Links to Consider
Emily Oster's reader has second thoughts on having a child; Lorenzo Warby on accountability; Dan Williams on socially useful beliefs; Tove K on Joyce Benenson
Emily Oster only offers a snippet to unpaid subscribers. She quotes one of her readers:
For the first 13 months of my daughter’s life, I loved being a mom. My mental health had never been better, despite lack of sleep, breastfeeding trouble, and other challenges. Now, not so much. I maybe even feel like I regret having a kid. How do I come to terms with not loving this irreversible decision I used to think was a good one?
—Booking an appointment with my psychiatrist as we speak
My question is: where are this woman’s parents?
The ultimate reward for having a child is having grandchildren. I would think that it is natural for grandparents to provide enough emotional and physical support to a mother to overcome her doubts about whether she should have had children.
In a wide-ranging essay, Lorenzo Warby writes,
A fundamental problem for developed democracies is that the processes for evading electoral accountability continue to evolve, while accountability mechanisms have not caught up—or have been actively degraded. In large part this has been due to problems of scale. Greater scale means more capacity for accountability to be evaded by feedback dilution and for mechanisms to degrade accountability to emerge.
Everybody in every organization wants authority without accountability. My COO/CA model is an attempt to overcome that in government.
Dan Williams has started a substack.
human cooperation occurs within large-scale, complex social networks featuring strategic, smart individuals with divergent fitness interests. Human cooperation is therefore much more interesting, complex, and challenging.
His interests clearly overlap with mine. I would note that human cooperation also occurs within smaller-scale units, the size of tribes. I have a three-layer model of human behavior, in which we play games at the level of the individual, the tribe, and society. The games that we play at each level can undermine the other levels.
Nature is the baseline, shared by all human populations. It is how to rise over that baseline that is the important question that we all should be working at. The baseline differs a bit between males and females on average. But since the point is rising over it, discussing which sex has the lowest baseline is meaningless.
Gender equality means equal opportunities to participate in the strivings of the human race to surpass its own nature. Warriors and Worriers is one of the few books that take us closer to that goal.
Do read her whole review. She talks about her own childhood and her own children in light of Joyce Benenson’s insights. Of course, my own review of Benenson is worth re-reading.
substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
@
The quoted part of Lorenzo’s essay is a keen insight. It is impossible to set up a government system that stays forever free of corruption, because opportunists will by trial and error evolve ways to use its institutions for their own ends, no matter how well the system is set up initially. There is an ongoing Red Queen dynamic in which those who want to keep the system running as intended need to keep evolving their own mechanisms for rooting out corruption, sometimes a lot more than they think.
One idea is that there could be a commission every 20 years or so tasked with identifying and recommending solutions to persistent government dysfunction that isn’t getting solved by existing political processes. For example, a current issue would be why the US government can’t stop running enormous budget deficits. The commission would recommend changes such as bureaucratic restructuring, changes to laws, or even constitutional amendments. These recommendations would then have to be taken up by the applicable branches of government, but if the commission had sufficient prestige it might be difficult for incumbent politicians to ignore.
One can imagine challenges to this approach, especially how to choose the commission and keep people from evolving ways to game that process. Whether it would work or not in practice, we need to find ways to stay a step ahead of corrupting influencers and prevent them from creating a level of dysfunction that is impossible to uproot. I think the COO/CA idea has the same intent, and can operate on a shorter time scale.
Her parents might be dead because she might have waited until she was nearly 40 to have children. My youngest sister had her first child at age 41, and our father was already gone and our mother is too infirm at age 75 today to be able to offer much support that a grandparent might normally be able to. My brother-in-law was even older than my sister, and his father is now gone. So the grandchild only has two grandmothers and only one of those is able to care for her on weekend and overnights.