Children make you miserable

A blog post by Chris Dillow points to a paper by Luca Stanca arguing that having children makes people miserable. According to Stanca’s study of the statistics on subjective well-being: “On the basis of a purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational agent is zero”.

This raises awkward questions for proponents of happiness as the organising principle for individuals and society. Should people really have no children simply because the data shows that they are unlikely to make people happy overall?