as Gaurav puts it) for the first few years of their life. Even if we assume that they are sent to work at the age of eight, parents have to actually take care of their children for that many years. It is incredible that a man so poor that the extra income from a child working is actually useful to him will be able to do such long range planning and willingly make the investment required.

The other explanation – about agriculture also doesn’t make sense. There simply isn’t any money in agriculture anymore. Even a landed farmer won’t think of his sons as useful additions to the workforce. In fact, it is customary to have one son tending to your farms and to pack off the other sons to the cities to earn money.

Most likely, it is poverty that is causing people to send their children to work even though they wouldn’t want to if they had the option.

I think the explanation for why people have large families is more mundane. It is mostly some combination of lack of education, tradition, inertia and a preference for sons. The last of course, has an economic component.

By extension it means that SS is right. Having too many children is a problem for an already poor family.
Hey, but doesn’t that contradict what I was saying yesterday? Actually, yes. I should have been more clear. I simply reused the argument that answers those who claim that population is the problem, i.e. if it weren’t for population growth, Nehru’s policies would have succeeded, but gave the impression that I don’t consider population a problem. My fault entirely.

Another way of clearing up my case is that if by some magic (or more likely, coercion) the government had succeeded in enforcing the two-child norm (even with absolutely no side effects such as a police state and even more corrupt officials) we would still be poor. But given that we are poor, large families make it worse.

Also, just as too many children is the problem and not population if we “solve” the population problem a bit too fast, say by forcing parents to have only one kid, we will end up with the opposite problem when we are old – too many old people who can’t work. This is the problem western countries are facing now. So the pace at which we are going seems just right to me.