I'm unimpressed by Lyons's article, especially compared to the normal standard of these links. It feels like a typical American reading of domestic politics into a foreign country's'. He has an odd definition of liberalism that verges on asymmetric insight ("Acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society" is very much the opposite of liberalism as I personally see it). It also contains bizarre errors that a simple Wikipedia search could correct, for example:
> He was convicted during Tusk’s previous regime (2007-2014) for allegedly abusing his power while pursuing government corruption with “excessive zeal,” but was officially pardoned by then-new President Andrzej Duda in 2015
Every source I've seen says that he was convicted in 2015, and his re-arrest hinges on whether the pardon, issued during his later appeals trial, could be valid before the final verdict, so this is hardly a minor point. (As an aside, what kind of phrasing is "convicted [...] for allegedly abusing"? Isn't the point of a conviction that a court has determined allegations to be true?)
I think him noticing that the conflict here is whether institutions should be "politicized"/accountable democratically (despite the scare quotes around the first, these are not really different) is interesting, though.
For a while, I thought that if you take the position that democracy is mostly interesting for creating a framework for peaceful transitions of power, insulating as much of civil society as possible from democracy seems desirable. But maybe now that there's an expectation that everything be subject to democracy, trying to put the genie back into the bottle will itself cause unstable transitions, as we see in the constitutional crisis in Poland (and similarly in pre-war Israel).
But ultimately my main issue with the article is that while I'm sympathetic to the claim that the left's (the fact that PO isn't recently left-wing is another issue) opposition to authoritarianism is self-serving and hypocritical, that doesn't make it *incorrect*. Sometimes the cure really is worse than the disease.
The larger context is that in most of the developed world the left is now converging on "by any means necessary best practices" on what amounts to an increasing willingness to leverage the institutions under their control to play "institutional abuse hardball" against their political opponents, which is a degeneration of long-standing norms and an expansion of tactics and escalation in intensity that threatens to undermine the system's legitimacy and stability.
There are now plenty of examples in North America and Europe and also Israel, and such abuses once being common in several Latin American countries encouraged the passage of various kind of immunity laws for political figures, and indeed the history of pardoning authorities was shaped by similar instance and considerations.
That any individual case is arguable and the bounds of discretion for any particular case vast and apparently unconstrained by any meaningful limiting principle is not a fact about the cases but a fact about the bug in all these legal systems that sustain a state of affairs such that not even legal experts can really be sure what the courts will say the law is - or whether they will or won't enter the fray on a political issue - on any of a large number of key questions.
The big picture of what has happened here is "The Empire Strikes Back" in the Star Wars story arc. The judiciary in all of these countries was transformed into a backstop for progressive policies as part of their institutional "defense in depth" and "by hook or by crook" creation of multiple independent channels by which a policy can be implemented and maintained should any of the other channels fail to work out. There is literally no hope and no point to anything a non-progressive movement or party may try to do unless it can find a way to neutralize these structural disadvantages. And naturally any attempts that show any promise of doing so can only provoke the most extreme reactions by the progressives who recognize the major danger to their position and program.
What we are seeing now is the deployment of new and more vicious weapons in this arms race. We would have been better off with a ceasefire based in bilateral disarmament, but those who expect to win the war have no incentive not to expand their use of tactics to whatever degree required for victory. Of course there is the possibility of yet more reaction and another escalation on the part of the opposition, but that would be both foolish and counterproductive, not to mention too ugly to contemplate.
Lyon's article includes excerpts from Legutko's 2016 book The Demon in Democracy, which compares the historical progressivism of 'liberal democracy' with that of communism. It is an interesting read. It is hard not to feel sympathy with the Eastern European countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. When Gorbachev made it clear that he would not use military force to maintain these countries as the USSR's 'buffer zone,' they enthusiastically formed alliances with 'the West' in the belief that this would free them from Soviet tyranny, only to find (if you believe people like Lyons and Legutko) that they have merely substituted one form of tyranny for another. Those of us living in 'the West' should give careful consideration to Eastern European thinkers and Russian dissident voices in trying to understand what is happening here. I am not familiar with recent political events in Poland, but Hungary's Viktor Orban makes for an interesting 'canary in the coalmine.' He was elected for another term (despite all the efforts of 'the West' to replace him through intervention in the last election), and unlike Putin, he hasn't invaded any other neighboring countries, but the mainstream media portrays him as some kind of dictator and he gets almost as much flack as Putin. To me that is a sign that what is going on in Hungary, Poland and, indeed, in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and 'the West' more generally, is about something other than 'democracy.'
“and marries her ideal mate by her mid-20s. Biologically she can easily have a several children. But to do so she must forgo developing vital human capital until she is in her 40s. Her male peers, meanwhile, will be building theirs.“
Is her ideal mate also one of these peers, or just sitting on a couch paying video games all the time? Or is he using his comparative advantage to work, so she can focus on the kids (note for the easily triggered: it can be the reverse and the guy can have the comparative advantage as a stay-at-home dad).
I find that one fundamental problem with the modern day view of marriage that Ms. Postrel expresses views the guy and the gal as autonomous units in competition with each other, even after marriage.
For some reason, one of the greatest insights of economics—the ability of the spouses to specialize in work and home—gets thrown out the window when it comes to this topic.
Of course, washers and driers, vacuum cleaners, processed foods, restaurants/take-out, cheap permanent-press clothes, and nowadays daycare take away many of the advantages of that specialization. The prototypical stay-at-home mom "cooked and cleaned and took care of the children"--and often had skills the man didn't. But housewifery has largely been deskilled, a consequence of making it easier and quicker. The guy and the gal are not so much in competition with each other as in parallel with each other.
Even before those machines and businesses existed, it had long been possible for women of means to replace the need for her personally to perform all those functions manually with a particular kind of economic technology. See: Downton Abbey.
You might think that being relieved in this way of many of the burdens of child-rearing would have meant that elite women could afford to have more kids. Instead, as Galton noticed, they had fewer kids.
The demand curve doesn't go the way people think it does, as the wealth / income effect points to kids being an (economically) inferior good. Robin Hanson has been using "Kings and Queens" language to explain a plausible evopsych mechanism for this.
Here's the thing, process and perpetuation of civilization is not compatible with every human being satisfying momentary impulsive urges. And so civilized cultures if they are to preserve themselves must find ways to suppress these urges or deter acting on them should they arise.
In this case, we see that the opportunities provided by a modern economy of widespread prosperity and high levels of wealth activate a particular kind of mindset and encourages behaviors optimized for pre-civilized conditions but not for modern conditions, as the opportunity cost of kids has become so high that people stimulated into this mindset just stop having kids.
What that tells us is that we have not merely taken a wrong turn into a shallow ditch that we can drive out of again because paths are plentiful and easy to take. Instead we are in an extremely deep hole fighting against some of the most powerful and universal primitive human instincts, as one would expect from any instinct related to reproduction. All the paths out are radical and difficult, and if they are too much to stomach, the alternative is that we just accept we're going to quickly die out down here.
We can get a preview for what this will look like from countries in even deeper holes, and it seems that after a century of division the Korean Peninsula will come to be reunified ... by being taken over by the North. Not because they were richer or more powerful or won a war but just because the South didn't want to make the babies needed to populate an army.
I think you understate your case when you say, "Here's the thing, process and perpetuation of civilization is not compatible with every human being satisfying momentary impulsive urges."
It's not just "momentary impulsive urges" that are incompatible. It's desires that are deep-rooted and long-term, e.g., wanting to have new experiences that are pretty sure to be enjoyable (a planned trip, a new restaurant, new entertainment), the same or better things with less effort (e.g., food prepared outside the home, all the "labor saving devices" from vacuum cleaners to automobiles). Having kids is not guaranteed to be enjoyable, and in fact is guaranteed often not to be. Young parents have a real problem getting enough sleep when both work. Far from being labor savers, they are labor takers.
I don't think I'm disagreeing; you actually seem to say this in the rest of your comment, "we have not merely taken a wrong turn into a shallow ditch that we can drive out of again because paths are plentiful and easy to take. Instead we are in an extremely deep hole fighting against some of the most powerful and universal primitive human instincts".
I know a lot of stay-a-home parents that would object to that characterization of the easy lifestyle they must now live.
Someone still has to run the dishwasher, vacuum floors, pick up dinner, get children from daycare, manage expenses and bills, etc. Which spouse picks up that slack when they’re both exhausted from a long day of work having to cover the very expensive outsourcing of babysitting their young children to daycare?
If this made family formation and marriage life so much the easier, thats not observed in the trend lines.
I didn't mean to say that was an "easy lifestyle". What I was trying to say was that 1) it doesn't require much skill, therefore 2) one sex can't get much better at it than the other, reducing the potential gains from specialization. Though to "manage expenses and bills" does require skill.
As you say, both parents can come home "exhausted from a long day of work", or just with a desire to relax or to have fun. I think the lifestyle is not conducive to family formation and marriage. Much easier to come home to a dog than a small human--though in the long run the human may be more rewarding.
Thanks, agree, and I take your drift about skills and that progress has made life easier, certainly some of the physical demands.
But I think the key isn’t physical skills per se but the trade off over time constraints in having and raising a family. Having one parent specialize in “just being available” is probably the most important skill set to “specialize” in as a parent if possible, and likely worth a lot more than a dual income.
This is what I thought Ms. Postrel’s post missed entirely: the mindset that a spouse loses out on a career because they’re taking care of a family.
And this viewpoint in a world where we’ve assumed the spouse married Mr. or Ms. Ideal! No need to hedge bets on a spouse that may end up a philanderer or deadbeat.
When the world teaches you to view career and family as merely substitute goods rather than complementary ones, where else do you expect marriage and fertility rates to trend?
"This is what I thought Ms. Postrel’s post missed entirely: the mindset that a spouse loses out on a career because they’re taking care of a family."
I think that if you define a "career" as something high-paying with special skills and a high upside as opposed to a "job" that pays okay but has a limited ceiling and can be done by a large number of people, she is right. A parent can specialize in "just being available" for ten or fifteen or twenty years, maybe doing something part-time when the kids are in school and then taking a "job" after they graduate. But that means they must forgo a "career".
The big question is why so many couples find that unacceptable. Part of it is a visceral feminism: men don't have to do that; what men can do is automatically better, therefore I should do what they would do. Part of it is the Ellen Goodman fear: if you are totally reliant on your husband's income, you are screwed if he dies or divorces or acts like a jerk. Part of it is just that it means a lower income, and when you're young and childless, the prospect of living on two incomes rather than one can be mighty appealing.
The first inkling I got that the norm of daycare is a Soviet-style attack on the family, came when a relative-of-a-relative brought home a Russian bride. She didn’t have a job nor drive, but each morning would ride the bus to take the baby to daycare, then return to the apartment. I asked the relative what she did all day. As far as she knew, she watched TV. Maybe she cooked dinner.
It’s amazing what women used to accomplish while minding children.
First - a disclaimer: to be honest after I ceased to read daily press I probably follow more US politics than of Poland where I live - but I still probably do know more than others on this blog.
If your main point is: "If you do not allow the main opposition party to compete, then you are doing democracy wrong." - then you should also condemn what Wąsik and Kamiński allegedly did - which was trying to frame their political opposition.
DINKS just wanna have fun -- the biggest issue is that being a party-going teen is great fun. Like Taylor Swift being a 32 y.o. woman acting like she's 16 (& an audience much like that). Where "like" replaces "love", tho also now including sex, which is confused with love. There was a great old Monkees song, I wanna be free (1966), "I wanna hold your hand, walk along the sand, always in the sun, always having fun". The desire to have the freedom of no responsibility, with the comfort of committed relationship. Having it all -- that's what people want, but can't buy or get. Especially not before that 35 yo alarm rings.
Virginia Postrel's article on fertility is so correct on the the three facts:
1. Women's bio clock on having babies is mostly run out by 35
2. People build crucial human capital while under 40
3. Some jobs are greedy "Greedy jobs are often the highest paid or most prestigious in a particular field, industry, or society."
These facts are especially for the network based jobs of high pay, 2x-10x more than median wage. Today, Doctors after 3-9 years out, can pretty easily get hired by a new hospital, at some 10-20% less than similar aged doctors who didn't stop for kids. Partnerships in law firms, like The Firm, require huge amounts of early year work, but it's not clear that that's required for those lawyers willing to make between median wage and 2x median wage. When money & wages are the main status symbols, the desire for more status becomes the desire for money, Big Money.
Prestige and status by society are given too much to career folk, and their careers, and not enough to folk who are parenting, and those doing a pretty good job parenting. Not noted is how "good parenting" has little drama, little reason to be on TV or in a book. More cultural emphasis should be placed on folks who are empty without kids. Of those w/o, it's maybe 40%, maybe 80% who regret it after 40. Giving up kids for a career seems a lousy choice if, in retrospect, your career peak was VP of some division working your butt off for the company, for the mostly rich owners (of stock) of the company.
More small businesses in more small towns can be encouraged by govt tax programs.
Later she notes " and, despite the law, employers often discriminate against people over 40, especially in entry-level positions." Also despite lawsuits - I've a friend who was among those programmers winning a lawsuit against Google for age discrimination. They've likely become more careful about this, tho unlikely to hire many more -- I left IBM early because of a company desire to reduce the number of older, often overpaid (not me! High Slovak wages much much lower than median US), people. Giving folks X months of free monthly pay to leave works with almost everybody for a big enough X.
The Federal govt should put in a deliberate effort to hire married folk over 40, over 50, & even over 60, both for diversity and to increase govt turnover. Vivek's 8 yr term limits on govt bureaucrats seems great. It's not clear at all how the 40 year old with 10 years govt experience is really so much better at managing a different govt office than a mother (or parent) returning to work.
Still, so much emphasis on fertility reduction in OECD countries is mostly overblown. There are, and will be more, subcultures of family friendly places where there are lots of kids. It's crucial to let those places keep the local rules they set up based on behavior, and excluding folk with bad behavior.
Tho more meritocratic capitalism, rather than crony capitalism, becoming successful in Africa & Mexico would help reduce their birth rates and make the normal folk there more materially better off. There should be more surveys of house size, nutrition/ hunger & clothes & shoes rather than "happiness".
I don't doubt that the happiest people you know are those embedded in, and devoted to, thick traditional family structures. But consider that:
(a) the set of people you know is probably unrepresentative, just like the set of people I or anyone else knows. You may, for instance, be undersampling people who have happily and successfully curated "chosen families" as social networks, often in response to the bad aspects of their natal families-- and who have, at least, found greater happiness that way than they could have ever found with their natal families.
(b) Happiness is not the only, or even necessarily the supreme, compelling telos of human life. Many great achievers have found fulfillment and flourishing through their achievements yet not been particularly happy. Would we really wish they had chosen more mundane paths?
This is actually a nice way into a larger philosophical question. Following J.S.Mill and H. Taylor, I take to be core claims of liberal pluralism that:
-- There are many reasonable and valid paths to human flourishing, and none that is the best for everyone. The universal and eternal human good does not and cannot exist.
-- Moreover, the set of good life-paths changes over time, and includes many paths that we don't know about yet. Therefore to discover these requires continual "experiments in living," including tolerance for some of those experiments to fail while the experimentation process goes on anyway.
-- And thus, sociopolitical institutional arrangements, to maximize long-term human flourishing, must maximize the ability of people with wildly different chosen life-paths to live those out in peace and dignity together, including not only very unusual life-paths but even very unpopular ones.
The question of what particular institutions actually maximize this ability durably in practice is a vexed one. The requirement for tolerance of unpopular paths, and the fact that a drive to experiment is typically the preserve of an eccentric minority, will always put this type of pluralism in tension with majoritarian democracy. Among the many problems with managerial-elitist modern liberalism, some of them indeed stem from this tension.
But the populist critics of managerial liberalism rarely acknowledge how much its structure is driven by the goal of restraining the social tendencies toward theocracy and ethnocentrism that have done so much damage to the Millian experimentation process for so long. Either, like the Lyons article you shared, they ignore that history altogether, or worse, they come up with elaborate excuses for why theocracy and ethnocentrism aren't actually so bad.
While there is not an infinite number of imaginable arrangements, there is a limited number that would actually lead to human flourishing. Depending on how malleable human nature is, perhaps a small number.
"And thus, sociopolitical institutional arrangements, to maximize long-term human flourishing, must maximize the ability of people with wildly different chosen life-paths to live those out in peace and dignity together"
I wonder how many young women there are who would like to be a "full-time wife and mother" but feel they can't, that they don't have the ability. If for no other reason than that she can't find a man who will marry someone who won't bring in an income.
There are people who have non-deceptive sexual and emotional relations with more than one person, maybe even live together. It isn't easy to pull off and my limited experience says it often doesn't work. Of course, lots of marriages fail, too.
It seems that the Thales Way’s excerpt about dress code and its associated comment praising the benefits of group cohesiveness is foreshadowing In My Tribe’s new clothing line; or at least an In My Tribe t-shirt available for pre-order? Only half joking.
"If we were very sure that the researchers ran this study only one time, we could be pretty confident in the result — there is always the possibility that this is one of the “chance” significant findings, but the high level of significance gives us confidence."
Does this make any sense logically? Wouldn't one have higher confidence if the researchers had run the study multiple times and found the same level of significance? Am I missing something here?
And, to note, this part wasn't about the dead fish MRI study, but just a hypothetical study that passed whatever threshhold for significance one set beforehand.
I think she was being sarcastic, showing how misleading it can be to rely on "high levels of significance". Obviously, dead fish can't perceive social situations and don't have mental processes, no matter what the statistical analysis says.
I wasn't talking about the dead fish study- she was talking about a generic study that passes the threshold of significance and wrote that confidence in the significance goes up if you know the researchers didn't just run the study multiple times and found the outlier results and published those and none of the others.
Thanks for the correction. If you're comparing two studies, one of which was run once and had high significance and the second of which was part of a group where many of the runs did not return statistically significant results, you should have less confidence in the second because it's an outlier. An outlier to the studies run and thus likely to be an outlier from normal reality. Is that a reasonable interpretation of what she was saying?
Of course, if you don't know multiple runs were done (because the studies that didn't reach "significance" never were reported), you can't make that determination. Which is one reason all potentially published studies should be pre-registered and all results reported.
I know Arnold is not a fan of happiness research, but I recall seeing a graph of happiness by gender over time. In that graph, women were much happier than men in the mid-century, and their happiness has been declining to converge with men roughly aligned with their entrance into the workforce.
Even if you don’t trust happiness research, the notion that work makes you happy and family makes you sad seems pretty clearly backwards. People (men and women) should be fighting to work less and spend more time with family. Instead we’ve convinced 3 generations of women to do the opposite.
I think it was Virginia Postrel who made this point. Much happiness research asks questions like, "Compare your happiness now with how much you think it could ever be. Now rate it on a scale of zero to ten, with ten being the closest you are to maximum happiness and zero being the least." If you are a miserable dirt poor peasant who never sees things getting better, your honest answer is ten. If you are a well-off highly ambitious person, you might truthfully answer five.
The question does not measure happiness. It measures resignation (if you look at it negatively) or contentment (if you look at it positively; "Aye, best to accept what we cannot change, and get what enjoyment we can.").
Perhaps what has happened in the United States with women is that they have gone from resignation/contentment to ambition--often wildly over-optimistic ambition: "You can have it all." "If you can dream it, you can achieve it."
I'm unimpressed by Lyons's article, especially compared to the normal standard of these links. It feels like a typical American reading of domestic politics into a foreign country's'. He has an odd definition of liberalism that verges on asymmetric insight ("Acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society" is very much the opposite of liberalism as I personally see it). It also contains bizarre errors that a simple Wikipedia search could correct, for example:
> He was convicted during Tusk’s previous regime (2007-2014) for allegedly abusing his power while pursuing government corruption with “excessive zeal,” but was officially pardoned by then-new President Andrzej Duda in 2015
Every source I've seen says that he was convicted in 2015, and his re-arrest hinges on whether the pardon, issued during his later appeals trial, could be valid before the final verdict, so this is hardly a minor point. (As an aside, what kind of phrasing is "convicted [...] for allegedly abusing"? Isn't the point of a conviction that a court has determined allegations to be true?)
I think him noticing that the conflict here is whether institutions should be "politicized"/accountable democratically (despite the scare quotes around the first, these are not really different) is interesting, though.
For a while, I thought that if you take the position that democracy is mostly interesting for creating a framework for peaceful transitions of power, insulating as much of civil society as possible from democracy seems desirable. But maybe now that there's an expectation that everything be subject to democracy, trying to put the genie back into the bottle will itself cause unstable transitions, as we see in the constitutional crisis in Poland (and similarly in pre-war Israel).
But ultimately my main issue with the article is that while I'm sympathetic to the claim that the left's (the fact that PO isn't recently left-wing is another issue) opposition to authoritarianism is self-serving and hypocritical, that doesn't make it *incorrect*. Sometimes the cure really is worse than the disease.
The larger context is that in most of the developed world the left is now converging on "by any means necessary best practices" on what amounts to an increasing willingness to leverage the institutions under their control to play "institutional abuse hardball" against their political opponents, which is a degeneration of long-standing norms and an expansion of tactics and escalation in intensity that threatens to undermine the system's legitimacy and stability.
There are now plenty of examples in North America and Europe and also Israel, and such abuses once being common in several Latin American countries encouraged the passage of various kind of immunity laws for political figures, and indeed the history of pardoning authorities was shaped by similar instance and considerations.
That any individual case is arguable and the bounds of discretion for any particular case vast and apparently unconstrained by any meaningful limiting principle is not a fact about the cases but a fact about the bug in all these legal systems that sustain a state of affairs such that not even legal experts can really be sure what the courts will say the law is - or whether they will or won't enter the fray on a political issue - on any of a large number of key questions.
The big picture of what has happened here is "The Empire Strikes Back" in the Star Wars story arc. The judiciary in all of these countries was transformed into a backstop for progressive policies as part of their institutional "defense in depth" and "by hook or by crook" creation of multiple independent channels by which a policy can be implemented and maintained should any of the other channels fail to work out. There is literally no hope and no point to anything a non-progressive movement or party may try to do unless it can find a way to neutralize these structural disadvantages. And naturally any attempts that show any promise of doing so can only provoke the most extreme reactions by the progressives who recognize the major danger to their position and program.
What we are seeing now is the deployment of new and more vicious weapons in this arms race. We would have been better off with a ceasefire based in bilateral disarmament, but those who expect to win the war have no incentive not to expand their use of tactics to whatever degree required for victory. Of course there is the possibility of yet more reaction and another escalation on the part of the opposition, but that would be both foolish and counterproductive, not to mention too ugly to contemplate.
Lyon's article includes excerpts from Legutko's 2016 book The Demon in Democracy, which compares the historical progressivism of 'liberal democracy' with that of communism. It is an interesting read. It is hard not to feel sympathy with the Eastern European countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. When Gorbachev made it clear that he would not use military force to maintain these countries as the USSR's 'buffer zone,' they enthusiastically formed alliances with 'the West' in the belief that this would free them from Soviet tyranny, only to find (if you believe people like Lyons and Legutko) that they have merely substituted one form of tyranny for another. Those of us living in 'the West' should give careful consideration to Eastern European thinkers and Russian dissident voices in trying to understand what is happening here. I am not familiar with recent political events in Poland, but Hungary's Viktor Orban makes for an interesting 'canary in the coalmine.' He was elected for another term (despite all the efforts of 'the West' to replace him through intervention in the last election), and unlike Putin, he hasn't invaded any other neighboring countries, but the mainstream media portrays him as some kind of dictator and he gets almost as much flack as Putin. To me that is a sign that what is going on in Hungary, Poland and, indeed, in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and 'the West' more generally, is about something other than 'democracy.'
Though with regard to the last point, I may be too harsh. The article doesn't explicitly endorse any alternative.
“and marries her ideal mate by her mid-20s. Biologically she can easily have a several children. But to do so she must forgo developing vital human capital until she is in her 40s. Her male peers, meanwhile, will be building theirs.“
Is her ideal mate also one of these peers, or just sitting on a couch paying video games all the time? Or is he using his comparative advantage to work, so she can focus on the kids (note for the easily triggered: it can be the reverse and the guy can have the comparative advantage as a stay-at-home dad).
I find that one fundamental problem with the modern day view of marriage that Ms. Postrel expresses views the guy and the gal as autonomous units in competition with each other, even after marriage.
For some reason, one of the greatest insights of economics—the ability of the spouses to specialize in work and home—gets thrown out the window when it comes to this topic.
Of course, washers and driers, vacuum cleaners, processed foods, restaurants/take-out, cheap permanent-press clothes, and nowadays daycare take away many of the advantages of that specialization. The prototypical stay-at-home mom "cooked and cleaned and took care of the children"--and often had skills the man didn't. But housewifery has largely been deskilled, a consequence of making it easier and quicker. The guy and the gal are not so much in competition with each other as in parallel with each other.
Even before those machines and businesses existed, it had long been possible for women of means to replace the need for her personally to perform all those functions manually with a particular kind of economic technology. See: Downton Abbey.
You might think that being relieved in this way of many of the burdens of child-rearing would have meant that elite women could afford to have more kids. Instead, as Galton noticed, they had fewer kids.
The demand curve doesn't go the way people think it does, as the wealth / income effect points to kids being an (economically) inferior good. Robin Hanson has been using "Kings and Queens" language to explain a plausible evopsych mechanism for this.
Here's the thing, process and perpetuation of civilization is not compatible with every human being satisfying momentary impulsive urges. And so civilized cultures if they are to preserve themselves must find ways to suppress these urges or deter acting on them should they arise.
In this case, we see that the opportunities provided by a modern economy of widespread prosperity and high levels of wealth activate a particular kind of mindset and encourages behaviors optimized for pre-civilized conditions but not for modern conditions, as the opportunity cost of kids has become so high that people stimulated into this mindset just stop having kids.
What that tells us is that we have not merely taken a wrong turn into a shallow ditch that we can drive out of again because paths are plentiful and easy to take. Instead we are in an extremely deep hole fighting against some of the most powerful and universal primitive human instincts, as one would expect from any instinct related to reproduction. All the paths out are radical and difficult, and if they are too much to stomach, the alternative is that we just accept we're going to quickly die out down here.
We can get a preview for what this will look like from countries in even deeper holes, and it seems that after a century of division the Korean Peninsula will come to be reunified ... by being taken over by the North. Not because they were richer or more powerful or won a war but just because the South didn't want to make the babies needed to populate an army.
I think you understate your case when you say, "Here's the thing, process and perpetuation of civilization is not compatible with every human being satisfying momentary impulsive urges."
It's not just "momentary impulsive urges" that are incompatible. It's desires that are deep-rooted and long-term, e.g., wanting to have new experiences that are pretty sure to be enjoyable (a planned trip, a new restaurant, new entertainment), the same or better things with less effort (e.g., food prepared outside the home, all the "labor saving devices" from vacuum cleaners to automobiles). Having kids is not guaranteed to be enjoyable, and in fact is guaranteed often not to be. Young parents have a real problem getting enough sleep when both work. Far from being labor savers, they are labor takers.
I don't think I'm disagreeing; you actually seem to say this in the rest of your comment, "we have not merely taken a wrong turn into a shallow ditch that we can drive out of again because paths are plentiful and easy to take. Instead we are in an extremely deep hole fighting against some of the most powerful and universal primitive human instincts".
I know a lot of stay-a-home parents that would object to that characterization of the easy lifestyle they must now live.
Someone still has to run the dishwasher, vacuum floors, pick up dinner, get children from daycare, manage expenses and bills, etc. Which spouse picks up that slack when they’re both exhausted from a long day of work having to cover the very expensive outsourcing of babysitting their young children to daycare?
If this made family formation and marriage life so much the easier, thats not observed in the trend lines.
I didn't mean to say that was an "easy lifestyle". What I was trying to say was that 1) it doesn't require much skill, therefore 2) one sex can't get much better at it than the other, reducing the potential gains from specialization. Though to "manage expenses and bills" does require skill.
As you say, both parents can come home "exhausted from a long day of work", or just with a desire to relax or to have fun. I think the lifestyle is not conducive to family formation and marriage. Much easier to come home to a dog than a small human--though in the long run the human may be more rewarding.
Thanks, agree, and I take your drift about skills and that progress has made life easier, certainly some of the physical demands.
But I think the key isn’t physical skills per se but the trade off over time constraints in having and raising a family. Having one parent specialize in “just being available” is probably the most important skill set to “specialize” in as a parent if possible, and likely worth a lot more than a dual income.
This is what I thought Ms. Postrel’s post missed entirely: the mindset that a spouse loses out on a career because they’re taking care of a family.
And this viewpoint in a world where we’ve assumed the spouse married Mr. or Ms. Ideal! No need to hedge bets on a spouse that may end up a philanderer or deadbeat.
When the world teaches you to view career and family as merely substitute goods rather than complementary ones, where else do you expect marriage and fertility rates to trend?
"This is what I thought Ms. Postrel’s post missed entirely: the mindset that a spouse loses out on a career because they’re taking care of a family."
I think that if you define a "career" as something high-paying with special skills and a high upside as opposed to a "job" that pays okay but has a limited ceiling and can be done by a large number of people, she is right. A parent can specialize in "just being available" for ten or fifteen or twenty years, maybe doing something part-time when the kids are in school and then taking a "job" after they graduate. But that means they must forgo a "career".
The big question is why so many couples find that unacceptable. Part of it is a visceral feminism: men don't have to do that; what men can do is automatically better, therefore I should do what they would do. Part of it is the Ellen Goodman fear: if you are totally reliant on your husband's income, you are screwed if he dies or divorces or acts like a jerk. Part of it is just that it means a lower income, and when you're young and childless, the prospect of living on two incomes rather than one can be mighty appealing.
DINKS just wanna have fun!
The first inkling I got that the norm of daycare is a Soviet-style attack on the family, came when a relative-of-a-relative brought home a Russian bride. She didn’t have a job nor drive, but each morning would ride the bus to take the baby to daycare, then return to the apartment. I asked the relative what she did all day. As far as she knew, she watched TV. Maybe she cooked dinner.
It’s amazing what women used to accomplish while minding children.
In top form here Arnold; and much to read. Thanks.
First - a disclaimer: to be honest after I ceased to read daily press I probably follow more US politics than of Poland where I live - but I still probably do know more than others on this blog.
If your main point is: "If you do not allow the main opposition party to compete, then you are doing democracy wrong." - then you should also condemn what Wąsik and Kamiński allegedly did - which was trying to frame their political opposition.
DINKS just wanna have fun -- the biggest issue is that being a party-going teen is great fun. Like Taylor Swift being a 32 y.o. woman acting like she's 16 (& an audience much like that). Where "like" replaces "love", tho also now including sex, which is confused with love. There was a great old Monkees song, I wanna be free (1966), "I wanna hold your hand, walk along the sand, always in the sun, always having fun". The desire to have the freedom of no responsibility, with the comfort of committed relationship. Having it all -- that's what people want, but can't buy or get. Especially not before that 35 yo alarm rings.
Virginia Postrel's article on fertility is so correct on the the three facts:
1. Women's bio clock on having babies is mostly run out by 35
2. People build crucial human capital while under 40
3. Some jobs are greedy "Greedy jobs are often the highest paid or most prestigious in a particular field, industry, or society."
These facts are especially for the network based jobs of high pay, 2x-10x more than median wage. Today, Doctors after 3-9 years out, can pretty easily get hired by a new hospital, at some 10-20% less than similar aged doctors who didn't stop for kids. Partnerships in law firms, like The Firm, require huge amounts of early year work, but it's not clear that that's required for those lawyers willing to make between median wage and 2x median wage. When money & wages are the main status symbols, the desire for more status becomes the desire for money, Big Money.
Prestige and status by society are given too much to career folk, and their careers, and not enough to folk who are parenting, and those doing a pretty good job parenting. Not noted is how "good parenting" has little drama, little reason to be on TV or in a book. More cultural emphasis should be placed on folks who are empty without kids. Of those w/o, it's maybe 40%, maybe 80% who regret it after 40. Giving up kids for a career seems a lousy choice if, in retrospect, your career peak was VP of some division working your butt off for the company, for the mostly rich owners (of stock) of the company.
More small businesses in more small towns can be encouraged by govt tax programs.
Later she notes " and, despite the law, employers often discriminate against people over 40, especially in entry-level positions." Also despite lawsuits - I've a friend who was among those programmers winning a lawsuit against Google for age discrimination. They've likely become more careful about this, tho unlikely to hire many more -- I left IBM early because of a company desire to reduce the number of older, often overpaid (not me! High Slovak wages much much lower than median US), people. Giving folks X months of free monthly pay to leave works with almost everybody for a big enough X.
The Federal govt should put in a deliberate effort to hire married folk over 40, over 50, & even over 60, both for diversity and to increase govt turnover. Vivek's 8 yr term limits on govt bureaucrats seems great. It's not clear at all how the 40 year old with 10 years govt experience is really so much better at managing a different govt office than a mother (or parent) returning to work.
Still, so much emphasis on fertility reduction in OECD countries is mostly overblown. There are, and will be more, subcultures of family friendly places where there are lots of kids. It's crucial to let those places keep the local rules they set up based on behavior, and excluding folk with bad behavior.
Tho more meritocratic capitalism, rather than crony capitalism, becoming successful in Africa & Mexico would help reduce their birth rates and make the normal folk there more materially better off. There should be more surveys of house size, nutrition/ hunger & clothes & shoes rather than "happiness".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyX6rMpYI_U --- Monkees!
I don't doubt that the happiest people you know are those embedded in, and devoted to, thick traditional family structures. But consider that:
(a) the set of people you know is probably unrepresentative, just like the set of people I or anyone else knows. You may, for instance, be undersampling people who have happily and successfully curated "chosen families" as social networks, often in response to the bad aspects of their natal families-- and who have, at least, found greater happiness that way than they could have ever found with their natal families.
(b) Happiness is not the only, or even necessarily the supreme, compelling telos of human life. Many great achievers have found fulfillment and flourishing through their achievements yet not been particularly happy. Would we really wish they had chosen more mundane paths?
This is actually a nice way into a larger philosophical question. Following J.S.Mill and H. Taylor, I take to be core claims of liberal pluralism that:
-- There are many reasonable and valid paths to human flourishing, and none that is the best for everyone. The universal and eternal human good does not and cannot exist.
-- Moreover, the set of good life-paths changes over time, and includes many paths that we don't know about yet. Therefore to discover these requires continual "experiments in living," including tolerance for some of those experiments to fail while the experimentation process goes on anyway.
-- And thus, sociopolitical institutional arrangements, to maximize long-term human flourishing, must maximize the ability of people with wildly different chosen life-paths to live those out in peace and dignity together, including not only very unusual life-paths but even very unpopular ones.
The question of what particular institutions actually maximize this ability durably in practice is a vexed one. The requirement for tolerance of unpopular paths, and the fact that a drive to experiment is typically the preserve of an eccentric minority, will always put this type of pluralism in tension with majoritarian democracy. Among the many problems with managerial-elitist modern liberalism, some of them indeed stem from this tension.
But the populist critics of managerial liberalism rarely acknowledge how much its structure is driven by the goal of restraining the social tendencies toward theocracy and ethnocentrism that have done so much damage to the Millian experimentation process for so long. Either, like the Lyons article you shared, they ignore that history altogether, or worse, they come up with elaborate excuses for why theocracy and ethnocentrism aren't actually so bad.
I agree, but with two "qualifications".
While there is not an infinite number of imaginable arrangements, there is a limited number that would actually lead to human flourishing. Depending on how malleable human nature is, perhaps a small number.
"And thus, sociopolitical institutional arrangements, to maximize long-term human flourishing, must maximize the ability of people with wildly different chosen life-paths to live those out in peace and dignity together"
I wonder how many young women there are who would like to be a "full-time wife and mother" but feel they can't, that they don't have the ability. If for no other reason than that she can't find a man who will marry someone who won't bring in an income.
Yes, I think this reading only works if you define every possible type of air-conditioned office job as a "wildly different life path".
Funny, the first thing I thought of was polyamory (perhaps because family friends are involved in it).
I’m pretty sure polyamory is a form of deception, less so a “lifestyle”.
There are people who have non-deceptive sexual and emotional relations with more than one person, maybe even live together. It isn't easy to pull off and my limited experience says it often doesn't work. Of course, lots of marriages fail, too.
I'm guessing this is most common where one party is a good cook, perhaps, or another prty has a million dollars in the bank.
It seems that the Thales Way’s excerpt about dress code and its associated comment praising the benefits of group cohesiveness is foreshadowing In My Tribe’s new clothing line; or at least an In My Tribe t-shirt available for pre-order? Only half joking.
In her essay, Ms. Oster wrote:
"If we were very sure that the researchers ran this study only one time, we could be pretty confident in the result — there is always the possibility that this is one of the “chance” significant findings, but the high level of significance gives us confidence."
Does this make any sense logically? Wouldn't one have higher confidence if the researchers had run the study multiple times and found the same level of significance? Am I missing something here?
And, to note, this part wasn't about the dead fish MRI study, but just a hypothetical study that passed whatever threshhold for significance one set beforehand.
I think she was being sarcastic, showing how misleading it can be to rely on "high levels of significance". Obviously, dead fish can't perceive social situations and don't have mental processes, no matter what the statistical analysis says.
I wasn't talking about the dead fish study- she was talking about a generic study that passes the threshold of significance and wrote that confidence in the significance goes up if you know the researchers didn't just run the study multiple times and found the outlier results and published those and none of the others.
Thanks for the correction. If you're comparing two studies, one of which was run once and had high significance and the second of which was part of a group where many of the runs did not return statistically significant results, you should have less confidence in the second because it's an outlier. An outlier to the studies run and thus likely to be an outlier from normal reality. Is that a reasonable interpretation of what she was saying?
Of course, if you don't know multiple runs were done (because the studies that didn't reach "significance" never were reported), you can't make that determination. Which is one reason all potentially published studies should be pre-registered and all results reported.
I know Arnold is not a fan of happiness research, but I recall seeing a graph of happiness by gender over time. In that graph, women were much happier than men in the mid-century, and their happiness has been declining to converge with men roughly aligned with their entrance into the workforce.
Even if you don’t trust happiness research, the notion that work makes you happy and family makes you sad seems pretty clearly backwards. People (men and women) should be fighting to work less and spend more time with family. Instead we’ve convinced 3 generations of women to do the opposite.
I think it was Virginia Postrel who made this point. Much happiness research asks questions like, "Compare your happiness now with how much you think it could ever be. Now rate it on a scale of zero to ten, with ten being the closest you are to maximum happiness and zero being the least." If you are a miserable dirt poor peasant who never sees things getting better, your honest answer is ten. If you are a well-off highly ambitious person, you might truthfully answer five.
The question does not measure happiness. It measures resignation (if you look at it negatively) or contentment (if you look at it positively; "Aye, best to accept what we cannot change, and get what enjoyment we can.").
Perhaps what has happened in the United States with women is that they have gone from resignation/contentment to ambition--often wildly over-optimistic ambition: "You can have it all." "If you can dream it, you can achieve it."
The total victory of meritocracy has its costs!