>> The Most Common Reasons Not To Have Kids Are Financial
not the same as “fewer than desired”
Yep, the entire survey is inherently flawed - on an epistemological level. Specifically, even if we exclude other possible flaws (survey has already established that the respondent can physically have children, respondent is able to filter out social desirability bias, respondent is not subject to cultural biases, etc.), the survey question is still fundamentally flawed due to causal ambiguity. The survey merely gathers perceived explanations rather than true causal knowledge.
There is a basic human tendency to discount or understate long-term consequences of our actions. The state of the world in 20 years, the cost of college tuition for our (yet-to-be-born) children, etc. are vague. Normally, the human mind would underweight such distant possibilities. But here, in the case at hand, the respondents actually over-emphasize the long-range difficulties.
Why?
Regards,