Not having children to save money

[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.

 

[DaveC426913]

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.

No. It's about the stats.

An evo-psych will be able provide an the answer that is in line with what you want that is plausible to you.
The stats will tell you what really is happening - which is a better indicator of what women are actually choosing.

 

[DaveC426913]

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.

None if which has anything to do with starting a family. This is a total strawman, just like the dating thing.

Women - particularly older women - cannot afford to confuse attraction with ability to raise a family.

 

[FallenApple]

None if which has anything to do with starting a family. This is a total strawman, just like the dating thing.

Women - particularly older women - cannot afford to confuse attraction with ability to raise a family.

Ultimately, both the ability to raise a family and attraction are both absolutely needed to start a family. How is a woman even supposed to get pregnant if there is no physical attraction?

Obviously when women considers having children, she would look for a man with the means to raise the child. This would require financial and emotional stability.

But frequent copulation between partners clearly requires high amounts of raw physical attraction. Otherwise, it's unlikely that the frequency of copulation will result in a bullseye( pregnancy)

 

[FallenApple]

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

Cultural evolution is too complicated. The simpler explanation is from evolutionary psychology. The V-Taper is beautiful because athletic men needed to be good hunters, the hourglass shape is beautiful because it indicates fertility and and has an important role in childbirth. Resources are important because sometimes things might run out.

All of those are simple explanations. No need for something way out there like cultural evolution. Parsimony is key.

 

[FallenApple]

No. It's about the stats.

An evo-psych will be able provide an the answer that is in line with what you want that is plausible to you.
The stats will tell you what really is happening - which is a better indicator of what women are actually choosing.

Blind stats will tell you what is happening in the aggregate. But since evo-psych is has differing suggestions, then the responsible statistical technique to adopt is to control for those variables that I have suggested. If after controlling for attractiveness, wealth/income, and personal choice to remain celibate and/or childless, and we still see that age has a huge association with childlessness, then I will admit that age has a much higher likelihood of having a large causal effect than I have previously thought.

 

[DaveC426913]

Ultimately, both the ability to raise a family and attraction are both absolutely needed to start a family. How is a woman even supposed to get pregnant if there is no physical attraction?

False.

Cultural evolution is too complicated. The simpler explanation is from evolutionary psychology. The V-Taper is beautiful because athletic men needed to be good hunters, the hourglass shape is beautiful because it indicates fertility and and has an important role in childbirth. Resources are important because sometimes things might run out.

No.

My primitive ancestors feared leopards too, but I can look at a picture of a leopard without fear. We are not doomed to follow the instincts of our forebears; we do not live in the same world. 21st century men do not need to be good physical hunters.

You talk about hypothetical ancestral drivers. But modern fathers come in all shapes and sizes. Women do not need to choose their mates based on traits are are no longer applicable to a stable family; they are not idiots.

The primary driver, by far, is modern cultural factors.

stats will tell you what is happening in the aggregate.

Yes, which - because you are both trying to predict the future, and predict the behavior of people you cannot control - is the best you have to go on.

It is the best indicator of what you will actually encounter, not what you suppose you should encounter.

 

[FallenApple]

False.No.

My primitive ancestors feared leopards too, but I can look at a picture of a leopard without fear. We are not doomed to follow the instincts of our forebears; we do not live in the same world. 21st century men do not need to be good physical hunters.

You talk about hypothetical ancestral drivers. But modern fathers come in all shapes and sizes. Women do not need to choose their mates based on traits are are no longer applicable to a stable family; they are not idiots.

The primary driver, by far, is modern cultural factors.Yes, which - because you are both trying to predict the future, and predict the behavior of people you cannot control - is the best you have to go on.

It is the best indicator of what you will actually encounter, not what you suppose you should encounter.

Women forcing themselves to endure sex with a man she finds highly unattractive just to have a child for cultural reasons?... that's not idiocy, that's insanity. I doubt that really happens with great frequency.

Well I suppose that's why affairs exist.

I don't think we have changed that much from our ancestral selfs. The brain structures haven't changed much since the hunter gatherer era made up a far greater percentage of humanity than modern culture has.

 

[DaveC426913]

Women forcing themselves to endure sex with a man she finds highly unattractive just to have a child for cultural reasons?... that's not idiocy, that's insanity. I doubt that really happens with great frequency.

No one suggested any such thing. This is way, way off-topic. Let's dispense with the straw men please, and get back to facts.

 

[FallenApple]

No one suggested any such thing. This is way, way off-topic. Let's dispense with the straw men please, and get back to facts.

Sure, but that's essentially the implication if culture is valued far above attractiveness and income to the point where the latter two barely even matter.

Back on topic then, evolutionary psychology do show wealth and looks to be very important factors in a man for a woman looking to rear a child with.

 

[DaveC426913]

Back on topic then, evolutionary psychology do show wealth and looks to be very important factors in a man for a woman looking to rear a child with.

All right. I've shown my data; you show yours.

 

[pinball1970]

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.

Ive been following this and I should not be surprised by the scientific analysis. All compelling and sounds reasonable but having a kid should be with the love of your life. Or best attempts.

 

[DaveC426913]

Ive been following this and I should not be surprised by the scientific analysis. All compelling and sounds reasonable ...

Would you say the OP's response in #105 is compelling and reasonable?

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.

This sure sounds to me like he's applying a bias that arbitrarily falls in his favour, and hoping it sounds like a reasonable assumption.
He doesn't seem to take into account
- that larger samples will tend to have smaller biases, or that
- that same bias could just as easily fall the other way, so choosing one but on the other is skewing the apparent expectation.

 

[ZeGato]

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

I don't think that data is that relevant to be honest. Is it guaranteed that all the men included WANTED to have children, or was it just doing a global research on the fathers' ages? Because if it's the later, it may just reflect the unwilingness to have children as you get older, not the likelihood of having children at a particular age, given that you want to.
Aside from that though, fertility does decrease as men get older, so it's in fact harder to have children. I suspect that controlling for willingness to have children, the drop in birth rate at a given age wouldn't be that severe as that data shows though.

 

[DaveC426913]

Did that survey guarantee that all the men included WANTED to have children, or was it just doing a global research on the fathers' ages? Because if it's the later, it may just reflect the unwilingness to have children as you get older, not the likelihood of having children at a particular age, given that you want to.

My intent was simply showing what people are actually doing, regardless of motive. This will be a good indicator of what the OP can expect the pool to look like when he's ready.

 

[FallenApple]

My intent was simply showing what people are actually doing, regardless of motive. This will be a good indicator of what the OP can expect the pool to look like when he's ready.

Ultimately, it comes down to if you have some sort of causal scientific casual explanation or not.

1) It just makes sense to me that handsome tall men are wanted in accordance to evolutionary psychology, which has been heavily researched. Also men with resources are desired as well, which is also clearly in accordance with evolutionary psychology.

2) This is all ignoring the fact that many men may not want to have children at all, or that once they already have had children, they simply have less of a psychological need to have further children, which is also in line with the observation that the rate of child production reduces with age.

This is enough justification to ask for a study that specifically controls for these potential confounders that might show that the statistical association which you presented might be a spurious association.

Just because there is a connection doesn't mean there is a causation. This happens so many times in statistical analysis when the underlying science isn't taken into account. This is one of the reasons why( among many) that statistical studies in the social sciences, and maybe in other sciences as well, have a replicability issue.

A statistical association in and of itself of a study merely means that the "result" is worthy of a second look, nothing more.

Furthermore, the bias doesn't go either way, there is no reason so suspect that men are rejected because they are handsome and wealthy. This is so very intuitive that it isn't surprising at all if it went in my favor.

It not simply the bias is directed is in my favor, it's that it doesn't make sense if it went the other way because science can't explain it if it did.

The science clearly suggests that those with desirable genetic traits along with resources would be the ideal types for child rearing.

Genetic traits I'm referring to are tantamount to traits essential to mating and survival during most of human evolution[early from our psychological perspective, but recent nonetheless], since organisms do not evolve on a such a short time scale such as that of the industrial revolution till now. Modern civilization compared to what? A few hundred years compared to hundreds of thousands of years of human structural development, it doesn't compare at all,

There are many "vestigal" traits that are no longer useful in the modern sense, but are still sought after just because they have been useful for much of the human history, which is vastly ancestral. The advent of human written language is just a very small speck compared to the overall scale of the human evolution.

 

[FallenApple]

Summary:

1) I would still have these highly sought after physical vestigial traits that have been considered highly attractive for much of human history even when I'm age 40 to 50 years of age, (maybe not beyond that).

2) by then I would be much more wealthier than I am now, which has also been theorized (wealth that is) as being important to attraction and child rearing.

By the combination of 1) and 2), ( which are so important) I should be able to offset the loss in "looks" due to older age by the time I am older should I have 1) and 2).

 

[DaveC426913]

...I would still have these highly sought after physical vestigial traits that have been considered highly attractive for much of human history...
...I would be much more wealthier than I am now...

Let's just hope she doesn't find modesty to be an important trait.

Look, we have been in the zone of wild speculation for a while now. You appear to be placing your bets on women with the mating instincts of our prehistoric ancestors. There's nothing to stop you, but I can't speak to that, so I'll leave you to it. Carry on.

 

[Dale]

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.

This type of data is exceptionally solid. This is vital statistics data from the CDC which gets birth record data from all the hospitals in the US. This is almost not sample data but population data. The only births that would not be included in this data would be births for which no medical attention was sought, which is such a minuscule portion of all births that I think it can be safely neglected and it can be considered to be the population.

When you speak about biases you are concerned that a sample may not represent the population. That concern simply doesn’t apply if you study the entire population. Because this is population data, then attractive/rich/whatever men are also in this data already, to the exact degree and frequency that they are in the population as a whole.

 

[DaveC426913]

Yeah. Wot Dale said.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

What? And miss the priceless moment when I learned that BOTH my sons are majoring in Physics?