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.
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?
When Perri Klass, doctor and author, had her first child in medical school. She learned she was pregnant the afternoon of her medical exam. To give a sense how odd people thought this decision was, I'll quote from her 11/11/1984 article in the New York Times Magazine, "In medical school one day, when I was several months along, a lecturer mentioned the problem of teen-age pregnancy, and half the class turned to look at me."
Isn't it easier to pay women that would have greedy jobs to stay home and raise the kids.
Functionally, if you gave huge tax breaks to married fathers, then fathers with greedy jobs would see the most benefit and generally speaking the sort of men and women that take on greedy jobs end up marrying each other.
The wife's career would be mother, at least for a time. The family would be compensated for that career as if she had been working a greedy job.
If the woman derives great pleasure from the greedy job itself this doesn't do much, but for those that feel the need to have two such careers for monetary reasons (to afford say housing in expensive cities) this would present a solution.
You could, but I assuming that in addition to "the woman derives great pleasure from the greedy job itself this doesn't do much" as well as that we (society) all derive benefit from what those working at greedy jobs produce. (and I'm not sure we could differentiate between useful/not-useful at this level).
There's already a financial incentive (balanced against whatever your greedy salary was) in being at home - you don't have to pay for daycare. And also, greedy jobs by definition don't take well to multi-year breaks from them. (Again I am heavily thinking about med school/residency careers). And I think, just based on my general knowledge of humanity, that a lot (majority?) of people prefer the balance of vaguely 8 hrs sleep, 8 hrs job, 4 hrs for kids/housework, (outsourcing 8 hrs of childcare to daycare/school), 4 hrs for leisure. More, certainly, than prefer a greedy job that takes 12 hrs, or replacing their job with kids/housework. I love my kids and all, but I don't want to spend 12 hours a day with them, and I don't think they do either. Some do, and that's fine!
I also have an ulterior motive: I think that "greedy" jobs in general should be reformed, not just to make having kids during them possible, but for a lot of other beneficial reasons. I think everyone just accepts that they are greedy by nature, but they often aren't. Except for the tiny minority of jobs where the unique talents of the individual are so in demand that there is no conceivable alternative (or they just want to, and that's again a limited #) to them putting every waking minute into it, it would almost always be better to hire/train 15 non-greedy-job employees than overwork 10 greedy-job employees (or whatever ratio it takes). Medical insurance reform to detach health insurance from your workplace, so that fixed costs of employment are lower, would probably also help with that.
Different greedy jobs are different, but if there exists some zero sum competition where only one person can get the greedy job, the person willing to sacrifice more is always going to win.
I will offer investment banking as an example. People often wonder "why have all these people working 80 hour weeks, why not twice as many people working 40 hour weeks". I think this ignores that 1) more people means more people with the precious inside information you need to succeed in that industry and 2) a business where trading a millisecond faster at 2am is an advantage is not one you can 9-5.
Now, let's say fewer women become investment bankers so they can be mothers. I think the world will survive. To me it's one of those greedy jobs that is one big Red Queen Race, and I think a lot of greedy jobs fall into that category.
If you're a women that desperately wants to work a greedy job I don't think I can really help you. You will have to work as hard as the other person that wants that job. And the result of that is that people use having fewer kids as a way to win that race, to societies detriment.
But I could alter the tax code such that not taking that greedy job left your family no worse off in the competition for real estate and schools and the rest. Then its up to you what you want to do.
A good point, and I'm certainly not an expert on investment banking work conditions, but I think that maybe there are only a relatively few jobs in the country that are 1) zero sum, 2) the zero sum competition occurs across a level of time/effort that precludes not just "spending a few hours with kids after school/daycare that I can now afford" but "being able to have kids at all", 3) are sufficiently Red Queen like AND are in a zip code where you need to actually win that race to have what you consider to be a decent QOL, but 4) the people in that job are not already "desperately want[ing] to work [that] greedy job" for their own reasons, and so therefore not that amenable to financial incentives otherwise.
Yes, in the case you describe, maybe there's nothing my changes can do for them, maybe high flight investment banking as an industry is not amenable to change. But I think there are far more people in jobs that are not like that, particularly in the Red Queen aspect- and how could they? By definition only a few people win RQ-style jobs, so the rest have to content themselves with normal jobs.
I certainly can't possibly calculate the actual ratio, but I would think that for every 1 investment banker in NYC who fits your description, I think there are probably hundreds of medical residents, engineers, pre-tenure profs, college/grad students, mid-level managers and others where the current structure of the job/education disincentivizes having kids, but where that feature is not inextricable from the job. And where conscious changes to the way those jobs are setup, changes to the availability and practicality of substitute childcare (via extended family, daycares, and maids/nannies/whatever term), and sure, tax-code, regulatory changes that currently make "over-working 1 person" much better than "regular working 2 people", could result in a lot more kids in that wider group, and also a lot of other better things downstream of that.
edit: AND, if you reform job X so it's no longer "so greedy you can't have kids", those jobs are gonna exist next door (and the next zip code over) to that woman who is Red Queen investment banking for 80 hrs a week to afford their rent. If she can do that job, she is definitely qualified for a lot of those other jobs that certainly won't pay as well, but might 1) pay enough to afford what she wants for her family and 2) be more enjoyable in general. So she quits banking and does that job instead. She's happier, she has time to spend however many hours she wants having kids, and investment banking becomes a little less Red Queen-ish for the people still in it.
I think if companies could offer "greedy jobs" that aren't "greedy" then they already would. People would produce greedy level output at lower rates of hourly pay because not having to deal with the greedy inconveniences is worth it to them.
That companies don't do this either means that:
1) all current and potential businesses are ignorant of their own incentives
2) there is some regulatory hurdle that promotes greediness
#1 seems a bit far fetched
#2 could be true but then we are just dealing with individual industry level political issues
If you can't reform residency because healthcare is eating our entire economy, you can't reform it so that doctors have more kids. It's just one more good reason to try and reform residency, and I don't know what the specific industry and political reasons why reform doesn't happen.
Trying to fight a hundred regulatory battles that may or may not indirectly solve the problem seems quite exhausting. With tax incentives I can get at the issue directly. That this might not be exactly what a certain kind of obsessed type A girlboss exactly wants for her particular career doesn't really change where I can get the most bang for my buck in terms of getting the most middle and UMC women to have more kids.
Definitely good points. And I don't have a general problem with "tax money for having kids" - it's probably one of highest ROI subsidies you could think of, though the details of how you implement it probably matter a lot. And essentially the actual impact of all my suggestions are as direct/indirect, financial/non-financial incentives to having kids.
My reason for taking what seems like a roundabout, "fight a hundred regulatory battles" sort of way is twofold: first, we actually do need to fight these hundred battles to get a net benefit. If we subsidize having kids and people have more kids, the positive effect of that will be swamped (and we'll be less able to fund those subsidies) if we just have to tax those kids out the wazoo to pay for 8 quadrillion in healthcare. Second, even more than healthcare, partisanship has eaten everything. You could (yes, self-conscious heavy emphasis on "could") spin the healthcare reforms we actually need in bi-partisan, or perhaps at least under-the-partisan-radar ways. But there is no way the partisan culture warriors are gonna let "money for stay at home moms" happen without making it a political bloodbath, and even more importantly, whichever side that decides they don't like it would almost certainly sabotage it either politically or in implementation. I really do think that it is likely easier in the long run to "accidentally" help fertility by fixing other major problems, rather than focusing on it directly - especially since "accidentally hurting fertility while trying to do other things" is how we got here.
"If you can't reform residency because healthcare is eating our entire economy, you can't reform it so that doctors have more kids. " -> this points to what I'm saying about "the reforms that make jobs easier to have kids in" are just a subset of the "individual industry level political issues" package. I think in a state of crazy libertarian nature, most of the incentives around having kids vs. job are pretty well balanced, and would result in a lot more kids.
But healthcare (only harping on this since I'm most familiar with it, and as you say, consumes an evergrowing segment of jobs/life) is absolutely screwed up top to bottom due to both your #2 and #1, with the small change that I would say that the current/potential businesses are only "ignorant" of the incentives because regulatory/legal hurdles make it illegal/financial-impossible to act on them.
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.
I think you need to reread the post, especially point 3, which discusses the division of labor. I would disagree, however, that all full-time jobs are incompatible with parenting. I know many excellent and devoted parents who have worked full time while raising children. But in these cases usually neither spouse has a greedy job. Both have predictable schedules and can get away when needed.
You assume that if women understand that they can't have it all--a belief that went out several decades ago--they will choose to have children, despite incurring a huge opportunity cost in building human capital. The falling birth rates suggest the opposite.
I never said that a full-time job is incompatible with parenting. Please reread my comment. I was talking about the same demanding careers that you mentioned in the article.
And I do not assume that women will choose to have more children. I never even mentioned the birth rate. My goal is to assist young people in making wise life choices.
If American young women choose to put career first, then American young men will increasingly marry foreign women who want to put being a mother first.
It is far better for women to make a rational choice in their 20s than be forced by biology in their 30s, which is increasingly what is happening.
What is your evidence that we no longer tell young women that they cannot have a fulfilling professional career and be a great mother?
I think that is exactly what we tell young women.
And I know many educated double-income parents who think they are great parents but spend very little time with their children. That is not being a good parent.
I thought that when you wrote, "Neither men nor women can be both a full-time employee and a full-parent" you meant that a full-time job isn't compatible with good parenting (as distinct from simply having children). I can't tell what you think, because you seem to shift between referring to "greedy" jobs and referring to full-time jobs. A greedy job, like the one I had in my 30s, is inflexible and all-consuming. (I didn't even go to the dentist for seven years, the results of which were not pretty.)
When I referred to men and women competing, I meant in the workplace, not within the household. I wasn't referring to people who are married to one another but merely to the broad categories of male and female employees.
I'm 64 and even I heard "you can't have it all." I think that belief was more common among older baby boomers. Their daughters are more realistic. Claudia Goldin discusses this a bit in our interview. But, again, she is talking about "greedy jobs," not a more flexible professional career. For the latter, her touchstone profession is pharmacist, which, thanks to the replacement of pharmacist-owned independents by corporate chains like CVS, has gone from an extremely greedy job to a high-paid profession that can often be done part-time and that is increasingly dominated by women.
Also, this is not an American phenomenon. It's global and particularly strong in developed countries with more traditional expectations about marriage and childbearing.
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.
I know. People keep talking about it as if we would have more children just because there is free education/childcare/etc. But the lack of those things is not why I don't want children!
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).
Both are much better than the "estranged" family, which is what we see more and more often. See: the recent piece in Persuasion on voluntary familial estrangement.
This is still related to Postrel's point. You're a woman who had children, so now you are behind your male peers professionally in greedy careers. That will make you even less able to obtain the career you want in the city you want to live in. Many mothers would like to live near their own parents, but that is just one more piece of the puzzle. If you are behind in terms of career accomplishments, then you'll have less choice of which city to live in. Sometimes even just getting jobs in the same city is hard for two professional parents. Now, what are the odds that city is also the once both of them grew up in?
It was not my intention to contradict the thesis of Virginia’s post. (Sorry, VP, if it came off that way.) All I’ll say—and thanks for your response—is that the situation you describe is also potentially related to my point, which is more about cultural change than economic verities. I don’t mean to suggest that we can go back in time, just that there’s an inherently negative aspect to modern 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.
People always ask me this question but I don't know why it would make a difference. It's not the nine months of pregnancy I'm worried about, it's the 20 years of parenting!
Artificial wombs might enable women to delay safely having children until later in their careers. But since one's 40s are often the busiest, most productive professional years it's not a solution to the fundamental problem.
"Entrepreneurial energy" would also be low for people by their 40s. Although I don't have much data about new business formation. My intuition is that people mostly start businesses in their late 20s and early 30s.
If women are becoming mothers in the 40s they would be able to afford more 'motherhood augmenting services' like childcare, maids and tutoring services. They would also have the human capital and experience to make special arrangements with their employers like more work from home, more vacation time, flexible work hours etc.
That's just the first nine months. Having a child signs one up for at least an 18 year commitment and usually much longer.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, Martian women laid eggs that incubated for years and hatched into four year olds capable of walking and talking and already toilet trained. I guess this would make having children more attractive to some, but I don't think we're going to find our solution to be a technological fix. Lloyd Alexander had the baddie in his Prydain books cranking out cauldron born warriors completely automating the entire process of child rearing, but, again, I don't see this as a real solution. (Elon Musk probably does.)
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.
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.
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?
When Perri Klass, doctor and author, had her first child in medical school. She learned she was pregnant the afternoon of her medical exam. To give a sense how odd people thought this decision was, I'll quote from her 11/11/1984 article in the New York Times Magazine, "In medical school one day, when I was several months along, a lecturer mentioned the problem of teen-age pregnancy, and half the class turned to look at me."
100%!
Isn't it easier to pay women that would have greedy jobs to stay home and raise the kids.
Functionally, if you gave huge tax breaks to married fathers, then fathers with greedy jobs would see the most benefit and generally speaking the sort of men and women that take on greedy jobs end up marrying each other.
The wife's career would be mother, at least for a time. The family would be compensated for that career as if she had been working a greedy job.
If the woman derives great pleasure from the greedy job itself this doesn't do much, but for those that feel the need to have two such careers for monetary reasons (to afford say housing in expensive cities) this would present a solution.
You could, but I assuming that in addition to "the woman derives great pleasure from the greedy job itself this doesn't do much" as well as that we (society) all derive benefit from what those working at greedy jobs produce. (and I'm not sure we could differentiate between useful/not-useful at this level).
There's already a financial incentive (balanced against whatever your greedy salary was) in being at home - you don't have to pay for daycare. And also, greedy jobs by definition don't take well to multi-year breaks from them. (Again I am heavily thinking about med school/residency careers). And I think, just based on my general knowledge of humanity, that a lot (majority?) of people prefer the balance of vaguely 8 hrs sleep, 8 hrs job, 4 hrs for kids/housework, (outsourcing 8 hrs of childcare to daycare/school), 4 hrs for leisure. More, certainly, than prefer a greedy job that takes 12 hrs, or replacing their job with kids/housework. I love my kids and all, but I don't want to spend 12 hours a day with them, and I don't think they do either. Some do, and that's fine!
I also have an ulterior motive: I think that "greedy" jobs in general should be reformed, not just to make having kids during them possible, but for a lot of other beneficial reasons. I think everyone just accepts that they are greedy by nature, but they often aren't. Except for the tiny minority of jobs where the unique talents of the individual are so in demand that there is no conceivable alternative (or they just want to, and that's again a limited #) to them putting every waking minute into it, it would almost always be better to hire/train 15 non-greedy-job employees than overwork 10 greedy-job employees (or whatever ratio it takes). Medical insurance reform to detach health insurance from your workplace, so that fixed costs of employment are lower, would probably also help with that.
Different greedy jobs are different, but if there exists some zero sum competition where only one person can get the greedy job, the person willing to sacrifice more is always going to win.
I will offer investment banking as an example. People often wonder "why have all these people working 80 hour weeks, why not twice as many people working 40 hour weeks". I think this ignores that 1) more people means more people with the precious inside information you need to succeed in that industry and 2) a business where trading a millisecond faster at 2am is an advantage is not one you can 9-5.
Now, let's say fewer women become investment bankers so they can be mothers. I think the world will survive. To me it's one of those greedy jobs that is one big Red Queen Race, and I think a lot of greedy jobs fall into that category.
If you're a women that desperately wants to work a greedy job I don't think I can really help you. You will have to work as hard as the other person that wants that job. And the result of that is that people use having fewer kids as a way to win that race, to societies detriment.
But I could alter the tax code such that not taking that greedy job left your family no worse off in the competition for real estate and schools and the rest. Then its up to you what you want to do.
A good point, and I'm certainly not an expert on investment banking work conditions, but I think that maybe there are only a relatively few jobs in the country that are 1) zero sum, 2) the zero sum competition occurs across a level of time/effort that precludes not just "spending a few hours with kids after school/daycare that I can now afford" but "being able to have kids at all", 3) are sufficiently Red Queen like AND are in a zip code where you need to actually win that race to have what you consider to be a decent QOL, but 4) the people in that job are not already "desperately want[ing] to work [that] greedy job" for their own reasons, and so therefore not that amenable to financial incentives otherwise.
Yes, in the case you describe, maybe there's nothing my changes can do for them, maybe high flight investment banking as an industry is not amenable to change. But I think there are far more people in jobs that are not like that, particularly in the Red Queen aspect- and how could they? By definition only a few people win RQ-style jobs, so the rest have to content themselves with normal jobs.
I certainly can't possibly calculate the actual ratio, but I would think that for every 1 investment banker in NYC who fits your description, I think there are probably hundreds of medical residents, engineers, pre-tenure profs, college/grad students, mid-level managers and others where the current structure of the job/education disincentivizes having kids, but where that feature is not inextricable from the job. And where conscious changes to the way those jobs are setup, changes to the availability and practicality of substitute childcare (via extended family, daycares, and maids/nannies/whatever term), and sure, tax-code, regulatory changes that currently make "over-working 1 person" much better than "regular working 2 people", could result in a lot more kids in that wider group, and also a lot of other better things downstream of that.
edit: AND, if you reform job X so it's no longer "so greedy you can't have kids", those jobs are gonna exist next door (and the next zip code over) to that woman who is Red Queen investment banking for 80 hrs a week to afford their rent. If she can do that job, she is definitely qualified for a lot of those other jobs that certainly won't pay as well, but might 1) pay enough to afford what she wants for her family and 2) be more enjoyable in general. So she quits banking and does that job instead. She's happier, she has time to spend however many hours she wants having kids, and investment banking becomes a little less Red Queen-ish for the people still in it.
I think if companies could offer "greedy jobs" that aren't "greedy" then they already would. People would produce greedy level output at lower rates of hourly pay because not having to deal with the greedy inconveniences is worth it to them.
That companies don't do this either means that:
1) all current and potential businesses are ignorant of their own incentives
2) there is some regulatory hurdle that promotes greediness
#1 seems a bit far fetched
#2 could be true but then we are just dealing with individual industry level political issues
If you can't reform residency because healthcare is eating our entire economy, you can't reform it so that doctors have more kids. It's just one more good reason to try and reform residency, and I don't know what the specific industry and political reasons why reform doesn't happen.
Trying to fight a hundred regulatory battles that may or may not indirectly solve the problem seems quite exhausting. With tax incentives I can get at the issue directly. That this might not be exactly what a certain kind of obsessed type A girlboss exactly wants for her particular career doesn't really change where I can get the most bang for my buck in terms of getting the most middle and UMC women to have more kids.
Definitely good points. And I don't have a general problem with "tax money for having kids" - it's probably one of highest ROI subsidies you could think of, though the details of how you implement it probably matter a lot. And essentially the actual impact of all my suggestions are as direct/indirect, financial/non-financial incentives to having kids.
My reason for taking what seems like a roundabout, "fight a hundred regulatory battles" sort of way is twofold: first, we actually do need to fight these hundred battles to get a net benefit. If we subsidize having kids and people have more kids, the positive effect of that will be swamped (and we'll be less able to fund those subsidies) if we just have to tax those kids out the wazoo to pay for 8 quadrillion in healthcare. Second, even more than healthcare, partisanship has eaten everything. You could (yes, self-conscious heavy emphasis on "could") spin the healthcare reforms we actually need in bi-partisan, or perhaps at least under-the-partisan-radar ways. But there is no way the partisan culture warriors are gonna let "money for stay at home moms" happen without making it a political bloodbath, and even more importantly, whichever side that decides they don't like it would almost certainly sabotage it either politically or in implementation. I really do think that it is likely easier in the long run to "accidentally" help fertility by fixing other major problems, rather than focusing on it directly - especially since "accidentally hurting fertility while trying to do other things" is how we got here.
"If you can't reform residency because healthcare is eating our entire economy, you can't reform it so that doctors have more kids. " -> this points to what I'm saying about "the reforms that make jobs easier to have kids in" are just a subset of the "individual industry level political issues" package. I think in a state of crazy libertarian nature, most of the incentives around having kids vs. job are pretty well balanced, and would result in a lot more kids.
But healthcare (only harping on this since I'm most familiar with it, and as you say, consumes an evergrowing segment of jobs/life) is absolutely screwed up top to bottom due to both your #2 and #1, with the small change that I would say that the current/potential businesses are only "ignorant" of the incentives because regulatory/legal hurdles make it illegal/financial-impossible to act on them.
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.
I think you need to reread the post, especially point 3, which discusses the division of labor. I would disagree, however, that all full-time jobs are incompatible with parenting. I know many excellent and devoted parents who have worked full time while raising children. But in these cases usually neither spouse has a greedy job. Both have predictable schedules and can get away when needed.
You assume that if women understand that they can't have it all--a belief that went out several decades ago--they will choose to have children, despite incurring a huge opportunity cost in building human capital. The falling birth rates suggest the opposite.
I never said that a full-time job is incompatible with parenting. Please reread my comment. I was talking about the same demanding careers that you mentioned in the article.
And I do not assume that women will choose to have more children. I never even mentioned the birth rate. My goal is to assist young people in making wise life choices.
If American young women choose to put career first, then American young men will increasingly marry foreign women who want to put being a mother first.
It is far better for women to make a rational choice in their 20s than be forced by biology in their 30s, which is increasingly what is happening.
What is your evidence that we no longer tell young women that they cannot have a fulfilling professional career and be a great mother?
I think that is exactly what we tell young women.
And I know many educated double-income parents who think they are great parents but spend very little time with their children. That is not being a good parent.
I thought that when you wrote, "Neither men nor women can be both a full-time employee and a full-parent" you meant that a full-time job isn't compatible with good parenting (as distinct from simply having children). I can't tell what you think, because you seem to shift between referring to "greedy" jobs and referring to full-time jobs. A greedy job, like the one I had in my 30s, is inflexible and all-consuming. (I didn't even go to the dentist for seven years, the results of which were not pretty.)
When I referred to men and women competing, I meant in the workplace, not within the household. I wasn't referring to people who are married to one another but merely to the broad categories of male and female employees.
I'm 64 and even I heard "you can't have it all." I think that belief was more common among older baby boomers. Their daughters are more realistic. Claudia Goldin discusses this a bit in our interview. But, again, she is talking about "greedy jobs," not a more flexible professional career. For the latter, her touchstone profession is pharmacist, which, thanks to the replacement of pharmacist-owned independents by corporate chains like CVS, has gone from an extremely greedy job to a high-paid profession that can often be done part-time and that is increasingly dominated by women.
Also, this is not an American phenomenon. It's global and particularly strong in developed countries with more traditional expectations about marriage and childbearing.
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.
It still seems to surprise some people that not all women want to have children.
I know. People keep talking about it as if we would have more children just because there is free education/childcare/etc. But the lack of those things is not why I don't want children!
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).
Both are much better than the "estranged" family, which is what we see more and more often. See: the recent piece in Persuasion on voluntary familial estrangement.
This is still related to Postrel's point. You're a woman who had children, so now you are behind your male peers professionally in greedy careers. That will make you even less able to obtain the career you want in the city you want to live in. Many mothers would like to live near their own parents, but that is just one more piece of the puzzle. If you are behind in terms of career accomplishments, then you'll have less choice of which city to live in. Sometimes even just getting jobs in the same city is hard for two professional parents. Now, what are the odds that city is also the once both of them grew up in?
It was not my intention to contradict the thesis of Virginia’s post. (Sorry, VP, if it came off that way.) All I’ll say—and thanks for your response—is that the situation you describe is also potentially related to my point, which is more about cultural change than economic verities. I don’t mean to suggest that we can go back in time, just that there’s an inherently negative aspect to modern 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?
People always ask me this question but I don't know why it would make a difference. It's not the nine months of pregnancy I'm worried about, it's the 20 years of parenting!
Artificial wombs might enable women to delay safely having children until later in their careers. But since one's 40s are often the busiest, most productive professional years it's not a solution to the fundamental problem.
"Entrepreneurial energy" would also be low for people by their 40s. Although I don't have much data about new business formation. My intuition is that people mostly start businesses in their late 20s and early 30s.
If women are becoming mothers in the 40s they would be able to afford more 'motherhood augmenting services' like childcare, maids and tutoring services. They would also have the human capital and experience to make special arrangements with their employers like more work from home, more vacation time, flexible work hours etc.
That's just the first nine months. Having a child signs one up for at least an 18 year commitment and usually much longer.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, Martian women laid eggs that incubated for years and hatched into four year olds capable of walking and talking and already toilet trained. I guess this would make having children more attractive to some, but I don't think we're going to find our solution to be a technological fix. Lloyd Alexander had the baddie in his Prydain books cranking out cauldron born warriors completely automating the entire process of child rearing, but, again, I don't see this as a real solution. (Elon Musk probably does.)
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.
I love it when men who think women are inferior beings incapable of intelligent choice fancy themselves fans of the Enlightenment.
I smell projection. Just because you have personal agency and can make intelligent choices, doesn't mean you also can't also be 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.