Chronic Murmuring

ok you're creeping me out.

but to step into your hypothetical world, shouldnt the parents see the kids as investments, not liabilities?

Infanticide was somewhat common in antiquity, in part for the economic reasons you cite (though it had nothing to do with child labor laws, of course). Unfortunately, though, I can't offer any references in the event that you're interested in this.

Signed,

Useless grad student

P.S. Note the new web address.

By the way, I think that your thought experiment is without enough factors that would potentially govern a parent's choice whether or not to abandon a newborn. Even in antiquity there were debates concerning proper practices in relation to the function of infanticide and scope of infanticide, and so I would think that your subjects moral beliefs need to play a considerable role in the outcome.

Oh, and I second BobW: you're creeping me out. :-)

You're a strange buckaroo Scott. Big part of why I dig you so much. Figure out an excuse to get up to Chattavegas and we'll get down. I'm startin' to get a hankerin' for sour mash whiskey. Like takin' a big drink of Kentucky.

But you're not allowed to kill any children while you're here. Even theoretically. That's right out.

Wayne, yeah you're completely right. I don't really have anything to base a prediction on, yet, because I don't have any kind of theory. It may not really be the way to go about it by thinking about the child labor law, either, since child labor laws were instituted in the 20th century, and while I wouldn't be surprised if it did affect household structure, I doubt it resulted in parents off'ing their children to keep costs down. I need to do some more thinking about it.

bobw - I keep trying to write a reply, but each time, I erase it. Like Wayne said, I need to make this more complete because there's not enough factors in place that would allow me to predict anything. I think my initial response, though, is that given the extreme poverty that I'm imagining for my hypothetical economy, the family cannot afford the investment. This is not uncommon when you consider developing countries. They oftentimes cannot afford to invest in anything because their production each day is roughly equal to what they need for subsistence. This is one reason why I've read for why it is good for governments to subsidize education in developing countries - specifically in the form of paying parents to send their kids to school. They would send their kids to school but they can't, because they need their children's wages to survive. But, from the macro perspective, investments in education are believed to be a principal driver of increasing living standards. So there's a critical region where theoretically a nation can't actually grow because they're not able to invest in things which give them a future return. In the same way, I was thinking that maybe the investment idea might not make sense to some poorer families on my make-believe world. Maybe infanticide isn't a realistic outcome - or if it is, it's definitely not theoretically clear to me. But I was just thinking along the lines of what would happen when children are valued for economic reasons and a policy no longer allows parents to use their children for that end. For one, over the long run, you might expect this to affect family's fertility decisions. They may have smaller families if they cannot expect to use their children in household production. Would it lead, though, to infanticide? That does seem extreme. Maybe instead of infanticide, we might see families merging (ie, extended families) who could share resources. But I was just going over the idea in my head - why do socieities choose to kill their offspring? Even if we just forget, for a second, our society which has such high rates of abortion relative to other countries - why does infanticide (ie, death by exposure, etc.) arise in primitive communities? Is it purely religio-cultural in nature, or are there economic forces at play, too? I don't know. I don't know anything about infanticide, so I was just thinking about a hypothetical situation involving child labor laws. Child labor is specifically caused by poverty. As incomes increase, parents do not usually send their kids to work until their teenage years, and even then, it's for the child to have disposable income. But what if child labor was outlawed, and the function of child labor in the first place was for household production. If they cannot afford to keep their children, they might be inclined to abandon them, kill them, send them to shelters or homes of some kind. The point being - it would seem that household composition could be affected by a policy like that, although precisely in what way I'm not sure.