Man Would Not Sell His Baby For $50,000

Mark Oppenheimer has a lovely piece up on Medium called “Forty Thoughts on a Fourth Daughter,” about how and why he and his wife decided to have four entire children (all lady children, too). He mentions that if you have more than a couple of kids people assume you are either very religious or not very intelligent, which, yes. But apparently they just love kids a lot:

There must be some principle of economics that describes the situations whereby some items become more valuable once they are yours. That is, you might only pay $50 for a shirt, but some shirts, once you own them, you wouldn’t sell for less than $100. Children are like that. The child you never had may be an abstract source of disappointment, but once you have any given child, life without her (or him) becomes unthinkable. It could be stated more crassly: I don’t think we would have paid more than $50,000 to get a fourth child — I just made that number up, but it sounds right — yet now that we have her, we wouldn’t part with her for anything.

First of all, I am glad to see Oppenheimer would not sell his baby for $50,000, but also, the shirt thing! You know when you’re at the store looking at clothes and you see a shirt and you kind of squint at it, wondering if it’s going to just be another shirt you wear once in awhile or if it’s going to be a Shirt for you, that you want to wear every day all the time and you feel wonderful and complete with it, if only you had better jeans and shoes? Being able to tell how meaningful clothes will be before you buy them would be a GREAT superpower. Same with having babies, actually.

Photo: JoeRobb

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