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
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.
I think the history (and abuse) of similar commissions, GAO, the IGs, etc. in the US provides plenty of reason to be pessimistic about the prospects of any such efforts. The track record of holding anyone personally accountable for anything is miserable. Even accountable after having been proven to have been lying under oath to commission investigators, as, according the Chairman Thomas Kean, a large number of high-ranking officials did to the 9/11 Commission, which he later complained was "set up to fail."
In general, it is a mistake to give government organizations control over access to the information and records related to their activities. Ideally all records should be created in triplicate (at least, or perhaps using blockchains) on systems controlled by the separate branches and perhaps other copies for the major political parties and the public at large, so that no one ever has to go begging for permission or be unjustly denied access to see what they are legally authorized to see. Fat chance of that, you might as well call for a Constitutional convention.
A good way to look at a lot of longstanding weaknesses of USG is to start from the perspective of what Yudkowsky called, "Inadequate Equilibria" for which there is no "Free Energy" available for reform. That is, to assume that every time you see a big problem, it is most likely already well-known to experts or insiders, and it remains deeply entrenched and hard to change because of powerful forces defending it and keeping it that way, and there being very little incentive for anyone to mount a high-effort, low-probability effort to charge the machine gun nests to break through that kind of resistance.
A good example in the US is the real estate transaction system. Everybody knows there is tremendous room for improvement and cost-reduction, and everybody knows why it hasn't happened.
From that perspective it is very unrealistic to expect insiders to be persuaded to voluntarily implement any kind of significant reform, or allow themselves to be publicly embarrassed or held to account by outsiders, if they can use their insider powers and influence to prevent it.
What has tended to work better historically in those few areas where it can apply is for outsider entrepreneurs - even those selling to government - to set up superior systems or processes outside of the internal rot and decay and then to produce undeniably large improvements fast enough so as to change the facts on the ground and the patterns of life before the insiders have a chance to realize the danger, regroup, and organize to forestall the changes.
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.
My parents (father now deceased) live in our house and have provided immense support.
My wife's mother (the father is dead) doesn't do much of anything with us. It seems that's her way generally with everyone, not specific to us.
Some people want to be active grandparents. Some don't. And in a lot of cases someone would have to move to be close and often that is a barrier people won't jump across (my parents did, but her mother would never).
Most parents will accept all the help grandparents are willing to give, unless the grandparents want to attach "advice" to such help. When they do so they aren't really helping, they are using help to manipulate.
Ghost of Christmas Present: “She moved away from her parents to attend a prestigious college. Then after college she got a prestigious job in a big blue city. It’s hard for her parents to visit for long periods of time.”
Arnold: “I see. Maybe this Prestige vs Dominance perspective needs revision?”
Ghost of Christmas Future: “It does get revised. Would you like to see?”
Re: Benenson on sex differences in social psychology. Arnold's review harnesses Benenson's framework to interpret admin cancel culture and management on campus. Let me outline a simple model of the battle of the sexes *among colleges students and grads*. (This model is tangentially related to Benenson's research about sex differences in child psychology.)
Empirical (statistical) premises:
• A young woman is more likely than a young man to want a monogamous relationship.
• More young women than young men attempt and complete college.
• People nowadays tend to mate and marry at their education level.
Mechanisms and dynamics:
On campus, young women who want monogamy perceive promiscuous young women as a threat. They try and police promiscuity (and increase their own status) by pejorative labelling and shunning. Regulatory gossip can backfire by unwittingly advertising who is available for no-strings-attached sex. Restrictive norms emerge and expand to ban dating any "ex" of a friend/teammate/sorority sister. At a closed residential campus, especially at a small college, such intrusive norms have a lot of scope. Because campuses are awash in alcohol (a disinhibiting mind drug), informal regulation of behavior tends to unravel. Thus young women adapt by practicing overreach, but nonetheless suffer much frustration in the lopsided battle of the sexes on campus.
After college, sex ratio imbalance of education pedigree in the marriage market recasts the lopsided battle of the sexes. A substantial fraction of educated women won't "settle" and don't marry, but can support themselves at a middle-class standard. A smaller subset of them eventually choose to have and raise children on their own.
(In Europe, the marriage market among college grads has been partly or largely transformed into a long-term household-formation market, without marriage.)
I both agree and disagree with your comment that "[t]he ultimate reward for having a child is having grandchildren." We have three grandchildren. Two are within 30 minute drive (which for the Chicago area is really good). The other is 500 miles away, but that's why we got Silver status on United. Grandchildren are great.
Where I might disagree a little is that children are great, too. We were lucky; our two kids were fantastic. Grandchildren have just added to it.
"Intertemporal Choice Inconsistency." People are really bad at imagining and predicting how they are going to be and what they are going to like and want when they get older. That makes some sense: they've never been older, only younger, and only have that past experience to go on. They thing that certain things that have seemed stable for a while are unlikely to change much over time. A tragedy of the human condition is that they are often really wrong about that, and thus make a lot of really big mistakes they can't go back to reverse and thus later come to regret.
One example out of many is that if you are wrong in thinking that you won't really enjoy becoming a grandparent many years from now, then you won't invest today in the kind of behaviors and efforts now so as to maximize the probability of harmonious grandparentdom later on.
For Americans of a certain age who came to realize too late they made this error (in terms of my anecdotal experience of hearing them complain about it) my impression is that for a variety of reasons they really failed to invest in what you might call "relationship strength management", leading to a lot of alienation, grudges, and estrangement from their kids. They slacked in day-to-day bolstering of affectionate bonds by failing to do more positives or refrain from more negatives, and in general failed to imagine the future path of their lives as being intimately involved in the lives of their grown children and grandchildren instead of living separated lives of their own distinct and apart from them.
When their children go on to have kids of their own, these hard feelings are hard to overcome and forgive, and years of bad habits formative of relationships and personalities are too hard to break after too many years. So their kids don't really want grandpa or grandma around, even if it would mean a lot of help. And anticipating not getting that kind of help, they have marginally fewer kids marginally later.
There are some downsides but also big advantages to seeing matters of marriage and close extended family in the manner C.S. Lewis described as being "shipwrecked" together and thus stuck with and dependent on each other for life, such that one was always a little paranoid about and incentivized to remain attentive to the maintenance of relations. American culture seems to be at a historical low point in that regard.
As usual, quite a bit of insight. When we get to the three levels of intrapersonal interaction; I think you miss at least one. Having three levels is nice, but not sufficient. The obvious one that is missing is 'couple.' There are arguments to be made for 'several' scales that have emergent properties other than that.
Yeah, multiple levels may catch it better than a number. There are acquaintances within the band, the family (which starts with relationships between sexual partners, hunting parties, the band, and the larger ethnic-linguistic tribe.
“ I have a three-layer model of human behavior, in which we play games at the level of the individual, the tribe, and society.” Published or written up? I’d like to see what you have when it’s ready to circulate. Best, CM
"The ultimate reward for having a child is having grandchildren." I'd be interested in learning why you feel this way. Posterity? A feeling of security that only a big brood can provide? As someone with a child but no grandchildren yet, I don't "get it." Given our falling rates of fertility, I suspect many others don't either, especially people who are not yet parents.
Reading Toke's review of Warriors and Worriers I found much to question (listed in a comment on that substack post). It made me question whether I'd accept the assertions made in the book. Your review almost seemed like it was for a different book. There was a little overlap but not much. You made the book sound much more in line with my existing beliefs. I then read the review by Hanson that Toke mentions. That one also gave me a positive vibe.
Is it coincidence that Toke is female whereas you and Hanson are male?
I don’t think so. You surely don’t write to an advice column out of an abundance of sensitivity to others’ speculations about your circumstances. Anyway I think AK’s response is directed at the avalanche of similar comments from like a hundred women saying, essentially: me too, oftentimes I hate motherhood and regret it. You’re not alone, etc. It obviously struck a nerve with the female professional class.
The power of “you’re not alone” in general, not just here, I leave to others to decide; I may just be immune to it.
“The sight of my child is odious to me - but at least I’m not alone! I have internet pals!”
AK is just about the only respondent with a concrete suggestion, beyond go for a walk, or “do something for you” (to remind you further, I guess, of your prior life when *everything* outside of paid work, was “for you”).
Nobody else seemed to have any notion that - this isn’t exactly normal, I wonder if there might be something mistaken in our assumptions, or our preparations for adult life, that we should all feel so.
Isolation was for me the hardest part of motherhood. Both in terms of loneliness and boredom, but even more so in having no guidance, correction, example. I was never going to be a great mother but I must believe I could have been a better mother surrounded by other women. That’s not the culture I was born into, but I’d rather question it than assume motherhood should be a joyless struggle that calls up in us a desire for *less* participation in Life.
Actually I’m misremembering a bit. Yes, there can be some boredom in playing with babies/toddlers. But too, for some of us who start earlier - I had no illustrious career to abandon or maintain, so have no commonality with Oster’s audience - but I *was* busy trying to do all the new things at once: learn to cook, clean house, be some sort of wife to the poor unfortunate who knocked me up. Plus I had silly ideas about what family life was that seemed to owe more to catalog pictures of home decor. So I was clueless in all dimensions - not just the most important.
I’d advise getting into a mothers group, making friends with parents the same age, etc.
I’d also recognize the ages 2-4 are kind of the hardest. Kids talk back, throw temper tantrums, can’t be left alone without supervision. It’s also the range we’re, in the USA at least, you have to shell out a lot of money for daycare.
It gets easier after that. My oldest are 6 and 4 now, at it’s like autopilot. I’m typing this from the trampoline park as they entertain themselves.
I’m of two minds on this issue. The “I wish I didn’t have a kid so I could travel and consume more” sentiment ought to be low status and shunned. On the other hand I think that the government should give large payments to parents so they don’t feel like they are “losing out” relative to DINKs.
The worst way to be a parent is to think like you are applying an ideal model: from day 1 to universities and careers for your kids. It creates anxiety for the parents and even worse for the kids. Just think about instilling sound principles and not objectives on our kids is hard enough, why overloading the whole family with expectations that will certainly be disappointed.
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.
I think the history (and abuse) of similar commissions, GAO, the IGs, etc. in the US provides plenty of reason to be pessimistic about the prospects of any such efforts. The track record of holding anyone personally accountable for anything is miserable. Even accountable after having been proven to have been lying under oath to commission investigators, as, according the Chairman Thomas Kean, a large number of high-ranking officials did to the 9/11 Commission, which he later complained was "set up to fail."
In general, it is a mistake to give government organizations control over access to the information and records related to their activities. Ideally all records should be created in triplicate (at least, or perhaps using blockchains) on systems controlled by the separate branches and perhaps other copies for the major political parties and the public at large, so that no one ever has to go begging for permission or be unjustly denied access to see what they are legally authorized to see. Fat chance of that, you might as well call for a Constitutional convention.
A good way to look at a lot of longstanding weaknesses of USG is to start from the perspective of what Yudkowsky called, "Inadequate Equilibria" for which there is no "Free Energy" available for reform. That is, to assume that every time you see a big problem, it is most likely already well-known to experts or insiders, and it remains deeply entrenched and hard to change because of powerful forces defending it and keeping it that way, and there being very little incentive for anyone to mount a high-effort, low-probability effort to charge the machine gun nests to break through that kind of resistance.
A good example in the US is the real estate transaction system. Everybody knows there is tremendous room for improvement and cost-reduction, and everybody knows why it hasn't happened.
From that perspective it is very unrealistic to expect insiders to be persuaded to voluntarily implement any kind of significant reform, or allow themselves to be publicly embarrassed or held to account by outsiders, if they can use their insider powers and influence to prevent it.
What has tended to work better historically in those few areas where it can apply is for outsider entrepreneurs - even those selling to government - to set up superior systems or processes outside of the internal rot and decay and then to produce undeniably large improvements fast enough so as to change the facts on the ground and the patterns of life before the insiders have a chance to realize the danger, regroup, and organize to forestall the changes.
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.
Yes. And of course new parents are less likely to have a parent of their own living nearby, not that phone calls can't help.
"My question is: where are this woman’s parents?"
My parents (father now deceased) live in our house and have provided immense support.
My wife's mother (the father is dead) doesn't do much of anything with us. It seems that's her way generally with everyone, not specific to us.
Some people want to be active grandparents. Some don't. And in a lot of cases someone would have to move to be close and often that is a barrier people won't jump across (my parents did, but her mother would never).
Yes to all. And sometimes new parents don't want their parents interfering.
Most parents will accept all the help grandparents are willing to give, unless the grandparents want to attach "advice" to such help. When they do so they aren't really helping, they are using help to manipulate.
Arnold: “Where are this woman’s parents?”
Ghost of Christmas Present: “She moved away from her parents to attend a prestigious college. Then after college she got a prestigious job in a big blue city. It’s hard for her parents to visit for long periods of time.”
Arnold: “I see. Maybe this Prestige vs Dominance perspective needs revision?”
Ghost of Christmas Future: “It does get revised. Would you like to see?”
Re: Benenson on sex differences in social psychology. Arnold's review harnesses Benenson's framework to interpret admin cancel culture and management on campus. Let me outline a simple model of the battle of the sexes *among colleges students and grads*. (This model is tangentially related to Benenson's research about sex differences in child psychology.)
Empirical (statistical) premises:
• A young woman is more likely than a young man to want a monogamous relationship.
• More young women than young men attempt and complete college.
• People nowadays tend to mate and marry at their education level.
Mechanisms and dynamics:
On campus, young women who want monogamy perceive promiscuous young women as a threat. They try and police promiscuity (and increase their own status) by pejorative labelling and shunning. Regulatory gossip can backfire by unwittingly advertising who is available for no-strings-attached sex. Restrictive norms emerge and expand to ban dating any "ex" of a friend/teammate/sorority sister. At a closed residential campus, especially at a small college, such intrusive norms have a lot of scope. Because campuses are awash in alcohol (a disinhibiting mind drug), informal regulation of behavior tends to unravel. Thus young women adapt by practicing overreach, but nonetheless suffer much frustration in the lopsided battle of the sexes on campus.
After college, sex ratio imbalance of education pedigree in the marriage market recasts the lopsided battle of the sexes. A substantial fraction of educated women won't "settle" and don't marry, but can support themselves at a middle-class standard. A smaller subset of them eventually choose to have and raise children on their own.
(In Europe, the marriage market among college grads has been partly or largely transformed into a long-term household-formation market, without marriage.)
I both agree and disagree with your comment that "[t]he ultimate reward for having a child is having grandchildren." We have three grandchildren. Two are within 30 minute drive (which for the Chicago area is really good). The other is 500 miles away, but that's why we got Silver status on United. Grandchildren are great.
Where I might disagree a little is that children are great, too. We were lucky; our two kids were fantastic. Grandchildren have just added to it.
"Intertemporal Choice Inconsistency." People are really bad at imagining and predicting how they are going to be and what they are going to like and want when they get older. That makes some sense: they've never been older, only younger, and only have that past experience to go on. They thing that certain things that have seemed stable for a while are unlikely to change much over time. A tragedy of the human condition is that they are often really wrong about that, and thus make a lot of really big mistakes they can't go back to reverse and thus later come to regret.
One example out of many is that if you are wrong in thinking that you won't really enjoy becoming a grandparent many years from now, then you won't invest today in the kind of behaviors and efforts now so as to maximize the probability of harmonious grandparentdom later on.
For Americans of a certain age who came to realize too late they made this error (in terms of my anecdotal experience of hearing them complain about it) my impression is that for a variety of reasons they really failed to invest in what you might call "relationship strength management", leading to a lot of alienation, grudges, and estrangement from their kids. They slacked in day-to-day bolstering of affectionate bonds by failing to do more positives or refrain from more negatives, and in general failed to imagine the future path of their lives as being intimately involved in the lives of their grown children and grandchildren instead of living separated lives of their own distinct and apart from them.
When their children go on to have kids of their own, these hard feelings are hard to overcome and forgive, and years of bad habits formative of relationships and personalities are too hard to break after too many years. So their kids don't really want grandpa or grandma around, even if it would mean a lot of help. And anticipating not getting that kind of help, they have marginally fewer kids marginally later.
There are some downsides but also big advantages to seeing matters of marriage and close extended family in the manner C.S. Lewis described as being "shipwrecked" together and thus stuck with and dependent on each other for life, such that one was always a little paranoid about and incentivized to remain attentive to the maintenance of relations. American culture seems to be at a historical low point in that regard.
Arnold;
As usual, quite a bit of insight. When we get to the three levels of intrapersonal interaction; I think you miss at least one. Having three levels is nice, but not sufficient. The obvious one that is missing is 'couple.' There are arguments to be made for 'several' scales that have emergent properties other than that.
Yeah, multiple levels may catch it better than a number. There are acquaintances within the band, the family (which starts with relationships between sexual partners, hunting parties, the band, and the larger ethnic-linguistic tribe.
“ I have a three-layer model of human behavior, in which we play games at the level of the individual, the tribe, and society.” Published or written up? I’d like to see what you have when it’s ready to circulate. Best, CM
Once again, many thanks Arnold. Am laying in Lorenzo's next piece as we speak!
"The ultimate reward for having a child is having grandchildren." I'd be interested in learning why you feel this way. Posterity? A feeling of security that only a big brood can provide? As someone with a child but no grandchildren yet, I don't "get it." Given our falling rates of fertility, I suspect many others don't either, especially people who are not yet parents.
Re: evasion of electoral accountability.
Compare Michael Munger, "The road to crony capitalism" (2019).
EconTalk at link below:
https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-crony-capitalism/
Essay in The Independent Review (w/ Mario Villareal-Diaz, co-author) at link below:
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1343
Punchline: "Capitalism in a democracy is not sustainable."
I would add that 'clean' (non-crony) capitalism isn't feasible in autocracies, monarchies, or dictatorships, either.
Real political-economy is a caricature of a parody of "The Theory of the Second Best" in economics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best
Reading Toke's review of Warriors and Worriers I found much to question (listed in a comment on that substack post). It made me question whether I'd accept the assertions made in the book. Your review almost seemed like it was for a different book. There was a little overlap but not much. You made the book sound much more in line with my existing beliefs. I then read the review by Hanson that Toke mentions. That one also gave me a positive vibe.
Is it coincidence that Toke is female whereas you and Hanson are male?
Pretty ugly comments with your first link. You don't know if this woman's parents are still alive, or if she has a relationship with them, etc.
I don’t think so. You surely don’t write to an advice column out of an abundance of sensitivity to others’ speculations about your circumstances. Anyway I think AK’s response is directed at the avalanche of similar comments from like a hundred women saying, essentially: me too, oftentimes I hate motherhood and regret it. You’re not alone, etc. It obviously struck a nerve with the female professional class.
The power of “you’re not alone” in general, not just here, I leave to others to decide; I may just be immune to it.
“The sight of my child is odious to me - but at least I’m not alone! I have internet pals!”
AK is just about the only respondent with a concrete suggestion, beyond go for a walk, or “do something for you” (to remind you further, I guess, of your prior life when *everything* outside of paid work, was “for you”).
Nobody else seemed to have any notion that - this isn’t exactly normal, I wonder if there might be something mistaken in our assumptions, or our preparations for adult life, that we should all feel so.
Isolation was for me the hardest part of motherhood. Both in terms of loneliness and boredom, but even more so in having no guidance, correction, example. I was never going to be a great mother but I must believe I could have been a better mother surrounded by other women. That’s not the culture I was born into, but I’d rather question it than assume motherhood should be a joyless struggle that calls up in us a desire for *less* participation in Life.
Actually I’m misremembering a bit. Yes, there can be some boredom in playing with babies/toddlers. But too, for some of us who start earlier - I had no illustrious career to abandon or maintain, so have no commonality with Oster’s audience - but I *was* busy trying to do all the new things at once: learn to cook, clean house, be some sort of wife to the poor unfortunate who knocked me up. Plus I had silly ideas about what family life was that seemed to owe more to catalog pictures of home decor. So I was clueless in all dimensions - not just the most important.
+1
I’d advise getting into a mothers group, making friends with parents the same age, etc.
I’d also recognize the ages 2-4 are kind of the hardest. Kids talk back, throw temper tantrums, can’t be left alone without supervision. It’s also the range we’re, in the USA at least, you have to shell out a lot of money for daycare.
It gets easier after that. My oldest are 6 and 4 now, at it’s like autopilot. I’m typing this from the trampoline park as they entertain themselves.
I’m of two minds on this issue. The “I wish I didn’t have a kid so I could travel and consume more” sentiment ought to be low status and shunned. On the other hand I think that the government should give large payments to parents so they don’t feel like they are “losing out” relative to DINKs.
Parenting should be a resource neutral decision.
The worst way to be a parent is to think like you are applying an ideal model: from day 1 to universities and careers for your kids. It creates anxiety for the parents and even worse for the kids. Just think about instilling sound principles and not objectives on our kids is hard enough, why overloading the whole family with expectations that will certainly be disappointed.