Matt Taibbi on the elites who hate our freedom; Brian Chau on elites who never lose status; Ed West on declining fertility; Jonathan Haidt on research on social media and social pathology
Just as a quick reaction - I am a woman and had one pregnancy. I think I get what you are trying to say.. but worth noting that pregnancy had a totally trivial impact on my life compared to HAVING TO LOOK AFTER A BABY (even though I could totally afford childcare). This is the real big deal, and the reason I only had one kid.
Yes, I think that is the real issue. The discomforts of pregnancy are pretty vague and abstract to those women who haven't experienced it, and those who have don't seem to mind it too much as a cause. Hell, my wife is thinking she wants a 4th kid, despite needing a C-section for each of the previous, which is a really miserable process with really long recovery. I note that her interest in another kid coincides with our youngest getting close to the age of going off to kindergarten and no longer being a baby for the most part. Less demands on her parenting leads to interest in another kid, suggesting to me that the limiting factor is how much time and energy she has to spend on care.
Yes to Taking Care, for years, being far more important than the ~8 (more) months of pregnancy and usually a painful delivery.
I love kids; we have 4 (we had 3 in a one bedroom apt for first 5 years, about 660 sq ft/ 66 sq meter), but we live close to my wife's very very helpful parents. Raising kids includes huge quantity time investments in a semi-boring "watching" mode.
For the conscientious person child bearing is much easier than child raising. Not just the emotional and physical demands of tending to a child, but also the economic realities. Furthermore, having more than two children requires a massive change in lifestyle. One needs a larger car - a minivan or full size SUV to fit the child seats. And one needs a larger home.
And having one child requires a huge lifestyle change. Clearly there are more women now than before who refuse this change. Not because they cannot tolerate pregnancy but because of the dependency that having a child creates.
Good point. It is definitely true that having two kids is not twice as difficult as having one; the step change from 0 to 1 kid is really tough, 1 to 2 kids is only somewhat more difficult. 2 to 3 is irritating, as you say, because you have to get new cars, but not a ton harder than 2 otherwise.
You don't need a larger car, unless you are driving a sub compact. I've got three kids under the age of 10 and they all fit in the backseat of a civic by searching out better fitting car seats. We also have the same home (plus a second bathroom) that we had with zero kids. Three kids, 2 adults, 2 bedrooms, a playroom. ~1700 sq ft.
But I will push back even further than that- a new, larger car isn't even that much more. A new base price Civic is $25,000, a new Odyssy is $37,000, and you get 10 years out of a car easy. That's $1,200 a year and there are plenty of cheaper options than the Odyssy that will fit 3 kids easy.
When you actually breakdown earning/spending the major isses for most 2 income families fall into one of three categories.
1. Overestimating the earnings of the 2nd person and not accounting for taxes.
2. Underestimating the costs of the job, be it commute costs, 2nd car ownership, higher housing costs to live in an area where both people can work, the higher costs of buying prepared foods vs cooking, and having much less flexibility in their schedules.
3. Spending way to much on their child's education.
A 'high quality' school district can often cost $5,000 more in property taxes each year which on its own dwarfs the cost of a larger car (without even considering the higher home prices that go with it as well).
Once you have made one of the above mistakes when you have a kid or two, you end up looking at the budget and having no idea how you could affor that larger car for a 3rd.
What you say is no doubt true for some. That said,
- For modest income couples, the second income really does make a big difference, even after taxes.
- Some couples both want to work, not stay home with the kids. That only works if you can afford daycare. Even then it take a huge bite out of nearly everyone's finances.
- Some people want the bigger house in the better neighborhood, longer commute, etc. more than they want the kids. Some would rather stay in an apartment in the city too.
- Some don't want kids even if it were painless and no cost.
Regarding the elites who never lose status: I think that, while the market does curtail some of the worse examples of failing upwards, being insulated from the results of your actions is alive and well in big corporations. That seems to be the key: the bigger an organization the less accountable all the members are, particularly in the tangle of management where assigning responsibility and blame is difficult. Government bureaucrats have the benefit of being in a monopoly that takes the money it needs to run, but the size of their organizations might be part of the driving force as well, one shared with the private sector.
(I don't think it is a coincidence that most, if not all, government regulation of businesses tends to drive them towards ever larger organizations.)
Women tend to want kids more than men do, even though they deal with pregnancy.
I don't think women were pressured into being breeders so much as people had sex and children were a natural result. While children were certainly more useful in the old days I think its really unlikely that the total cost/benefit ratio of having a child was a fiscal positive for your average farm couple.
Surrogacy is a reasonable financial option for most UMC people, and few select it. People have posited that artificial wombs might change the abortion debate, but I don't buy it. Raising a kid is a lot harder than having a kid, and people are uncomfortable with adoption.
I think pregnancy is a lot easier in ones 20s then 30s, but it's the people delaying to the 30s that are falling short on TFR. I also think that long run its easier to take a career break in your 20s then your 30s.
There was some interesting research from looking at Britain vs the American Colonies around the comparative value of children attached to widowed women. Short version: In Britain a woman with kids from a previous marriage was really unlikely to remarry, whereas in the Colonies they tended to get snapped up really quickly. The take away was that the largely agrarian Colonies kids were valuable farm workers where as in the more industrialized (possibly over populated) UK kids were seen as a burden for the most part.
Now, I don't recall if they controlled for the ratio of males to females (more single men in the New World vs more single women in the Old World due to constant wars grinding up the men?) but it was an interesting finding.
I can confirm personally that kids are quite useful and valuable on a pre-industrial farm. There are a ton of jobs that need done that require almost no skill, so hiring an adult to do them is a lot of cost for relatively little benefit. Kids working for food and shelter are a great deal by comparison, and have the added benefit of tending to care a bit more for the whole enterprise. Not to mention kids being generally nice to have around for most people.
On women having fewer kids. I’m wondering if someone with your beliefs can hear this but my theory is that we allowed our economy to become unbalanced starting in the 1960s. By keeping our markets open we allowed export driven countries: Germany then Japan then South Korea and finally China to suppress wages in their own countries and export cheap good to the US. This gutted our manufacturing base. Worse yet we let those countries recycle their dollars into the US to make sure their currency didn’t appreciate. This made it worse. As a result our economy became more services oriented which favored women. So open market neo liberals caused the femeninization of our economy which has now led to lower birth rates and the destruction of lower class men.
All those other countries have had falling birthrates too.
The only clear correlation I'm aware of is education level of women. That seems causal though I'm sure there are other factors too. Maybe those other factors result from education, maybe not.
In an odd way, the Haidt article gives me hope. At least here we see that science is working. You can make the argument that people are only receptive to the idea that social media causes depression because a) it's common sense and b) social media companies are in society's bad graces already, but the point still stands. Researchers are using well-planned experiments and data to draw conclusions. Five years ago the body of work was inconclusive so experts hedged their bets. Now, the body of work is pointing firmly, though not inarguably, in one direction, and experts are changing their tone.
I see the issue of social media and social pathology as a subset of the broader social pathology of modernity as articulated by Liah Greenfeld in Mind, Modernity, and Madness. Thus while Haidt's work is valid, it is not clear that it will lead to effective solutions. Ultimately I see a shift towards education that supports the healthy development of identity as a more robust solution than limits on social media for teens, which strikes me as an impossible censorship task. Ultimately K12 education that supports identity formation in a healthier manner will be a more robust solution - which implies greater educational choice because government schools will not be effective at this. I predict the adolescent mental health crisis will become a leading driver of educational choice in the next decade. "Social and Emotional Learning" in public schools will be completely ineffective at addressing the crisis. Purpose and community, human connection, in voluntary K12 learning communities will be a more effective prophylactic than attempts to limit access to social media.
"Compare what became of Ben Bernanke or Anthony Fauci with what became of Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. "
Why? Is that a reasonable comparison?
- Madoff stole other people's money.
- Whether she knew it or not, Holmes was a part of defrauding investors.
- Whatever his success, Fauci tried to protect public health. His lie about masks was with that aim. To the best of my knowledge, he did none of this for personal gain. Maybe you could argue he told other lies to keep his position or hoping history would look on him favorably but that is not comparable to Madoff/Holmes.
- Bernacke's primary goal was to minimize economy-wide chaos. Whatever other goals he might have had, whatever mistakes he might have made, I think it's hard to argue against that point. I think it's hard to argue he did any of it for personal gain, beyond wanting history to look on him favorably.
Our society needs higher status, as well as more gov't support, for married folks having kids. (Perhaps like more cash subsidies to parents of kids, both husbands and wives; but Hungary's experiments aren't moving the fertility level too much).
Perhaps requiring Fed. gov't to hire 10% new hires over 40, married with 2 or more kids. As known, "personnel is policy", but set asides for special groups is somewhat anti-meritocratic, from a rationalist perspective, but possibly better for National good of having more kids born to married parents.
Tho the Noah Smith described Japan seems a pretty nice to live for those living there, and they're not yet suffering materialistically from their demographic neutron bomb / low fertility & aging population.
Similarly, as more over-educated women find less fulfillment & meaning in life, especially without stable marriages to a (one of the too-few) "good men". Meaning higher educated & more income (& taller!). I haven't seen demographic projections of future #s of children born to parents by education, with an estimate of how high IQ & higher ed means fewer kids on avg from women -- which we should expect to mean more lower IQ kids being born, but especially fewer high IQ females who far less often reproduce.
The practicing Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews; maybe big family Catholics, will be inheriting the Earth. By having kids who show up in the future. Such family oriented folk are likely to be far less hyper-individualist, tho the gov't schools & especially high status colleges will be trying to make them more secular and anti-family value, which in sexual terms conflicts with individual values.
I'd like to request links to the car seats you can fit three abreast in the back of a Civic. We haven't had any luck with that in the 'States. (Apparently there are whole back seats you can get in the EU, replacing or going on top of the existing one, but they aren't legal here.)
I agree on the school thing, though. People way over estimate the degree of difference in the top 40% say of schools. (Or even 60% I might hazard.)
For convertible car seats, the Clek Foonf and Fllo (don't believe the ikea-style naming, I believe they're Canadian) are the narrowest I've found.
For high-back boosters, the Maxi-Cosi Rodifix is a good one and relatively narrow. The absolute narrowest I've seen is the Volvo OEM booster cushion/backrest (PN 31470488 and 31470519) which are great but eyewateringly expensive.
For standard boosters, the narrowest is the Bubble Bum but the Graco Rightguide is also good.
I have fit two Rodifixes and a Foonf in the back of a Volvo V60 and a Rightguide, a Rodifix, and a traditional Chicco infant seat in the back of a first gen IS300 (which is essentially the size of a modern civic).
EDIT: If you google _carseatlady narrowest_ you'll get a lot of info from a relatively authoritative source.
Thanks! I will look that up. Getting more than two seats into a standard sedan would be really useful. As it stands it takes a SUV with 3 rows to hold them all.
Like natural evolution and evolutionary design algorithms, market capitalism only works by its successful failure mechanisms of death (bankruptcy) for variations that don't work. Crony capitalism doesn't work because it can't fail and the politically connected are never tested (common in Central America and South of the Border).
Failure is the key to success. It could also be observing and learning from the failure of others (much harder to do and subject to bad ideas becoming frozen and stopping all innovation).
Without death natural evolution does not work and we wouldn't exist.
Much as you trust Haidt on causes of mental health problems, I would trust Lyman Stone first of all on causes of declining fertility. He has tremendous command of the research findings and isn’t shy about sharing them, and is honest about things that don’t fit his ideological narrative (which is very different from mine to say the least).
Just as a quick reaction - I am a woman and had one pregnancy. I think I get what you are trying to say.. but worth noting that pregnancy had a totally trivial impact on my life compared to HAVING TO LOOK AFTER A BABY (even though I could totally afford childcare). This is the real big deal, and the reason I only had one kid.
Yes, I think that is the real issue. The discomforts of pregnancy are pretty vague and abstract to those women who haven't experienced it, and those who have don't seem to mind it too much as a cause. Hell, my wife is thinking she wants a 4th kid, despite needing a C-section for each of the previous, which is a really miserable process with really long recovery. I note that her interest in another kid coincides with our youngest getting close to the age of going off to kindergarten and no longer being a baby for the most part. Less demands on her parenting leads to interest in another kid, suggesting to me that the limiting factor is how much time and energy she has to spend on care.
Yes to Taking Care, for years, being far more important than the ~8 (more) months of pregnancy and usually a painful delivery.
I love kids; we have 4 (we had 3 in a one bedroom apt for first 5 years, about 660 sq ft/ 66 sq meter), but we live close to my wife's very very helpful parents. Raising kids includes huge quantity time investments in a semi-boring "watching" mode.
For the conscientious person child bearing is much easier than child raising. Not just the emotional and physical demands of tending to a child, but also the economic realities. Furthermore, having more than two children requires a massive change in lifestyle. One needs a larger car - a minivan or full size SUV to fit the child seats. And one needs a larger home.
And having one child requires a huge lifestyle change. Clearly there are more women now than before who refuse this change. Not because they cannot tolerate pregnancy but because of the dependency that having a child creates.
Good point. It is definitely true that having two kids is not twice as difficult as having one; the step change from 0 to 1 kid is really tough, 1 to 2 kids is only somewhat more difficult. 2 to 3 is irritating, as you say, because you have to get new cars, but not a ton harder than 2 otherwise.
For us, past the first two years, having 2 kids was easier than having 1. In fact having 3 is probably easier than 1.
You don't need a larger car, unless you are driving a sub compact. I've got three kids under the age of 10 and they all fit in the backseat of a civic by searching out better fitting car seats. We also have the same home (plus a second bathroom) that we had with zero kids. Three kids, 2 adults, 2 bedrooms, a playroom. ~1700 sq ft.
But I will push back even further than that- a new, larger car isn't even that much more. A new base price Civic is $25,000, a new Odyssy is $37,000, and you get 10 years out of a car easy. That's $1,200 a year and there are plenty of cheaper options than the Odyssy that will fit 3 kids easy.
When you actually breakdown earning/spending the major isses for most 2 income families fall into one of three categories.
1. Overestimating the earnings of the 2nd person and not accounting for taxes.
2. Underestimating the costs of the job, be it commute costs, 2nd car ownership, higher housing costs to live in an area where both people can work, the higher costs of buying prepared foods vs cooking, and having much less flexibility in their schedules.
3. Spending way to much on their child's education.
A 'high quality' school district can often cost $5,000 more in property taxes each year which on its own dwarfs the cost of a larger car (without even considering the higher home prices that go with it as well).
Once you have made one of the above mistakes when you have a kid or two, you end up looking at the budget and having no idea how you could affor that larger car for a 3rd.
What you say is no doubt true for some. That said,
- For modest income couples, the second income really does make a big difference, even after taxes.
- Some couples both want to work, not stay home with the kids. That only works if you can afford daycare. Even then it take a huge bite out of nearly everyone's finances.
- Some people want the bigger house in the better neighborhood, longer commute, etc. more than they want the kids. Some would rather stay in an apartment in the city too.
- Some don't want kids even if it were painless and no cost.
Regarding the elites who never lose status: I think that, while the market does curtail some of the worse examples of failing upwards, being insulated from the results of your actions is alive and well in big corporations. That seems to be the key: the bigger an organization the less accountable all the members are, particularly in the tangle of management where assigning responsibility and blame is difficult. Government bureaucrats have the benefit of being in a monopoly that takes the money it needs to run, but the size of their organizations might be part of the driving force as well, one shared with the private sector.
(I don't think it is a coincidence that most, if not all, government regulation of businesses tends to drive them towards ever larger organizations.)
I don't buy your pregnancy theory at all.
Women tend to want kids more than men do, even though they deal with pregnancy.
I don't think women were pressured into being breeders so much as people had sex and children were a natural result. While children were certainly more useful in the old days I think its really unlikely that the total cost/benefit ratio of having a child was a fiscal positive for your average farm couple.
Surrogacy is a reasonable financial option for most UMC people, and few select it. People have posited that artificial wombs might change the abortion debate, but I don't buy it. Raising a kid is a lot harder than having a kid, and people are uncomfortable with adoption.
I think pregnancy is a lot easier in ones 20s then 30s, but it's the people delaying to the 30s that are falling short on TFR. I also think that long run its easier to take a career break in your 20s then your 30s.
There was some interesting research from looking at Britain vs the American Colonies around the comparative value of children attached to widowed women. Short version: In Britain a woman with kids from a previous marriage was really unlikely to remarry, whereas in the Colonies they tended to get snapped up really quickly. The take away was that the largely agrarian Colonies kids were valuable farm workers where as in the more industrialized (possibly over populated) UK kids were seen as a burden for the most part.
Now, I don't recall if they controlled for the ratio of males to females (more single men in the New World vs more single women in the Old World due to constant wars grinding up the men?) but it was an interesting finding.
I can confirm personally that kids are quite useful and valuable on a pre-industrial farm. There are a ton of jobs that need done that require almost no skill, so hiring an adult to do them is a lot of cost for relatively little benefit. Kids working for food and shelter are a great deal by comparison, and have the added benefit of tending to care a bit more for the whole enterprise. Not to mention kids being generally nice to have around for most people.
On women having fewer kids. I’m wondering if someone with your beliefs can hear this but my theory is that we allowed our economy to become unbalanced starting in the 1960s. By keeping our markets open we allowed export driven countries: Germany then Japan then South Korea and finally China to suppress wages in their own countries and export cheap good to the US. This gutted our manufacturing base. Worse yet we let those countries recycle their dollars into the US to make sure their currency didn’t appreciate. This made it worse. As a result our economy became more services oriented which favored women. So open market neo liberals caused the femeninization of our economy which has now led to lower birth rates and the destruction of lower class men.
All those other countries have had falling birthrates too.
The only clear correlation I'm aware of is education level of women. That seems causal though I'm sure there are other factors too. Maybe those other factors result from education, maybe not.
That’s a good point
In an odd way, the Haidt article gives me hope. At least here we see that science is working. You can make the argument that people are only receptive to the idea that social media causes depression because a) it's common sense and b) social media companies are in society's bad graces already, but the point still stands. Researchers are using well-planned experiments and data to draw conclusions. Five years ago the body of work was inconclusive so experts hedged their bets. Now, the body of work is pointing firmly, though not inarguably, in one direction, and experts are changing their tone.
I see the issue of social media and social pathology as a subset of the broader social pathology of modernity as articulated by Liah Greenfeld in Mind, Modernity, and Madness. Thus while Haidt's work is valid, it is not clear that it will lead to effective solutions. Ultimately I see a shift towards education that supports the healthy development of identity as a more robust solution than limits on social media for teens, which strikes me as an impossible censorship task. Ultimately K12 education that supports identity formation in a healthier manner will be a more robust solution - which implies greater educational choice because government schools will not be effective at this. I predict the adolescent mental health crisis will become a leading driver of educational choice in the next decade. "Social and Emotional Learning" in public schools will be completely ineffective at addressing the crisis. Purpose and community, human connection, in voluntary K12 learning communities will be a more effective prophylactic than attempts to limit access to social media.
"Compare what became of Ben Bernanke or Anthony Fauci with what became of Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. "
Why? Is that a reasonable comparison?
- Madoff stole other people's money.
- Whether she knew it or not, Holmes was a part of defrauding investors.
- Whatever his success, Fauci tried to protect public health. His lie about masks was with that aim. To the best of my knowledge, he did none of this for personal gain. Maybe you could argue he told other lies to keep his position or hoping history would look on him favorably but that is not comparable to Madoff/Holmes.
- Bernacke's primary goal was to minimize economy-wide chaos. Whatever other goals he might have had, whatever mistakes he might have made, I think it's hard to argue against that point. I think it's hard to argue he did any of it for personal gain, beyond wanting history to look on him favorably.
Our society needs higher status, as well as more gov't support, for married folks having kids. (Perhaps like more cash subsidies to parents of kids, both husbands and wives; but Hungary's experiments aren't moving the fertility level too much).
Perhaps requiring Fed. gov't to hire 10% new hires over 40, married with 2 or more kids. As known, "personnel is policy", but set asides for special groups is somewhat anti-meritocratic, from a rationalist perspective, but possibly better for National good of having more kids born to married parents.
Tho the Noah Smith described Japan seems a pretty nice to live for those living there, and they're not yet suffering materialistically from their demographic neutron bomb / low fertility & aging population.
Similarly, as more over-educated women find less fulfillment & meaning in life, especially without stable marriages to a (one of the too-few) "good men". Meaning higher educated & more income (& taller!). I haven't seen demographic projections of future #s of children born to parents by education, with an estimate of how high IQ & higher ed means fewer kids on avg from women -- which we should expect to mean more lower IQ kids being born, but especially fewer high IQ females who far less often reproduce.
The practicing Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews; maybe big family Catholics, will be inheriting the Earth. By having kids who show up in the future. Such family oriented folk are likely to be far less hyper-individualist, tho the gov't schools & especially high status colleges will be trying to make them more secular and anti-family value, which in sexual terms conflicts with individual values.
I'd like to request links to the car seats you can fit three abreast in the back of a Civic. We haven't had any luck with that in the 'States. (Apparently there are whole back seats you can get in the EU, replacing or going on top of the existing one, but they aren't legal here.)
I agree on the school thing, though. People way over estimate the degree of difference in the top 40% say of schools. (Or even 60% I might hazard.)
For convertible car seats, the Clek Foonf and Fllo (don't believe the ikea-style naming, I believe they're Canadian) are the narrowest I've found.
For high-back boosters, the Maxi-Cosi Rodifix is a good one and relatively narrow. The absolute narrowest I've seen is the Volvo OEM booster cushion/backrest (PN 31470488 and 31470519) which are great but eyewateringly expensive.
For standard boosters, the narrowest is the Bubble Bum but the Graco Rightguide is also good.
I have fit two Rodifixes and a Foonf in the back of a Volvo V60 and a Rightguide, a Rodifix, and a traditional Chicco infant seat in the back of a first gen IS300 (which is essentially the size of a modern civic).
EDIT: If you google _carseatlady narrowest_ you'll get a lot of info from a relatively authoritative source.
Thanks! I will look that up. Getting more than two seats into a standard sedan would be really useful. As it stands it takes a SUV with 3 rows to hold them all.
Brian Chau view has lots of validity.
Like natural evolution and evolutionary design algorithms, market capitalism only works by its successful failure mechanisms of death (bankruptcy) for variations that don't work. Crony capitalism doesn't work because it can't fail and the politically connected are never tested (common in Central America and South of the Border).
Failure is the key to success. It could also be observing and learning from the failure of others (much harder to do and subject to bad ideas becoming frozen and stopping all innovation).
Without death natural evolution does not work and we wouldn't exist.
Much as you trust Haidt on causes of mental health problems, I would trust Lyman Stone first of all on causes of declining fertility. He has tremendous command of the research findings and isn’t shy about sharing them, and is honest about things that don’t fit his ideological narrative (which is very different from mine to say the least).