Knowing lots of women (and couples) who delayed (and had fewer) kids for exactly these reasons, I think the only thing that is going to reverse the decline in fertility among couples with members who are in those "greedy" jobs is 1) restoring the kind of support networks that existed in the past - with lots of people who aren't-the-mom providing childcare/household tasks.
And on the demand side: 2) reducing the societal perception that kids are a massive burden and extremely susceptible to damage from lack of relentless parenting/protection and 3) a change IN the way those "greedy" jobs work to allow having kids (or other "luxuries").
From personal experience, someone having kids in med school or residency was considered "insane" and the med schools/residency programs had no interest whatsoever in making it more possible. They considered a two-day weekend "a golden weekend." Believe whatever you want about inheritance or nature vs. nurture or SES data, I think we can agree that doctors having kids is a good thing - at the very least the pediatric rotation they do should provide some good information! But we have a medical training system (and a society that demands parenting time-commitments that are incompatible with it) that makes it almost impossible to do so.
I am not sure this is the right way to actually address it for this case, but you often see data showing "there is only 25% women in this job" with the implication that without some kind of discrimination, it would be closer to 50%. What would it look like if we did "only 5% of people in medical training had kids, while the % for everyone else over the same time period is 70%" and treated that like a problem (by the people running medical training, not by just imposing yet another societal demand on those docs) that had to be fixed?
There's the greedy job problem at the top, but there's also the greedy job problem at the bottom. An awful lot of jobs offer irregular, unpredictable hours, variable pay, compulsory overtime and pay low enough to require one to work more than one job to stay off the streets. A lot more people work that kind of job than are high powered career oriented folks. These are the people who might want to have children, but know that taking a day off when a child is sick may mean losing one's job, one's car, one's apartment and so on in a terrible, well documented spiral. If we want more children, the low end greedy job problem seems easier to fix and would benefit more people.
There's something misogynist about this focus on pushing women in high powered careers to have children. Where's the pressure for male executives on the C-suite track to take off a decade or two and raise their wife's children? If she's on a high powered track, odds are she can take a month or so off, and then, after delivery, let daddy take over. Even a highly competitive career can recover from a brief hiatus, but not one lasting decades. Where's the pressure on male doctors? Male professors? Maybe men need different career incentives, or we need to change the tax code to encourage men to raise their children.
I've yet to see a convincing argument that falling fertility is a problem. The dumbest one going around argues that more people would provide us with more creative brainpower to solve the world's problems. Are we really twice as creative as we were in 1974 with four billion than we are today with eight billion? How many of the pressing problems of 1974 has our much larger population let us to solve by sheer dint of additional warm bodies? We've been there, done that. We can survive it again, even if it means wearing lime green leisure suits. Besides, if the population drops by 50%, that means capital investment per capita has doubled. There's no clear argument as to why a higher level of capital investment per person would be a bad thing.
The real argument seems to be about women succeeding outside their traditional roles, not population, not creativity, not capital formation.
I wrote a piece on this a while back, and you and I had a a brief exchange on it. I had been wanting to write back after I thought it over. I'm one of those males who worries about the fertility rates in relatively liberal societies--and yet I thoroughly agree with your three basic facts. My wife and I have only one child. We wanted more, but the clock had likely run out. I firmly believe a woman ought to be able to pursue the career paths you (and Claudia Goldin) allude to. The question I ask is whether government policies impose distortions and lead to a fertility rate that is lower than what a nondistorted market would yield
An example is urban planning. One reason that Alanna and I waited longer than we would have liked to for a second child involved urban design. We lived far from our jobs because (among other things) central city schools were terrible, central city crime was high, and massive freeway construction made it desirable to endure long commutes to avoid the pitfalls of living where our job prospects lay. Labor laws created unnecessary income cliffs if either of us worked less than 40 hours a week. I could go on, but I'll stop there. The fact is that long commutes, the need for 40+ hours a week, and other artificial parameters led us to delay childbearing. With better public public policies, we probably would have started our quest earlier and might have had another child or maybe two.
It's a similar issue to tax and welfare policies and the breakup of the two-parent household. One should be free to be a single parent, a divorced parent, whatever. But, most likely, distortionary public policies make it artificially desirable to be single/divorced/etc. And, as has been well-documented, this has had devastating effects on various communities in American society--especially in inner cities and rural areas.
For me, the question is not whether women should have a right to pursue careers, etc. in lieu of childrearing. The question is whether misguided policies force women to make an either/or choice that would not be necessary under better public policies. I think the answer is yes.
And I'll note that my epiphany on this came while attending a lecture by Claudia Goldin, who was describing the generational sequence of career versus family choices made by cohorts of women over the twentieth century.
I do not have kids because I don't want to have kids. I think a lot of the pro-natalist discussion just forgets this option altogether. It is not just because we have education and careers and birth control and a ticking biological clock that we are having less children, it's also because all of those things gave us the option to do something else with our lives if we'd prefer it. And many do.
Personally, I'd rather come up with ways we can do more with less people, then to try to come up with ways to coerce people to have more children they might not want to have.
You make some good points, but a married man and a married woman do not compete against each other for income. The income goes to the family, and every decent married father knows that.
I think that is a mistake to conflate having a child with parenting a child. Parenting like a professional career is extremely time-intensive. Neither men nor women can be both a full-time employee and a full-time parent. There simply is not enough time in the day.
The only solution is a division of labor, which is typically an optimal way to get things done in a groups.
Both men and women in their early 20s need to choose which they want to be and then look for a spouse who is willing and able to play the opposite role.
The problem is that we do not tell our young people that they need to make that choice and we pretend they can have it all. Because of the biological clock, women are the primary victim of this lack of honesty.
Thank you for saying this! I've been especially worried about Robin's very pessimistic view and conclusions. Some smaller changes I think could be made:
* As potential grandparents, commit to financial and personal support for early grandkids (Per Brian's point 1) and communicate that. If you will likely leave an inheritance, don't wait until it's not needed. I've even said we'd pay for egg freezing.
* Support "Returning Moms" advocacy groups. I think Opportunity@Work had a big effect on getting employers ready to drop the degree requirement, and you're starting to see a cascade now. Can we do something similar for bringing parents back into interesting careers?
* Every alternative higher ed project out there will make this easier. Put energy into those
The men who blog about fertility should catalog all the work they are doing to help women overcome these issues. Spot on: "Every time I read yet another article by yet another man who is ignoring these facts it makes me wonder what he was doing in his 30s."
The nuclear family has been disastrous for birth rates and effective child care. Lots of commentators I read seem to romanticize the nuclear family—especially the desire for fathers to be active caregivers—but seem not to realize that its precursor, the extended family, with its many members living in proximity to one another with the expectation of being called upon to help, was much more conducive to higher birth rates and workable child care. IOW, I’m not surprised that Mormons have significantly higher birth rates than other Americans. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/01/12/mormons-in-america-family-life).
How many women (and men) are chasing the superstar careers because that's the only way to pay for housing? How many women (and men) are forgoing some lower-hour careers, like teaching, that can't compete for scarce housing resources in productive cities?
"Get housing costs down" is also something we already know how to do; the fixes are entirely legislative/legal.
I think you are bringing up important factors concerning the dilemma women face concerning childrearing vs career. But at least related to Robin Hanson's case, your critique is besides the point. The factors you list and many more are already discussed in the list of post you ref.
Well put. Anda good outline of what needs to change. And while it's no demerit for not having any positive suggestions, they would surely have been welcomed.
Some of mine would be (no one of which is a magic bullet and, hopefully, all of which have other benefits.)
The generous refundable child tax credit.
Land use and building code reform to make it easier for families with children to live near highly productive jobs
Push out the expected "retirement" age so that the person "starting over" at 40 still has 30 or 40 years of productive working life ahead.
De-credential lots of jobs
Refocus medical practice and research (Yeah how?) on preserving productive health over life extension per se.
More progressive personal taxes would reduce somewhat the shine of "greedy" jobs.
Tax credits for career shift education.
Let's make it a rule that anyone writing about a problem must make three suggestions toward ameliorating it. :)
All this will be moot in the next 20 or so years when aging is cured. Of course, the same knuckleheads who trumpeted the “population bomb” will crawl out from under their rocks to oppose that as well.
I think you really mean “fecundity” as opposed to “fertility” rates.
“Fertility refers to the natural capability to produce offspring while fecundity refers to the potential for reproduction of an organism or a population.”
As Jordan Peterson points out, correctly, there is more to life than a career. Sadly, the Feminist Industrial Complex has convinced many women of the opposite. If you are ambitious, career-wise, vs family-wise, well, that's a learned behavior. Many women find out too late that they have been duped.
So the bottom line is that women don't have kids because they pursue "careers" instead. This isn't exactly a new or innovative insight. There is an unspoken assumption here that women must or at least should focus on "career" to the same extent that men do, instead of prioritizing family and children.
Knowing lots of women (and couples) who delayed (and had fewer) kids for exactly these reasons, I think the only thing that is going to reverse the decline in fertility among couples with members who are in those "greedy" jobs is 1) restoring the kind of support networks that existed in the past - with lots of people who aren't-the-mom providing childcare/household tasks.
And on the demand side: 2) reducing the societal perception that kids are a massive burden and extremely susceptible to damage from lack of relentless parenting/protection and 3) a change IN the way those "greedy" jobs work to allow having kids (or other "luxuries").
From personal experience, someone having kids in med school or residency was considered "insane" and the med schools/residency programs had no interest whatsoever in making it more possible. They considered a two-day weekend "a golden weekend." Believe whatever you want about inheritance or nature vs. nurture or SES data, I think we can agree that doctors having kids is a good thing - at the very least the pediatric rotation they do should provide some good information! But we have a medical training system (and a society that demands parenting time-commitments that are incompatible with it) that makes it almost impossible to do so.
I am not sure this is the right way to actually address it for this case, but you often see data showing "there is only 25% women in this job" with the implication that without some kind of discrimination, it would be closer to 50%. What would it look like if we did "only 5% of people in medical training had kids, while the % for everyone else over the same time period is 70%" and treated that like a problem (by the people running medical training, not by just imposing yet another societal demand on those docs) that had to be fixed?
There's the greedy job problem at the top, but there's also the greedy job problem at the bottom. An awful lot of jobs offer irregular, unpredictable hours, variable pay, compulsory overtime and pay low enough to require one to work more than one job to stay off the streets. A lot more people work that kind of job than are high powered career oriented folks. These are the people who might want to have children, but know that taking a day off when a child is sick may mean losing one's job, one's car, one's apartment and so on in a terrible, well documented spiral. If we want more children, the low end greedy job problem seems easier to fix and would benefit more people.
There's something misogynist about this focus on pushing women in high powered careers to have children. Where's the pressure for male executives on the C-suite track to take off a decade or two and raise their wife's children? If she's on a high powered track, odds are she can take a month or so off, and then, after delivery, let daddy take over. Even a highly competitive career can recover from a brief hiatus, but not one lasting decades. Where's the pressure on male doctors? Male professors? Maybe men need different career incentives, or we need to change the tax code to encourage men to raise their children.
I've yet to see a convincing argument that falling fertility is a problem. The dumbest one going around argues that more people would provide us with more creative brainpower to solve the world's problems. Are we really twice as creative as we were in 1974 with four billion than we are today with eight billion? How many of the pressing problems of 1974 has our much larger population let us to solve by sheer dint of additional warm bodies? We've been there, done that. We can survive it again, even if it means wearing lime green leisure suits. Besides, if the population drops by 50%, that means capital investment per capita has doubled. There's no clear argument as to why a higher level of capital investment per person would be a bad thing.
The real argument seems to be about women succeeding outside their traditional roles, not population, not creativity, not capital formation.
I wrote a piece on this a while back, and you and I had a a brief exchange on it. I had been wanting to write back after I thought it over. I'm one of those males who worries about the fertility rates in relatively liberal societies--and yet I thoroughly agree with your three basic facts. My wife and I have only one child. We wanted more, but the clock had likely run out. I firmly believe a woman ought to be able to pursue the career paths you (and Claudia Goldin) allude to. The question I ask is whether government policies impose distortions and lead to a fertility rate that is lower than what a nondistorted market would yield
An example is urban planning. One reason that Alanna and I waited longer than we would have liked to for a second child involved urban design. We lived far from our jobs because (among other things) central city schools were terrible, central city crime was high, and massive freeway construction made it desirable to endure long commutes to avoid the pitfalls of living where our job prospects lay. Labor laws created unnecessary income cliffs if either of us worked less than 40 hours a week. I could go on, but I'll stop there. The fact is that long commutes, the need for 40+ hours a week, and other artificial parameters led us to delay childbearing. With better public public policies, we probably would have started our quest earlier and might have had another child or maybe two.
It's a similar issue to tax and welfare policies and the breakup of the two-parent household. One should be free to be a single parent, a divorced parent, whatever. But, most likely, distortionary public policies make it artificially desirable to be single/divorced/etc. And, as has been well-documented, this has had devastating effects on various communities in American society--especially in inner cities and rural areas.
For me, the question is not whether women should have a right to pursue careers, etc. in lieu of childrearing. The question is whether misguided policies force women to make an either/or choice that would not be necessary under better public policies. I think the answer is yes.
And I'll note that my epiphany on this came while attending a lecture by Claudia Goldin, who was describing the generational sequence of career versus family choices made by cohorts of women over the twentieth century.
I do not have kids because I don't want to have kids. I think a lot of the pro-natalist discussion just forgets this option altogether. It is not just because we have education and careers and birth control and a ticking biological clock that we are having less children, it's also because all of those things gave us the option to do something else with our lives if we'd prefer it. And many do.
Personally, I'd rather come up with ways we can do more with less people, then to try to come up with ways to coerce people to have more children they might not want to have.
You make some good points, but a married man and a married woman do not compete against each other for income. The income goes to the family, and every decent married father knows that.
I think that is a mistake to conflate having a child with parenting a child. Parenting like a professional career is extremely time-intensive. Neither men nor women can be both a full-time employee and a full-time parent. There simply is not enough time in the day.
The only solution is a division of labor, which is typically an optimal way to get things done in a groups.
Both men and women in their early 20s need to choose which they want to be and then look for a spouse who is willing and able to play the opposite role.
The problem is that we do not tell our young people that they need to make that choice and we pretend they can have it all. Because of the biological clock, women are the primary victim of this lack of honesty.
Thank you for saying this! I've been especially worried about Robin's very pessimistic view and conclusions. Some smaller changes I think could be made:
* As potential grandparents, commit to financial and personal support for early grandkids (Per Brian's point 1) and communicate that. If you will likely leave an inheritance, don't wait until it's not needed. I've even said we'd pay for egg freezing.
* Support "Returning Moms" advocacy groups. I think Opportunity@Work had a big effect on getting employers ready to drop the degree requirement, and you're starting to see a cascade now. Can we do something similar for bringing parents back into interesting careers?
* Every alternative higher ed project out there will make this easier. Put energy into those
The men who blog about fertility should catalog all the work they are doing to help women overcome these issues. Spot on: "Every time I read yet another article by yet another man who is ignoring these facts it makes me wonder what he was doing in his 30s."
The nuclear family has been disastrous for birth rates and effective child care. Lots of commentators I read seem to romanticize the nuclear family—especially the desire for fathers to be active caregivers—but seem not to realize that its precursor, the extended family, with its many members living in proximity to one another with the expectation of being called upon to help, was much more conducive to higher birth rates and workable child care. IOW, I’m not surprised that Mormons have significantly higher birth rates than other Americans. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/01/12/mormons-in-america-family-life).
I think housing should play a bigger role in the discussion: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388, particularly in the most efficient and productive cities.
How many women (and men) are chasing the superstar careers because that's the only way to pay for housing? How many women (and men) are forgoing some lower-hour careers, like teaching, that can't compete for scarce housing resources in productive cities?
"Get housing costs down" is also something we already know how to do; the fixes are entirely legislative/legal.
Would artificial wombs change the equation for women?
I think you are bringing up important factors concerning the dilemma women face concerning childrearing vs career. But at least related to Robin Hanson's case, your critique is besides the point. The factors you list and many more are already discussed in the list of post you ref.
Well put. Anda good outline of what needs to change. And while it's no demerit for not having any positive suggestions, they would surely have been welcomed.
Some of mine would be (no one of which is a magic bullet and, hopefully, all of which have other benefits.)
The generous refundable child tax credit.
Land use and building code reform to make it easier for families with children to live near highly productive jobs
Push out the expected "retirement" age so that the person "starting over" at 40 still has 30 or 40 years of productive working life ahead.
De-credential lots of jobs
Refocus medical practice and research (Yeah how?) on preserving productive health over life extension per se.
More progressive personal taxes would reduce somewhat the shine of "greedy" jobs.
Tax credits for career shift education.
Let's make it a rule that anyone writing about a problem must make three suggestions toward ameliorating it. :)
All this will be moot in the next 20 or so years when aging is cured. Of course, the same knuckleheads who trumpeted the “population bomb” will crawl out from under their rocks to oppose that as well.
I think you really mean “fecundity” as opposed to “fertility” rates.
“Fertility refers to the natural capability to produce offspring while fecundity refers to the potential for reproduction of an organism or a population.”
As Jordan Peterson points out, correctly, there is more to life than a career. Sadly, the Feminist Industrial Complex has convinced many women of the opposite. If you are ambitious, career-wise, vs family-wise, well, that's a learned behavior. Many women find out too late that they have been duped.
So the bottom line is that women don't have kids because they pursue "careers" instead. This isn't exactly a new or innovative insight. There is an unspoken assumption here that women must or at least should focus on "career" to the same extent that men do, instead of prioritizing family and children.