Eleven The High Price of Motherhood - More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg - #famigliaecarriera #causalitàocorrelazione #abortoallastessaetà #cercatoallastessaetà #nonvolutoallastessaetà #economistieprovettesporche
difficult trade-offs between family and career. Amalia Miller, a young economist at the University of Virginia, has thought hard about those trade-offs.Read more at location 1859
On average, a woman in her twenties will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year.Read more at location 1860
So if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you’re giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings.Read more at location 1863
A woman who gives birth at 24 might be a different sort of person from a woman who gives birth at 25,Read more at location 1868
maybe the 24-year-old started her family sooner precisely because she already saw that her career was going badly.Read more at location 1870
Instead of comparing random 24-year-old mothers with random 25-year-old mothers, she effectively compared 24-year-old mothers with 25-year-old mothers who had miscarried at 24.Read more at location 1871
But the comparison is still imperfect. Maybe miscarriages and low wages have a common cause—poor health, for example.Read more at location 1874
Let’s compare 25-year-old mothers with those 24-year-old mothers who conceived while using birth control. Now you’ve got two groups of women, none of whom wanted to be pregnant at 24.Read more at location 1877
Again, the experiment is imperfect. Getting pregnant while on birth control might be a symptom of carelessness, and carelessness can be a liability in the workplace.Read more at location 1879
a bunch of women who all report that they’d been trying to get pregnant since they were 23. Some succeeded at 24; others at 25.Read more at location 1880
None of these experiments—the miscarriage experiment, the birth-control experiment, and the “trying to get pregnant” experiment—is perfect, but all three point to the same conclusion.Read more at location 1882
In this case, the result is that early motherhood is not only correlated with low wages; it actually causes them. That’s largely what good empirical economics is about—finding thoughtful and creative ways to distinguish between correlation and causation.Read more at location 1885
Reminding an economist that correlation does not imply causation is like reminding a chemist to be sure his test tubes are clean.Read more at location 1889
Note: ECONOMISTI E RUBINETTI
