Book Nook Reading Notes on *Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids*
Bet On It reader Dan Barrett wrote these notes for his Book Nook book club on my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Dan’s idea:
I’m organizing reading groups packaged as the Book Nook to help colleagues (1) guide their own learning journeys, (2) connect with people they’d otherwise not meet, & (3) deepen their understanding of the Principles of Human Progress. This has taken the form of 25 reading groups hosted throughout 2024 with at least as many planned for 2025.
Enjoy!
P.S. I’ve signed a contract to write a new introduction for a reissue of the book. Should release in 2026!
Introduction
Do you agree with Caplan’s initial points on why people don’t have kids or have more kids? P1-2
Do you agree with his selfish reasons to have more kids? P2+
Parents can sharply improve their lives without hurting their kids. There are many models for parenting & (if we agree w/ Caplan) biology is a big driver of development.
What do you think about the nature vs nurture debate? Do you think you turned out who you are based on your genes or on your circumstance?
Should we lean into behavior (even if it’s adverse) as opposed to changing behavior towards an imagined future? P5
Do you see more parents overcharging themselves? Do you think that you’d do the same or not? Why? P5
Parents are much more worried than they ought to be.
Do you think that the world is getting better or worse? How do you think that perception affects your ideas of having kids? P6
Caplan speaks to a safer reality, instead of what the new portrays, via more anecdotal evidence (i.e., look out your window). While it seems statistically we’re safer now, what can we do to make ourselves feel safer and/or more confident?
Many of the benefits of children come later in life.
Do you agree with Caplan in a shortsightedness to not have that 1-2 more kids? P6-7 Is how many kids we have more a function of how small/big our families are?
Self-interest and altruism point in the same direction.
How much do you agree with the idea that more people mean more ideas, innovations, & solutions? P8 Is this based on a Western society model? Otherwise, why hasn’t China exploded with Silicon Valley-level innovations?
Is his “more hands make for less fiscal burdens” argument a cop-out? Structural reforms don’t often change without emergencies/catastrophes, so is having more kids perpetuating unsustainable entitlement programs, deficit government spending, and/or distortive economic practices?
Do you find his “what’s in it for me to have some or more kids” argument (P9) compelling? Does having children really just come down to your intrinsic benefits?
Do you think society overemphasizes the pros or cons of having kids? P10 How much bearing does society have on whether you & others like you have kids? What’s the bigger societal effects of what people assume in this space?
Chapter 1
Do you find the customer satisfaction, overall happiness, & monetary happiness datapoints compelling? P14+
This book was written in 2011 & so could the resulting 13 years have changed these arguments? Are there intergenerational considerations here (e.g., Boomers & Xers had more social pressures to have kids vs Millennials & Zers have less peer pressure)? This might be false like with other cross-generation things like our desire to be social & how many of us want social media to be quelled (i.e., Anxious Generation).
What do you think about happiness studies & indexes? Should we take them seriously for something so subjective? That there’s only a marginal difference between parents & those childless, does this read as a wash to you? Do we think this takes the longer-term view into account?
To Caplan’s points of our idea of parenting vs the reality of monotony & years-delayed selflessness. Do you think that kids will be better or worse than depicted? Do you think that you’d change & if so for the better or worse? P16-19
Are you surprised by how much time parents are spending to parent? P19-20 How do you think you’d manage your time or do you think your time will be managed by your kids’ needs?
Should we govern our chores via 3 questions? P22 (Do I enjoy it, does my child enjoy it, are there any long-run benefits?)
Do we think that there are too many norms without benefit or justification, especially as times have changed?
Caplan’s sleep hacking & self-interest perspective calls into question many of what we assume we should do. P22-23
Do you think to ask (or do you think your parents asked) if what activity you’re doing is worth the effort? P24-26 Should we reframe how we think about our time to consider both parents’ & kids’ wants?
How credible is the two-way view of discipline? P26-28 Is it just as much a parent factor as it is for kids? Do you have examples of how disciplining children can lead to better results?
What was the degree of supervision you grew up with? P28-30 How do you think that degree of supervision affected who you are today?
Did you have an allowance or a fee-for-service arrangement growing up? Do you think it instilled lessons in you? Do you think it made your parents happy and/or helped them out? P30-32
Covering the Intro through Chapter 1, are there considerations for your ST role that can lead to better fulfillment, satisfaction, & happiness?
Chapter 2
On separated twin studies, there are a range of totals (137 sets of twins separated at birth 1979-1999, 1894 sets since 1922), so the dataset is small but convincing. The question most studies seem to ask is if separated twins end up behaving similar, so differences might be dismissed based on the main question.
What do we think about Caplan’s distinction between nature, nurture, & environment? P42-43 Is there enough light between nurture & environment?
How much do you think you’d design or create a wish list for your kids? P45+ How will you balance things that you hope for them or that you enjoy vs them naturally growing towards? How much of a child’s choices are emergent (not necessarily nature, nurture, or environmental)?
Health (P46-49): If we agree with Caplan’s assertion that parenting doesn’t affect child longevity, will you change your thoughts towards healthy habits & diet?
Random: On P49, there’s some correlation to peers for drinking as opposed to parents. How might you try to influence your kids’ friends?
Intelligence (P49-51): I have to wonder how screen time affects this. It seems possible that with all of our concern of dopamine fixes, our kids turn out the same as us but only through a different path, but I’d still try to limit screen time until this is more solidly proven. Perhaps we’re too concerned for how kids learn?
Will you play classical music to your baby?
Happiness (P51-53): This was perhaps the most convincing in that while happiness is situational, the degree of happiness seems more innate.
Success (P53-58): At what point of nurturing does it become nature? Like with academic success, you might come from an underperforming situation but if you have 5 generations of successes, does it begin to change?
P57: If stressing over our kids doing well academically is overblown, does this apply to our kids being resilient? More so, if we apply the nature over anything else angle, does anything we do as parents really matter in the long run? Caplan has some small caveats but not much otherwise.
Character (P58-62): Do you agree with Caplan that nurture has little effects on political or religious character? Should we be focusing more on the principles & perhaps outcomes of our political & even religious aspirations?
Values (P62-71): On family values, is this less about the end goal of what we want our kids to be (Caplan’s argument) & more about how our kids come to those decisions/conclusions?
Appreciation (P71-72): Seems to back up (though more so than family values) that nurture comes into prominence in establishing a base of values/worldview/set of principles that our kids can base whatever decisions on. It’s up to parents to set the stage for kids to play out their plot.
Chapter 3
Do we follow Caplan’s point on P76? “The short-run effects of parenting are larger than the long-run of parenting.” Does fade-out affect much of our purposeful efforts or are there ways we can raise kids to be similar to us without running ourselves into the group?
On the political & religious points (P62 & P79), how might children paying lip service to parents’ desired choices/positions affect or lead to collective illusions?
Caplan points to completed parents defending their methods because their kids turned out ok. How can we help our parents understand Caplan’s points (should we agree) to pro-short-run people? P85
P86 is where the book dates itself. Peer pressure is a full contact social sport now, so while parents ought to focus on their own homes, it’s not the case these days. See Free Range Kids for examples where one decision opens up a home to lots of criticism.
If we adjust our outlook more to Caplan’s nature over nurture argument, how can we apply this to our own work? Do our theories or change, processes, and/or paradigms change?
Chapter 4
Do you feel safer than you did growing up? Do you think that kids are safer than they were in the 1950s? How can we help reverse the perception that back in the day is safer than today? P95-96
What’s your biggest safety fear for your would-be children? Do you root that fear in experience, exposure, numbers, or something else? Are/Were these fears those of your parents? How can you work through these fears, either before or after you have kids? P97
Chapter 5
Are there other hindsight bias factors to the shrinking of families? P110-112
Are Caplan’s “why not” factors (more tech, more money, more longevity, unchanged financial impacts) convincing enough for more kids? P113-114
I appreciate Caplan trying to balance out long-run trends (sleepless nights are forgotten with grandchildren decades later). How could this be packaged for people not so economically minded? P117-119
Does Caplan’s enlightened family planning make you reconsider your life plans or not? The longer-facing perspective helps but it’s unclear if it’s enough to add 103 more kids. P120-121
Chapter 6
What reason did your parents have to have you? Was it intentional or circumstance? As you read this book, what reasons have surfaced or changed? Do you foresee having kids as a series of intentions or circumstances? P123-126
Do we agree with Caplan’s “more people, more solutions” argument? Musk & others content this, but many who do are of excess means. There ought to be calibration here, but what does that mean? Should there be more free people than subjugated having more kids? More people where there are fewer geographically? How does immigration fit in here? P126-129
Caplan’s writing from a pre-AI perspective. Does AI reinforce or counter his core argument? Is it now “more energy = more AI = more solutions”? Should we expect more kids as work changes or will there always be work that requires new people? P130
Sure, government services/spending favor the old vs young. Is it a permanent situation? Once the Boomers fade out, won’t demographics be better balanced? Would this perhaps usher in a shift from entitlements to family benefits & education? Or will we do the same to the Zoomers & Alphas? P132-133
Is it true or ironic? P136 “Ten years from now, you probably won’t even want to return to the world of today…”
Caplan doesn’t say that having fewer people would fix global warming & environmental degradation. He does hint at structural & corrective measures to improve the environment without population controls. Is this a good way to look at this issue? Should we also focus on dirty developing economies? P123-136
Chapter 7
Is having more kids a focus of finances? Would having more government benefits like paid leave, child credits/payments, medical assistance help prompt your choice to have more kids? While Canada, Austria, & Sweden have homogeneous populations, the US has had series problems with such approaches. P137-141
The in-laws argument might be more of a support network question. If parents were tripping over communal help, would the burden of child rearing be lifted? Besides family, what networks do you know about? (for example, La Leche League) Any education networks that go back to the start of life? P141-142
P143-144 Just throw money at the problem! He’s right about intergenerational wealth transfer & this might become easier with the Boomers fading out, leaving money to Xers & Millennials, concentrating money before Millennials age out of having children. Are there policies to encourage this transfer to the younger & be faster?
Chapter 8
Is there personal angst against tech in fertility? P147-149
Does the list of fertility tech (artificial insemination, IVF, surrogacy, artificial wombs) at all increase or decrease your considerations for the number of kids you might want to have? P149-154
Chapter 9
Chats
Did this line up with what you’ve read so far? It read better to me than most of the 1st third of the book P164-168
Can we make the connection between discipline of our youth with our kids? Are kids like us but smaller? P168-170
What do you think about the division of happiness or happiness pie arguments? P170-171
What are ways that you will try to regulate your tiredness & stress, particularly in relation to & in front of your children? P171-172
Caplan’s marginal analysis of the book being the less stupid option & approach to parent is very PBM! Are there other PBM tools we can employ here? Can we agree that parenting is ALL trade offs? P173-175
Seems like Caplan’s spiel sums up the book perfectly on P177
Conclusion
Do parenting books toe a line too much? Does this book make a much more direct argument?
Has Caplan given you enough to want to have more kids or to have kids at all?
What are the major pushbacks of omissions in this book?
Physical toll of having more kids
Sample size in his referenced studies being enough
Treating kids as transactions can be problematic
Another advantage is that you might still have a child after the Muslim terrorists kill your other children.
How do you join a reading group?