http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/nyregion/large-poor-families-are-left-out-of-new-yorks-housing-plans-officials-say.html is one of my favorite New York Times articles in a long time. The best minds of government and non-profit organizations (and journalism, since the NYT saw fit to run the story on the front page) have discovered that it is challenge to support and house a family of eight (two parents plus six children) in New York City on an income of $1700/month (roughly my stipend as a single graduate student at MIT in the early 1990s!).
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Remarkable, thanks for the pointer! Amazingly enough I miss the front page of NYT.
“We’ve learned as a community that having a big number to shoot for is important”. “I like kids, so I make more,” he said. “My culture has a lot of kids.”
How can you begin to respond? You don’t compromise with your culture and community, do you? It’s like going back on evolution. They might not even be wrong (besides hoping for the subsidy).
I remember reading a recent review of some parenting book in the New Yorker whose author backed into the right number of children to have as ~3 on the basis of a “present value” type calculation, because people underestimate the future benefit of kids: It’s hard for 1 child to take care of her parents when they’re old, so +1, but between the two, one might be more feckless or just move far away etc… so you hedge and get a 3rd one. So when you’re old and need help… even though you’re still poor, the ~1.5-2 risk adjusted kids are now taking care of you instead of being a burden. QED.