Economic Costs and Benefits Do Matter for Family Planning

This piece on CNN reports on a rise in the number of vasectomies performed over the last six months.  It didn't dawn on the doctors right away that this was the result of men/couples looking at the troubled economy and deciding that the risk of another (expensive) child simply wasn't worth taking.  But indeed, that seems to be what it's all about.  As the article rightly notes, it's about men on the margin:

"It's unlikely that some guy read the Dow Jones numbers that day and said, 'Why don't we have a vasectomy?' " Jones said. "More likely, people have already been considering it and typically a guy and his wife have spoken a year or two about this."

The recognition that family planning decisions are, at least to a significant degree, the result of economic (in the broad sense) considerations is crucial not just to understanding why vasectomies are up, but for larger public policy questions such as why handing out condoms in third-world countries doesn't reduce birthrates (A:  because the benefits of more kids outweighs the cost, at least to a point larger than the average number in the West, in poor, agrarian economies).  Economic considerations also help explain the longer-run secular changes in family size and parent-child relationships that have characterized the West since the Industrial Revolution.

Comments

[Brian Pitt]

Thanks for the plug Professor Horwitz. I would like to see the data broken down by race.