Friday, June 03, 2005

Do soldiers come from large families?

This article in the New York Times suggests that parents are one of the principal obstacles to military recruiting. I suppose this makes sense. Young men are less risk averse than any other adult group. I wonder, though, what the effect is on a parent's attitude of the number of children he or she has. I imagine that parents with only one or two children would be less willing to have a child in the military than a parent with four or five children.Now, of course, people from larger families are probably more likely to enter the military for reasons independent of family size. Nevertheless, I wonder how much family size, if you could control for the other factors, predicts likelihood of military service.

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