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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again

The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.

More seriously, my assumption here is that there's a kind of… not sunk cost fallacy, exactly, but "at this point"-ism to it. Once you've had one child, that's it, you are A Parent, you're going to have that dangling responsibility for the rest of your life come hell or high water. So you may as well make the most of it and keep on in that direction; trying to suddenly about-face to a high-flying career in rocket science would bring only the disappointment of never making it as big as if you'd jumped straight in without having a kid first, while with one kid under your belt, you're well on your way to becoming a very successful homemaker.

The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.

Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.

Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.

Well, yes. But in the heroin case, "someone who's tried it once is likely to want to do more" doesn't prove that you are wickedly preventing people from self-actualizing by forbidding them from trying it the first time. In fact, quite the opposite - we recognize that getting hooked on a hard drug 'hijacks' people's preferences and gets in the way of their real wants and goals, so that allowing them to get exposed to the addictive substance is doing a disservice to their self-actualization! So, conceivably, pregnancy could be the same: a woman who tries it once might get 'hooked' and that's exactly why it's against a woman's better interests to have even a single child, lest she get addicted to the experience and let it ruin her life as she irrationally sinks all her time and resources into parenthood.

(I don't actually believe this, hence why it's an unserious gotcha.)

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