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Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.
I presume by this you mean "mothers being stressed causes their children to be less healthy and less intelligent" rather than "those women who are likely to have less intelligent, less healthy children are also more likely to be stressed". Do you have a source and an estimate of the effect size? Based on the sorts of things I've seen (example), the effects exist but are usually quite small. For example, the highest effect size I found in that study was r=0.16 for maternal exposure to a natural disaster, which explains about 2.5% of the variance in outcomes -- and most of that effect size came from a single n=20 study about an ice storm, so I expect the effect size in practice is even smaller than that.
I expect this is almost the entire effect in practice.
From a purely economic viewpoint I doubt that. I think the opportunity cost of being a homemaker is genuinely higher now than it used to be. Also the benefits are both distributed across society, and the benefits of choosing the homemaker route are not as legible as they could be to the women making that decision.
I am not sure if a 40-day ice storm can be compared with years of chronic stress occurring pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the post-pregnancy years crucial for childhood development. Table 2 in your study shows a .24 effect size for cognitive development due to ice storms however. What I do is plug in “maternal stress [serious problem]” into google scholar and consider those results. I have never come across a study that attempted to unify all of the different provlems caused by stressed mothers. We have:
autism: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.1830 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01745-3
obesity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/obr.12951
The above are for prenatal stress, and so don’t factor for stress during motherhood, breastfeeding technique, extent of breastfeeding (huge differences in yr+ exclusive feeding and gradual weening)
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I read him to mean older mothers are likely to have less intelligent kids because egg and sperm quality degrades as humans age. Not sure if it is true though it seems plausible. I’m not sure I would really trust the science here since the result is clearly politically salient.
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Even if none of that is true, you’re also dealing with the added costs associated with outsourcing child-rearing. Daycare generally costs enough that the second income doesn’t go as far as it would on paper.
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I am not sure where your quote is coming from, I didn't say anything about "more" economic value compared to some other state of affairs.
In any case if your argument is correct it suggests my proposal would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. We can simply tax away part of the social gains of raising children and remit it to the women doing the raising and we will all come out better off. Let's get it done!
I think the argument is that it increases overall utility; not money. So whilst kaldor hicks efficient it may be hard to compensate the losers with a tax on the winners if there is less pecuniary wealth.
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