Children: inferior good?

Weekend: Dersha and I are Beirut Tourney 2k9 Champions.
Hasty Pudding was AMAZING. Dirty jokes and econ jokes all night long. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Notes from Development: [I love gapminder.]

When you put "children per woman" on the y-axis and "income per person" on the x-axis you see a downward sloping curve, which indicates that children are an inferior good.

Inferior good: a good for which your demand decreases as your income increases.
Examples:
1) bus rides (when you make more money, you buy a car and drive...a hybrid, of course)
2) cup noodles (when you make more money, you say "F*** this cancer in a cup, I'm going to eat a meal cooked by Ming Tsai at Blue Ginger")

However, Professor Lucas says that children are not an inferior good. Rather, births are an inferior good. AND she told us that natural birth rate is something RIDICULOUS like 14 per woman. Madness.

So we were listing reasons that people decide to have children and here was our list:
investment in future
labor
can't help it [lack of birth control, education, etc]
cultural norms
religion
curiosity [to see what your kids would look like]

Do you think there are people with really low self-esteem who are thinking, if I have any love for children, I will not have any b/c they might look like me? Because I feel like if I had a really awful genetic disorder, I would not want to risk my kids being born with it. I'm not equating ugliness with genetic disorders, although studies have shown that better looking people tend to make more money. Just wondering aloud...

And of course, Professor Lucas had to remind us all of another reason:
b/c people like children and children bring them joy

at which point Evelyne and Annie and I were like, "oh yeah..."

Replacement fertility [the number of children each woman must have to keep population stable] is 2.1. So remember, when you have kids, make sure you have a little more than 2 of them...