The Long Term Effects of Birth Control

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Here are a few of the highlights from this working paper:

  • Individuals’ access to contraceptives increased their children’s college completion, labor force participation, wages, and family incomes decades later.
  • Mothers in states permitting the sale of the Pill are less likely to report their children were unwanted or ill-timed—an outcome strongly associated with subsequent developmental issues and diminished lifetime human capital and earnings.
  • Greater access to family planning programs results in a statistically significant 2 percent increase in family income.
  • Children born just after family planning programs began were more likely to complete at least 12, 13, and 16 years of education
  • Children conceived in areas with greater legal or financial access to family planning went on to live in higher-earning households as adults than did children conceived in the same areas whose mothers had less access to family planning.
  • Both increasing legal access and increasing financial access to the Pill are associated with a 2 to 3 percent increase in family income. Scaling these estimates by a guess at the share of children benefiting from them implies much larger effects, perhaps around a 20 to 30 percent gain in family incomes for the children of directly benefiting families.
  • Children conceived in areas with greater financial access to contraception were 2 to 7 percent more likely to attain 16 or more years of education.

In summary, Birth Control is good for the economy, and families.

 

Economic recovery or not, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:

Economic recovery or not, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer:

Not so long ago I made the argument that the numbers showing that the economic recovery only benefited the rich were exaggerated and out of context. I argued that since the wealthiest people in the country kept their money in the stock market when it crashed, they made it all back and then some during the recovery while the middle class pulled out of the market and lost most of what they had invested and didn't benefit from the rebound. You can see that tweet here. My good friend and economist Rob Mahrt was quick to counter with the data and charts in this article and summed them up concisely in this tweet to help me understand why I was wrong. The rich really did get richer during the economic recovery even controlling for capital gains, which is the money made from investments. What is worse, the poor got poorer too. The number of Americans living in poverty climbed to 46.5 million last year, but the poverty rate remained at 15%. The poverty threshold is $23,492 for a family of four. That works out to the entire family spending a total (including housing, food, insurance, etc) of $66 dollars a day or about $16 per person. That is extremely low in my eyes. The only positive takeaway from this report was that slightly more people have health insurance. We have a long way to go.