Not having children to save money

[Rive]

...getting older contracts your dating pool.

I'm not sure that this statement is true without any constraints or should be limited to successful offspring production (or something along that line), but I'm pretty sure one better to be filthy rich to have realistic hope for (new) kids at age of 80

 

[FallenApple]

@FallenApple, do you have a source to back up your statistic above?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...omen-initiate-divorce-much-more-men-heres-why

Actually the statistic is for divorce rates. I remembered incorrectly.

 

[Rive]

It matches the theory of evolutionary psychology.

Evolution requires variations being present, while you are hooked on the single aspect of wealth - in an environment where it is really hard to say that significant percent of offspring originates from this kind of relationships.
I think you got carried away with this. Human psychology is not this simple.
And evolutionary psychology is a science which is just started to bloom, even its foundations are still fuzzy.

 

[FallenApple]

I think you missed the point of my original post. My point was that you can't reasonably infer anything from a single data point, regardless if it's in line with something you (or others) already believe.

At this point you seem to be arguing for the sake of argument. Witness:

Let's grant that getting richer expands your dating pool. As multiple people have already pointed out, getting older contracts your dating pool. Which process goes faster? Which one happens whether you want it to or not? Which one is to some degree contingent on good fortune?

I imagine you understand this; none of it is particularly surprising. If you're looking for a simple answer to "Is it possible to postpone having a family till later in my career (age ~40-50)?" then the answer is "It's possible; people have done it before." If you're trying to devise a to plan for that to happen, there are a lot of big contingencies to plan around. I'll wager if you're flexible enough with your definitions of career and family, you could come up with a pretty solid plan.

I'm not trying to infer from a single data point. I'm just saying that the theory says what it says it if I don't fit the theory, then my probability of success is drastically diminished. I'm not trying to prove or validate the theory. The theory is already established.

The thing is, yes I could date seriously now. Yes, I could try to start a family. And this would in turn put a huge financial burden on me. The way I see it, if I don't already have the $200,000 it takes to raise a kid, cash on hand, then its probably not a good idea to have the kid. It's similar to taking on debt. The moment you agree to the contract, you are obligated to pay back.

I have to balance being financially risk adverse with what I want. If it reduces the probability if me finding a future mate, then so be it.

Well, if I get a job that makes around 150K to 200K per year, then I would consider having a child. Otherwise, I would just date around to pass the time.

 

[FallenApple]

Evolution requires variations being present, while you are hooked on the single aspect of wealth - in an environment where it is really hard to say that significant percent of offspring originates from this kind of relationships.
I think you got carried away with this. Human psychology is not this simple.
And evolutionary psychology is a science which is just started to bloom, even its foundations are still fuzzy.

I just find evolutionary psychology to be a very interesting topic. And its best theory we have for how the human behavior we observe today originated. I agree, there would be variations present. Probabilistically speaking, survival for our female ancestors is more certain with well resourced males. This should shift the mode of the distribution of resource preferences to the right slowly over time.

 

[Rive]

survival for our female ancestors is more certain with well resourced males.

But in the same time, the rare resource of wealthy males were always very limited, what implies the existence of a pool of alternative selection criteria present - and actually those are the ones which would be responsible for the majority (!) of the choices...

 

[FallenApple]

But in the same time, the rare resource of wealthy males were always very limited, what implies the existence of a pool of alternative selection criteria present - and actually those are the ones which would be responsible for the majority (!) of the choices...

The highly attractive females can get those limited wealthy males

 

[gmax137]

The highly attractive females can get those limited wealthy males

attractive as defined by whom? do you really think "attractive" is a universal objective trait? or do you mean attractive is as defined by the wealthy males?

 

[FallenApple]

attractive as defined by whom? do you really think "attractive" is a universal objective trait? or do you mean attractive is as defined by the wealthy males?

Not completely universal but many traits are universal enough. Which is why there are some people that consistently are able to find many dates and why some people are not so lucky

Some traits simply have a higher market demand.

It's like Coca Cola. Even though there are some people that prefer Pepsi, the market is dominated by Coca Cola.

Same idea can be applied to traits in the dating market

This is reflected by the fact that the number of matches on dating websites for men follows the Pareto distribution.

Look at height for example. If there are equal preferences for men every height level, ( equal number of women have a fetish for 5'0 men as much as a 6'0 man or a 5'5 man etc, then the preference distribution would easily follow a uniform distribution. But it doesn't.

The same goes for wealth.

Simply put, attraction isn't uniformly distributed.

Famous psychologist, Jordon Peterson, has mentioned that women would rather share a high quality man than to have a male of low quality all to herself.

 

[Rive]

The highly attractive females can get those limited wealthy males

... kind of like having a hammer makes people see nails everywhere...

Wealth is really just the first 'measured' charm, nothing more: nothing less. Using it to explain everything is something similar to what in the past those Freud-maniac bearded dudes did around sexuality...
A more detailed look would show you many more of these (male) traits, from excessive muscles to grey hair and further. It is up to you if you want to see them or not.

 

[FallenApple]

... kind of like having a hammer makes people see nails everywhere...

Wealth is really just the first 'measured' charm, nothing more: nothing less. Using it to explain everything is something similar to what in the past those Freud-maniac bearded dudes did around sexuality...
A more detailed look would show you many more of these (male) traits, from excessive muscles to grey hair and further. It is up to you if you want to see them or not.

No its not just wealth. It is one part of a combination of factors. Height, Looks, Wealth, Personality.

 

[EngWiPy]

Whatever makes you happy. People can live without children, and you can find a partner that doesn't want them.

 

[DaveC426913]

I finally found the data I was looking for. I believe it was so hard to find because it's so fundamental that it just isn't of interest, and therefore does not show up in Google searches (even a search of journals like PubMed probably wouldn't turn it up).

This article contains the following graph, showing how births dramatically decrease as a function of paternal age:

If we take anyone vertical slice (such as the rightmost points) - it shows how births drop off dramatically with paternal age:

note: this data includes all births in a family, so the start of families is probably even more pronounced, since it will very strongly bias the data toward the left/younger.

So, I don't think anyone doubted this outcome.
Now we'll add some "advantage factor" - wealth or good looks. These could be anything, but I've made it a constant across the board - independent of age:

The question now becomes just how big an advantage must it be in order to more than offset the huge drop in changes due to increasing age?

 

[DaveC426913]

Roughly, the incidence of birth more than halves every five years the father ages.

 

[FallenApple]

I finally found the data I was looking for. I believe it was so hard to find because it's so fundamental that it just isn't of interest, and therefore does not show up in Google searches (even a search of journals like PubMed probably wouldn't turn it up).

This article contains the following graph, showing how births dramatically decrease as a function of paternal age:
View attachment 234459

If we take anyone vertical slice (such as the rightmost points) - it shows how births drop off dramatically with paternal age:
View attachment 234461

note: this data includes all births in a family, so the start of families is probably even more pronounced, since it will very strongly bias the data toward the left/younger.

So, I don't think anyone doubted this outcome.
Now we'll add some "advantage factor" - wealth or good looks. These could be anything, but I've made it a constant across the board - independent of age:

View attachment 234457The question now becomes just how big an advantage must it be in order to more than offset the huge drop in changes due to increasing age?

View attachment 234458

Fascinating. But its all births though. Not first births.

And also, we need to control for the person's attractiveness level and wealth to be absolutely certain that the association between low first births increasing age isn't due to unattractiveness or poverty.

 

[FallenApple]

The article mentioned the biological causal factor to be decreasing reproductive capacity for males after 40. So the biological clock isn't too strict. Still plenty of time left.

 

[Svein]

Roughly, the incidence of birth more than halves every five years the father ages.

View attachment 234462

That looks like a Poisson distribution...

 

[FallenApple]

That looks like a Poisson distribution...

Yes it does. And the Poisson distribution deals with independent events occurring over some fixed quantitative intervals.

Perhaps we can view the events taken over space, whatever that is, and the horizontal axis as the number of events occurring at that particular quantity, i.e age.

So viewed from this perspective, perhaps the number of events, age, is indeed independent of each other and happened by pure chance.

 

[DaveC426913]

Fascinating. But its all births though. Not first births.

Yes. As I pointed out, that makes it much worse for your case.

You are looking for first birth, since you're talking about starting a family.

If we were able to break that chart down by birth order, then only plot the ones relevant to you - a very large number of points would disappear from the right side of the graph. Those are the points you need to hit, and they're almost gone now.

And also, we need to control for the person's attractiveness level and wealth to be absolutely certain that the association between low first births increasing age isn't due to unattractiveness or poverty.

You posit a statistically highly unlikely scenario: that the data above just happens to have a huge bias of unusually poor and/or unusually unattractive men concentrated in the upper age brackets - for no particular reason than hugely bad luck on the part of the researchers. The point of taking a large sample is that such statistical unlikelihoods are so minimized as to be statistically-insignificant.

 

[DaveC426913]

Yes it does. And the Poisson distribution deals with independent events occurring over some fixed quantitative intervals.

It might look a bit like a duck, but it doesn't walk like a duck - it's not a duck.

 

[FallenApple]

Yes. As I pointed out, that makes it much worse for your case.

You are looking for first birth, since you're talking about starting a family.

If we were able to break that chart down by birth order, then only plot the ones relevant to you - a very large number of points would disappear from the right side of the graph. Those are the points you need to hit, and they're almost gone now.You posit a statistically highly unlikely scenario: that the data above just happens to have a huge bias of unusually poor and/or unusually unattractive men concentrated in the upper age brackets - for no particular reason than hugely bad luck on the part of the researchers. The point of taking a large sample is that such statistical unlikelihoods are so minimized as to be statistically-insignificant.

The point is you can have an effect due to a potential confounder regardless of sample size. One really does need to control for those.

There could be several reasons. Unattractiveness, poverty etc.

You need to consider free will too. Are these men the type of men who would choose to not have children?

Regarding the "bad luck" of the researchers. If being very unattractive and very poor results in low mating options, then it's possible that the observations of high age and low rate of producing children could be from the men being on the lower tail of the attractiveness and income distributions.

From the data you presented, it doesn't seem like the researchers excluded men that already have a child. Children are expensive, and hence we can expect that already having a child would reduce a man's chance of having another one. At a certain point, having more children wouldn't be sustainable financially. This needs to be controlled for as well.Here's an example of confounding. Say you sample a large amount of people and noticed that as alcohol consumption goes up, the risk of lung cancer goes up. Does that mean that lung cancer is due to alcohol? It's more plausible that its due to smoking and that people with addictive personalities would be more likely to smoke and drink. (And this could happen on a very large scale.). Thus, when looking at the subpopulation of people that don't smoke, but drink, you find that the correlation between amount of alcohol consumed and lung cancer would be insignificant, which makes perfect intuitive sense and matches theory as well.

 

[FallenApple]

It might look a bit like a duck, but it doesn't walk like a duck - it's not a duck.

Fair enough.

 

[DaveC426913]

Yes things can go many ways - and that include ways that work against you instead of for you.

If you're going to count on confounding factors, it is just as likely that the data has a hidden bias toward richer, younger men, and poorer older men, meaning, if this were factored out, your odds would be even worse than the data indicates. You don't know which.

So, you may well find a mate who wants to start a family with you, but all other things being equal, your chances will be drastically reduced as you age. It is often hard enough to find a compatible mate when there are hundreds of potentials (as most people seem to find) - suggesting that, of those hundreds - many of them just won't be a good fit, leaving them with a fraction. If that pool is reduced to a dozen, well now the good fit fraction comes down to just one or two.

I don't know how much wealth you intend to come into, but it will have to be enough to double your desirability to women, and keep doubling every five years - to offset the accumulating age penalty - just to break even in the desirability game.

 

[DaveC426913]

From the data you presented, it doesn't seem like the researchers excluded men that already have a child.

Yes. As I said, this works against you.

If the data were fine-grained enough to distinguish first child (say, blue dots instead of red dots) from subsequent children, we would see a very strong tendency for red dots to gather on the left side of the graph, and correspondingly fewer red dots on the right - where you intend to be. i.e. showing that your chances of having your first child is even lower than it appears now.

Conversely, by not distinguishing between first and subsequent children, the above chart falsely presents a much higher possibility of you having a first child later in life than you can expect.

 

[DaveC426913]

OMG, can't someone with some statistics chops weigh in here?? Surely the OP is cherry-picking his population bias' to suit what appears to be his overly-optimistic thinking.

I'm not wise enough in the ways of Statistics-Fu to state that succinctly.

 

[FallenApple]

The reason why I was able to date an attractive woman 8 years younger than me is simple. Did my height change compared to my early twenties? Did my voice change? Did anything change? The only thing that changed is that my face looks slightly older while the positioning of all its features are just as it was then.

Say I wait until I am 40 to start a family. Would women choose a 6'1, well muscled, wide shouldered, good looking, deep voiced man with a good amount of savings, albeit middle aged with some signs of wrinkles on a otherwise good face, or would they go for the Average Joe living paycheck to paycheck, but happens to be younger? That's really what it boils down to.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Would women choose a 6'1, well muscled, wide shouldered, good looking, deep voiced man with a good amount of savings, albeit middle aged with some signs of wrinkles on a otherwise good face, or would they go for the Average Joe living paycheck to paycheck, but happens to be younger? That's really what it boils down to.

I don't think women are quite as shallow as that, and you're counting on the exceptions.



"Sometimes your shallowness is so thorough, it's almost like depth."

 

[FallenApple]

I don't think women are quite as shallow as that, and you're counting on the exceptions.



"Sometimes your shallowness is so thorough, it's almost like depth."

Attraction is non negotiable. Fair or unfair, it is what it is.

I am attracted to certain traits in women. If none of those traits are there, then it would be very difficult to sustain a relationship. I'm not judging their personality based on said traits. I can sustain a friendship with a woman I'm not attracted to just fine. Since when has sexual attraction ever been reduced to a judgment of character or the compatibility of background? Never because that isn't the purpose. And it works both ways, male attraction to female and female attraction to male. No one is going to have a happy relationship with someone they find unattractive.

 

[FallenApple]

OMG, can't someone with some statistics chops weigh in here?? Surely the OP is cherry-picking his population bias' to suit what appears to be his overly-optimistic thinking.

I'm not wise enough in the ways of Statistics-Fu to state that succinctly.

It's not about the stats. Associations are useless without theory to back it up. What we need isn't a statistician, but an evolutionary psychologist.

 

[Rive]

Cultural evolution/selection at work.
:shrug:
I would say we should just let things go on their own way.