Get a bunch of women sitting around and talking and more often than not they express their regret for not having had kids or not having had more kids. We were the generation who waited too long before we had kids and who suffered through infertility and often ended up with max two children. It was all about career etc. I was once in a book club of about eight women and only two had their own kids including me, the rest having had to adopt (most of these adoptions turned out to be ‘difficult’ for one reason or another). This was a very wealthy crowd who had the max flexibility to do what they wanted. That said, I have two daughters, 30 and 31 whom I have admonished to start having kids earlier than I did. One has been married for five years and is in finance with no kid in sight and the other is not married at all. It’s worrisome to say the least. Have kids! And then more kids!
Yup. Right now advice to young people begins and ends with this. Everything else is more or less covered, but there’s this giant hole where family formation is regarded as one option among many, and if you decide to pursue it, you need to plan it out completely and slowly. God forbid you jump into it. You might miss out on the joys of travel, or something.
I squeaked by. It scares me just to think about how close I was to missing it. I got married late (god forbid I only had ten years of dating and single life! Don’t want to rush into anything) and then we waited to have kids. Then the result that’s obvious to everyone on earth except the WEIRD: we had trouble, had to go with IVF. It worked thank god, and we’ve got three great kids. I’d never complain because were incredibly lucky it worked, but honestly, we’re built to have 5. It just got too late.
Not necessarily....it's an interesting conversation and far more complex than just that. 'Having a career' was also billed by the Feminist Movement as the way to realize one's 'full potential as a woman', whatever that meant. Many women, seem to have bought into it as a way to achieve the 'ultimate freedom', that of economic independence. Once on their way, a career provided women money so that they didn't necessarily have to negotiate with husbands / partners about how money would be spent in the household. (Also overtime, most women didn't have a 'career' as much as they ended up with just a job to tend to....that's another story). Having work / career became also more prestigious than just staying at home, tending to children & household. Yet to be written is the split that has been created between so called 'working women' and women who have chosen to stay home. Personally, I was stunned when an art dealer friend, a close friend to this day, proclaimed after I quit my corporate job that, "I can't believe we're still friends given that you don't work anymore." That was a bit of a body blow, a diss of sorts. That said, I never stopped 'working' - I started a business, eventually wrote seven books, etc, but in her eyes I had some how failed, especially since I had gone to a top business school which behind my back folks whispered was a 'education wasted'.
Folks are just beginning to discuss the fallout from the Feminist Movement. And there's lots to discuss. I'd like to think the wisdom acquired over the years will give my daughters the perspective that I did not have at the time.
Let it not be said that I understand anything about women. But this is incomprehensible to me. What kind of man marries a 26 year old girl of I presume serviceable looks and fails to impregnate her in 5 years? Just the logistics, like how?
The Western crisis of meaning started long before the birthrate fell. It's correlated much more with the decline of organized religion historically (and the rise of romantic love).
I'm religious but I still think there's more going on here. A lot can be blamed on the Industrial Revolution, the meaninglessness of most of our schooling and subsequent work. And the emptiness of electronic media consumption as our primary leisure activity.
Of course, part (but far from all) of what makes all these things soul-draining is that they're individualized experiences that pull everyone away from the family.
I think your basic point is right here — public meeting places don’t replace the family relationship — but I don’t think that means the parks-and-libraries crowd is entirely wrong, either. I live in a smallish city where there are a lot of public spaces available. I think those spaces give the city a sort of cohesion and a sense of togetherness that would otherwise be harder to keep in mind. That’s the outermost ring of connections; the least strong bond after families and churches and schools. But it’s still nice to have multiple layers of connection, of varying degrees of strength. So I can see the argument that such spaces are a meaningful public good.
But I agree that they generally can’t create a meaningful life on their own.
100% agree; we need public spaces (and especially the public square) to allow people to gather together and both have communal fellowship as well as practice political activism. This is why I think it is so bad that only liberals seem to believe that it is okay to use public spaces to organize politically. No wonder conservatives are so useless, they either dont or cant use public spaces for a variety of reasons
That seems like such an odd angle to me as well, equating public spaces with political activism. Sure, that's one of the things that can occur there, but more often than not the people I see gathering at libraries are stay at home moms taking their kids out for story time.
If the American Left (or Right, for that matter) had any brain at all, it would minimize immigration, encourage large families, develop an industrial policy at a national level that restored the ability to live off of one income, crack down on large publicly held corporations that break communities apart and destroy small businesses, reduce the tax burden to nothing for those who have 3 or more kids, and cut the defense budget by a half or more and then reinvest that money in the nation's infrastructure. Doing so would give them the power they so desperately crave, for generations, and they would gain it legitimately for once.
I would rather develop those skills among our own population, for the purposes of national development and national loyalty. As the new CEO of Twitter demonstrates, being generous to highly skilled immigrants does not necessarily engender in them the love of our country that we, rather than they, deserve. Our people deserve and should demand loyalty, and this is best served by someone with a visceral knowledge of, and affinity for, this place.
Countries should earn loyalty rather than demand it. And the idea of turning away immigrants, especially skilled and educated immigrants, to "develop [...] skills among our own population" strikes me as getting things backwards. The teachers of skills include immigrants, and high-education immigrants raise productivity (https://voxeu.org/article/how-highly-educated-immigrants-raise-native-wages); immigrant-driven productivity gains mean more resources that can be devoted to educating and skilling up the population, including the non-immigrant population.
Furthermore, does it for a moment strike you as condescending, this belief that we have a right to the high skilled among other peoples, and that we have in any way the right to denude them of their best? I mean, who exactly the hell are we?
I as a citizen have a right to demand loyalty from someone who comes here anew. Economic considerations are completely subsidiary to the nation and its people. Productivity and all the rest of that are not what a people should primarily concern themselves with.
You, as an individual, have a right to demand loyalty, just as I, as an individual, have a right to reject such demands. Economic considerations are vitally important. They allow us to make more efficient use of the resources needed to pursue your/my policy goals, such as raising the non-immigrant population's skill levels.
We agree that economics are important. We disagree on their relative importance. To me, they are absolutely subsidiary to the welfare and concerns of the people. They must serve the people. They must be used and exercised to benefit the development of the people. They are a servant and must never be the master.
Perhaps. The issue is an overriding distaste or loathing of this country at the highest levels. I don't think this is as acute in the lower classes, but I see no reason to continue to promote immigration at the expense of the native born population. We don't need a single immigrant with an existing population of a third of a billion people. A healthy birth rate would allow us to maintain productivity, boost melding and assimilation, and restriction on outsiders would allow us to foster a healthy nationalism which we desperately need if this country has any chance of surviving without becoming a more oppressive police state than it already is or disintegrating altogether.
For the sake of transparency, I know exactly the kind of immigrants you speak of. I went to school and got BS and MS degrees with them. I know a Turkish couple that have Golden Retrievers named Heidi and Peter, and who put up a Christmas tree every year and who can get a fire going in the fireplace better than any native born American that I've ever known. I am not trying to attack them or ignore what they obviously bring to the table. I just think we need a massive national recalibration for a couple of generations to try and get this thing healthy again and to make it so We the People are running the show because I don't want to live with or under the people running it now.
I'm just not aware of "an overriding or distaste for the country at the highest levels" (leaving aside a few Trumpist malcontents).
And I do not want to promote immigration at the expense of the natives; I think that more immigrants, epically like Peter and Heidi's owners (or my Egyptian doctor), would make us natives better off.
If the elites of this country loved this country, they would not pursue sanctions in a conflict that hurt and impacted the people of this country. If they loved this country, they would not aid and abet illegal immigration that hurts the lowliest of our people the most. If the elites loved this country, they would not pursue ideologies that take meaningful work away from people and reduce our standard of living.
They do all of these things, and much more. They have nothing but contempt and disdain for us and from from where I sit, the feeling is so much more than mutual.
Re: the Trumpists, I would take them over Victoria Nuland, Bill Kristol, Jen Psaki, Jake Sullivan, the shrieking harpy we call "Vice President" or any of the rest of them. These people betray us, and these people mean us and our families harm - their policies prove it.
Yes, Heidi and Peter's owners are outstanding people. Their kids are American citizens, and they and all others like them should be priority #1.
Maybe after we fully assimilate the enclaves we have now. And I don't know of many high value immigrants interested in moving to China outside of a few overseas Chinese (and most of them still prefer the West).
I agree with you there. We could do more to help integrate recent immigrants, but frankly immigrants to the US, even low income ones, integrate pretty darn well.
There is not and cannot be any substitute for them.
I remember getting a pissy lecture from an attractive young woman on some feminist type issue. She used a phrase like “social construction” of something or other. And I’m looking at her and I’m thinking: The fundamental shape of your body, which I’m looking at, your waist, your hips, your breasts, evolved over millions of years to make and feed babies. That is older than politics, older than Society, million of years, thousands of times older. The biological organisms speaking to me was built by forces so ancient that she can’t even imagine them, and she is saying things that deny those forces even exist, though they compose what she actually is, down to the most basic feelings and urges in the oldest parts of her brain. And she has somehow missed all this. Women suffer the most from the loss of marriage, family and children. They are built for it, literally. And when they lose the chance to have it, nothing can ever make up for that loss.
Daft argument, you are built to hunt mammoths on the savannah so why are you using a computer and keyboard when your literal point is to hunt with a spear?
There are other ways to get food. And even so, men miss the hunting bands, and the comradeship, and the excitement, and try to simulate those things other ways. Interactive action video games are one example, and their addictive nature shows how deep the wiring is that they stimulate. But women have no similar substitute. There is no other way to actually have children. Its not an argument, it is a statement of the obvious. If a woman who is a trusted friend tells you her feelings on this, you will get a flood of emotional pain. Anecdote not quantification, but true nonetheless. Another data point is the misery and rage of childless women, which is one of the fundamental features of the contemporary world. If you don't think women's bodies and brains are evolved to have and care for babies and children, then you don't believe in evolution or biology. You know it. Don't deny it.
Pet argumentative peeve: someone makes a defective argument, receives pushback on it, then renews the argument while insisting that what they're making is "not an argument" — how do people still fall for this?
Pet comment thread peeve: An absolutely clear response distinguishing an argument from a statement of obvious facts, where someone doesn’t like the facts, is met with fake lack of understanding. In this case the obvious fact is that all biological organisms are the products of evolution, including human females. And the human female, evolved a brain and a body to produce babies and children, to care for them. Including feeding them. That’s why it’s no surprise that women who don’t live out their biological fuction are usually unhappy. And it’s no surprise that that is precisely what our society faces now. And this is indisputable based on survey data. Women are not happy, and this trend is increasing. It’s an interesting question why people refuse to face and admit obvious facts like this. It’s because they have an ideological belief which they don’t want to give up, even though it is detached from reality, and it’s harmful. If they were only destroying their own lives, we could just ignore them. But they’re not. They are promoting ideas which are damaging to society, including millions of young women who are just coming into adulthood, and who will be misled and destroy their own lives as well. These are bad and destructive ideas, and we have decades of evidence to prove that. Biology is real. Evolution is real. Humans are not exempt from those realities. And ideologies which attempt to contradict those realities should be opposed.
I think I've understood you well — so I have to reject your accusation of a "fake lack of understanding" twice over. I understand that you're arguing against ideologies, invoking Hard-Hitting Realities Of Biotruths backed up by hand-waving anecdotes and references to uncited evolutionary psychology, while claiming that you're not making an argument. That might've gone over the heads of the people liking your comments, but you won't get it past me!
Not daft at all. A man has a penis made for the exact same purpose as the woman's breasts and hips. He also often has an insatiable desire, particularly when young, to impregnate every attractive woman that he sees. This is to perpetuate the species, and has been that way since Helen was taken from Agamemnon off to Troy. His are the complimentary desires and structures to hers; they are millions of years old and are immutable, outside of bizarre modern psychology, ideology, and programming.
"Hertz argues that since people are having smaller families, we need to ask ourselves how to replace the meaning they used to find in children, siblings, and cousins by encouraging them to find ways “'to care for people who are not necessarily linked to them by blood.'”
Organized religion used to play that role in people's lives, I suspect (I don't know personally, because my parents weren't religious and neither am I), and its ongoing collapse seems to me to have created, at least partly, this lack of meaning and personal connection for a lot of people. A library is a poor substitute, clearly.
I think you're correct about ideological commitments preventing people like her from ever advocating the most basic solutions to this problem. I would just add that a big one of these is environmentalism. When I used to be on the left in my younger days, population growth was a huge concern. Having more than two kids were considered selfish and feckless, and having none at all was considered an admirable sacrifice for the good of the planet. You don't hear as much of this sentiment today, as birth rates have declined and there's more triumphalism about turning the US into a majority minority country because diversity is so great and all, but I think it's still there, hiding beneath the surface.
Organized religion also gives a way for the childless to contribute to families and children. It seems like this was taken for granted in the past -- that we work to perpetuate the next generation whether we have kids of our own or not.
You are right on here, and you are right about the enviro-population cult. This insane ideology allows modern center-leftists to kill two birds with one stone: "caring" about the planet, their one and only religion now, while at the same time indulging in an equally lunatic social justice cause, which is to encourage mass immigration under the pretense of helping the poor brown migrant. It is narcissism practiced in an insane way and on an insane level.
I don’t think that’s fair to them. They believe that bringing anybody to the USA will turn them into productive Americans, that exporting a USA model to other countries will make them just as productive, and in the meantime the USA can globalize its youth need by investing retirement funds overseas in poor countries with lots of youth.
I think this is understandable given a belief in a certain kind of human equality and a simple idea of economic exchange among generations. At least I had this idea until I had kids and then dealt with my dying father.
Yes, you had this idea until you encountered reality. You may be right, but I think these reasons, if that's what they believe, are abhorrent. And I think economics must be subservient to the nation, not the other way around. The economy must be made to serve the people.
Really well written. This is exactly right, and I think where all the real cultural energy is now. It’s still nascent, obviously, but I think this form of community building and the philosophy behind it will be the next big “movement”.
When we talk about people being dissatisfied due to lack of meaning, I think we are misdiagnosing the problem. I concede that having children is one way to assign meaning to one's life, but this is not the only possible meaning to life and never has been: people have fought and died for their country; people have taught youth philosophy, law, medicine, or some other topic of knowledge which would be used by their students to benefit themselves or others; people have written great works of literature still read centuries later; people have led their states successfully through times of crisis, or introduced reforms that changed their states for the better; people have made great scientific discoveries that changed the way we live or see the world; people have built structures that continued to stand beyond their own lifetimes; people have founded businesses that continued to be successful after they died: you might say that most of these are difficult for most people to achieve, but more modest meanings can also be assigned to one's life, such as building a garden in one's backyard that would continue to be enjoyed by birds, insects, or other animals beyond one's lifetime; or collecting a small library of books and storing them in a safe place so that, if civilization should collapse, there would be one more place for future historians to uncover and rediscover the literature of one's own age: the possibilities are really limitless, as long as they involve some aspect of your life "pointing beyond" your own existence.
And of course there's the big meaning that most people throughout history have hoped for or feared: that after they died, they should have a second life lived in accordance with how they lived in the first one. There's no greater, more totalizing meaning to one's life than the knowledge that when one dies one will go to the underworld to be punished for one's misdeeds, yet I doubt most people would be happy if they were told that this was the meaning that their life in fact had. And, on the other hand, people in heaven probably are no less happy for the knowledge that their eternal happiness in paradise is meaningless, that it doesn't in turn point to another post-afterlife. So I find the handwringing over meaning vain: meaning is readily available to all and the possibilities for meaning are numerous enough to suit all preferences and capabilities; and the extreme examples of heaven and hell show that meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for happiness. What people are really searching for is "it": the one meaningless but all-encompassing experience that everything they've done was building up to. This is why people hope to go to heaven, because they think heaven is "it"; the same impulse leads people to experiment with drugs, strive to attain prophetic ecstasy, and probably also to have children: in the moment, it seems that nothing else matters than to have these experiences, but unfortunately the experience doesn't last. Even parents suffer from empty-nest syndrome, if their children do survive to adulthood.
So the search for meaning is a red herring; the real question is whether the ultimate meaningless experience exists, and then how it can be attained. In recent centuries people have come to doubt the existence of heaven or a posthumous paradise for good people to enjoy forever; I think there are good reasons to doubt its existence, and this doubt has certainly caused a psychological crisis, but calling this crisis a crisis of meaning is the opposite of the truth, and certainly having children is neither here nor there.
Meaning is everywhere, but people don't know to look for it. A cat mom would be happier as a real mom, but she lives in a culture which enables and encourages the path to disappointment. Parenting and other paths to meaning are difficult. Hedonism is easy. When you replace the forces that drive people to meaning with forces that drive them to Hedonism, the masses embrace Hedonism no matter how miserable it makes them.
Those sublime moments you call "it" are nothing more than peaks of meaning. They cannot be separated from the wider path to meaning, at least without pathology. The intensity of feeling which comes from holding your newborn child is echoed for the rest of your life, never forgotten, enrichening the rest of your experience.
Contrast the junky, who experiences the same euphoria once, and then destroys his life trying to recreate it. The difference between these two types of "it" is meaning.
I agree that meaning is everywhere, as your example of the cat lady shows. Raising cats and raising human children are both meaningful activities, because what you are doing will have effects that last beyond your own life. The cats you are currently raising might not outlive you, but this is true of human children as well; the cat lady and the mother can at least hope that their wards will outlive them. If you want to criticize the cat lady, as is your right, then you're not criticizing her according to the criterion of meaning. But I think you're confused about what we're talking about when we talk about meaning. Meaning is a property of a sign, which points beyond itself to some other object, which is the signified. A sign can't signify itself, or at least self-signification is not a property of signs. So a meaningful life signifies something beyond just the individual life; a meaningful life can't signify the same life or a part of that life. Thus, to say that holding your newborn is meaningful because it affects the rest of your life is irrelevant to the present discussion, because virtually everything we do, from eating breakfast in the morning to going to the bathroom is meaningful in that way: if you go long enough without defecating you die, therefore every instance of defecation echoes for the rest of your life, and is therefore a peak of meaning. Again, people who experience emotional crises usually live with the effects of those crises for the rest of their lives, but you're not telling everyone to attempt suicide: why is that? Not only are you making a fundamental error about the metaphysics of meaning, but on your own terms you have failed to explain what's so great about having children.
I completely agree that hedonism is a poor substitute for meaning, and large elements of the dominant culture encourage the latter along with other junk values like consumerism and instant gratification. I am not a "woke" person in the sense that I subscribe to some ready-made ideology propagated through the mainstream media and the liberal "blue church." I am actually quite opposed to large segments of the cultural apparatus that perpetuate and reproduce liberal wokescold politics, in part because I do not believe that self-hate and judgment promote change.
In fact, it's largely a way for our dominant systems (neoliberal capitalism chief among them) to reify themselves with woke window dressing. See, for example, the way the CIA brags about its diversity in hiring. I want a world that is not defined by a struggle for dominance, power, and hegemony. I recognize that's the world we're in, more or less, but I think that needs to be transcended, and I believe that transition can actually be a winning proposition for the vast bulk of humanity. The discourse around transitioning to "Game B" from "Game A" some may have heard is one way of understanding what I'm speaking about that is less burdened by terms associated with the woke faction. If you haven't heard of it, google it.
This means including analyses and frameworks that help us understand where we're at, which is where the terms associated with "woke" politics that many here have an allergy to figures in. Not the kind that's been co-opted by neoliberal wokescold identity politics, but authentic, illuminating analyses of dominant power structures and systems like capitalism, imperialism, and colonization. Not to denounce or create new enemies, but to understand where we're at, how we arrived here, and how we can repair the damage.
When one heads down this path of understanding, what awaits is an abundance of meaning: almost more than one heart can bear at times. When I think of the many overlapping crises our species, and the planet as a whole, is facing (what many would call the metacrisis) I am filled with awe for the task at hand. Both the difficulty and the potential reward if we're able to get it right, which will be a complete paradigm shift across all the various overlapping systems that make up our world system. Humanity's overall structure and relationship with the planet will, if we succeed, move towards harmony as opposed to extraction. The goal, of coming into right relationship not only with each other, but also the intelligence and beauty of the planet itself, of healing our woundedness as a species, and moving towards a life-affirming culture (as opposed to the thinly veiled culture of death that characterizes late capitalism, which is all that endless growth on a finite planet can provide) provides incredible amounts of meaning to my life.
I think it's a shame the way some of this has been coopted and manipulated by forces that actually want this transition to fail. So instead of these ideas helping people come back into a meaningful relationship with benevolent forces bigger than themselves (what organized religion has previously done, though it too was co-opted by dominant systems like imperialism, where you had incredible hypocrisy like the catholic church using Jesus's teachings to justify large-scale slaughter of indigenous people).
This post is getting long as is, I guess I'm just trying to say that plenty of meaning can be found outside of raising a family or attending church. Though I don't have anything against either of those things, and absolutely agree that having children should be encouraged and supported by communities, there are larger tasks at hand for humanity, that will require us to cooperate collectively, and this has a lot of meaning to it too.
Great article. I was thinking about my small town, which has a huge library and countless parks. I never see childless adults there.
Exception: the dog park. It's the only public community space childless adults meet up with others and sometimes make lasting friendships. I wonder why...
Have you considered the possibility that an economic system in which individuals are treated as replaceable cogs might have something to do with why people do not want to have children?
I recommend reading "Democracy and Technology" by Richard E. Sclove as a good starting point on how to think of organizing society in more humane ways (which includes treating individuals with dignity and respect instead of as replaceable automatons).
If you want to actually understand how economic activity can be structured in ways that respect individual autonomy then you will have to do the actual legwork of learning what much smarter people have thought of and written down on the subject.
There's more to this comment that its immediate appearance. US culture really revolves around individualism. One feature is "individuals are treated as replaceable cogs" but OTOH comparing to the rich parts of Europe, individuals treat jobs as replaceable, too. In Europe, people who change employers after their early 20s are looked upon with some suspicion; in the US, reinventing yourself is valorized. Similarly with personal relationships; divorce is considered much more dubious in England than in the US, going back over a century at least. But individualism works against the meaning derived from long-term obligational relationships between people.
Speaking of political activism: “ If anything, we should be taxing it.”
I’ve long thought that each level of government should tax the total incoming cash flow of subordinate levels of government. (Taxes, fees, fines and debt issuance.) This would help offset the tendency to treat public spending as free. It would be especially effective at deterring big debt-backed boondoggles. If we had a VAT, I’d make the rate equal to the VAT.
And I’d also add an income tax on the income of government workers at a rate that is higher by a percent equal to the the income tax rates applied to private workers by the subordinate governments. (This would offset the fact that the government can pay market wages, but then tax some of it back, which gives them an advantage in recruiting personnel.)
The relative cost of getting married and having children has gone up drastically in the last 50-75 years. Before if you wanted to have fewer children to have more more things you also more of less had to forego sex. Social Security had also reduced the annuity value of having children. And the relative price for women was even steeper. Societies have not yet adapted to this.
Personally I think that a child tax credit would at least be a symbolic step for recognizing the value of family formation and having children.
OTOH, I don't think there is a strong IDEOLOGICAL hostility to family and children although the mistaken perception that having children has a significant detrimental effect on ACC probably does play some role as does our financing SS and Medicare out of a wage tax rather than a VAT.
It's really not that expensive to have kids. You just have to treat motherhood/fatherhood as a lifestyle and not an "add-on" to a self-centric lifestyle. Spend time teaching your kids how to play and reading to them and you don't need expensive entertainment gizmos. All children can sleep in one bedroom, at age 9 or 10 boys and girls can be separated into two rooms. Clothing should be hand me downs from other families or older siblings, there's no need to buy new. Food should be homemade, simple, and healthy. And most of all, one parent should stay home with the kids (at least until they're all in elementary school). It's not complicated, it's just a sacrifice people aren't willing to make. They want to keep one foot in pre-parenthood life instead of fully embracing parenthood.
I don't disagree but I'm just saying there is a trade off now that did not exist in the past or at least the terms are steeper. Yglesias argues that child rearing suffers from Baumol's "cost disease" as a way of explaining why the tradeoffs are steeper now.
Thank you for making this point. I have blabbed at the internet many times that to have a middle class life equivalent to 1980: house, vacation house, health, ability to send kids to private school or college, car not in the shop, retirement savings.... that you need to make $250000/year (it’s probably going up to $400000 after this year).
Add in the fact that young people are paying a big chunk of whatever they earn to keep retirement health care going when those costs are exploding.
I admire people who have kids in this economy but they have to suspend disbelief and accept that they can never “be ready” in a financial sense.
The "family" brand has picked up a few unpleasant ideological connotations by people who have used it to deride their pet peeves around same sex marriage, bathroom bills, etc.
The solution to "Bowling Alone" is not public spaces. As the public sphere expands, it takes the energy out of the private spaces that historically made the US unique. Those private spaces existed to provide benefits to their members, whether the League of Women Voters or the Knights of Columbus, or yes, the neighborhood book club. That change was exacerbated by electronic communications, which allowed transactional relationships to replace the less-flexible but deeper relationships that preceded them.
School and participation in sports survives and draws people, together. Politics, too, although much less so.
Note also the perhaps unsurprising phenomenon that "hostages" taken by Native Americans often refused to return to their prior lives when given the chance, while many Native Americans who grew up away from their bands often returned to them, rejecting their adopted way of life, opting for a greater sense of community, despite the other sacrifices involved.
Most new public spaces have to include some deliberately under-achieving community art project. We are just in a time with no confidence in great ideas or projects. Maybe our idea of public spaces comes from the grand libraries and museums that have come down to us from the gilded age. Public and private are words that had different meanings to them.
To YOU. That’s the problem with all of this essay: you think your experiences constitute conclusive evidence for your arguments. Let me provide some of mine: at least as many of my friends want to escape forever from their parents and siblings as want to be near them. Families are probably more often sources of trauma than anything else. My husband hates every member of his family of origin except his late mother and his brother, and his opinion of his brother is skeptical. Forcing people into the abusive misery that is the patriarchal family will only make more people miserable, but misery is what conservatives want.
Get a bunch of women sitting around and talking and more often than not they express their regret for not having had kids or not having had more kids. We were the generation who waited too long before we had kids and who suffered through infertility and often ended up with max two children. It was all about career etc. I was once in a book club of about eight women and only two had their own kids including me, the rest having had to adopt (most of these adoptions turned out to be ‘difficult’ for one reason or another). This was a very wealthy crowd who had the max flexibility to do what they wanted. That said, I have two daughters, 30 and 31 whom I have admonished to start having kids earlier than I did. One has been married for five years and is in finance with no kid in sight and the other is not married at all. It’s worrisome to say the least. Have kids! And then more kids!
Yup. Right now advice to young people begins and ends with this. Everything else is more or less covered, but there’s this giant hole where family formation is regarded as one option among many, and if you decide to pursue it, you need to plan it out completely and slowly. God forbid you jump into it. You might miss out on the joys of travel, or something.
I squeaked by. It scares me just to think about how close I was to missing it. I got married late (god forbid I only had ten years of dating and single life! Don’t want to rush into anything) and then we waited to have kids. Then the result that’s obvious to everyone on earth except the WEIRD: we had trouble, had to go with IVF. It worked thank god, and we’ve got three great kids. I’d never complain because were incredibly lucky it worked, but honestly, we’re built to have 5. It just got too late.
I think what has been forgotten is that having a career is a means to having and raising children.
Not necessarily....it's an interesting conversation and far more complex than just that. 'Having a career' was also billed by the Feminist Movement as the way to realize one's 'full potential as a woman', whatever that meant. Many women, seem to have bought into it as a way to achieve the 'ultimate freedom', that of economic independence. Once on their way, a career provided women money so that they didn't necessarily have to negotiate with husbands / partners about how money would be spent in the household. (Also overtime, most women didn't have a 'career' as much as they ended up with just a job to tend to....that's another story). Having work / career became also more prestigious than just staying at home, tending to children & household. Yet to be written is the split that has been created between so called 'working women' and women who have chosen to stay home. Personally, I was stunned when an art dealer friend, a close friend to this day, proclaimed after I quit my corporate job that, "I can't believe we're still friends given that you don't work anymore." That was a bit of a body blow, a diss of sorts. That said, I never stopped 'working' - I started a business, eventually wrote seven books, etc, but in her eyes I had some how failed, especially since I had gone to a top business school which behind my back folks whispered was a 'education wasted'.
Folks are just beginning to discuss the fallout from the Feminist Movement. And there's lots to discuss. I'd like to think the wisdom acquired over the years will give my daughters the perspective that I did not have at the time.
Not having to grovel to men is worth EVERYTHING.
If your husband has so little respect for you that you have to "grovel" then you married the wrong guy.
I don’t grovel because I have my own money, interests, and friends. I don’t need anything from him.
Let it not be said that I understand anything about women. But this is incomprehensible to me. What kind of man marries a 26 year old girl of I presume serviceable looks and fails to impregnate her in 5 years? Just the logistics, like how?
Maybe he considered her opinion in the matter?
The Western crisis of meaning started long before the birthrate fell. It's correlated much more with the decline of organized religion historically (and the rise of romantic love).
I'm religious but I still think there's more going on here. A lot can be blamed on the Industrial Revolution, the meaninglessness of most of our schooling and subsequent work. And the emptiness of electronic media consumption as our primary leisure activity.
Of course, part (but far from all) of what makes all these things soul-draining is that they're individualized experiences that pull everyone away from the family.
I think your basic point is right here — public meeting places don’t replace the family relationship — but I don’t think that means the parks-and-libraries crowd is entirely wrong, either. I live in a smallish city where there are a lot of public spaces available. I think those spaces give the city a sort of cohesion and a sense of togetherness that would otherwise be harder to keep in mind. That’s the outermost ring of connections; the least strong bond after families and churches and schools. But it’s still nice to have multiple layers of connection, of varying degrees of strength. So I can see the argument that such spaces are a meaningful public good.
But I agree that they generally can’t create a meaningful life on their own.
100% agree; we need public spaces (and especially the public square) to allow people to gather together and both have communal fellowship as well as practice political activism. This is why I think it is so bad that only liberals seem to believe that it is okay to use public spaces to organize politically. No wonder conservatives are so useless, they either dont or cant use public spaces for a variety of reasons
That seems like such an odd angle to me as well, equating public spaces with political activism. Sure, that's one of the things that can occur there, but more often than not the people I see gathering at libraries are stay at home moms taking their kids out for story time.
If the American Left (or Right, for that matter) had any brain at all, it would minimize immigration, encourage large families, develop an industrial policy at a national level that restored the ability to live off of one income, crack down on large publicly held corporations that break communities apart and destroy small businesses, reduce the tax burden to nothing for those who have 3 or more kids, and cut the defense budget by a half or more and then reinvest that money in the nation's infrastructure. Doing so would give them the power they so desperately crave, for generations, and they would gain it legitimately for once.
Why not encourage big families AND encourage high skilled immigrants. We need more geopolitical weight in the struggle with China.
I would rather develop those skills among our own population, for the purposes of national development and national loyalty. As the new CEO of Twitter demonstrates, being generous to highly skilled immigrants does not necessarily engender in them the love of our country that we, rather than they, deserve. Our people deserve and should demand loyalty, and this is best served by someone with a visceral knowledge of, and affinity for, this place.
Countries should earn loyalty rather than demand it. And the idea of turning away immigrants, especially skilled and educated immigrants, to "develop [...] skills among our own population" strikes me as getting things backwards. The teachers of skills include immigrants, and high-education immigrants raise productivity (https://voxeu.org/article/how-highly-educated-immigrants-raise-native-wages); immigrant-driven productivity gains mean more resources that can be devoted to educating and skilling up the population, including the non-immigrant population.
Furthermore, does it for a moment strike you as condescending, this belief that we have a right to the high skilled among other peoples, and that we have in any way the right to denude them of their best? I mean, who exactly the hell are we?
No more condescending than the belief that we have the right to deny people entry.
I as a citizen have a right to demand loyalty from someone who comes here anew. Economic considerations are completely subsidiary to the nation and its people. Productivity and all the rest of that are not what a people should primarily concern themselves with.
You, as an individual, have a right to demand loyalty, just as I, as an individual, have a right to reject such demands. Economic considerations are vitally important. They allow us to make more efficient use of the resources needed to pursue your/my policy goals, such as raising the non-immigrant population's skill levels.
We agree that economics are important. We disagree on their relative importance. To me, they are absolutely subsidiary to the welfare and concerns of the people. They must serve the people. They must be used and exercised to benefit the development of the people. They are a servant and must never be the master.
This is an odd argument since some folks think that it is (presumably pretty well assimilated) elites that lack loyalty to our country.
And of course some of the surplus generated by attracting highly skilled immigrants can go to developing skills among existing residents.
Perhaps. The issue is an overriding distaste or loathing of this country at the highest levels. I don't think this is as acute in the lower classes, but I see no reason to continue to promote immigration at the expense of the native born population. We don't need a single immigrant with an existing population of a third of a billion people. A healthy birth rate would allow us to maintain productivity, boost melding and assimilation, and restriction on outsiders would allow us to foster a healthy nationalism which we desperately need if this country has any chance of surviving without becoming a more oppressive police state than it already is or disintegrating altogether.
For the sake of transparency, I know exactly the kind of immigrants you speak of. I went to school and got BS and MS degrees with them. I know a Turkish couple that have Golden Retrievers named Heidi and Peter, and who put up a Christmas tree every year and who can get a fire going in the fireplace better than any native born American that I've ever known. I am not trying to attack them or ignore what they obviously bring to the table. I just think we need a massive national recalibration for a couple of generations to try and get this thing healthy again and to make it so We the People are running the show because I don't want to live with or under the people running it now.
I'm just not aware of "an overriding or distaste for the country at the highest levels" (leaving aside a few Trumpist malcontents).
And I do not want to promote immigration at the expense of the natives; I think that more immigrants, epically like Peter and Heidi's owners (or my Egyptian doctor), would make us natives better off.
{ I'm just not aware of "an overriding or distaste for the country at the highest levels" }
That's the most blinkered statement I've read in months.
If the elites of this country loved this country, they would not pursue sanctions in a conflict that hurt and impacted the people of this country. If they loved this country, they would not aid and abet illegal immigration that hurts the lowliest of our people the most. If the elites loved this country, they would not pursue ideologies that take meaningful work away from people and reduce our standard of living.
They do all of these things, and much more. They have nothing but contempt and disdain for us and from from where I sit, the feeling is so much more than mutual.
Re: the Trumpists, I would take them over Victoria Nuland, Bill Kristol, Jen Psaki, Jake Sullivan, the shrieking harpy we call "Vice President" or any of the rest of them. These people betray us, and these people mean us and our families harm - their policies prove it.
Yes, Heidi and Peter's owners are outstanding people. Their kids are American citizens, and they and all others like them should be priority #1.
Maybe after we fully assimilate the enclaves we have now. And I don't know of many high value immigrants interested in moving to China outside of a few overseas Chinese (and most of them still prefer the West).
I agree with you there. We could do more to help integrate recent immigrants, but frankly immigrants to the US, even low income ones, integrate pretty darn well.
How are you going to reconstitute the assimilationist ethic that will make that immigration not destabilizing?
What's to "reconstitute?" The immigrants just come, get jobs, have families, the kids go to school, and there you. are.
"If the American Left (or Right, for that matter) had any brain at all" ...this is all you need to know :) about modern political parties
Do you have kids, Richard?
I did think it odd that he never mentioned this in the article.
Good post.
Absolutely right about family and children.
There is not and cannot be any substitute for them.
I remember getting a pissy lecture from an attractive young woman on some feminist type issue. She used a phrase like “social construction” of something or other. And I’m looking at her and I’m thinking: The fundamental shape of your body, which I’m looking at, your waist, your hips, your breasts, evolved over millions of years to make and feed babies. That is older than politics, older than Society, million of years, thousands of times older. The biological organisms speaking to me was built by forces so ancient that she can’t even imagine them, and she is saying things that deny those forces even exist, though they compose what she actually is, down to the most basic feelings and urges in the oldest parts of her brain. And she has somehow missed all this. Women suffer the most from the loss of marriage, family and children. They are built for it, literally. And when they lose the chance to have it, nothing can ever make up for that loss.
Daft argument, you are built to hunt mammoths on the savannah so why are you using a computer and keyboard when your literal point is to hunt with a spear?
There are other ways to get food. And even so, men miss the hunting bands, and the comradeship, and the excitement, and try to simulate those things other ways. Interactive action video games are one example, and their addictive nature shows how deep the wiring is that they stimulate. But women have no similar substitute. There is no other way to actually have children. Its not an argument, it is a statement of the obvious. If a woman who is a trusted friend tells you her feelings on this, you will get a flood of emotional pain. Anecdote not quantification, but true nonetheless. Another data point is the misery and rage of childless women, which is one of the fundamental features of the contemporary world. If you don't think women's bodies and brains are evolved to have and care for babies and children, then you don't believe in evolution or biology. You know it. Don't deny it.
Pet argumentative peeve: someone makes a defective argument, receives pushback on it, then renews the argument while insisting that what they're making is "not an argument" — how do people still fall for this?
Pet comment thread peeve: An absolutely clear response distinguishing an argument from a statement of obvious facts, where someone doesn’t like the facts, is met with fake lack of understanding. In this case the obvious fact is that all biological organisms are the products of evolution, including human females. And the human female, evolved a brain and a body to produce babies and children, to care for them. Including feeding them. That’s why it’s no surprise that women who don’t live out their biological fuction are usually unhappy. And it’s no surprise that that is precisely what our society faces now. And this is indisputable based on survey data. Women are not happy, and this trend is increasing. It’s an interesting question why people refuse to face and admit obvious facts like this. It’s because they have an ideological belief which they don’t want to give up, even though it is detached from reality, and it’s harmful. If they were only destroying their own lives, we could just ignore them. But they’re not. They are promoting ideas which are damaging to society, including millions of young women who are just coming into adulthood, and who will be misled and destroy their own lives as well. These are bad and destructive ideas, and we have decades of evidence to prove that. Biology is real. Evolution is real. Humans are not exempt from those realities. And ideologies which attempt to contradict those realities should be opposed.
I think I've understood you well — so I have to reject your accusation of a "fake lack of understanding" twice over. I understand that you're arguing against ideologies, invoking Hard-Hitting Realities Of Biotruths backed up by hand-waving anecdotes and references to uncited evolutionary psychology, while claiming that you're not making an argument. That might've gone over the heads of the people liking your comments, but you won't get it past me!
Not daft at all. A man has a penis made for the exact same purpose as the woman's breasts and hips. He also often has an insatiable desire, particularly when young, to impregnate every attractive woman that he sees. This is to perpetuate the species, and has been that way since Helen was taken from Agamemnon off to Troy. His are the complimentary desires and structures to hers; they are millions of years old and are immutable, outside of bizarre modern psychology, ideology, and programming.
"Hertz argues that since people are having smaller families, we need to ask ourselves how to replace the meaning they used to find in children, siblings, and cousins by encouraging them to find ways “'to care for people who are not necessarily linked to them by blood.'”
Organized religion used to play that role in people's lives, I suspect (I don't know personally, because my parents weren't religious and neither am I), and its ongoing collapse seems to me to have created, at least partly, this lack of meaning and personal connection for a lot of people. A library is a poor substitute, clearly.
I think you're correct about ideological commitments preventing people like her from ever advocating the most basic solutions to this problem. I would just add that a big one of these is environmentalism. When I used to be on the left in my younger days, population growth was a huge concern. Having more than two kids were considered selfish and feckless, and having none at all was considered an admirable sacrifice for the good of the planet. You don't hear as much of this sentiment today, as birth rates have declined and there's more triumphalism about turning the US into a majority minority country because diversity is so great and all, but I think it's still there, hiding beneath the surface.
Organized religion also gives a way for the childless to contribute to families and children. It seems like this was taken for granted in the past -- that we work to perpetuate the next generation whether we have kids of our own or not.
You are right on here, and you are right about the enviro-population cult. This insane ideology allows modern center-leftists to kill two birds with one stone: "caring" about the planet, their one and only religion now, while at the same time indulging in an equally lunatic social justice cause, which is to encourage mass immigration under the pretense of helping the poor brown migrant. It is narcissism practiced in an insane way and on an insane level.
I don’t think that’s fair to them. They believe that bringing anybody to the USA will turn them into productive Americans, that exporting a USA model to other countries will make them just as productive, and in the meantime the USA can globalize its youth need by investing retirement funds overseas in poor countries with lots of youth.
I think this is understandable given a belief in a certain kind of human equality and a simple idea of economic exchange among generations. At least I had this idea until I had kids and then dealt with my dying father.
Yes, you had this idea until you encountered reality. You may be right, but I think these reasons, if that's what they believe, are abhorrent. And I think economics must be subservient to the nation, not the other way around. The economy must be made to serve the people.
Really well written. This is exactly right, and I think where all the real cultural energy is now. It’s still nascent, obviously, but I think this form of community building and the philosophy behind it will be the next big “movement”.
When we talk about people being dissatisfied due to lack of meaning, I think we are misdiagnosing the problem. I concede that having children is one way to assign meaning to one's life, but this is not the only possible meaning to life and never has been: people have fought and died for their country; people have taught youth philosophy, law, medicine, or some other topic of knowledge which would be used by their students to benefit themselves or others; people have written great works of literature still read centuries later; people have led their states successfully through times of crisis, or introduced reforms that changed their states for the better; people have made great scientific discoveries that changed the way we live or see the world; people have built structures that continued to stand beyond their own lifetimes; people have founded businesses that continued to be successful after they died: you might say that most of these are difficult for most people to achieve, but more modest meanings can also be assigned to one's life, such as building a garden in one's backyard that would continue to be enjoyed by birds, insects, or other animals beyond one's lifetime; or collecting a small library of books and storing them in a safe place so that, if civilization should collapse, there would be one more place for future historians to uncover and rediscover the literature of one's own age: the possibilities are really limitless, as long as they involve some aspect of your life "pointing beyond" your own existence.
And of course there's the big meaning that most people throughout history have hoped for or feared: that after they died, they should have a second life lived in accordance with how they lived in the first one. There's no greater, more totalizing meaning to one's life than the knowledge that when one dies one will go to the underworld to be punished for one's misdeeds, yet I doubt most people would be happy if they were told that this was the meaning that their life in fact had. And, on the other hand, people in heaven probably are no less happy for the knowledge that their eternal happiness in paradise is meaningless, that it doesn't in turn point to another post-afterlife. So I find the handwringing over meaning vain: meaning is readily available to all and the possibilities for meaning are numerous enough to suit all preferences and capabilities; and the extreme examples of heaven and hell show that meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for happiness. What people are really searching for is "it": the one meaningless but all-encompassing experience that everything they've done was building up to. This is why people hope to go to heaven, because they think heaven is "it"; the same impulse leads people to experiment with drugs, strive to attain prophetic ecstasy, and probably also to have children: in the moment, it seems that nothing else matters than to have these experiences, but unfortunately the experience doesn't last. Even parents suffer from empty-nest syndrome, if their children do survive to adulthood.
So the search for meaning is a red herring; the real question is whether the ultimate meaningless experience exists, and then how it can be attained. In recent centuries people have come to doubt the existence of heaven or a posthumous paradise for good people to enjoy forever; I think there are good reasons to doubt its existence, and this doubt has certainly caused a psychological crisis, but calling this crisis a crisis of meaning is the opposite of the truth, and certainly having children is neither here nor there.
BS.
Meaning is everywhere, but people don't know to look for it. A cat mom would be happier as a real mom, but she lives in a culture which enables and encourages the path to disappointment. Parenting and other paths to meaning are difficult. Hedonism is easy. When you replace the forces that drive people to meaning with forces that drive them to Hedonism, the masses embrace Hedonism no matter how miserable it makes them.
Those sublime moments you call "it" are nothing more than peaks of meaning. They cannot be separated from the wider path to meaning, at least without pathology. The intensity of feeling which comes from holding your newborn child is echoed for the rest of your life, never forgotten, enrichening the rest of your experience.
Contrast the junky, who experiences the same euphoria once, and then destroys his life trying to recreate it. The difference between these two types of "it" is meaning.
I agree that meaning is everywhere, as your example of the cat lady shows. Raising cats and raising human children are both meaningful activities, because what you are doing will have effects that last beyond your own life. The cats you are currently raising might not outlive you, but this is true of human children as well; the cat lady and the mother can at least hope that their wards will outlive them. If you want to criticize the cat lady, as is your right, then you're not criticizing her according to the criterion of meaning. But I think you're confused about what we're talking about when we talk about meaning. Meaning is a property of a sign, which points beyond itself to some other object, which is the signified. A sign can't signify itself, or at least self-signification is not a property of signs. So a meaningful life signifies something beyond just the individual life; a meaningful life can't signify the same life or a part of that life. Thus, to say that holding your newborn is meaningful because it affects the rest of your life is irrelevant to the present discussion, because virtually everything we do, from eating breakfast in the morning to going to the bathroom is meaningful in that way: if you go long enough without defecating you die, therefore every instance of defecation echoes for the rest of your life, and is therefore a peak of meaning. Again, people who experience emotional crises usually live with the effects of those crises for the rest of their lives, but you're not telling everyone to attempt suicide: why is that? Not only are you making a fundamental error about the metaphysics of meaning, but on your own terms you have failed to explain what's so great about having children.
I completely agree that hedonism is a poor substitute for meaning, and large elements of the dominant culture encourage the latter along with other junk values like consumerism and instant gratification. I am not a "woke" person in the sense that I subscribe to some ready-made ideology propagated through the mainstream media and the liberal "blue church." I am actually quite opposed to large segments of the cultural apparatus that perpetuate and reproduce liberal wokescold politics, in part because I do not believe that self-hate and judgment promote change.
In fact, it's largely a way for our dominant systems (neoliberal capitalism chief among them) to reify themselves with woke window dressing. See, for example, the way the CIA brags about its diversity in hiring. I want a world that is not defined by a struggle for dominance, power, and hegemony. I recognize that's the world we're in, more or less, but I think that needs to be transcended, and I believe that transition can actually be a winning proposition for the vast bulk of humanity. The discourse around transitioning to "Game B" from "Game A" some may have heard is one way of understanding what I'm speaking about that is less burdened by terms associated with the woke faction. If you haven't heard of it, google it.
This means including analyses and frameworks that help us understand where we're at, which is where the terms associated with "woke" politics that many here have an allergy to figures in. Not the kind that's been co-opted by neoliberal wokescold identity politics, but authentic, illuminating analyses of dominant power structures and systems like capitalism, imperialism, and colonization. Not to denounce or create new enemies, but to understand where we're at, how we arrived here, and how we can repair the damage.
When one heads down this path of understanding, what awaits is an abundance of meaning: almost more than one heart can bear at times. When I think of the many overlapping crises our species, and the planet as a whole, is facing (what many would call the metacrisis) I am filled with awe for the task at hand. Both the difficulty and the potential reward if we're able to get it right, which will be a complete paradigm shift across all the various overlapping systems that make up our world system. Humanity's overall structure and relationship with the planet will, if we succeed, move towards harmony as opposed to extraction. The goal, of coming into right relationship not only with each other, but also the intelligence and beauty of the planet itself, of healing our woundedness as a species, and moving towards a life-affirming culture (as opposed to the thinly veiled culture of death that characterizes late capitalism, which is all that endless growth on a finite planet can provide) provides incredible amounts of meaning to my life.
I think it's a shame the way some of this has been coopted and manipulated by forces that actually want this transition to fail. So instead of these ideas helping people come back into a meaningful relationship with benevolent forces bigger than themselves (what organized religion has previously done, though it too was co-opted by dominant systems like imperialism, where you had incredible hypocrisy like the catholic church using Jesus's teachings to justify large-scale slaughter of indigenous people).
This post is getting long as is, I guess I'm just trying to say that plenty of meaning can be found outside of raising a family or attending church. Though I don't have anything against either of those things, and absolutely agree that having children should be encouraged and supported by communities, there are larger tasks at hand for humanity, that will require us to cooperate collectively, and this has a lot of meaning to it too.
Great article. I was thinking about my small town, which has a huge library and countless parks. I never see childless adults there.
Exception: the dog park. It's the only public community space childless adults meet up with others and sometimes make lasting friendships. I wonder why...
Have you considered the possibility that an economic system in which individuals are treated as replaceable cogs might have something to do with why people do not want to have children?
Do you think an economic system has ever existed that doesn’t treat people like replaceable cogs?
I recommend reading "Democracy and Technology" by Richard E. Sclove as a good starting point on how to think of organizing society in more humane ways (which includes treating individuals with dignity and respect instead of as replaceable automatons).
If you want to actually understand how economic activity can be structured in ways that respect individual autonomy then you will have to do the actual legwork of learning what much smarter people have thought of and written down on the subject.
Spare me your condescension. Untested hypotheses are just that - untested. People were once saying the same thing about Marx.
What were they saying about Marx?
There's more to this comment that its immediate appearance. US culture really revolves around individualism. One feature is "individuals are treated as replaceable cogs" but OTOH comparing to the rich parts of Europe, individuals treat jobs as replaceable, too. In Europe, people who change employers after their early 20s are looked upon with some suspicion; in the US, reinventing yourself is valorized. Similarly with personal relationships; divorce is considered much more dubious in England than in the US, going back over a century at least. But individualism works against the meaning derived from long-term obligational relationships between people.
Speaking of political activism: “ If anything, we should be taxing it.”
I’ve long thought that each level of government should tax the total incoming cash flow of subordinate levels of government. (Taxes, fees, fines and debt issuance.) This would help offset the tendency to treat public spending as free. It would be especially effective at deterring big debt-backed boondoggles. If we had a VAT, I’d make the rate equal to the VAT.
And I’d also add an income tax on the income of government workers at a rate that is higher by a percent equal to the the income tax rates applied to private workers by the subordinate governments. (This would offset the fact that the government can pay market wages, but then tax some of it back, which gives them an advantage in recruiting personnel.)
That was a funny idea, I was thinking of the people who meet in my local liberry and laughing.
Excellent idea, truly.
The relative cost of getting married and having children has gone up drastically in the last 50-75 years. Before if you wanted to have fewer children to have more more things you also more of less had to forego sex. Social Security had also reduced the annuity value of having children. And the relative price for women was even steeper. Societies have not yet adapted to this.
Personally I think that a child tax credit would at least be a symbolic step for recognizing the value of family formation and having children.
OTOH, I don't think there is a strong IDEOLOGICAL hostility to family and children although the mistaken perception that having children has a significant detrimental effect on ACC probably does play some role as does our financing SS and Medicare out of a wage tax rather than a VAT.
It's really not that expensive to have kids. You just have to treat motherhood/fatherhood as a lifestyle and not an "add-on" to a self-centric lifestyle. Spend time teaching your kids how to play and reading to them and you don't need expensive entertainment gizmos. All children can sleep in one bedroom, at age 9 or 10 boys and girls can be separated into two rooms. Clothing should be hand me downs from other families or older siblings, there's no need to buy new. Food should be homemade, simple, and healthy. And most of all, one parent should stay home with the kids (at least until they're all in elementary school). It's not complicated, it's just a sacrifice people aren't willing to make. They want to keep one foot in pre-parenthood life instead of fully embracing parenthood.
I don't disagree but I'm just saying there is a trade off now that did not exist in the past or at least the terms are steeper. Yglesias argues that child rearing suffers from Baumol's "cost disease" as a way of explaining why the tradeoffs are steeper now.
Thank you for making this point. I have blabbed at the internet many times that to have a middle class life equivalent to 1980: house, vacation house, health, ability to send kids to private school or college, car not in the shop, retirement savings.... that you need to make $250000/year (it’s probably going up to $400000 after this year).
Add in the fact that young people are paying a big chunk of whatever they earn to keep retirement health care going when those costs are exploding.
I admire people who have kids in this economy but they have to suspend disbelief and accept that they can never “be ready” in a financial sense.
The "family" brand has picked up a few unpleasant ideological connotations by people who have used it to deride their pet peeves around same sex marriage, bathroom bills, etc.
The solution to "Bowling Alone" is not public spaces. As the public sphere expands, it takes the energy out of the private spaces that historically made the US unique. Those private spaces existed to provide benefits to their members, whether the League of Women Voters or the Knights of Columbus, or yes, the neighborhood book club. That change was exacerbated by electronic communications, which allowed transactional relationships to replace the less-flexible but deeper relationships that preceded them.
School and participation in sports survives and draws people, together. Politics, too, although much less so.
Note also the perhaps unsurprising phenomenon that "hostages" taken by Native Americans often refused to return to their prior lives when given the chance, while many Native Americans who grew up away from their bands often returned to them, rejecting their adopted way of life, opting for a greater sense of community, despite the other sacrifices involved.
Most new public spaces have to include some deliberately under-achieving community art project. We are just in a time with no confidence in great ideas or projects. Maybe our idea of public spaces comes from the grand libraries and museums that have come down to us from the gilded age. Public and private are words that had different meanings to them.
Thank you for the clarity.
To YOU. That’s the problem with all of this essay: you think your experiences constitute conclusive evidence for your arguments. Let me provide some of mine: at least as many of my friends want to escape forever from their parents and siblings as want to be near them. Families are probably more often sources of trauma than anything else. My husband hates every member of his family of origin except his late mother and his brother, and his opinion of his brother is skeptical. Forcing people into the abusive misery that is the patriarchal family will only make more people miserable, but misery is what conservatives want.
Anecdotes aren’t data. If the current system were better, people would be happier. On average they aren’t.
"Hater of sexist assholes". Oohhhhh, sick burn.