Children can be an economic benefit to a household in two primary ways: by providing labor or wages to the family when they are still young, mostly a thing of the past, and by providing support and care for aging, retired parents. A guaranteed pension will tend to reduce the interest in having enough children of one’s own to rely on in old age. Births will go down. This is not a mere theory: Italian scholars Alessandro Cigno and Furio Rosati estimated that “as much as three-quarters of the reduction in the total fertility rate which occurred in Italy between 1930 and 1984 can be ascribed to
...more
