"The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition."
Or it may be people who are more self-centered, more impulsive, more present-oriented, and with less executive function.
Or it may be both, and society will continue to bifurcate into the equivalents of Belmont and Fishtown. What will be lost will be the middle of people who are together enough to control their fertility and whose utility function prefers all the things they can do today and tomorrow and next year if they don't have kids (the opportunity cost theory of fertility crash, e.g., https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/).
"the opportunity cost theory" amounts to saying that people have decided there are things they would rather do. It says that people have the desired amount of children, when in fact surveys consistently show people wanting more children than they end up having. And I don't think it deals well with my observation that there is deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers. You can make a tautology out of "people choose X over Y because they want to," but it is less persuasive when they seem to want Y at age 20 and again at age 50 but choose X at age 30 and are stuck with it.
No, it doesn't say they have the desired amount of children. It is in some ways a tragic theory. It says that day to day and month to month, people decide they don't want kids NOW. They want to have kids "when they're ready". This is some times referred to as the "capstone" strategy for kids as opposed to the "foundation". Kids are a capstone AFTER you have finished your schooling, established yourself at your job, and hopefully have a house with a yard. For some people, this will be an easy change, but for lots of people it will be difficult to break habits that have been years in the making. Even those who then have a kid may well decide to stop after one. It's a bigger change than they realized. "When am I ever going to get enough sleep." "All she does is eat and poop." Also, fertility declines so having more kids (or that first one) may be difficult--or impossible to do naturally.
There may well be a "deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers" but, as Tom Schelling has observed, 55 year old me is a different person than 25 year old me.
It is a common observation that people over-discount the future. Throughout most of history, kids were not so much a conscious choice as something that happened after sex. Now that kids are for many people a conscious choice, that over-discounting comes into play. So people end up with fewer kids than they say they actually want.
Nowadays, wanting kids is like wanting to lost weight. "I want to lose weight but I get so hungry on a diet and I'd rather watch tv than exercise and ..." "I want to have kids but I don't want to give up vacations or eating out or all the other things the two of us enjoy. I have to get a promotion and we have to save enough to buy a house (but I don't want to give up those vacations and eating out and all those other things in order to build up a big nest egg).
Some of us knew when we were children that we weren't interested in having kids at all. But marriage was an assumed goal. So I was found by a not-interested-in-kids man & we've been together for pushing 50 years. High C + high openness personalities with dark triad tendencies. Perhaps just as well we are not reproducing.
"Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" can join "Time Inconsistent Preferences" and "Bounded Rationality" and - what I would add - "Bounded Conscientiousness". All are really pseudo-technical euphemisms for the more common, blunt, and ancient terms used to describe the human condition.
It's possible to think it's best to respect the right of people to make certain decisions, while recognizing that lots of them will end up making what they will come to believe were bad decisions.
I'll explain, but first, let me step back to a bigger picture.
The bigger picture is a story of war between two factions (Sowell's Conflict of Visions), and then, "Player 3 has entered the game". "Science" (real or fake) is not actually one of the players, more of a weapon each side tries to use to fight the war, because of the shared social presumption of claims having objective basis and transcending (thus trumping) differences in opinion.
The war is about "deutungshoheit" / "discursive dominance" for the elite consensus position on or intellectual framing / modeling on the nature of human psychology. Heh, maybe Arnold should do a sequel to "The Three Languages of Politics" with "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology". (Ok, not catchy, needs work.)
The traditional view is that humans are born to be really different in ways that really matter, and that human beings have all kinds of inherent limits and weaknesses and faults that cause them to make a lot of bad decisions. Crooked timbers and all that. The language would be similar to the traditional religious terms involving talents as rare gifts, sins, lusts, temptations, virtues, and so on, though it's certainly possible to take out the theology and use secular equivalents. To a traditionalist, "bad decisions" are an obvious, common, and frequent fact of human existence and it would be absurd for anyone to try and rationalize them as "actually good" on the one hand or define them away on the other. People make bad decisions all the time - often even by their own standards and intentions - because people are wicked, impulsive, hypocritical, only rarely all that bright, and constantly deluding themselves about their true motives. Even if a traditionalist is willing to respect the right of an adult to make certain choices, he will do this while thinking that most people - being people - are going to use that liberty to make bad choices, and they are going to suffer bad consequences as a result.
If they learn at all, most of the time they're going to learn the hard way, and it's probably going to take a few times at that. If Socrates has to tell us to "first, know thyself", it's because few humans ever get even close to really knowing themselves, and are often clueless about how much they will change in the future as they age and/or find themselves in very different circumstances, to do things they never though they'd do, to believe and want things they never thought they would ever believe or want. Humans are fools, and any human who thinks humans can make good decisions about their futures without a tremendous amount of observable examples, help, support, guidance, and hard nudges by people with influence over them who care about their welfare, is a fool's fool.
Comes now player 2 - Utopian / Social-Constructivists / "Blank Slate" / Progressive Anthropology (similar ideas can be found in the thought of Rousseau, Plato, etc.) If humans are bad it's because society corrupts them, but we can make a new non-corrupting society, a new way of life, and "new men" will result to live in it. These efforts go back centuries, started religious, became secular-religion ideologies, usually some flavor of socialism, and then when the status of Science rose to the top of the hierarchy of epistemic discourse, tried to reformulate and justify themselves in terms of "Science", which, unlike actual science, always proves flexible enough to assert the truth of what the powers that be want people to think is true.
100 years ago Trotsky wrote about the "man of the future" on the road to superman, and the USSR produced lots of output on the "New Soviet Man" and "New Soviet Woman". Of course that's problematic and we know better now and would have corrected them with, "Ahem, you mean, New Soviet Person, right?"
This completely different way of modelling how and why people decide and behave as they do is able to reject the traditionalist's view of the value of traditional norms and institutions and to claim that we are sitting on a goldmine of locked-up potential welfare and flourishing which we could unlock if only ...
Player 3 is "Economics Imperialism" (sometimes getting a boost from evolutionary psychology), going well beyond matters of specialization and trade and taking over from the progressivism-ruined fields of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology and explaining choices in a values-neutral manner using the metaphysical construct of "utility" combined with subjective preferences and framing matters as people acting, deciding, trading, etc. in ways they calculate on some level to be the choices most likely to maximize this utility, somehow balancing their present interests with their anticipated future interests.
This model works pretty good for sophisticated businesses seeking profits by trading in markets. For actual human beings though, especially on matters touching the more primal impulses of core evolutionary matters like mating and reproduction, it is Ptolemaic Geocentrism that needs quite a few more epicycles.
And, guess what, I'll let you in on a secret, which is that the epicycles turn out to be the same weaknesses and faults and limits that the traditionalists, but they use more modern, technical-ish, intellectual-ish, science-ish terminology - effectively just euphemisms - to avoid having to admit the inherent similarity to low-status, knuckle-dragging, traditionalist thinking to the public or to themselves. These euphemism epicycles are the tribute economics imperialism pays to traditionalism when the traditionalists were right about human reality.
So "bounded rationality" in reality just means that people are not actually smart, rational, patient, and persistent enough to make the best chess moves in live even when they have all the information.
"Well, if you can't make the perfect chess move, you can still make the 'best' (satisficer) move from the much smaller number of possibilities when one can only see one move ahead. But wait, how do you know it's the best if you can only see one move ahead? Well, not if best means, "best for winning the game", but maybe we can redefine best so that it's best according to some simpler heuristic which a person who can only think one move ahead could develop by ... um ... uh .... "
Yeah, the whole point is they can't do that on their own. The best heuristic is, "What would someone better than me do if they were in my position?" and one discovers the answer by means of relying on observable examples, cultural institutions, and social influences, while hoping you don't live in Clown World full of smart-set inside-jokes you don't get where following high-status messages about what one should do is only liable to get one in deep, irreversible trouble.
Likewise, "Time Inconsistent Preferences" just means that people have a hard time with deferred gratification (e.g., marshmallow tests) and while some are ants plenty are grasshoppers who would starve in the winter if left to their own devices. The related, "Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" means that as badly as people are ignorant of their true selves now, they are far worse off in knowing how they are going to be in the future, what they are going to want, and how to provide for those wants by trading off certain choices today.
When I say "Bounded Conscientiousness", I am kind of poking fun at these euphemisms, and it's just my way of saying that some people are obviously just born bad apples with a higher disposition to violence, crime, and other bad acts, and have a very hard time resisting impulse and temptation, and repressing personally counterproductive and externally anti-social behaviors out of some internal sense of scruples to follow typical norms. Without going full "Lord of the Flies" levels of "civilizational order is fragile", the traditionalist believes that some people are more likely to become criminals, and if you stop keeping their heads down and start going soft of crime, so that they start to think "crime pays", then crime is what they'll do. Crazy, I know.
Now, there is a bit of a wrinkle to all this. You might think the traditionalists - especially what you might call "Neo-Traditionalists" informed by insights from genetics, evolutionary psychology, psychometrics, comparative biology, and game-theoretic social analysis - would want to call some of this word-game-playing out. And they did and do. But to the extent anyone even listens to people like us (which is approximately zero) there is also a bit of pressure to bite one's tongue. That's because there's a catch.
The catch is that while traditionalists do not sacralize liberty and choice and consent uber alles, and have qualms about "the market" regarding the need for paternalistic prohibitions or regulations, they recognize that the Progressives are ON TOP and IN CHARGE, and that just like a dog returns to its vomit and the progressive will go soft of crime, the sow after washing also returns to wallowing in the mire, and the progressives will also try to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in their suffocation of the market that is the indispensable engine of all our progress and prosperity.
And in the last century it seems that only the science-ish, technical-ish language of Economics Imperialism has had any track record of actual success in successfully arguing down the progressives by providing this framework capable of explaining the virtues of free markets and liberalized consumer choices and thwarting their constant efforts to convince people and prove that they can do better by means of mega-regulation, socialist redistribution, and central planning.
Now that's what I call an answer! Thank you. I've never looked at it that way but you may be right about "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology" (and, boy, does it need a new name).
I feel that I personally have moved from kind of Milton Friedman libertarian utopianism to a more tragic view, all those epicycles. Though I can't really think of them as epicycles. Maybe I'm kidding myself but I still think of them as "enriching the model". Tragic because now free choice often doesn't lead to "happiness", "flourishing", "satisfaction". And restricting choice still has all the problems of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Historically, those who restrict choice have often done very bad things with their power. Are we "stuck between a rock and a hard place"?
Arnold and I are similar in a lot of ways. We're both male; we're both grandparents :) I read and agreed with him when he was "arguing in my spare time" many decades ago. I wonder if he feels he's changed in similar ways.
"Bounded Libertarianism", lol. Milton Friedman was no utopian or hyper-individualist social radical (not anything near the level of a Rothbard or Rand) and while not exactly a social conservative, like Hayek, he seemed to
frequently show respect for, presume the wisdom of, or align with socially conservative positions (though the title to Jennifer Burns' biography, "the last conservative" is quite misleading.) It was Friedman who said the unit of society is not the individual but more often the family, and I don't think he meant that as a purely descriptive matter which should it change would be fine with him.
Yeah. What I meant by "Milton Friedman libertarian utopianism" was the idea that if people were "free to choose", you would wind up with the best of all possible worlds--with the understanding that lots of worlds aren't possible. Of course, Friedman never said that but it was what I took away from him.
It seems like you are referring to a subset of people. Maybe it's just college educated with good jobs, maybe it's even a majority including many with blue collars who have relatively stable lives but surely it's not people who have unplanned children or people who are miserable and think a child whom they will struggle to support is going to somehow make their life better. And I doubt it includes grandparents trying to raise grandkids they can't afford after their children abandoned those grandkids for one reason or another.
Is there more desire for additional children beyond the ones you have than there has been in the past? Or is it that there has always been a certain number of people who had fewer kids than they want? Perhaps the difference is that in the present day there is less overall demand for kids, and still some amount of unmet demand for kids--but no more unmet demand than there used to be.
"The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition."
Or it may be people who are more self-centered, more impulsive, more present-oriented, and with less executive function.
Or it may be both, and society will continue to bifurcate into the equivalents of Belmont and Fishtown. What will be lost will be the middle of people who are together enough to control their fertility and whose utility function prefers all the things they can do today and tomorrow and next year if they don't have kids (the opportunity cost theory of fertility crash, e.g., https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/).
"the opportunity cost theory" amounts to saying that people have decided there are things they would rather do. It says that people have the desired amount of children, when in fact surveys consistently show people wanting more children than they end up having. And I don't think it deals well with my observation that there is deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers. You can make a tautology out of "people choose X over Y because they want to," but it is less persuasive when they seem to want Y at age 20 and again at age 50 but choose X at age 30 and are stuck with it.
No, it doesn't say they have the desired amount of children. It is in some ways a tragic theory. It says that day to day and month to month, people decide they don't want kids NOW. They want to have kids "when they're ready". This is some times referred to as the "capstone" strategy for kids as opposed to the "foundation". Kids are a capstone AFTER you have finished your schooling, established yourself at your job, and hopefully have a house with a yard. For some people, this will be an easy change, but for lots of people it will be difficult to break habits that have been years in the making. Even those who then have a kid may well decide to stop after one. It's a bigger change than they realized. "When am I ever going to get enough sleep." "All she does is eat and poop." Also, fertility declines so having more kids (or that first one) may be difficult--or impossible to do naturally.
There may well be a "deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers" but, as Tom Schelling has observed, 55 year old me is a different person than 25 year old me.
It is a common observation that people over-discount the future. Throughout most of history, kids were not so much a conscious choice as something that happened after sex. Now that kids are for many people a conscious choice, that over-discounting comes into play. So people end up with fewer kids than they say they actually want.
Nowadays, wanting kids is like wanting to lost weight. "I want to lose weight but I get so hungry on a diet and I'd rather watch tv than exercise and ..." "I want to have kids but I don't want to give up vacations or eating out or all the other things the two of us enjoy. I have to get a promotion and we have to save enough to buy a house (but I don't want to give up those vacations and eating out and all those other things in order to build up a big nest egg).
Some of us knew when we were children that we weren't interested in having kids at all. But marriage was an assumed goal. So I was found by a not-interested-in-kids man & we've been together for pushing 50 years. High C + high openness personalities with dark triad tendencies. Perhaps just as well we are not reproducing.
"Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" can join "Time Inconsistent Preferences" and "Bounded Rationality" and - what I would add - "Bounded Conscientiousness". All are really pseudo-technical euphemisms for the more common, blunt, and ancient terms used to describe the human condition.
It's possible to think it's best to respect the right of people to make certain decisions, while recognizing that lots of them will end up making what they will come to believe were bad decisions.
I wish you could expand on this. Sounds like a great blog post.
Happy to oblige, in due time.
"Bounded Conscientiousness"? What do you mean by that?
I'll explain, but first, let me step back to a bigger picture.
The bigger picture is a story of war between two factions (Sowell's Conflict of Visions), and then, "Player 3 has entered the game". "Science" (real or fake) is not actually one of the players, more of a weapon each side tries to use to fight the war, because of the shared social presumption of claims having objective basis and transcending (thus trumping) differences in opinion.
The war is about "deutungshoheit" / "discursive dominance" for the elite consensus position on or intellectual framing / modeling on the nature of human psychology. Heh, maybe Arnold should do a sequel to "The Three Languages of Politics" with "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology". (Ok, not catchy, needs work.)
The traditional view is that humans are born to be really different in ways that really matter, and that human beings have all kinds of inherent limits and weaknesses and faults that cause them to make a lot of bad decisions. Crooked timbers and all that. The language would be similar to the traditional religious terms involving talents as rare gifts, sins, lusts, temptations, virtues, and so on, though it's certainly possible to take out the theology and use secular equivalents. To a traditionalist, "bad decisions" are an obvious, common, and frequent fact of human existence and it would be absurd for anyone to try and rationalize them as "actually good" on the one hand or define them away on the other. People make bad decisions all the time - often even by their own standards and intentions - because people are wicked, impulsive, hypocritical, only rarely all that bright, and constantly deluding themselves about their true motives. Even if a traditionalist is willing to respect the right of an adult to make certain choices, he will do this while thinking that most people - being people - are going to use that liberty to make bad choices, and they are going to suffer bad consequences as a result.
If they learn at all, most of the time they're going to learn the hard way, and it's probably going to take a few times at that. If Socrates has to tell us to "first, know thyself", it's because few humans ever get even close to really knowing themselves, and are often clueless about how much they will change in the future as they age and/or find themselves in very different circumstances, to do things they never though they'd do, to believe and want things they never thought they would ever believe or want. Humans are fools, and any human who thinks humans can make good decisions about their futures without a tremendous amount of observable examples, help, support, guidance, and hard nudges by people with influence over them who care about their welfare, is a fool's fool.
Comes now player 2 - Utopian / Social-Constructivists / "Blank Slate" / Progressive Anthropology (similar ideas can be found in the thought of Rousseau, Plato, etc.) If humans are bad it's because society corrupts them, but we can make a new non-corrupting society, a new way of life, and "new men" will result to live in it. These efforts go back centuries, started religious, became secular-religion ideologies, usually some flavor of socialism, and then when the status of Science rose to the top of the hierarchy of epistemic discourse, tried to reformulate and justify themselves in terms of "Science", which, unlike actual science, always proves flexible enough to assert the truth of what the powers that be want people to think is true.
100 years ago Trotsky wrote about the "man of the future" on the road to superman, and the USSR produced lots of output on the "New Soviet Man" and "New Soviet Woman". Of course that's problematic and we know better now and would have corrected them with, "Ahem, you mean, New Soviet Person, right?"
This completely different way of modelling how and why people decide and behave as they do is able to reject the traditionalist's view of the value of traditional norms and institutions and to claim that we are sitting on a goldmine of locked-up potential welfare and flourishing which we could unlock if only ...
Player 3 is "Economics Imperialism" (sometimes getting a boost from evolutionary psychology), going well beyond matters of specialization and trade and taking over from the progressivism-ruined fields of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology and explaining choices in a values-neutral manner using the metaphysical construct of "utility" combined with subjective preferences and framing matters as people acting, deciding, trading, etc. in ways they calculate on some level to be the choices most likely to maximize this utility, somehow balancing their present interests with their anticipated future interests.
This model works pretty good for sophisticated businesses seeking profits by trading in markets. For actual human beings though, especially on matters touching the more primal impulses of core evolutionary matters like mating and reproduction, it is Ptolemaic Geocentrism that needs quite a few more epicycles.
And, guess what, I'll let you in on a secret, which is that the epicycles turn out to be the same weaknesses and faults and limits that the traditionalists, but they use more modern, technical-ish, intellectual-ish, science-ish terminology - effectively just euphemisms - to avoid having to admit the inherent similarity to low-status, knuckle-dragging, traditionalist thinking to the public or to themselves. These euphemism epicycles are the tribute economics imperialism pays to traditionalism when the traditionalists were right about human reality.
So "bounded rationality" in reality just means that people are not actually smart, rational, patient, and persistent enough to make the best chess moves in live even when they have all the information.
"Well, if you can't make the perfect chess move, you can still make the 'best' (satisficer) move from the much smaller number of possibilities when one can only see one move ahead. But wait, how do you know it's the best if you can only see one move ahead? Well, not if best means, "best for winning the game", but maybe we can redefine best so that it's best according to some simpler heuristic which a person who can only think one move ahead could develop by ... um ... uh .... "
Yeah, the whole point is they can't do that on their own. The best heuristic is, "What would someone better than me do if they were in my position?" and one discovers the answer by means of relying on observable examples, cultural institutions, and social influences, while hoping you don't live in Clown World full of smart-set inside-jokes you don't get where following high-status messages about what one should do is only liable to get one in deep, irreversible trouble.
Likewise, "Time Inconsistent Preferences" just means that people have a hard time with deferred gratification (e.g., marshmallow tests) and while some are ants plenty are grasshoppers who would starve in the winter if left to their own devices. The related, "Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" means that as badly as people are ignorant of their true selves now, they are far worse off in knowing how they are going to be in the future, what they are going to want, and how to provide for those wants by trading off certain choices today.
When I say "Bounded Conscientiousness", I am kind of poking fun at these euphemisms, and it's just my way of saying that some people are obviously just born bad apples with a higher disposition to violence, crime, and other bad acts, and have a very hard time resisting impulse and temptation, and repressing personally counterproductive and externally anti-social behaviors out of some internal sense of scruples to follow typical norms. Without going full "Lord of the Flies" levels of "civilizational order is fragile", the traditionalist believes that some people are more likely to become criminals, and if you stop keeping their heads down and start going soft of crime, so that they start to think "crime pays", then crime is what they'll do. Crazy, I know.
Now, there is a bit of a wrinkle to all this. You might think the traditionalists - especially what you might call "Neo-Traditionalists" informed by insights from genetics, evolutionary psychology, psychometrics, comparative biology, and game-theoretic social analysis - would want to call some of this word-game-playing out. And they did and do. But to the extent anyone even listens to people like us (which is approximately zero) there is also a bit of pressure to bite one's tongue. That's because there's a catch.
The catch is that while traditionalists do not sacralize liberty and choice and consent uber alles, and have qualms about "the market" regarding the need for paternalistic prohibitions or regulations, they recognize that the Progressives are ON TOP and IN CHARGE, and that just like a dog returns to its vomit and the progressive will go soft of crime, the sow after washing also returns to wallowing in the mire, and the progressives will also try to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in their suffocation of the market that is the indispensable engine of all our progress and prosperity.
And in the last century it seems that only the science-ish, technical-ish language of Economics Imperialism has had any track record of actual success in successfully arguing down the progressives by providing this framework capable of explaining the virtues of free markets and liberalized consumer choices and thwarting their constant efforts to convince people and prove that they can do better by means of mega-regulation, socialist redistribution, and central planning.
Now that's what I call an answer! Thank you. I've never looked at it that way but you may be right about "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology" (and, boy, does it need a new name).
I feel that I personally have moved from kind of Milton Friedman libertarian utopianism to a more tragic view, all those epicycles. Though I can't really think of them as epicycles. Maybe I'm kidding myself but I still think of them as "enriching the model". Tragic because now free choice often doesn't lead to "happiness", "flourishing", "satisfaction". And restricting choice still has all the problems of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Historically, those who restrict choice have often done very bad things with their power. Are we "stuck between a rock and a hard place"?
Arnold and I are similar in a lot of ways. We're both male; we're both grandparents :) I read and agreed with him when he was "arguing in my spare time" many decades ago. I wonder if he feels he's changed in similar ways.
"Bounded Libertarianism", lol. Milton Friedman was no utopian or hyper-individualist social radical (not anything near the level of a Rothbard or Rand) and while not exactly a social conservative, like Hayek, he seemed to
frequently show respect for, presume the wisdom of, or align with socially conservative positions (though the title to Jennifer Burns' biography, "the last conservative" is quite misleading.) It was Friedman who said the unit of society is not the individual but more often the family, and I don't think he meant that as a purely descriptive matter which should it change would be fine with him.
Yeah. What I meant by "Milton Friedman libertarian utopianism" was the idea that if people were "free to choose", you would wind up with the best of all possible worlds--with the understanding that lots of worlds aren't possible. Of course, Friedman never said that but it was what I took away from him.
It seems like you are referring to a subset of people. Maybe it's just college educated with good jobs, maybe it's even a majority including many with blue collars who have relatively stable lives but surely it's not people who have unplanned children or people who are miserable and think a child whom they will struggle to support is going to somehow make their life better. And I doubt it includes grandparents trying to raise grandkids they can't afford after their children abandoned those grandkids for one reason or another.
The bottom line is we have no reason to think it will self correct.
If people want kids but find it to troublesome, imagine how troublesome it will seem when the dependency ratio is even worse.
Yes, exactly. The burdens and sorrows seem if not less, at least ameliorated when they are experienced communally.
Is there more desire for additional children beyond the ones you have than there has been in the past? Or is it that there has always been a certain number of people who had fewer kids than they want? Perhaps the difference is that in the present day there is less overall demand for kids, and still some amount of unmet demand for kids--but no more unmet demand than there used to be.