The Marginal Value of an Average Birth
Are new neighbors harmful?
Births can be seen as a form of immigration. They create new citizens with new genomes who never lived in your country before. They can also be more costly than some types of immigration. For instance, controlling for race, we can compare the immigration of white English physicians to the United States against the birth of children of white Americans.
If we don’t control for IQ, an English doctor is clearly a larger value add over an average white American. Even if we do control for IQ, childhood is expensive. English doctors don’t consume American school and daycare for themselves, while the babies of white American doctors do. That, of course, does not mean that white physician babies aren’t a value add at the end of their lives. They almost certainly are. It just means that their childhood is expensive and subtracts from the net value add.
Most people being born are not going to be physicians or equivalent types of people. Yet their childhoods are similarly expensive. If, as adults, someone barely produce more than they take, then they can end up a net negative once one counts their childhood.
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