should I have a baby?

Another day and another appalling calculator, and a generally imprudent commercial idea with adverse bias written all over it.  While Big Data could easily be used to help support the question “should I have a baby?”, this newly wide-spread application sadly fails as being the solution, including for so many non-financial reasons.   

Among the many actuarial considerations they evade, and without which will easily lead to inevitably false signals are:

* career compatibility with having a baby
* confidence in continued income growth
* current age
* health/longevity expectations
* estimated child care expenses
* any existing babies
* and most prominent, one’s enthusiasm in being a parent!

Today some are also on the fence about having one child, and then wind up through the pregnancy process with twins or triplets!  This topic of having children in society is an important one for us all to consider, as there are vital benefits and expenses to be allocated.  If we simply let people foolishly dispense private information in pursuit of computer-aided guidance on something so central to them, then we should at least have additional features to these sorts of websites.  Such as robust margin of errors presented, and details on what data sources and modeling techniques were applied.