My Father's Day Essay for the WSJ

Great article. Bring on the new book!

Well done, I just read it with my wife. We have 1.

The issue is less your children than it is positioning your children in the mating market to optimize the quantity and quality of your grandchildren.

That's what much of the frenzy is about, and that's particularly hard to study.

Am reading your article, but on the like. As an adult, I never spent much time with kids until my first daughter was born in my mid-30s. Prior to that, I could not have imagined how much I would enjoy being a father. I now have 3 ranging from 13 yrs to two weeks.

I view parenting more as teaching. Sometimes directly as in showing someone how to tie one's shoes or paddle a canoe or do a math problem or learning to read. But more importantly by telling stories: stories of my life and what I know of my parents and grandparents lives. Stories, told or read, can help kids learn a little more about how others have approached the challenges, complexities, hard times and good times in life.

How does the research solve the endogeneity problem? Maybe parents that ride their kids generally do so because they've identified a good reason to. Similar to how police force increases correlate with higher crime, not lower.

It's nice to see informed discussion of behavior genetics in the mainstream press, but I don't think you give a fair summary at the end.

...research has two big lessons. First, parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children.

First, lumping 'married' and 'children' is misleading in the context of a summary statement, since the large measurable benefit is wholly from the marriage, not the children. Second, parental sacrifices are very large (life-time cost per child are high, especially for college-going children), what are you are trying to say is that parental sacrifices can be smaller. There is a big difference.

The issue is less your children than it is positioning your children in the mating market to optimize the quantity and quality of your grandchildren. That's what much of the frenzy is about, and that's particularly hard to study.

I don't think these are particularly hard to study. For quantity of grandchildren you'd simply look at the shared environment component for grandchildren (e.g. are adopted siblings more alike in how many grandchildren they have). For offspring quality you can look at the shared environment component of social status, or, more directly, the social status of spouses.

A bigger problem, I think, is that behavior genetics currently answers questions too crudely to be helpful to parents.

Can't parents who drop $100,000+ on a high status college education expect better outcomes for their children than parents who don't provide this opportunity? Logically, you would think that parents who provide costly opportunities would be dramatically affecting their child outcomes. But behavior genetic studies suggest that parental socioeconomic status doesn't do much.

Why not?

Is it because the poor parents are spending proportionately more on opportunities than rich parents? Or is it because children somehow compensate in proportion to their own abilities (e.g. making due with student loans)? Or is it because the supposed advantages of fancy colleges are a spurious reflection of student ability (consistent with Dale and Krueger)?

Behavior genetics doesn't yet help distinguish between explanations like the first and third AFAIK. But if parents take the research to indicate something like the third explanation, when the true explanation is the first, the consequences of that misinterpretation could be severe.

But if parents take the research to indicate something like the third explanation, when the true explanation is the first, the consequences of that misinterpretation could be severe

By the way, this is one problem I potentially have with Dr. Caplan's new book. He is advocating the idea that behavior genetics indicates parents can invest less in their children without consequences. While I do suspect this is true, the same research could conceivably be indicating the opposite. Which would mean that Dr. Caplan's suggestions could be harmful.

Jason Malloy - on the other hand, if parents take the research to indicate something like the first explanation, when the true explanation is the third, then the consequences of that mis-interpretation are severe - about $100,000 per college-educated child.

Tracy, that is correct. There is certainly nothing wrong with advocating the third position (and, for the record, this is close to my viewpoint); my point was that it could be problematic if based on faulty or misleading arguments.

the grandparent argument ignores differing discount rates (someone with a high discount rate should be less likely to buy the argument, given what's given up in the short term for the prospective long term).