Somewhere Comfortably Between Dieoff and Overpopulation

Whatever else raising children may be, it's also an expensive and time consuming pain in the ass that sharply limits your flexibility to do a variety of things for a large number of years. One can easily imagine the joys of parenthood being roughly offset by the burdens. But later in life, having a solid relationship with grownup kids and their children seems low-cost and hard-to-replace. Loneliness is very hard on people. To acknowledge that reality isn't to say we need to get all freaked out if the norm moves from 2-3 kids per family to 1-2 kids per family. -- Yglesias

Surely Matt is right about this utilitarian analysis of childbearing and rearing -- until the appearance of those pesky imaginary numbers.  The "1-2 kids" concept seems designed expressly to obscure the central problem, namely, that there is a huge difference between a society that generates an average of one child per father and mother and a society that generates two. The difference: one society is working on a population decline and one is not. Now there may be no reason necessarily to freak out if the population is headed for decline in this fashion -- and certainly whether or not a population should decline depends on the population (its position with regard to resources, space, etc., etc.). But let's not swallow up the question with an analysis designed to do so, eh?