Alex Nowrasteh on the birth dearth; Ed West on mental illness and concept creep; Me on the recent Milton Friedman biography; Ed West on disruptive people
"reduces math and reading test scores in grades 9 and 10 by 0.02 standard deviations"
0.02 SD?! Anyone with any familiarity with standard deviations has to balk at a number like that. I was convinced that had to be a typo. But no, I downloaded the nber paper and there it was.
Look, saying "reduced" is a very misleading way to put "does practically nothing", and thinking one can use such weak evidence in support of anything is borderline innumerate. 0.02 standard deviations is unmeasurably precise in the context of those test scores and indistinguishable from zero. For comparison, 0.02SD is 0.3 IQ points, 1/16th of an inch (1.5 millimeters) in height, or something like a 1% difference in household income near the median.
"I was struck when Hughes talked about the negative rebound effect when Adderall wears off"
Adderall is just amphetamine*, i.e., "speed"**. When people consume stimulants in that family at sufficient doses to go beyond mere boost in focus and productivity to feelings of euphoria, arousal, and a substantial lift in mood, many will then tend to experience a mood crash called a "comedown" similar to an alcohol hangover but more emotional than physical, that is a depressed low proportionate in intensity and duration to the high, and which can be aggravated by numerous other factors.
The nature of human metabolic biodiversity is such that plenty of people barely get this at all and bounce right back, and plenty are at the other extreme of getting totally wrecked by comedowns even after small doses, and plenty are everywhere in between. For any member of this family of substances, depending on what effect one is trying to achieve, for some it will prove to be a wonder drug, for others borderline toxic. This makes it very hard to predict how any individual would react or to give individualized useful advice, and the wide statistical dispersion makes "experience reports" such as the one given by Hughes necessarily anecdotal. It also makes it hard for people with different reaction profiles to relate to each other with regards to these experiences.
*Technically, there are left and right-handed versions of amphetamine, the right-handed one is somewhat more stimulating and preferred for recreational use, and Adderall is a 3:1 ratio of right to left, in slightly different salts that don't make much difference. Just calling it "amphetamine" or "speed" is close enough, especially if someone takes a recreational-level dose.
**People don't say "speed" much anymore, and when they did, they used it in a very loose manner where it could refer to either amphetamine, methamphetamine, or occasionally some other similar substituted amphetamines. Drug culture language is fuzzy and often maps poorly to the precise identifications of chemical nomenclature.
About 15 years ago I thought I might have ADHD and asked my doctor. he said he could either do a full test or just give me Aderall to try. I opted for the Aderall and did it Monday through Friday for one week. It felt like I had drank a pot of coffee, but I didn't feel more focused. I skipped it on Saturday and Sunday, and the comedown was awful. I couldn't get out of bed. After that I flushed them down the toilet.
I found I had a less useful response to Adderall when I was prescribed it for a few years. It didn't seem to do much for focus or attention, but it very reliably made me need a nap 3.5 hours after taking it. It got to the point where it was more useful as a sleep aid ("I need to go to bed at 11, so take the dose at 7:30") than as a focus aid, although helping my sleep schedule be a bit more regular was useful for focus I suppose.
I wasn't really a fan of the 5 or 6 years I tried the pharmacology thing.
Then there are others who would take the same dose and be up all night with either restless insomnia or just being full of energy and not feeling any need to sleep at all. If you go to the erowid experience vault for amphetamine you'll see what I mean by people being all over the place in their experiences and often reporting polar opposite effects, both between individuals and even in the same individual with very different reactions to only slightly different doses. Nature uses similar 3D "shapes"* for all kinds of core biochemical functions the dynamics of which vary wildly between even closely related people, and the way these closely-shaped chemicals interact with various receptors and enzymes is thus also highly idiosyncratic. This fact about nature frustrates any attempts to debate policies about these substances. It's no one's fault; it's just how it is.
*3D shape is important not not an adequate way to understand how, why, and when these molecules interact, especially in an aqueous chemical environment. Each part of the fuzzy-quantum "surface" of the shape also has different electron density creating local electric field vectors, different nearby energy states, and different resonant modes of vibration. Seemingly minor changes can thus change potency by two orders of magnitude or produce entirely different effects in terms of both objective and subjective macroscopic experiences. As you can tell I cannot help but be fascinated and filled with a sense of magical wonder by this subject.
Yea, it is interesting, also worrisome when you are one the receiving end :D I often think that if one wanted to do psychiatry right the patients wouldn't be doing the "come see me for 30-40 minutes and we will write a prescription, and let me know in a few weeks how it went" model. Instead we would have people under observation for a few days or weeks at a shot to dial in the doses and keep a super close eye on the outcomes. I might be overly suspicious of self reports, but I strongly suspect that there is a huge disconnect between how the patient thinks things are working, how the psychiatrist thinks things are working, and how things are actually working. Probably asking too much, but the current model seems really half assed for something so variable and rather important to people's lives.
I wonder if the brand name makes it seem more palatable to prescribe to children, given that unlike some drugs the chemical name is not mysterious to the public.
Every pharmaceutical has a brand name engineered and chosen to perform as well as possible in the marketplace. Human psychology that tends to place substances into just a few qualitative categories with strongly positive or negative valence, and the emotional impact of particular strings of phonic sounds in a particular cultural and linguistic context that leads people to categorize such a branded substance in one of the "positive" categories, is a quite intriguing subject. In general, they want the word to be associated with medicine, healing, and high-status doctors "addreall!", and not party-drug tweakers "speed!" or evil greedy corporate toxins, which most people can't help thinking when you sound-out the chemical nomenclature. Amphetmatine is actually an acronym for what sounds like, "Alpha-Methyl-Phen-Ethyl-Amine", and if you say it that way everyone is going to think you're talking about something that would poison them. So even molecules can be described in the manner of "Russell Conjugation".
"West argues that schools need to return to policy of kicking out disruptive students."
As Education Realist keeps pointing out, in America, every kid has a legal "right to an education". You can't kick them out without providing/forcing them to some alternative that you can satisfy the courts is "education". Very few school systems today want to even think about that.
In Chicago, at least when I lived there in the nineties, this was always the advantage of Catholic schools. They just kicked out the disruptive students and didn't have to take them back. The public schools didn't have that option.
“West argues that schools need to return to policy of kicking out disruptive students.” Common in private schools. Almost nonexistent in public schools. Wouldn’t it be more effective to return to private schools?
In the chesterton/portage IN area my son taught at an alternative charter school for two years. They take kids that don't like or get in trouble in the regular public high schools. Not much trouble with violence but LOTS of kids who don't much care and generally aren't willing to put in any effort. Regardless, some school districts have alternatives for dealing with kids who aren't good for public high school.
Re: Alex N - It's hard to value things precisely that do not have accurate prices. This happens a lot even in markets for certain specialty goods and services. You need to have Christie's essentially rig the price for you to move certain semi-famous art pieces. The problem is even more difficult here with attempts to weigh opportunity costs for having children.
I don't like Alex or think much of his intellectual output, but he did a good job here describing the tradeoffs; it's just that they do not seem much like tradeoffs given a certain set of subjective values. I don't care that I can't go out to throw axes, although I suppose I could throw axes or shoot off bazookas in my back yard as much as it pleased me without impinging much on my lifestyle.
Alex N writes: "Those who write about cultural reasons for fertility will deserve to be taken seriously when they can point to widespread changing behaviors and hypothesize about why they changed. People who blame (or credit) a changed culture of increased sexual promiscuity on the development of cheap and effective prophylactics, birth control pills, and abortion are serious thinkers. Those technologies, where available, rapidly changed cultural practices and norms. I disagree with social conservatives who want to ban or restrict birth control and condoms to roll back widespread sexual promiscuity, but at least they understand that the cultural behavior they dislike is downstream of economics and technology. One can recognize serious thinkers even when disagreeing with their conclusions."
This seems like a straw man, because many if not most thinkers do point the causative finger at technology. As such, it shouldn't be shocking that many of them also seek to restrict those technologies. St. Paul pointed the finger at the corruption of the human heart and the abandonment of God's laws in his letter to the Romans. But even though Paul wrote right before the reign of Nero, it was still a couple centuries off from the real serious debauchery, and a full century before the publication of "The Golden Ass," which includes a hilarious description of a Roman, uh, donkey show.
J.D. Unwin, writing in the 1930s, compared the sexual regulations of hundreds of tribes and civilizations, drawing correlations between high cultural achievement and high levels of sexual regulation. There, he would put the onus on moral decline as causing fertility decline and civilizational decline. This is a very Spenglerian point of view, so we should also gesture vaguely at Spengler here as well.
Jacques Ellul, writing in the '60s, perhaps ascribes more to what he calls technique rather than technology on the face of it. Technologies like the condom and birth control are useful implements of technique used to flatten, standardize, and render society more operable by the means of technique.
Jonathan Last, writing in 2013, put a fair portion of the blame on the increased time and money that middle class parents feel compelled to expend on each child. As someone who just bought an Italian-designed double-stroller for over $1,100, maybe this one hits a little close to home. Last actually points at tons of non-technological issues in his book, so I think really Alex N. didn't look very hard despite being a full-time think-tank employee because Last is not obscure and this book is not obscure either. (Note: on checking again, it looks like he did include a reference to this book with the author's last name misspelled).
Putting this all together, Alex N.'s problem like the problem of all intellectuals is that our system of technique and technology does require more human resources to avoid its Spenglerian fate. Surely the need for more babies within the taxpaying middle class shrieks out to the Alex N's of the world like the announcer in Starcraft II informing them that they need to Build Additional Pylons to keep the economy going. But the people, they're just not listening, because they would rather go throw axes and sodomize each other until the barbarians burn it all down.
Concur in Dr. Kling’s opinion on fertility and am writing separately to address his comment regarding opportunity cost: “You are simply asserting that the decision is rational, without saying what would constitute evidence against that assertion.”
While it is true that the opportunity cost hypothesis appears strongly supported by a correlation between higher GDP and lower birthrates ( https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income ) this does not really track the trend in GDP growth in the United States. Pew describes the long term trend in US fertility:
“Following the baby boom from 1946 to 1964, birth rates plummeted through the early 1970s, then fluctuated little in succeeding decades. The Great Recession marked another turning point; fertility had slowly climbed in the years leading up to 2008 before tumbling. It has mostly continued to fall since then, with the latest available data covering 2020—and reflecting children conceived prior to the pandemic—showing 43 states recorded their lowest general fertility rate in at least three decades.”
And there may be confounding factors worthy of consideration. Additional evidence to this end that might be considered include the actual trade off between work and childbearing both in terms of job satisfaction and earnings, whether the reward of childbearing has deflated due to increased rates autism and other mental disorders as well as physical deformities, the incidence of mental health disorders in the population generally and whether that might influence the rationality of decision making, and finally possible alternate physical impediments to childbearing related to obesity and other physical disorders.
First, the opportunity cost hypothesis would suggest that high income women would have a lower fertility rate than lower income women, and this would appear born out in statistics showing an income-fertility correlation at various levels of income such that at one end women in households with income over $200,000 have about 45 births per 1,000 while women in households with less than $10,000 income have about 63. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ ) However, these $200k+ families are rare across most of the US, only approaching 1 in 5 in the District of Columbia with its vast sea of highly over-compensated federal government employees. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/percentage-of-households-making-over-200k ) It is hard to see how the that 63 – 45 differential can account for the overall decline in fertility.
Moreover, another recent Pew study finds that, although in general women and men are similarly satisfied with work, women have more complaints than men about their conditions of employment:
“For the most part, men and women express similar levels of satisfaction with their job overall and with specific aspects of their job, but there are two exceptions. Men are more likely than women to say they are extremely or very satisfied with the benefits their employer provides (52% of men vs. 46% of women) and with how much they’re paid (39% vs. 30%). And while men and women are about equally likely to say their job is enjoyable and fulfilling all or most of the time, women are more likely to say it’s stressful (31% vs. 26%) and overwhelming (24% vs. 15%) all or most of the time.”
This would seem to cloud the clarity of the opportunity cost hypothesis as well.
Even more so if we engage in some dis-aggregating a bit and looking at an overwhelmingly female occupation like daycare worker:
“In the most recent release of data for the first quarter of 2023, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program reported that the 77,000 childcare services establishments in the United States employ over 942,000 workers and account for $7.2 billion in total quarterly wages. The childcare industry is characterized by small establishments: 58 percent of childcare establishments employed fewer than 10 employees. [… …]
QCEW data show that average weekly wages for child daycare services were about 60 percent less than the national average from 2018 to 2022. From the BRS data, child daycare services and social assistance establishments saw slightly higher rates of increases in base pay attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic when compared with other establishments. In the first quarter of 2020, average wages for child daycare services were 63 percent below the national average. This gap closed slightly to 58 percent below the national average in the second quarter of 2020 but returned to 60 percent below the national average in the first quarter of 2023.”
I’ve not found any sources for data on trends in fertility rate statistics for child care workers but the opportunity cost of caring for other peoples’ children versus one’s own would seem to be relatively low, yet one suspects that their fertility rate has not been soaring. Does opportunity cost account for declining fertility among low income women as well?
Other possible confounding factors:
“More than 1 in 5 women in the United States experienced a mental health condition in the past year, such as depression or anxiety.” https://www.womenshealth.gov/mental-health
“Every year, an estimated 7.9 million infants (6% of worldwide births) are born with serious birth defects. Although some congenital defects can be controlled and treated, an estimated 3.2 million of these children are disabled for life. Moreover, birth defects are the leading cause of infant mortality in the United States.” https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-causes-and-statistics-863/ Could prenatal testing and related abortion as well as the increasing awareness of genetic illness be reducing fertility rates? Large numbers of women are being tested for genes like PALB2 that are correlated with breast cancer. Do women who are positive for PALB2 have lower fertility than those who are negative? Is there an altruistic desire to not pass along potentially harmful genes?
“About 1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder“ which is up from 1 in 150 in 2000. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html How might this affect a woman’s opportunity cost calculus?
“obese class II (BMIs ≥ 35.0 kg/m2) couples experienced a reduction in fecundability” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5400044/ GDP per capita is also correlated with obesity. Could obesity be a factor? Are we getting too fat to be fecund? Higher income women on the other hand do tend to have lower rates of obesity.
At any rate, a multiple cause explanation may offer more insights and advantages than a simple opportunity cost. Explanations that incorporate culture and differences in personal circumstances might be more useful in the long run.
0.02 standard deviations? Unless the study was of absolutely gigantic numbers of students and achieved a superhuman level of control over confounding factors, that translates to no evidence of anything.
In my corporate life the maxim “Slow to hire, quick to fire” would’ve been the rule had it not been for onerous HR practices. Namely, CYA to the extreme to avoid any threat of litigation. The only exceptions to this that I witnessed were a coupled harassment cases with smoking gun evidence. But the laggard, the misanthrope, the troublemaker, each took inordinate repeated offense and much documentation before the hammer could finally fall. I can easily see how schools are similar, unfortunately. We can extend this to our criminal court system as well.
"Nowrasteh is saying that the reason people are having fewer children nowadays is the same as the reason people are eating less meatloaf. There are now more appealing options out there."
It's rather ironic that in the case of meatloaf, the more appealing options are pretty much all more expensive but one of the likely leading reasons for less children is the cost.
Economics has historically been confined to the question of matching means with ends. The question surrounding fertility is whether or not this is a change fundamentally in means or in ends. If the ends have changed substantially, means become irrelevant to outcomes.
Modern analyses seem to start from a couple assumptions:
1. That children were generally (historically), in the objectives of their parents, either an accessible category of forced labor or an accident arising unavoidably from biological urges.
2. That children are currently an unendurable economic burden for otherwise loving [sometimes limited to minority] parents.
Both of these ring false. In contrast:
Historically parents loved children and wanted their family name to continue, prosper, and be honored. As a result, they desired to raise healthy, intelligent, hard-working children and have grandchildren to the nth generation. This was a primary objective of the wealth and the middle class and the honest laborer. It was out of reach for some.
Presently, raising children to be healthy, intelligent, and hard-working is within the reach of most biological parents who choose to devote themselves as a couple to this end. If they choose to devote themselves to other ends, it is not going to be achieved accidentally. It is much easier if pursued in a community of shared intention and can be difficult under other circumstances regardless of economics.
Here, then economics can enter in, as ends are established and means are in question.
I hypothesize that most people, if they sacrifice everything else, can find an appropriate community, but it is becoming more difficult and is being made more difficult purposefully by certain interest groups.
West: "my advice would be ... to focus on other people." Good advice, and another instance of opportunity cost, with so many easy distractions to avoid engaging with other people. But also another example of the limits of opportunity cost framing - the psychological/emotional cost of NOT engaging with other people is much higher, but the distractions present a barrier at the initial step. So many things in life are processes, and costs and benefits are distributed throughout the process.
"As an economist, you can talk about her choice to have sushi instead of meatloaf at lunch in terms of opportunity cost, meaning instantaneous measures of costs and benefits. I don’t think that language helps to describe her childlessness, which affects her in larger ways."
I disagree. Like Handle, let me back up :)
There are at least three ways to look at "I want".
1) "I want" to have this or do that because it will make me happy. Or in econ-speak, it gives me utility or satisfaction.
2) "I want" to have this or do that because presented with the possibility, I will do it. So I must want to do it, right? If I am presented with a sweet, gooey dessert, I will eat it even though I know it will spike my blood sugar. If someone serves me a drink, I will drink it even though I know I won't be able to stop at one; I will do it even though I won't enjoy it--or at least the enjoyment will quickly dissipate. I "want" to do it so much I crave it.
3) "I want" to have this or do that because it will help to make me the person I want to be. It will help me to be able to look on my life and be proud/satisfied with it.
Economics generally assumes all wants are number one. Of course, they aren't. I think opportunity cost helps explain WHY young people are doing what they do in terms of having kids. It DOES NOT describe how "her childlessness ... affects her in larger ways." That's more number three. Her "at the time" choices make her unhappy later. Opportunity cost helps explain behavior; it does not determine "welfare". That's hard for someone like me (or maybe you?), steeped in opportunity cost analysis to accept emotionally. It's a lot easier to accept it intellectually. Hey, just a consequence of "time-inconsistent preferences". But to feel it, to fully grasp its tragic significance, is something else. Depressing as hell.
I think you are on the right track and maybe your list is even correct but I think it is missing some clarity on the issue of not having children. This decision, when not unintentional, is somewhere between 2 and 3. It is an inability to see or properly account for the long term benefits. It is much like not saving money for the future.
Popular opinion tends to be that the kids who failed the marshmallow test were born with a deficit. This was not a finding of that study. The cause was not investigated but the researchers recognized there were other likely reasons as a result of the kid's life-to-date. Not having children is a bit like failing the marshmallow test only we can be pretty sure that environmental factors are what is skewing the results.
In the South it was a popular upper middle class custom to send out the family portrait, or often just the children, as a Christmas card. Over time with so much travel and so many great digital photos from which it was impossible to choose, this turned into an often 2-sided card with typically photos from the year’s vacations.
In the past the family portraits would finally be set aside when children reached adulthood. It was not expected to get a card with the unmarried 20 and 30-somethings, who had their own lives and might feel this was childish. Or if married, had their own children to promote.
But now the family portraits, at least among the happy and unself-conscious, keep on coming. And why not? The family is still family vacationing together, multiple times a year, sometimes with boyfriends or girlfriends in tow although they don’t usually make the picture; even as the kids are growing their 401ks.
This may be hard for some of us to relate to, but it is really normal. Family life has been very happy for these folks.
The one thing I do wonder is, if the kids ever think to themselves, whose vacations will I pay for, in 30 years? With whom will I continue these things, that supply the happiest times of my life?
I expect they do think about it, some of them. But the only thing more embarrassing for the modern upper middle class family, than having no snapshots of family fun long past their kids’ maturity, would be to have a daughter of whose great job after college they could not boast. And a succeeding job, even better than the first, showing her pluck and initiative. And the farther from home these jobs, the more prestigious. She is valued on the coast!
Bobcats are so beatiful. How we take that for granted, having been lucky enough to live on Earth while there were bobcats! (And domestic cats for that matter.) Have not heard of people trapping them down here, except accidentally. Shooting them if they mess with the chickens, perhaps.
Right now there is an effort in my state to this *small extent* to protect mountain lions - no, not from trapping, not from being killed at will - but from being left to die in the trap. That's right: the state wildlife department convened a working group to make recs re mountain lions, and their welfare; and the only thing they could mostly agree on, was that trappers should go run their traps ever few days. One of the guys who traps regularly, said - oh, death is peaceful once you get used to the idea, it is perfectly humane that an animal should be left to starve to death in a trap. He loved trapping so much he would continue trapping lions even after the landowners who had once hired him no longer realized he was doing it; and he never collected his traps.
And even that one point of agreement - is being fought.
"Let's solve the fertility crisis with massive punitive taxes on married couples."
Alex's solution is so bad one has to think he thought really hard about how to get the worst idea possible.
The obvious solution to Alex claiming that the opportunity cost of children has been $350,000 so far is that the state should reduce his taxes $350,000 so that having and not having children is dictated by desire rather then trying to outcompete each other for Red Queen resources by having fewer children.
Since those children will one day pay taxes, this is a steal for the state, but if you wanted to make it revenue neutral you could raise taxes on the childless (with sliding scale based on # of children). The obvious route for that is SS/Medicare, considering that as pay as you go systems the childless are not contributing at all to their own benefit expenses and should have to subsidize the children of those that are.
I continue to believe that childlessness is a kind of free riding, and that if the free riding were neutralized people would have more children.
I support surrogacy when people need it to have kids. I support it as a way to allow people to have additional kids if they already have some and get too old, etc.
And I think that Russian lady that had 100 IVF kids via surrogacy is a hero.
But what you might call the worst case, a rich person who doesn't like children all that much but will allow another woman to bear her one child for her to be raised by servants and otherwise wouldn't even bother having that...that should be low status. Raising that up as a model diminishes rather than enhances the status of children and motherhood. It's the celebratory African adoption of surrogacy.
West argues for kicking out disruptive students to improve educational outcomes for the rest.
That assumes the real goal (rather than the merely ostensible goal) of public education is learning. But suppose instead that the goal is to condition children to be receptive to propaganda, i.e., to respond predictably to having their emotional buttons pushed, which seems to increasingly be the case. Real learning would at least in some cases impede that goal. Or perhaps public education is primarily for the purpose of providing employment for teachers' union members who provide reliable political support for the Uniparty regime, and actual learning is only the moral cover to provide justification for the grift, so nobody involved cares much about it.
If Ed West's numbers are in the ballpark, then the toxic employees our public schools and universities are churning out, and the toxic work environments created by DEI-driven HR departments will have a significant impact on GDP.
"reduces math and reading test scores in grades 9 and 10 by 0.02 standard deviations"
0.02 SD?! Anyone with any familiarity with standard deviations has to balk at a number like that. I was convinced that had to be a typo. But no, I downloaded the nber paper and there it was.
Look, saying "reduced" is a very misleading way to put "does practically nothing", and thinking one can use such weak evidence in support of anything is borderline innumerate. 0.02 standard deviations is unmeasurably precise in the context of those test scores and indistinguishable from zero. For comparison, 0.02SD is 0.3 IQ points, 1/16th of an inch (1.5 millimeters) in height, or something like a 1% difference in household income near the median.
I see you got there first. The only thing this study tells me is that the unintended effects of a publish-or-perish culture are severe.
"I was struck when Hughes talked about the negative rebound effect when Adderall wears off"
Adderall is just amphetamine*, i.e., "speed"**. When people consume stimulants in that family at sufficient doses to go beyond mere boost in focus and productivity to feelings of euphoria, arousal, and a substantial lift in mood, many will then tend to experience a mood crash called a "comedown" similar to an alcohol hangover but more emotional than physical, that is a depressed low proportionate in intensity and duration to the high, and which can be aggravated by numerous other factors.
The nature of human metabolic biodiversity is such that plenty of people barely get this at all and bounce right back, and plenty are at the other extreme of getting totally wrecked by comedowns even after small doses, and plenty are everywhere in between. For any member of this family of substances, depending on what effect one is trying to achieve, for some it will prove to be a wonder drug, for others borderline toxic. This makes it very hard to predict how any individual would react or to give individualized useful advice, and the wide statistical dispersion makes "experience reports" such as the one given by Hughes necessarily anecdotal. It also makes it hard for people with different reaction profiles to relate to each other with regards to these experiences.
*Technically, there are left and right-handed versions of amphetamine, the right-handed one is somewhat more stimulating and preferred for recreational use, and Adderall is a 3:1 ratio of right to left, in slightly different salts that don't make much difference. Just calling it "amphetamine" or "speed" is close enough, especially if someone takes a recreational-level dose.
**People don't say "speed" much anymore, and when they did, they used it in a very loose manner where it could refer to either amphetamine, methamphetamine, or occasionally some other similar substituted amphetamines. Drug culture language is fuzzy and often maps poorly to the precise identifications of chemical nomenclature.
About 15 years ago I thought I might have ADHD and asked my doctor. he said he could either do a full test or just give me Aderall to try. I opted for the Aderall and did it Monday through Friday for one week. It felt like I had drank a pot of coffee, but I didn't feel more focused. I skipped it on Saturday and Sunday, and the comedown was awful. I couldn't get out of bed. After that I flushed them down the toilet.
You have me wondering what "full test" means. To the best of my knowledge the diagnosis is rather subjective.
I found I had a less useful response to Adderall when I was prescribed it for a few years. It didn't seem to do much for focus or attention, but it very reliably made me need a nap 3.5 hours after taking it. It got to the point where it was more useful as a sleep aid ("I need to go to bed at 11, so take the dose at 7:30") than as a focus aid, although helping my sleep schedule be a bit more regular was useful for focus I suppose.
I wasn't really a fan of the 5 or 6 years I tried the pharmacology thing.
Then there are others who would take the same dose and be up all night with either restless insomnia or just being full of energy and not feeling any need to sleep at all. If you go to the erowid experience vault for amphetamine you'll see what I mean by people being all over the place in their experiences and often reporting polar opposite effects, both between individuals and even in the same individual with very different reactions to only slightly different doses. Nature uses similar 3D "shapes"* for all kinds of core biochemical functions the dynamics of which vary wildly between even closely related people, and the way these closely-shaped chemicals interact with various receptors and enzymes is thus also highly idiosyncratic. This fact about nature frustrates any attempts to debate policies about these substances. It's no one's fault; it's just how it is.
*3D shape is important not not an adequate way to understand how, why, and when these molecules interact, especially in an aqueous chemical environment. Each part of the fuzzy-quantum "surface" of the shape also has different electron density creating local electric field vectors, different nearby energy states, and different resonant modes of vibration. Seemingly minor changes can thus change potency by two orders of magnitude or produce entirely different effects in terms of both objective and subjective macroscopic experiences. As you can tell I cannot help but be fascinated and filled with a sense of magical wonder by this subject.
Yea, it is interesting, also worrisome when you are one the receiving end :D I often think that if one wanted to do psychiatry right the patients wouldn't be doing the "come see me for 30-40 minutes and we will write a prescription, and let me know in a few weeks how it went" model. Instead we would have people under observation for a few days or weeks at a shot to dial in the doses and keep a super close eye on the outcomes. I might be overly suspicious of self reports, but I strongly suspect that there is a huge disconnect between how the patient thinks things are working, how the psychiatrist thinks things are working, and how things are actually working. Probably asking too much, but the current model seems really half assed for something so variable and rather important to people's lives.
Erowid Experience Vaults
"collection of more than 45000 personal reports describing first-hand experiences with psychoactive plants and drugs."
https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Amphetamines.shtml
I wonder if the brand name makes it seem more palatable to prescribe to children, given that unlike some drugs the chemical name is not mysterious to the public.
Every pharmaceutical has a brand name engineered and chosen to perform as well as possible in the marketplace. Human psychology that tends to place substances into just a few qualitative categories with strongly positive or negative valence, and the emotional impact of particular strings of phonic sounds in a particular cultural and linguistic context that leads people to categorize such a branded substance in one of the "positive" categories, is a quite intriguing subject. In general, they want the word to be associated with medicine, healing, and high-status doctors "addreall!", and not party-drug tweakers "speed!" or evil greedy corporate toxins, which most people can't help thinking when you sound-out the chemical nomenclature. Amphetmatine is actually an acronym for what sounds like, "Alpha-Methyl-Phen-Ethyl-Amine", and if you say it that way everyone is going to think you're talking about something that would poison them. So even molecules can be described in the manner of "Russell Conjugation".
"West argues that schools need to return to policy of kicking out disruptive students."
As Education Realist keeps pointing out, in America, every kid has a legal "right to an education". You can't kick them out without providing/forcing them to some alternative that you can satisfy the courts is "education". Very few school systems today want to even think about that.
In Chicago, at least when I lived there in the nineties, this was always the advantage of Catholic schools. They just kicked out the disruptive students and didn't have to take them back. The public schools didn't have that option.
That's another one of Education Realist's points.
“West argues that schools need to return to policy of kicking out disruptive students.” Common in private schools. Almost nonexistent in public schools. Wouldn’t it be more effective to return to private schools?
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/fundamental-questions-about-education
In the chesterton/portage IN area my son taught at an alternative charter school for two years. They take kids that don't like or get in trouble in the regular public high schools. Not much trouble with violence but LOTS of kids who don't much care and generally aren't willing to put in any effort. Regardless, some school districts have alternatives for dealing with kids who aren't good for public high school.
That’s good. I’m not familiar with these programs.
Re: Alex N - It's hard to value things precisely that do not have accurate prices. This happens a lot even in markets for certain specialty goods and services. You need to have Christie's essentially rig the price for you to move certain semi-famous art pieces. The problem is even more difficult here with attempts to weigh opportunity costs for having children.
I don't like Alex or think much of his intellectual output, but he did a good job here describing the tradeoffs; it's just that they do not seem much like tradeoffs given a certain set of subjective values. I don't care that I can't go out to throw axes, although I suppose I could throw axes or shoot off bazookas in my back yard as much as it pleased me without impinging much on my lifestyle.
Alex N writes: "Those who write about cultural reasons for fertility will deserve to be taken seriously when they can point to widespread changing behaviors and hypothesize about why they changed. People who blame (or credit) a changed culture of increased sexual promiscuity on the development of cheap and effective prophylactics, birth control pills, and abortion are serious thinkers. Those technologies, where available, rapidly changed cultural practices and norms. I disagree with social conservatives who want to ban or restrict birth control and condoms to roll back widespread sexual promiscuity, but at least they understand that the cultural behavior they dislike is downstream of economics and technology. One can recognize serious thinkers even when disagreeing with their conclusions."
This seems like a straw man, because many if not most thinkers do point the causative finger at technology. As such, it shouldn't be shocking that many of them also seek to restrict those technologies. St. Paul pointed the finger at the corruption of the human heart and the abandonment of God's laws in his letter to the Romans. But even though Paul wrote right before the reign of Nero, it was still a couple centuries off from the real serious debauchery, and a full century before the publication of "The Golden Ass," which includes a hilarious description of a Roman, uh, donkey show.
J.D. Unwin, writing in the 1930s, compared the sexual regulations of hundreds of tribes and civilizations, drawing correlations between high cultural achievement and high levels of sexual regulation. There, he would put the onus on moral decline as causing fertility decline and civilizational decline. This is a very Spenglerian point of view, so we should also gesture vaguely at Spengler here as well.
Jacques Ellul, writing in the '60s, perhaps ascribes more to what he calls technique rather than technology on the face of it. Technologies like the condom and birth control are useful implements of technique used to flatten, standardize, and render society more operable by the means of technique.
Jonathan Last, writing in 2013, put a fair portion of the blame on the increased time and money that middle class parents feel compelled to expend on each child. As someone who just bought an Italian-designed double-stroller for over $1,100, maybe this one hits a little close to home. Last actually points at tons of non-technological issues in his book, so I think really Alex N. didn't look very hard despite being a full-time think-tank employee because Last is not obscure and this book is not obscure either. (Note: on checking again, it looks like he did include a reference to this book with the author's last name misspelled).
Putting this all together, Alex N.'s problem like the problem of all intellectuals is that our system of technique and technology does require more human resources to avoid its Spenglerian fate. Surely the need for more babies within the taxpaying middle class shrieks out to the Alex N's of the world like the announcer in Starcraft II informing them that they need to Build Additional Pylons to keep the economy going. But the people, they're just not listening, because they would rather go throw axes and sodomize each other until the barbarians burn it all down.
Concur in Dr. Kling’s opinion on fertility and am writing separately to address his comment regarding opportunity cost: “You are simply asserting that the decision is rational, without saying what would constitute evidence against that assertion.”
While it is true that the opportunity cost hypothesis appears strongly supported by a correlation between higher GDP and lower birthrates ( https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income ) this does not really track the trend in GDP growth in the United States. Pew describes the long term trend in US fertility:
“Following the baby boom from 1946 to 1964, birth rates plummeted through the early 1970s, then fluctuated little in succeeding decades. The Great Recession marked another turning point; fertility had slowly climbed in the years leading up to 2008 before tumbling. It has mostly continued to fall since then, with the latest available data covering 2020—and reflecting children conceived prior to the pandemic—showing 43 states recorded their lowest general fertility rate in at least three decades.”
(https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2022/12/the-long-term-decline-in-fertility-and-what-it-means-for-state-budgets )
So, during an extended period of growth in GDP per capita (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/ ) fertility also increased.
And there may be confounding factors worthy of consideration. Additional evidence to this end that might be considered include the actual trade off between work and childbearing both in terms of job satisfaction and earnings, whether the reward of childbearing has deflated due to increased rates autism and other mental disorders as well as physical deformities, the incidence of mental health disorders in the population generally and whether that might influence the rationality of decision making, and finally possible alternate physical impediments to childbearing related to obesity and other physical disorders.
First, the opportunity cost hypothesis would suggest that high income women would have a lower fertility rate than lower income women, and this would appear born out in statistics showing an income-fertility correlation at various levels of income such that at one end women in households with income over $200,000 have about 45 births per 1,000 while women in households with less than $10,000 income have about 63. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ ) However, these $200k+ families are rare across most of the US, only approaching 1 in 5 in the District of Columbia with its vast sea of highly over-compensated federal government employees. (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/percentage-of-households-making-over-200k ) It is hard to see how the that 63 – 45 differential can account for the overall decline in fertility.
Moreover, another recent Pew study finds that, although in general women and men are similarly satisfied with work, women have more complaints than men about their conditions of employment:
“For the most part, men and women express similar levels of satisfaction with their job overall and with specific aspects of their job, but there are two exceptions. Men are more likely than women to say they are extremely or very satisfied with the benefits their employer provides (52% of men vs. 46% of women) and with how much they’re paid (39% vs. 30%). And while men and women are about equally likely to say their job is enjoyable and fulfilling all or most of the time, women are more likely to say it’s stressful (31% vs. 26%) and overwhelming (24% vs. 15%) all or most of the time.”
(https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-americans-view-their-jobs/ )
This would seem to cloud the clarity of the opportunity cost hypothesis as well.
Even more so if we engage in some dis-aggregating a bit and looking at an overwhelmingly female occupation like daycare worker:
“In the most recent release of data for the first quarter of 2023, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program reported that the 77,000 childcare services establishments in the United States employ over 942,000 workers and account for $7.2 billion in total quarterly wages. The childcare industry is characterized by small establishments: 58 percent of childcare establishments employed fewer than 10 employees. [… …]
QCEW data show that average weekly wages for child daycare services were about 60 percent less than the national average from 2018 to 2022. From the BRS data, child daycare services and social assistance establishments saw slightly higher rates of increases in base pay attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic when compared with other establishments. In the first quarter of 2020, average wages for child daycare services were 63 percent below the national average. This gap closed slightly to 58 percent below the national average in the second quarter of 2020 but returned to 60 percent below the national average in the first quarter of 2023.”
I’ve not found any sources for data on trends in fertility rate statistics for child care workers but the opportunity cost of caring for other peoples’ children versus one’s own would seem to be relatively low, yet one suspects that their fertility rate has not been soaring. Does opportunity cost account for declining fertility among low income women as well?
Other possible confounding factors:
“More than 1 in 5 women in the United States experienced a mental health condition in the past year, such as depression or anxiety.” https://www.womenshealth.gov/mental-health
“Every year, an estimated 7.9 million infants (6% of worldwide births) are born with serious birth defects. Although some congenital defects can be controlled and treated, an estimated 3.2 million of these children are disabled for life. Moreover, birth defects are the leading cause of infant mortality in the United States.” https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/birth-defects-causes-and-statistics-863/ Could prenatal testing and related abortion as well as the increasing awareness of genetic illness be reducing fertility rates? Large numbers of women are being tested for genes like PALB2 that are correlated with breast cancer. Do women who are positive for PALB2 have lower fertility than those who are negative? Is there an altruistic desire to not pass along potentially harmful genes?
“About 1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder“ which is up from 1 in 150 in 2000. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html How might this affect a woman’s opportunity cost calculus?
“obese class II (BMIs ≥ 35.0 kg/m2) couples experienced a reduction in fecundability” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5400044/ GDP per capita is also correlated with obesity. Could obesity be a factor? Are we getting too fat to be fecund? Higher income women on the other hand do tend to have lower rates of obesity.
At any rate, a multiple cause explanation may offer more insights and advantages than a simple opportunity cost. Explanations that incorporate culture and differences in personal circumstances might be more useful in the long run.
0.02 standard deviations? Unless the study was of absolutely gigantic numbers of students and achieved a superhuman level of control over confounding factors, that translates to no evidence of anything.
In my corporate life the maxim “Slow to hire, quick to fire” would’ve been the rule had it not been for onerous HR practices. Namely, CYA to the extreme to avoid any threat of litigation. The only exceptions to this that I witnessed were a coupled harassment cases with smoking gun evidence. But the laggard, the misanthrope, the troublemaker, each took inordinate repeated offense and much documentation before the hammer could finally fall. I can easily see how schools are similar, unfortunately. We can extend this to our criminal court system as well.
"Nowrasteh is saying that the reason people are having fewer children nowadays is the same as the reason people are eating less meatloaf. There are now more appealing options out there."
It's rather ironic that in the case of meatloaf, the more appealing options are pretty much all more expensive but one of the likely leading reasons for less children is the cost.
Economics has historically been confined to the question of matching means with ends. The question surrounding fertility is whether or not this is a change fundamentally in means or in ends. If the ends have changed substantially, means become irrelevant to outcomes.
Modern analyses seem to start from a couple assumptions:
1. That children were generally (historically), in the objectives of their parents, either an accessible category of forced labor or an accident arising unavoidably from biological urges.
2. That children are currently an unendurable economic burden for otherwise loving [sometimes limited to minority] parents.
Both of these ring false. In contrast:
Historically parents loved children and wanted their family name to continue, prosper, and be honored. As a result, they desired to raise healthy, intelligent, hard-working children and have grandchildren to the nth generation. This was a primary objective of the wealth and the middle class and the honest laborer. It was out of reach for some.
Presently, raising children to be healthy, intelligent, and hard-working is within the reach of most biological parents who choose to devote themselves as a couple to this end. If they choose to devote themselves to other ends, it is not going to be achieved accidentally. It is much easier if pursued in a community of shared intention and can be difficult under other circumstances regardless of economics.
Here, then economics can enter in, as ends are established and means are in question.
I hypothesize that most people, if they sacrifice everything else, can find an appropriate community, but it is becoming more difficult and is being made more difficult purposefully by certain interest groups.
West: "my advice would be ... to focus on other people." Good advice, and another instance of opportunity cost, with so many easy distractions to avoid engaging with other people. But also another example of the limits of opportunity cost framing - the psychological/emotional cost of NOT engaging with other people is much higher, but the distractions present a barrier at the initial step. So many things in life are processes, and costs and benefits are distributed throughout the process.
"As an economist, you can talk about her choice to have sushi instead of meatloaf at lunch in terms of opportunity cost, meaning instantaneous measures of costs and benefits. I don’t think that language helps to describe her childlessness, which affects her in larger ways."
I disagree. Like Handle, let me back up :)
There are at least three ways to look at "I want".
1) "I want" to have this or do that because it will make me happy. Or in econ-speak, it gives me utility or satisfaction.
2) "I want" to have this or do that because presented with the possibility, I will do it. So I must want to do it, right? If I am presented with a sweet, gooey dessert, I will eat it even though I know it will spike my blood sugar. If someone serves me a drink, I will drink it even though I know I won't be able to stop at one; I will do it even though I won't enjoy it--or at least the enjoyment will quickly dissipate. I "want" to do it so much I crave it.
3) "I want" to have this or do that because it will help to make me the person I want to be. It will help me to be able to look on my life and be proud/satisfied with it.
Economics generally assumes all wants are number one. Of course, they aren't. I think opportunity cost helps explain WHY young people are doing what they do in terms of having kids. It DOES NOT describe how "her childlessness ... affects her in larger ways." That's more number three. Her "at the time" choices make her unhappy later. Opportunity cost helps explain behavior; it does not determine "welfare". That's hard for someone like me (or maybe you?), steeped in opportunity cost analysis to accept emotionally. It's a lot easier to accept it intellectually. Hey, just a consequence of "time-inconsistent preferences". But to feel it, to fully grasp its tragic significance, is something else. Depressing as hell.
I think you are on the right track and maybe your list is even correct but I think it is missing some clarity on the issue of not having children. This decision, when not unintentional, is somewhere between 2 and 3. It is an inability to see or properly account for the long term benefits. It is much like not saving money for the future.
Popular opinion tends to be that the kids who failed the marshmallow test were born with a deficit. This was not a finding of that study. The cause was not investigated but the researchers recognized there were other likely reasons as a result of the kid's life-to-date. Not having children is a bit like failing the marshmallow test only we can be pretty sure that environmental factors are what is skewing the results.
In the South it was a popular upper middle class custom to send out the family portrait, or often just the children, as a Christmas card. Over time with so much travel and so many great digital photos from which it was impossible to choose, this turned into an often 2-sided card with typically photos from the year’s vacations.
In the past the family portraits would finally be set aside when children reached adulthood. It was not expected to get a card with the unmarried 20 and 30-somethings, who had their own lives and might feel this was childish. Or if married, had their own children to promote.
But now the family portraits, at least among the happy and unself-conscious, keep on coming. And why not? The family is still family vacationing together, multiple times a year, sometimes with boyfriends or girlfriends in tow although they don’t usually make the picture; even as the kids are growing their 401ks.
This may be hard for some of us to relate to, but it is really normal. Family life has been very happy for these folks.
The one thing I do wonder is, if the kids ever think to themselves, whose vacations will I pay for, in 30 years? With whom will I continue these things, that supply the happiest times of my life?
I expect they do think about it, some of them. But the only thing more embarrassing for the modern upper middle class family, than having no snapshots of family fun long past their kids’ maturity, would be to have a daughter of whose great job after college they could not boast. And a succeeding job, even better than the first, showing her pluck and initiative. And the farther from home these jobs, the more prestigious. She is valued on the coast!
Bobcats are so beatiful. How we take that for granted, having been lucky enough to live on Earth while there were bobcats! (And domestic cats for that matter.) Have not heard of people trapping them down here, except accidentally. Shooting them if they mess with the chickens, perhaps.
Right now there is an effort in my state to this *small extent* to protect mountain lions - no, not from trapping, not from being killed at will - but from being left to die in the trap. That's right: the state wildlife department convened a working group to make recs re mountain lions, and their welfare; and the only thing they could mostly agree on, was that trappers should go run their traps ever few days. One of the guys who traps regularly, said - oh, death is peaceful once you get used to the idea, it is perfectly humane that an animal should be left to starve to death in a trap. He loved trapping so much he would continue trapping lions even after the landowners who had once hired him no longer realized he was doing it; and he never collected his traps.
And even that one point of agreement - is being fought.
"Let's solve the fertility crisis with massive punitive taxes on married couples."
Alex's solution is so bad one has to think he thought really hard about how to get the worst idea possible.
The obvious solution to Alex claiming that the opportunity cost of children has been $350,000 so far is that the state should reduce his taxes $350,000 so that having and not having children is dictated by desire rather then trying to outcompete each other for Red Queen resources by having fewer children.
Since those children will one day pay taxes, this is a steal for the state, but if you wanted to make it revenue neutral you could raise taxes on the childless (with sliding scale based on # of children). The obvious route for that is SS/Medicare, considering that as pay as you go systems the childless are not contributing at all to their own benefit expenses and should have to subsidize the children of those that are.
I continue to believe that childlessness is a kind of free riding, and that if the free riding were neutralized people would have more children.
I support surrogacy when people need it to have kids. I support it as a way to allow people to have additional kids if they already have some and get too old, etc.
And I think that Russian lady that had 100 IVF kids via surrogacy is a hero.
But what you might call the worst case, a rich person who doesn't like children all that much but will allow another woman to bear her one child for her to be raised by servants and otherwise wouldn't even bother having that...that should be low status. Raising that up as a model diminishes rather than enhances the status of children and motherhood. It's the celebratory African adoption of surrogacy.
West argues for kicking out disruptive students to improve educational outcomes for the rest.
That assumes the real goal (rather than the merely ostensible goal) of public education is learning. But suppose instead that the goal is to condition children to be receptive to propaganda, i.e., to respond predictably to having their emotional buttons pushed, which seems to increasingly be the case. Real learning would at least in some cases impede that goal. Or perhaps public education is primarily for the purpose of providing employment for teachers' union members who provide reliable political support for the Uniparty regime, and actual learning is only the moral cover to provide justification for the grift, so nobody involved cares much about it.
There are of course many individual teachers who do care, but they are not in a position to change anything.
If Ed West's numbers are in the ballpark, then the toxic employees our public schools and universities are churning out, and the toxic work environments created by DEI-driven HR departments will have a significant impact on GDP.