Children have increasingly become a pastime. And people can only spend so much on pastimes. The solution is to arrange competitions where parents have a fair chance.
Here's detailed data and modeling purporting to detail why people have fewer kids these days: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28656/w28656.pdf The major observation is "Skill-biased technological progress is the primary driver of the decline in fertility and the rise in educational attainment; it encourages families to shift from having a large number of uneducated children toward a smaller number of educated ones."
I've been reading Yglesias' "One Billion Americans". On p. 52 he says that "The gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years." Yglesias argues that most of this difference is due to the expense of raising children. Comparing with my other comments, this seems to actually be the expense of raising children *in a middle-class appropriate way*. Yglesias suggests that the US welfare system be revised to substantially subsidize childrearing, and it seems plausible that we could substantially raise the birthrate without having to increase people's interest in having children per se.
Hm. Interesting statistics. I wonder what was the reason between the gap between how many children people wanted and how many children they had 40 years ago. Or maybe it was just that the statistics started by then?
As I suggested in https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/parent-shaming-causes-the-demographic, having one child too many is seen as very shameful. For that reason, people err on the infertile side. If people want 2.7 children on average and have 2.7 children on average, that means a rather large share of people have more children than they want. And that is seen as very uncivilized by mainstream people. Actually, I suspect that the growing cultural taboo against having children by accident accounts for more of the growing gap than higher living expenses.
Yglesias says that the surveys say that American women's stated desired number of children was 3 in 1970, declining to a bit over 2.5 in 1980, but it has held steady since then. He says that men's desired number is close to women's. (In poor countries, I've read, men often want considerably more children than women.)
My impression is that in the US having more children isn't considered shameful per se, and I've read some reports that having "extra" children is used as a status symbol. But at least in upper-middle-class suburban Boston, there is significant status associated with providing lavish resources for one's children, and I can see that having extra children but not providing them with the expensive goodies the Jones's children get might be distinctly disfavored.
My view might be affected by being raised in a small town in a rural area; once parents supplied their children a fairly basic middle-class standard of living, there weren't a lot of opportunities for spending lots of money on them, possibly until they were old enough to drive. But then, giving their kid an expensive new car would have seemed vain, as many people in town didn't own particularly expensive cars. Now in suburbia (where most people live) there are lots of elaborate school-related activities that one has to pay considerable money for.
Interesting: One can phrase this phenomenon in terms of "r-selection vs. k-selection". Do parents compete on the number of children or on their "quality"? I've noticed that in the professional class in the US, there's a tendency toward trying to produce "one perfect child" rather than producing a bunch of OK children as a matter of course.
And ironically, the professional class is probably making unscientific assumptions, since children tend to turn out the way they are rather than the way their parents make them.
I recently saw promoted https://www.businessinsider.com/dinks-childfree-parents-choice-kids-childless-2024-3 "The dark side of DINKs: People who want kids but can't afford them". Which reminded me of a newspaper story about a woman who had married a doctor (doctors are well-paid in the US) but because the doctor had an ex-wife to whom he was paying heavy alimony, "she couldn't afford to have kids".
But in any advanced country the social welfare system makes it possible to raise children reasonably successfully on zero earned income. What these people are saying is that they see a minimum level of expenditure required for children and they can't provide it. Despite that many people in their society can't provide that level of expenditure and have children anyway. This suggests that some sort of social fallacy is causing problems.
In re "children tend to turn out the way they are", there's a long-running complaint that the main US college admissions test, the SAT, is strongly correlated with parents' income. I ran into an analysis that looked at the families of the students who ranked in the top 5% of the SAT. While a disproportion of them had families with incomes in the top 25%, fully 15% had families with incomes in the *bottom* 25%. So income isn't an immense driver of SAT scores. OTOH, fully 50% of those students had one or more parent with a post-bachelor's degree. So social-and-genetic inheritance of educational status is considerably stronger than the effect of income.
You’ve made the point before that parents are disadvantaged in the workplace because it has become the sole field for playing the game of status-seeking and that that changing this will require a cultural change. What policy lever might we pull to make child rearing a legitimate field for status-seeking? My suggestion is a drastic steepening in the progressivity of the income tax. Work would become less important for status and, for young women in particular, the scales would tip in favor of marriage and child-rearing.
1) Being fat is even subsidized. You can underwrite insurance based on smoking but not weight.
There are some Asian countries that penalize for weight, they even make employers weigh in their employees to do the calculations.
2) The simple solution is to provide significant (like several hundred thousands dollars per kid) tax breaks for married couples. Partly flat and partly scaling with income. The money is there and its not hard to calculate.
This is aside from the main point of your article, but are you familiar with slime mold time mold's series of articles arguing that the obesity crisis is likely caused by a chemical contaminant? There's been a lot of debate around it, but I think their case is pretty solid and they don't seem to have backed down about it at all despite a few attempted rebuttals. It also agrees strongly with my own experience as someone who has effortlessly maintained about the same slightly below what is considered healthy weight my entire adulthood (and was proportionally the same in childhood) even when my calorie consumption and activity levels have varied dramatically.
One of the central concepts they reference (which has substantial experimental evidence behind it both in humans and animals that they go into) is that of the "lipostat", the idea that, under normal circumstances, weight is maintained homeostatically by the body in the same way that temperature is maintained homeostatically.
I.e. normally people only shiver when they're cold, but, if you're healthy, then even if you deliberately try to shiver for a long time when you're already warm, your temperature shouldn't go up much because you'll involuntarily sweat to balance it out. So if a person is shivering, and they seem to be doing it involuntarily despite already being warm, and their body temperature keeps going up and up and up because they're not sweating, then there has to be something going on at a deeper level that has shifted the body's target temperature (a fever).
In the same way, so goes the argument, if a person feels hungry all the time despite having their nutritional needs met, and they keep gaining weight despite already being well past what's healthy, then there has to be something going on at a deeper level that has shifted the body's target weight / lipostat outside its normal range.
I'm not familiar with that argument in particular. I have read Herman Ponzer's book Burn. Ponzer says that people tend to always eat the same amount (about 3000 calories a day, not 2000 as is common wisdom, that number is based on the bad science of self-reports according to Ponzer). So for starts, that can explain how the Masai can eat 3000 calories a day and stay slim: we all do (except those who get fat).
Ponzer claims that our bodies strive at keeping the same weight. If we exercise, it just saves on some other function. Exercise doesn't lead to weight loss. To me, that explains your experience rather well (I mean, if you are not doing extreme things). The Hadza also tend to keep the same weight, in spite of going through better times and worse times.
I think Slime Mold had an interesting chart. I looked for total figures for overweight (including obesity) versus normal weight people over time, but didn't find those numbers. It is interesting that mild overweight was as common in 1960 as today. Like if those people who are obese today were overweight in 1960.
I'm not sure that I entirely understand Slime Mold's argument. What is "chemical"? I mean, "palatable" might be a too weak word for soft drinks and fruit juices and crisps and other junk food. It might be that some kinds of palatable food just don't make people feel full, while other kinds of palatable food do. "Chemical" is still a rather strong word to describe such a mundane phenomenon.
"Palatable" probably isn't the best word for the type of food he intends to describe there. Cafeteria diet is better, but what he intends to highlight as I understand it is that heavily processed food seems to cause much more weight gain than less processed food even for the same calorie amount and macronutrient ratios, and if you read on he supposes that this is because more processed food has had more time to accumulate chemical contaminants (plastics, antibiotics, heavy metals, who knows what else) from various sources. Specifically his pet theory as revealed toward the end of the article series is that lithium from mining operations leaching into groundwater is responsible, though he also considers several other possible contaminants.
Lithium is known to very reliably cause weight gain when used as a psychiatric medication, as are several other psychiatric medications incidentally. Time mold is in agreement with Ponzer that our bodies strive to keep the same weight, but certain things like lithium and many psychiatric medications can disrupt that natural weight-keeping function, and Time mold thinks the obesity crises has been caused by one or more of those disrupting chemicals becoming much more widespread in much greater amounts over the past several decades.
This would not work in the US because our healthcare and retirement is both tied to full time employment (meaning 35 hrs per week). If you aren't working full time you get no benefits, in fact many employers very much love having part time employees specifically so they can get out of paying for their employee's benefits. And if you have a family with children, you really need that health coverage and it is the most expensive in the world here. Bernie Sanders' call for Medicare for All aside, changing our horrifically expensive employment-based health insurance system would be virtually impossible because the whole healthcare industry (one of the largest and wealthiest in the country) would oppose it.
Second, there's a much better example than the Amish you can look to: the Mormons. They also compete to have the most kids. And they do it while ALSO competing to have the best car, best house, best yard, most successful kids, and everything else. If that's really what you're aiming for, I'll tell you how they do it (I've lived in Utah for 20 years so I'm very familiar with how it works). First, you go to church every single week plus an extra day in a church related service group so that's at least two days per week on church activities every week your whole life. Plus they have a "family home night" that everyone follows. Second, you pound it into their heads, over and over,bat every church meeting that family and having kids is the entire point of life. There is basically no other point. If you can't have kids, you adopt. If you can, you have as many as you can afford. Your reward for this is that in heaven you get to have your own world that you populate as gods and have literally MILLIONS of children. And then you give out high status church positions only to families with lots of kids. And high status positions then help you also increase your economic well-being because it's basically a stamp of approval and gets you an in with am instant network of customers and clients and business contacts. You heavily promote gender roles and an expectation that father's provide and women mother and you don't allow same sex marriage.
That's what they do, and it has worked quite well. Everyone is trying to be like Mitt Romney...succeasful, good lookingm rich family with 5 kids and 20 grandkids. But even the Mormons are starting to fall short and native born LDS are having far fewer kids than they did a generation ago. Utah still has more children than any other state in the US, by far, but our population growth is now flat or declining if not for immigration. Because 20 years ago almost everyone here was Mormon and that's no longer the case. Outsiders like me moved in, the internet happened, and what used to be a homogenous insular community is not, any longer.
So, that's what it takes. Not a mild expression of family promotion and values, but a fairly hegemonic repeated pounding into their heads several times a week their entire lives and an insular community where everything is set up to promote that model. But it's really not even sustainable. The Mormons I work with who are over 40 all have a minimum of 3 kids and some have 6 or 7. But those younger usually have 2. A few have 3. And people like me...childless and married, or married with 1 kid, have moved here in droves and we seem to be impacting them way more than the other way around. Not that it's purposeful...I actually enjoyed benefiting from the abundance of kids because it used to keep prices lower and kept workplaces more relaxed and family friendly and less work obsessed.
Do you want the benefits of big families without having any of the costs?
I think your comment about the childless and one child affecting Mormons more than the other way around is insightful. Same reasoning applies to gay marriage. Gay norms affect marriage more than marriage affects gay norms. I think it’s because the outside forces have momentum. You moved to Utah. Mormons didn’t move to you or NYC en masse.
Yes, the American healthcare system really is inefficient. It inflates the cost of keeping a human being alive quite significantly. A typical bad card in social evolution.
The only bad thing with Mormons as fertility role models is that they actually don't have many kids anymore:
As you say, they kept having many kids for longer than other Americans, but now it's largely over. Their abysmal sex ratio surely doesn't help. In Date-o-nomics, Jon Birger uses them as a prime example of male flight and a resulting delay in marriage and family formation.
Mormons really want to fit in with "normal America". For a long time that meant a 1950s conservative ideal. But in modern times it's merged with woke progressivism. Romney is a good example of this. You copy that to a family with far fewer resources then the Romney's and fast toward a generation and they will be like everyone else.
I have seen articles suggesting that these days (among the professional class) having a third child is seen as something of a status symbol due to the added expense.
I was thinking while reading the part about obesity that one major factor is that food used to be labor-intensive, usually by the housewife working to prepare it. That tended to force food consumption to be at defined meal times, not in unlimited quantities, and to be whatever the housewife decided was a healthy diet. In a broader sense, it was a world where the housework was critical to life and there was a lot of it. I've seen analyses that in the 1920s in industrial US it took about as much (unpaid) housework as (paid) factory work to maintain the internal economy of a typical working-class family. And housework is far more compatible with tending children than paid employment, so children are "cheaper" if half your workforce is *needed* to do housework.
Parents put a lot more work into each child now. Indeed there seems to be a status competition to see how controlling a parent can be. It's not clear to me that there's any benefit to this. OTOH, if you're in the upper part of the "professional" class, where employment opportunities depend on education, the obsessive maximization of educational status at each stage of childraising might be optimal.
I realized that I did read somewhere a report by a black woman in the US who got criticized by her mother "You're 35 and you only have three children!" And she was not "poor". So there is still some valorization of childraising in US culture.
The missing piece with having parents do labor with young children is childcare. If one has a demanding, or even non standardized job (teacher, doctor, scientist) vs just hourly factory work, then that person has less flexibility to pick up slack.
And to work meaningfully from home you need someone to be watching the children.
>>And to work meaningfully from home you need someone to be watching the children.
Yes. And no. I'm doing quite a bit of meaningful writing (well, I think it is meaningful) when the children are asleep or playing. 20 hours of daycare a week for Mr Toddler certainly helps, especially since it allows Anders and me to synchronize our writing and thinking. But I put in most hours when I'm on standby duty watching the children. Editing a text while bottle-feeding a baby also works rather well, in my experience.
Standardized positions works badly for parents of young children. I think that with some effort, many positions could be much more de-standardized than they are. Many doctors can work remotely and take video calls, for example.
When I quit my job to stay at home raising our kids, the company I was working for really wanted to keep me around so they offered to let me continue working on a very part-time basis, selectively choosing work, working remotely, flexible hours, you name it, I got it.
I quit completely after about 3 months.
The problem? I knew what good work looked like in the office. Thanks to having a mother who stayed at home and raised me as a child, I knew what good work looked like from a caregiver. Trying to split me time resulted in me being neither. Working 10 hours a week, I was not worth 25% of a full-time employee, nor was I worth 75% of a full-time parent. Not by my own standards, and I suspect that given enough time, both the market and my children would have agreed.
I suspect that changing the status of the family is the bigger lift than creating alternative working arrangements. I also suspect that if you could figure out how to do the first, you wouldn't need the second.
But don't you get... bored? For how long time have you been home with the kids, full-time?
I guess tastes differ. And cultures. In Sweden there is very little of a concept of stay-at-home parenting (there even isn't any word for it, really). The idea that a family needs the full attention of one person just isn't there in any coherent shape. Even my grandmother, who was a proud housewife from head to toes, actually worked with assembling components for typewriters at home when she had young children. A delivery van drove the few meters from the typewriter factory to her home, dropped off boxes with unassembled components and picked up the assembled ones.
I've been at home full-time going on 8 years now. I have experienced many things in that time. Boredom has not been one of them. That might be a sign that I am not particularly adept at this role. Multi-tasking has never been my strong suit. I was really good at sitting down for long periods of time to work through complex problems that required a high degree of focus and concentration. Raising children and managing a household is nothing like that, and so, for better or worse, it always feels like there is something else that could use my attention that I'm not addressing adequately.
I remember the feeling of boredom as a child. I can't recall ever encountering that feeling as an adult. Occasionally I will catch myself "doom-scrolling" through twitter or revisiting websites that I know won't have anything new on them, and while that seems like a similar behavior to flipping through the same 3 or 4 channels as a kid on a Sunday afternoon, desperately hoping for a fluke cartoon to appear, the felt experience is not similar. As a kid, boredom felt like something was wrong with the world; as an adult, if the same behaviors emerge, it feels like there is something wrong with me--I'm keenly aware that I'm deliberately avoiding the world. The cure for that is simple: just start paying attention. I might not like what I find, but it won't be boring.
I think some governments today are trying to do the necessary change of discourse: going back to traditional ways, valuing the family, women's proud work of giving birth to the next generation, and so forth. I'm waiting with interest to see if they have any success or not. So far it doesn't look very impressive, but maybe it's too early. One of these places is China, their birth rate keeps dropping.
I worry that competition is part of human nature and that resource competition is the most straightforward kind. It stayed intact all through the Soviet Union, which really was meant to get rid of it. And having children in our time is quite bad for resource competition, as you say. Can we find good examples of competition that was artificially but successfully introduced by governments, schools, media or suchlike?
>>Can we find good examples of competition that was artificially but successfully introduced by governments, schools, media or suchlike?
Hm...Eurovision song contest? How about school as such? Isn't that a highly artificial, government-introduced competition?
Thinking about it, it should be much easier to intruduce a competition in having children compared to a competition in sitting on a chair taking in rather arbitrary information. All over the world, people are happy over and proud of their well-fed, healthy and happy children. It takes quite a bit of cultural evolution to make people anxious and ashamed instead. It is probably enough just to ease some of that cultural pressure against pride over children, and the kind of fertility competition that was so ubiquitous just a few generations ago will resume.
This is a top down solution which might or not work, but the biggest problem is that western elite is happy with TFR collapse so they have no reason to try it.
I've considered this before, and while it isn't really a bad idea, there are two problems.
The first is that, so long as there are no restrictions on the fertility of underclass women, it will be hard to convince people that they're really in competition. Any competition won by welfare mothers will be seen as not worth engaging in.
The second is more an issue about what might happen if children actually do become a clear status signal, because this could potentially give rise to a harsh social reality. While it is at least possible to discretely hide the amount of wealth one has accumulated, or to obscure it by raising questions of income vs property vs credit or inheritance, there is absolutely no way to obscure or avoid the raw number of children a couple has produced.
The very wealthy often dress modestly, drive unpretentious cars, and avoid expensive areas to live. Friends have told me of their aging relatives sitting quietly on enormous piles of money.
>>The first is that, so long as there are no restrictions on the fertility of underclass women, it will be hard to convince people that they're really in competition. Any competition won by welfare mothers will be seen as not worth engaging in.
It seems like fertility is falling fast among the lower classes of the mainstream population. So that problem might disappear on its own. Which is unusual for a problem.
>>The second is more an issue about what might happen if children actually do become a clear status signal, because this could potentially give rise to a harsh social reality. While it is at least possible to discretely hide the amount of wealth one has accumulated, or to obscure it by raising of income vs property vs credit or inheritance, there is absolutely no way to obscure or avoid the raw number of children a couple has produced.
As I said to Piotr, the ingenuity of the Amish is that they say competition-is-very-bad. If Amish people compete consciously over who has the most children, they could probably not admit it. I think that a fertility competition in mainstream society would have to be covert and modest that way.
> that problem might disappear on its own. Which is unusual for a problem.
A popular misquotation of Confucious has it that "If you sit long enough by the river, you'll see the bodies of your enemies float by." It's not so unusual to imagine there are some problems it's possible to outlive. However, dropping fertility in the lower classes is simply trailing the upper classes; what would be necessary would be for the fertility rates to reverse, or at least equalize. I doubt that there is any widespread sociological phenomenon it would please me more to see float by than differential fertility, but others have died watching that river rush on and on and on.
> the ingenuity of the Amish is that they say competition-is-very-bad. If Amish people compete consciously over who has the most children, they could probably not admit it. I think that a fertility competition in mainstream society would have to be covert and modest that way.
The Amish do have the advantage of extreme homogeneity. The growing heterogeneity of Western societies exacerbates many cultural problems. If some group or groups differ from others, you can bet that everyone will become instantly aware, and no amount of modesty will be able to completely deflect the envy that naturally arises.
I think children are a competition, the problem is that the competition about quality, quantity. Having two or more successful children does not provide any more status than having one. Also, having more children is not seen as increasing the chances of either of them becoming successful - it looks like a suboptimal strategy, as opposed to committing all resources and effort into the success of the only child.
Managing resource and commitment allocation with multiple children is hard and based from what I hear from people, parents typically do less than perfect in that area, leading to varied degrees of childhood trauma. This also leads people to think that having just one child is an obvious way to avoid it.
Generally we should be careful with framing children as competition/status game for parents. We all know the trope of the toxic parent pushing the child to achieve early success in sports/music/art/science etc. I don't think that it's that common in real life, but encouraging it should be avoided anyway.
Also, it's not good for adults either. My father has a habit of bragging about his children's 'successes' on social media and in real life. For some time he has been pushing me to buy an expensive car I don't need so he can brag about it. I really hate it.
>>We all know the trope of the toxic parent pushing the child to achieve early success in sports/music/art/science etc.
The Amish have a solution to that. They forbid both bragging and competition. Hiding away one's children would be inhumane, however, so they can never ask each other to hide children for the sake of humility. Also, since they discourage contraception, they can credible claim that it is not a competition, just God's will. If I believed in intelligent design, I would say the design of that system is very successful.
>>My father has a habit of bragging about his children's 'successes' on social media and in real life. For some time he has been pushing me to buy an expensive car I don't need so he can brag about it. I really hate it.
I really shouldn't laugh at that because it seems serious. But I can't help it. It IS comical. At least for us who are not personally involved.
Another approach is letting two parents do one job. For example, let's say I'm good at writing and spouse is good at math. Why can't we partition a back-office job that requires both, and collaborate, for the same compensation (or more, if more productive)? This is hard within the framework of current labor regulation and regulation around additional benefits. But it would be nice.
The issue of course is if you actually try to implement such a thing, at least in the US regulatory context, it will come with some kind of restrictions and additional rules out of left field that make it worse than it is now.
Here's detailed data and modeling purporting to detail why people have fewer kids these days: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28656/w28656.pdf The major observation is "Skill-biased technological progress is the primary driver of the decline in fertility and the rise in educational attainment; it encourages families to shift from having a large number of uneducated children toward a smaller number of educated ones."
I've been reading Yglesias' "One Billion Americans". On p. 52 he says that "The gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years." Yglesias argues that most of this difference is due to the expense of raising children. Comparing with my other comments, this seems to actually be the expense of raising children *in a middle-class appropriate way*. Yglesias suggests that the US welfare system be revised to substantially subsidize childrearing, and it seems plausible that we could substantially raise the birthrate without having to increase people's interest in having children per se.
Hm. Interesting statistics. I wonder what was the reason between the gap between how many children people wanted and how many children they had 40 years ago. Or maybe it was just that the statistics started by then?
As I suggested in https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/parent-shaming-causes-the-demographic, having one child too many is seen as very shameful. For that reason, people err on the infertile side. If people want 2.7 children on average and have 2.7 children on average, that means a rather large share of people have more children than they want. And that is seen as very uncivilized by mainstream people. Actually, I suspect that the growing cultural taboo against having children by accident accounts for more of the growing gap than higher living expenses.
Yglesias says that the surveys say that American women's stated desired number of children was 3 in 1970, declining to a bit over 2.5 in 1980, but it has held steady since then. He says that men's desired number is close to women's. (In poor countries, I've read, men often want considerably more children than women.)
My impression is that in the US having more children isn't considered shameful per se, and I've read some reports that having "extra" children is used as a status symbol. But at least in upper-middle-class suburban Boston, there is significant status associated with providing lavish resources for one's children, and I can see that having extra children but not providing them with the expensive goodies the Jones's children get might be distinctly disfavored.
My view might be affected by being raised in a small town in a rural area; once parents supplied their children a fairly basic middle-class standard of living, there weren't a lot of opportunities for spending lots of money on them, possibly until they were old enough to drive. But then, giving their kid an expensive new car would have seemed vain, as many people in town didn't own particularly expensive cars. Now in suburbia (where most people live) there are lots of elaborate school-related activities that one has to pay considerable money for.
Interesting: One can phrase this phenomenon in terms of "r-selection vs. k-selection". Do parents compete on the number of children or on their "quality"? I've noticed that in the professional class in the US, there's a tendency toward trying to produce "one perfect child" rather than producing a bunch of OK children as a matter of course.
And ironically, the professional class is probably making unscientific assumptions, since children tend to turn out the way they are rather than the way their parents make them.
I recently saw promoted https://www.businessinsider.com/dinks-childfree-parents-choice-kids-childless-2024-3 "The dark side of DINKs: People who want kids but can't afford them". Which reminded me of a newspaper story about a woman who had married a doctor (doctors are well-paid in the US) but because the doctor had an ex-wife to whom he was paying heavy alimony, "she couldn't afford to have kids".
But in any advanced country the social welfare system makes it possible to raise children reasonably successfully on zero earned income. What these people are saying is that they see a minimum level of expenditure required for children and they can't provide it. Despite that many people in their society can't provide that level of expenditure and have children anyway. This suggests that some sort of social fallacy is causing problems.
In re "children tend to turn out the way they are", there's a long-running complaint that the main US college admissions test, the SAT, is strongly correlated with parents' income. I ran into an analysis that looked at the families of the students who ranked in the top 5% of the SAT. While a disproportion of them had families with incomes in the top 25%, fully 15% had families with incomes in the *bottom* 25%. So income isn't an immense driver of SAT scores. OTOH, fully 50% of those students had one or more parent with a post-bachelor's degree. So social-and-genetic inheritance of educational status is considerably stronger than the effect of income.
You’ve made the point before that parents are disadvantaged in the workplace because it has become the sole field for playing the game of status-seeking and that that changing this will require a cultural change. What policy lever might we pull to make child rearing a legitimate field for status-seeking? My suggestion is a drastic steepening in the progressivity of the income tax. Work would become less important for status and, for young women in particular, the scales would tip in favor of marriage and child-rearing.
1) Being fat is even subsidized. You can underwrite insurance based on smoking but not weight.
There are some Asian countries that penalize for weight, they even make employers weigh in their employees to do the calculations.
2) The simple solution is to provide significant (like several hundred thousands dollars per kid) tax breaks for married couples. Partly flat and partly scaling with income. The money is there and its not hard to calculate.
Kudos for your accurate but brief description of the modern food environment.
Hyperpalatable food is worse than most people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food
Processed foods and drugs (e.g., Ozempic) have huge marketing budgets due to profits from intellectual property rights.
Healthy food (produce) has almost no marketing budget.
The result is market failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
Most Americans think they eat healthily.
Nutrition-research scientists idea of healthy eating is very different.
These channels are by scientists that interview nutrition-research scientists:
https://www.youtube.com/@NutritionMadeSimple
https://www.youtube.com/@PlantChompers
This is aside from the main point of your article, but are you familiar with slime mold time mold's series of articles arguing that the obesity crisis is likely caused by a chemical contaminant? There's been a lot of debate around it, but I think their case is pretty solid and they don't seem to have backed down about it at all despite a few attempted rebuttals. It also agrees strongly with my own experience as someone who has effortlessly maintained about the same slightly below what is considered healthy weight my entire adulthood (and was proportionally the same in childhood) even when my calorie consumption and activity levels have varied dramatically.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/02/05/philosophical-transactions-adam-mastroianni-says-please-squirt-lemon-juice-on-my-brain/
One of the central concepts they reference (which has substantial experimental evidence behind it both in humans and animals that they go into) is that of the "lipostat", the idea that, under normal circumstances, weight is maintained homeostatically by the body in the same way that temperature is maintained homeostatically.
I.e. normally people only shiver when they're cold, but, if you're healthy, then even if you deliberately try to shiver for a long time when you're already warm, your temperature shouldn't go up much because you'll involuntarily sweat to balance it out. So if a person is shivering, and they seem to be doing it involuntarily despite already being warm, and their body temperature keeps going up and up and up because they're not sweating, then there has to be something going on at a deeper level that has shifted the body's target temperature (a fever).
In the same way, so goes the argument, if a person feels hungry all the time despite having their nutritional needs met, and they keep gaining weight despite already being well past what's healthy, then there has to be something going on at a deeper level that has shifted the body's target weight / lipostat outside its normal range.
I'm not familiar with that argument in particular. I have read Herman Ponzer's book Burn. Ponzer says that people tend to always eat the same amount (about 3000 calories a day, not 2000 as is common wisdom, that number is based on the bad science of self-reports according to Ponzer). So for starts, that can explain how the Masai can eat 3000 calories a day and stay slim: we all do (except those who get fat).
Ponzer claims that our bodies strive at keeping the same weight. If we exercise, it just saves on some other function. Exercise doesn't lead to weight loss. To me, that explains your experience rather well (I mean, if you are not doing extreme things). The Hadza also tend to keep the same weight, in spite of going through better times and worse times.
I think Slime Mold had an interesting chart. I looked for total figures for overweight (including obesity) versus normal weight people over time, but didn't find those numbers. It is interesting that mild overweight was as common in 1960 as today. Like if those people who are obese today were overweight in 1960.
I'm not sure that I entirely understand Slime Mold's argument. What is "chemical"? I mean, "palatable" might be a too weak word for soft drinks and fruit juices and crisps and other junk food. It might be that some kinds of palatable food just don't make people feel full, while other kinds of palatable food do. "Chemical" is still a rather strong word to describe such a mundane phenomenon.
"Palatable" probably isn't the best word for the type of food he intends to describe there. Cafeteria diet is better, but what he intends to highlight as I understand it is that heavily processed food seems to cause much more weight gain than less processed food even for the same calorie amount and macronutrient ratios, and if you read on he supposes that this is because more processed food has had more time to accumulate chemical contaminants (plastics, antibiotics, heavy metals, who knows what else) from various sources. Specifically his pet theory as revealed toward the end of the article series is that lithium from mining operations leaching into groundwater is responsible, though he also considers several other possible contaminants.
Lithium is known to very reliably cause weight gain when used as a psychiatric medication, as are several other psychiatric medications incidentally. Time mold is in agreement with Ponzer that our bodies strive to keep the same weight, but certain things like lithium and many psychiatric medications can disrupt that natural weight-keeping function, and Time mold thinks the obesity crises has been caused by one or more of those disrupting chemicals becoming much more widespread in much greater amounts over the past several decades.
This would not work in the US because our healthcare and retirement is both tied to full time employment (meaning 35 hrs per week). If you aren't working full time you get no benefits, in fact many employers very much love having part time employees specifically so they can get out of paying for their employee's benefits. And if you have a family with children, you really need that health coverage and it is the most expensive in the world here. Bernie Sanders' call for Medicare for All aside, changing our horrifically expensive employment-based health insurance system would be virtually impossible because the whole healthcare industry (one of the largest and wealthiest in the country) would oppose it.
Second, there's a much better example than the Amish you can look to: the Mormons. They also compete to have the most kids. And they do it while ALSO competing to have the best car, best house, best yard, most successful kids, and everything else. If that's really what you're aiming for, I'll tell you how they do it (I've lived in Utah for 20 years so I'm very familiar with how it works). First, you go to church every single week plus an extra day in a church related service group so that's at least two days per week on church activities every week your whole life. Plus they have a "family home night" that everyone follows. Second, you pound it into their heads, over and over,bat every church meeting that family and having kids is the entire point of life. There is basically no other point. If you can't have kids, you adopt. If you can, you have as many as you can afford. Your reward for this is that in heaven you get to have your own world that you populate as gods and have literally MILLIONS of children. And then you give out high status church positions only to families with lots of kids. And high status positions then help you also increase your economic well-being because it's basically a stamp of approval and gets you an in with am instant network of customers and clients and business contacts. You heavily promote gender roles and an expectation that father's provide and women mother and you don't allow same sex marriage.
That's what they do, and it has worked quite well. Everyone is trying to be like Mitt Romney...succeasful, good lookingm rich family with 5 kids and 20 grandkids. But even the Mormons are starting to fall short and native born LDS are having far fewer kids than they did a generation ago. Utah still has more children than any other state in the US, by far, but our population growth is now flat or declining if not for immigration. Because 20 years ago almost everyone here was Mormon and that's no longer the case. Outsiders like me moved in, the internet happened, and what used to be a homogenous insular community is not, any longer.
So, that's what it takes. Not a mild expression of family promotion and values, but a fairly hegemonic repeated pounding into their heads several times a week their entire lives and an insular community where everything is set up to promote that model. But it's really not even sustainable. The Mormons I work with who are over 40 all have a minimum of 3 kids and some have 6 or 7. But those younger usually have 2. A few have 3. And people like me...childless and married, or married with 1 kid, have moved here in droves and we seem to be impacting them way more than the other way around. Not that it's purposeful...I actually enjoyed benefiting from the abundance of kids because it used to keep prices lower and kept workplaces more relaxed and family friendly and less work obsessed.
Do you want the benefits of big families without having any of the costs?
I think your comment about the childless and one child affecting Mormons more than the other way around is insightful. Same reasoning applies to gay marriage. Gay norms affect marriage more than marriage affects gay norms. I think it’s because the outside forces have momentum. You moved to Utah. Mormons didn’t move to you or NYC en masse.
Yes, the American healthcare system really is inefficient. It inflates the cost of keeping a human being alive quite significantly. A typical bad card in social evolution.
The only bad thing with Mormons as fertility role models is that they actually don't have many kids anymore:
https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking-mormon-american-family/
As you say, they kept having many kids for longer than other Americans, but now it's largely over. Their abysmal sex ratio surely doesn't help. In Date-o-nomics, Jon Birger uses them as a prime example of male flight and a resulting delay in marriage and family formation.
Mormons really want to fit in with "normal America". For a long time that meant a 1950s conservative ideal. But in modern times it's merged with woke progressivism. Romney is a good example of this. You copy that to a family with far fewer resources then the Romney's and fast toward a generation and they will be like everyone else.
I have seen articles suggesting that these days (among the professional class) having a third child is seen as something of a status symbol due to the added expense.
I was thinking while reading the part about obesity that one major factor is that food used to be labor-intensive, usually by the housewife working to prepare it. That tended to force food consumption to be at defined meal times, not in unlimited quantities, and to be whatever the housewife decided was a healthy diet. In a broader sense, it was a world where the housework was critical to life and there was a lot of it. I've seen analyses that in the 1920s in industrial US it took about as much (unpaid) housework as (paid) factory work to maintain the internal economy of a typical working-class family. And housework is far more compatible with tending children than paid employment, so children are "cheaper" if half your workforce is *needed* to do housework.
Parents put a lot more work into each child now. Indeed there seems to be a status competition to see how controlling a parent can be. It's not clear to me that there's any benefit to this. OTOH, if you're in the upper part of the "professional" class, where employment opportunities depend on education, the obsessive maximization of educational status at each stage of childraising might be optimal.
I realized that I did read somewhere a report by a black woman in the US who got criticized by her mother "You're 35 and you only have three children!" And she was not "poor". So there is still some valorization of childraising in US culture.
The missing piece with having parents do labor with young children is childcare. If one has a demanding, or even non standardized job (teacher, doctor, scientist) vs just hourly factory work, then that person has less flexibility to pick up slack.
And to work meaningfully from home you need someone to be watching the children.
>>And to work meaningfully from home you need someone to be watching the children.
Yes. And no. I'm doing quite a bit of meaningful writing (well, I think it is meaningful) when the children are asleep or playing. 20 hours of daycare a week for Mr Toddler certainly helps, especially since it allows Anders and me to synchronize our writing and thinking. But I put in most hours when I'm on standby duty watching the children. Editing a text while bottle-feeding a baby also works rather well, in my experience.
Standardized positions works badly for parents of young children. I think that with some effort, many positions could be much more de-standardized than they are. Many doctors can work remotely and take video calls, for example.
When I quit my job to stay at home raising our kids, the company I was working for really wanted to keep me around so they offered to let me continue working on a very part-time basis, selectively choosing work, working remotely, flexible hours, you name it, I got it.
I quit completely after about 3 months.
The problem? I knew what good work looked like in the office. Thanks to having a mother who stayed at home and raised me as a child, I knew what good work looked like from a caregiver. Trying to split me time resulted in me being neither. Working 10 hours a week, I was not worth 25% of a full-time employee, nor was I worth 75% of a full-time parent. Not by my own standards, and I suspect that given enough time, both the market and my children would have agreed.
I suspect that changing the status of the family is the bigger lift than creating alternative working arrangements. I also suspect that if you could figure out how to do the first, you wouldn't need the second.
Did you split it up into days or did you work one full day a week?
It was split up.
But don't you get... bored? For how long time have you been home with the kids, full-time?
I guess tastes differ. And cultures. In Sweden there is very little of a concept of stay-at-home parenting (there even isn't any word for it, really). The idea that a family needs the full attention of one person just isn't there in any coherent shape. Even my grandmother, who was a proud housewife from head to toes, actually worked with assembling components for typewriters at home when she had young children. A delivery van drove the few meters from the typewriter factory to her home, dropped off boxes with unassembled components and picked up the assembled ones.
I've been at home full-time going on 8 years now. I have experienced many things in that time. Boredom has not been one of them. That might be a sign that I am not particularly adept at this role. Multi-tasking has never been my strong suit. I was really good at sitting down for long periods of time to work through complex problems that required a high degree of focus and concentration. Raising children and managing a household is nothing like that, and so, for better or worse, it always feels like there is something else that could use my attention that I'm not addressing adequately.
I remember the feeling of boredom as a child. I can't recall ever encountering that feeling as an adult. Occasionally I will catch myself "doom-scrolling" through twitter or revisiting websites that I know won't have anything new on them, and while that seems like a similar behavior to flipping through the same 3 or 4 channels as a kid on a Sunday afternoon, desperately hoping for a fluke cartoon to appear, the felt experience is not similar. As a kid, boredom felt like something was wrong with the world; as an adult, if the same behaviors emerge, it feels like there is something wrong with me--I'm keenly aware that I'm deliberately avoiding the world. The cure for that is simple: just start paying attention. I might not like what I find, but it won't be boring.
I think some governments today are trying to do the necessary change of discourse: going back to traditional ways, valuing the family, women's proud work of giving birth to the next generation, and so forth. I'm waiting with interest to see if they have any success or not. So far it doesn't look very impressive, but maybe it's too early. One of these places is China, their birth rate keeps dropping.
I worry that competition is part of human nature and that resource competition is the most straightforward kind. It stayed intact all through the Soviet Union, which really was meant to get rid of it. And having children in our time is quite bad for resource competition, as you say. Can we find good examples of competition that was artificially but successfully introduced by governments, schools, media or suchlike?
>>Can we find good examples of competition that was artificially but successfully introduced by governments, schools, media or suchlike?
Hm...Eurovision song contest? How about school as such? Isn't that a highly artificial, government-introduced competition?
Thinking about it, it should be much easier to intruduce a competition in having children compared to a competition in sitting on a chair taking in rather arbitrary information. All over the world, people are happy over and proud of their well-fed, healthy and happy children. It takes quite a bit of cultural evolution to make people anxious and ashamed instead. It is probably enough just to ease some of that cultural pressure against pride over children, and the kind of fertility competition that was so ubiquitous just a few generations ago will resume.
This is a top down solution which might or not work, but the biggest problem is that western elite is happy with TFR collapse so they have no reason to try it.
Yup! Proud parents will have to form their own cooperatives. Like the Hutterites, minus the socialism and minus God.
I've considered this before, and while it isn't really a bad idea, there are two problems.
The first is that, so long as there are no restrictions on the fertility of underclass women, it will be hard to convince people that they're really in competition. Any competition won by welfare mothers will be seen as not worth engaging in.
The second is more an issue about what might happen if children actually do become a clear status signal, because this could potentially give rise to a harsh social reality. While it is at least possible to discretely hide the amount of wealth one has accumulated, or to obscure it by raising questions of income vs property vs credit or inheritance, there is absolutely no way to obscure or avoid the raw number of children a couple has produced.
Hmmm, I'm not so sure that the second factor makes a difference. Here in metro Boston, people do know what suburb you could afford to buy a house in.
The very wealthy often dress modestly, drive unpretentious cars, and avoid expensive areas to live. Friends have told me of their aging relatives sitting quietly on enormous piles of money.
>>The first is that, so long as there are no restrictions on the fertility of underclass women, it will be hard to convince people that they're really in competition. Any competition won by welfare mothers will be seen as not worth engaging in.
It seems like fertility is falling fast among the lower classes of the mainstream population. So that problem might disappear on its own. Which is unusual for a problem.
>>The second is more an issue about what might happen if children actually do become a clear status signal, because this could potentially give rise to a harsh social reality. While it is at least possible to discretely hide the amount of wealth one has accumulated, or to obscure it by raising of income vs property vs credit or inheritance, there is absolutely no way to obscure or avoid the raw number of children a couple has produced.
As I said to Piotr, the ingenuity of the Amish is that they say competition-is-very-bad. If Amish people compete consciously over who has the most children, they could probably not admit it. I think that a fertility competition in mainstream society would have to be covert and modest that way.
> that problem might disappear on its own. Which is unusual for a problem.
A popular misquotation of Confucious has it that "If you sit long enough by the river, you'll see the bodies of your enemies float by." It's not so unusual to imagine there are some problems it's possible to outlive. However, dropping fertility in the lower classes is simply trailing the upper classes; what would be necessary would be for the fertility rates to reverse, or at least equalize. I doubt that there is any widespread sociological phenomenon it would please me more to see float by than differential fertility, but others have died watching that river rush on and on and on.
> the ingenuity of the Amish is that they say competition-is-very-bad. If Amish people compete consciously over who has the most children, they could probably not admit it. I think that a fertility competition in mainstream society would have to be covert and modest that way.
The Amish do have the advantage of extreme homogeneity. The growing heterogeneity of Western societies exacerbates many cultural problems. If some group or groups differ from others, you can bet that everyone will become instantly aware, and no amount of modesty will be able to completely deflect the envy that naturally arises.
I think children are a competition, the problem is that the competition about quality, quantity. Having two or more successful children does not provide any more status than having one. Also, having more children is not seen as increasing the chances of either of them becoming successful - it looks like a suboptimal strategy, as opposed to committing all resources and effort into the success of the only child.
Managing resource and commitment allocation with multiple children is hard and based from what I hear from people, parents typically do less than perfect in that area, leading to varied degrees of childhood trauma. This also leads people to think that having just one child is an obvious way to avoid it.
Generally we should be careful with framing children as competition/status game for parents. We all know the trope of the toxic parent pushing the child to achieve early success in sports/music/art/science etc. I don't think that it's that common in real life, but encouraging it should be avoided anyway.
Also, it's not good for adults either. My father has a habit of bragging about his children's 'successes' on social media and in real life. For some time he has been pushing me to buy an expensive car I don't need so he can brag about it. I really hate it.
>>We all know the trope of the toxic parent pushing the child to achieve early success in sports/music/art/science etc.
The Amish have a solution to that. They forbid both bragging and competition. Hiding away one's children would be inhumane, however, so they can never ask each other to hide children for the sake of humility. Also, since they discourage contraception, they can credible claim that it is not a competition, just God's will. If I believed in intelligent design, I would say the design of that system is very successful.
>>My father has a habit of bragging about his children's 'successes' on social media and in real life. For some time he has been pushing me to buy an expensive car I don't need so he can brag about it. I really hate it.
I really shouldn't laugh at that because it seems serious. But I can't help it. It IS comical. At least for us who are not personally involved.
This is very true.
Another approach is letting two parents do one job. For example, let's say I'm good at writing and spouse is good at math. Why can't we partition a back-office job that requires both, and collaborate, for the same compensation (or more, if more productive)? This is hard within the framework of current labor regulation and regulation around additional benefits. But it would be nice.
That's a very good idea. If people can file for taxes jointly, why not take it a step further and share the entire job?
The issue of course is if you actually try to implement such a thing, at least in the US regulatory context, it will come with some kind of restrictions and additional rules out of left field that make it worse than it is now.
Yeah and also couples raising children together... Surely they deserve a little time apart