Bryan Caplan had a great post last week combining statistics, biology, and parenting to lead to the conclusion that weird people should have more kids. First, the statistics. If there is a zero correlation between parental and child traits then your child is as likely to be as similar to you as is a stranger. If the correlation between parent and child traits is greater than zero then you are more likely to be like your child than a stranger but only if you yourself are not normal. Here is Bryan:
Take a look:
Parent-Child Correlation
r= 0
r=.5
You
Stranger
Child
Stranger
Child
Percentile/
Expected
Percentile
50th
50th
50th
50th
50th
95th
50th
50th
50th
80th
99.99th
50th
50th
50th
95th
Notice that regardless of the value of r, normal people can expect to be like their kids. But that's not saying much, because normal people can expect to be like any random person they meet! The story's very different for weirdos. By definition, weirdos never have much in common with random strangers. With a zero parent-child correlation, weirdos will feel equally alienated from their children. As the parent-child correlation rises, however, weirdos' incompatibility with strangers stays the same, but their expected compatibility with their children gets stronger and stronger.
Now let's look at these facts like a mad economist. There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you. One is to meet them; the other is to make them. If you're average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere. If you're weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between. But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos' odds of making people like themselves get better and better.
…The lesson: As your weirdness increases, so does your incentive to have kids. If you like football and American Idol, you're never really alone. You don't need to build a Xanadu for yourself. But if you're a lonely misfit, oddball, freak, or weirdo, then find a like-minded spouse and make new life together. Let the normals laugh at you. You'll have each other.
Of course this only makes sense for weirdos who want to meet more people like themselves.
According to this logic, should one have fewer children in an age of Google, email, etc., since "similar" strangers are now much easier to meet?
"Let the normals laugh at you. You'll have each other." I came to this post just after reading on another blog about Charlie Sheen, who uses his drug problems as fodder for sitcom jokes normals laugh at, and about his father's "painfully honest and vivid accounts of what drunken, domineering, violent and egotistical fathers do to their sons." I'm not sure to what extent they "have each other."
Alex fails to mention the third way to surround yourself with people like you: imagine them. I have made many wonderful friends over the course of my life in this way.
This method also has the advantage that such friends spring forth full grown like Athena from Zeus' brow. You don't need to wait for them to grow up to embrace the fulsomeness of their intrinsic weirdness.
On a separate note, it is amply apparent that Alex Tabarrok is quite weird himself.
…because it wasn't hard enough to take economists seriously. Tell us again whether the New Deal was good or extended the Great Depression.
Good thing that Alex's post on the Inflation-Unemployment Tradeoff shows that he doesn't read the comments.
Oh, so that's why my in-laws had 12 kids!
Is this post actually Alex hitting on Tyler ??
Nevermind the marginal cost of additional kids…
Except that your kids are not friends to hang out with, they are a responsibility to be taken very seriously.
If you are having kids in the hope that they will "be like you" and you'll feel less isolated in your weirdness, you — and they — are well and truly f*cked.
why should i want to surround myself with people *like* myself? for some definition of "like", that sounds a.) boring and b.) unnecessarily stiff competition. if i were a mad economist, i'd want to surround myself with people whose interests coincided with mine (i.e. people whose goals were complementary to mine) vs. people who liked all the same things i did (and thus would be more likely to fight me for them).
i think you need additional assumptions of like-minded people not just competing for same resources, but able to create and produce within their own worlds. or perhaps look at similarity in meta-traits rather than in specific preferences.
@adrian "Of course this only makes sense for weirdos who want to meet more people like themselves."
So, I guess I need to get busy and have some kids. But definitely not today.
So this assumes parent do not kids at all? Caplanian to its extreme I guess…
Hieronymous, your argument boils down to "normal people are normal". More information flow makes it more likely that normal people in San Diego are consuming the same junk that normal people in Boston consume; but it also means that those of us who are weird have a much better opportunity to find things to be weird about, and to find other people to be weird with.
Unless, of course, you're contending that there were more SF conventions in AD1600 than there are now.
"The Gruesomes"
Weirdly and Creepella Gruesome, along with their son Gobby, move into Tombstone Manor, next door to the Flintstones. Trying to be neighborly, Fred and Barney agree to babysit Gobby, whose strange pets make for a tortuously eventful evening.
– Season 5, Episode 9
It would be nice if Bryan's argument were true but it's utter nonsense. "The Average Man" doesn't exist, and his whole argument rests on the assumption that he does. That is, "normal" averages a way a whole lot of very real variation. But more to the point, "weird" averages away even more. If I'm weird in way X it's very plausible that I'm likely to have a child that's weird in way Y and we won't relate very well. Bottom line is you can't boil personality down to a single dimension and do statistics with it. You can certainly produce numbers that way but they don't mean anything.
Laserlight: The earlier commenter argued that humans naturally tend toward weirdness because of a mathematical theory involving independent traits, when in fact they are similar in their material needs, their learning, and what they do every day, and more so because of modern phenomena.
At a SciFi convention, a bunch of people who like popular well-marketed shows, games, films, dress up in the same costumes, drive from their normal jobs and schools, and continue to believe the popular progressive or libertarian ideology they learned from the uniform culture and school curriculum.
It's so weird that millions of people do it, everyone else knows about it, and entire factories produce costumes, figurines, and DVDs with worldwide distribution.
There may be more monarchists at the SciFi convention with hand-knit costumes who prefer Rossum's Universal Robots to Star Trek, but that's cliche and milquetoast compared to even Hobbes' Leviathon, which is in the standard curriculum.
Who wants to be normal? Normal people (in the U.S.) have no savings and a lot of debt. If you are extremely good at anything, by definition you are not normal. Bill Gates, Warren
Buffet, Lebron James, Eddie Van Halen, Thomas Edison, and Einstein are/were not normal. Sometimes weird people change the world for the better. Normal people don't have that capability.
just how does Caplan imagine that weird guys will engender progeny?
I would imagine Caplan considers himself weird (he admits to having struggled to acquire "social intelligence") and he appears to be married.
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