This is interesting. In a sense a good reason why celebrities swear by being happier with having children, Being loaded (with cash) means having children does not carry with it the negative consequences. Does this mean that only rich people should have children? Of course not, but this I believe shows that unhappy poor people shouldn’t be allowed to have children. I don’t know. read the linked blog post for the pertinent papers.
Children & happiness
Having children makes you miserable. That’s the message of this paper by Luca Stanca, which draws upon data from 94 countries:
Having children is negatively related to subjective well-being. Conditioning on individual characteristics shows that the effect of parenthood on well-being is positive and significant only for widowers, older and highly educated individuals…On the basis of a purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational agent is zero.
This partly corroborates evidence from the UK (pdf), which shows that children increase the well-being only of married couples and widowers, but reduce the well-being of single or separated parents.
However, the reason for this is rather mundane. Children make (many) people less happy only because they are expensive. Mr Stanca finds that children improve people’s satisfaction with non-financial aspects of their life, but worsen their financial happiness. This corroborates some other evidence (hat-tip).
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Children & happiness.