Re: fertility and government
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 07:04:27PM -0400, Robert A. Book wrote: > [...] The point > I was tryign to make is that it's possible for a dictatorship to > depress child-rearing opportunities less than other opportunities, > thus making child-rearing relatively more attractive. Why do you think dictatorships tend to depress people's non-child-rearing opportunities more than their child-rearing opportunities? Note that this is a matter of choice for the government. Certainly dictators can choose to depress people's child-rearing opportunities very heavily if they want to. Just look at China's one-child policy. The article said average GDP growth in dictatorships is faster than in democracies because of higher fertility, meaning this "depression of opportunities" is actually causing the total wealth of the country (including human capital) to grow faster, which doesn't seem very plausible. I think maybe the answer is that a dictator has an economic incentive to maximize total GDP, while a voter has an incentive to maximize per capita GDP instead. The dictator owns all government revenue, which is directly related to total GDP. The voter has only a proportional claim to government revenue. The more people there are, the greater the GDP and government revenue, but also the more people he has to share it with, so he only cares about per capita GDP. Perhaps the difference in fertility reflect perfectly rational policy decisions made by those in control of governments. I'm curious if anyone is aware of an instance, where a conscious, explicit choice was made in government policy to choose higher total GDP over higher per capita GDP, or vice versa.
Re: fertility and government
On 7/18/2003, Wei Dai wrote: I think maybe the answer is that a dictator has an economic incentive to maximize total GDP, while a voter has an incentive to maximize per capita GDP instead. ... If the new capitas were coming from immigration this makes sense, but if they are coming from children, this doesn't make sense because people care about the existence and GDP of their children. Also, my reading of that paper is that the total GDP effect was not statistically significant, while the fertility effect was significant. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
Re: fertility and government
I'm curious if anyone is aware of an instance, where a conscious, explicit choice was made in government policy to choose higher total GDP over higher per capita GDP, or vice versa. It seems to me that most any policy restricting immigration is choosing to maximize per capita GDP over total GDP and has that more or less in mind, which also goes along the lines of the voting bodies preference of higher per capita GDP.
Weekday/end Work vs Leisure or Home product
Talking to Bryan just now we came up with the following question. It seems that for most people it is easier to work for money on weekdays than on weekends. This suggests that when trading off working for money versus leisure or home production, people should put more emphasis on working for money on weekdays, and less on weekends. So for example, you should do more leisure and home production on weekends than on weekends, which certainly seems the case. But does this work on the other margins as well? Do people pay to have pizza delivered on weekdays, but drive to pick it up on weekends? Do people pay for parking on weekdays, but drive around looking for free parking on weekends? Any other similar predictions hold? Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323