Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Importance: 2 | # | acx, kids
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?
I read SRTHMK hoping it would have some loophole, One Weird Trick that would let me stop feeling overwhelmed and join the ranks of those pronatalist influencers who blog about how childcare is great and you should go ahead and have kids right now, even if you’re only twenty-five, even if you don’t have your career totally figured out, even if you lost all your limbs in a tragic boating accident and are incapable of independent movement. It doesn’t, at least not for one-year-olds.
This book always felt like it pushed things much further than it could be (maybe it was necessary to overdo it a little considering the current consensus). I found myself more convinced with better arguments like here.