How Many Children Do We Want?

I was struck by the appearance of two op-eds in the New York Times on the same day. One, by Ma Jian, decried the one-child rule in China and the way it is enforced. The other, by Thomas Friedman, talked about the large number of children being born in Yemen and the way in which this handicaps development.

Clearly, both writers have a point. The conjunction between these two essays, however, points to the problem we have in talking about population growth. Population is the elephant in the room for environmentalists. On the one hand, population is still growing at an alarming rate, and I don’t know anyone who looks forward to living in a world whose population has grown to 9 or 10 billion – a world we’re very likely to see in my lifetime. On the other hand, many people are uncomfortable with the idea of limiting the number of children someone can have, with its associations to eugenics and forced abortions.

This is where the idea of choice architecture becomes useful. Choice architecture is a term popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

to describe the way in which people’s choices may be influenced by the social and physical context in which they are made. Given that the context has an influence anyway, why not try to construct a context that influences people in a desirable way? We think of the desire for children as innate and unchangeable, but changing rates of population growth demonstrate that this "basic" instinct is highly malleable. Examples of contextual influences include societal attitudes about childlessness and tax incentives that encourage fewer, or more, children. Women tend to have fewer children when they have more educational and occupational opportunities – so providing these would be an important part of the architecture.Of course, all of this only works if people have the choice NOT to have children, meaning there is good access to contraception.

Thinking about how to frame choices has the potential to be useful in a wide range of circumstances. But it’s particularly important here, where so many are afraid to suggest limiting the number of children, and yet the consequences of an unlimited number are so profound.