“Is Having Children a Sacrifice?” with Robert Tracinski

[00:00:02] Speaker A: There he is. Great. I'm going to invite him to speak. I don't know if you got that invitation. Rob. [00:00:15] Speaker B: Can you hear me now? [00:00:16] Speaker A: Yes. Great. [00:00:18] Speaker B: Okay. Something has gone screwy with the Twitter app, and it makes it very hard for me even to find this. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Okay. So anyway, I'm glad you did. We're going to go ahead and get started while we wait for the room to fill up. [00:00:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:00:35] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're pleased to have Atlas Society senior fellow Rob Traczynski here today discussing the topic. Is having children a sacrifice? After Rob's opening comments, we'll take questions from you. So please request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as we can. Rob, intriguing topic. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Well, you have kids, don't you, Scott? [00:01:00] Speaker A: I do have a son, yes. [00:01:02] Speaker B: So you gotta figure out whether you've made a sacrifice or not. [00:01:05] Speaker A: I have a position. [00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Sometimes you go back and forth on it. The reason I'm bringing this up is this comes up as a talking point in a number of different ways. So, for example, one of the things that set me off on this a. [00:01:20] Speaker A: While back was there's a little bit of an echo. Can you get just a little closer to the mic? [00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. The room I'm in is very echoey because it has been emptied of all furniture. Long story. [00:01:30] Speaker A: Okay. You sound much better now. [00:01:32] Speaker B: Okay, good. That just needs to be, I think that I can overwhelm the, the echoiness of the room by getting closer to the mic. This is my wife's office, which we're just finished renovating. So we've got all these stuff out and haven't put everything back in yet, at any rate. So the question here is, what set me off on this a while back was, I think it was a conservative, I think it was Ross Dauvitt in the New York Times writing a column about this. They're very, very concerned about declining population and we're not having enough fertility in this country, et cetera. And he described as well, this is because of the decadence of liberalism and of people being too selfish. People are selfish. They want to be happy. They don't want to do the self sacrifice required to have children and basically produce the next generation. And one thing that struck me about that, of course, is how if you actually want people to have more kids, the last thing you ought to be doing, it's like really poor salesmanship. The last thing ought to be doing is you actually want people to have more kids. The last thing you should be doing is telling them this is a sacrifice. You basically have to give up your enjoyment of your own life in order to have children. What would also strike me about it is how completely the opposite of this is from how I regard my kids. I do not regard this as, oh, I could be enjoying life if not for you, rugrats, and how sort of antinatalist that really is. And it's in a basic assumption, but it goes back to whole thing. So, you know, this I'm talking, you know, we're on behalf of the Atlas Society here. So this ties back to Ayn Rand's advocacy of rational self interest as a morality. And one of the major things you'll hear if you ever, you know, sort of advocate for rational self interest. One of the arguments people will put back to, what about having children? Aren't you against children? Because then you have children, you have to put somebody else's interests first. It's a sacrifice for you to do that. So it's partly, you know, it's sort of this case for self sacrifice is necessary. It doesn't just come from conservatives, it comes from people, all persuasions that self sacrifice is necessary because otherwise you wouldn't do things like be married, get married, or have kids. And this is very, this idea that, you know, self interest means basically not caring at all about any other human being on the earth. So that's why I wanted to address this issue now. It's also the reason I'm addressing it is to fill in a slight gap here, which is that, you know, in developing her philosophy, Ayn Rand did not write much about her position, her view of children. It wasn't, you know, she mostly developed the philosophy. She herself did not have children. She developed the philosophy by writing novels. And the characters going through these various adventures in her novels also do not have children. Now, it's partly because of the stage of life that they're in and that sort of thing. Most, you know, at least in her first two novels, they're mostly younger people who are starting out in the world, and they're the people who would not necessarily have kids yet. But it's something that she herself was not focused on and did not focus on in her novels. And so it's sort of not well trod and a topic in her philosophy. So it's something that I wanted to say a little bit more about, about why it is that you would have kids, why it, and how basically makes the case for having children as something that is self interested. So the first thing I want to say about that is that from my own perspective, starting on this, that the question of whether it's self sacrifice to have kids, the first thing that strikes me about that is having kids is fun. Yeah. And that's the thing I want to lead with because, you know, and that's another thing that you have that sort of inspired this is there especially, it's about, I guess, eight or ten years ago, there was a wave of books and the wave of books about, about child raising and that sort of thing. And, well, one of them, one of the books was titled all Joy and no fun. And all these books were sort of about how trying and difficult and onerous it was to have children. And it's usually with this thing of, oh, it's kind of worth it in this sort of general way. But they were very general about the benefits and very specific about all the bad things about it. Right. So it was, again, one of these things, people agonizing over it and making it seem like have, you know, all joy and no fun kind of says at all that this is, this is no fun. This is a terrible thing to do to have kids. And I wanted to emphasize how fun at the time this came out, I had, my kids were a good deal younger than they are now, but I was having a lot of fun with my kids. And I was like, well, if you're not happy, your kids are having fun, and if you're not having fun with them, you're missing the point. You know, you, you somehow missed out on some aspect of having kids if you don't find it fun. So I did a whole article by the time, about all the enjoyable things about having kids. And a lot of it is, you know, that a child's a child. There's an old saying, I think it goes back to Maria Montessori. The child's work is play. Right. Because, you know, play isn't just a frivolous thing for a child to do. It's also a major sort of learning activity in the act of, in the act of play, a child is learning a lot of things and acting out all the different roles that he loves to play later in life. And so, you know, it's a major growth experience, a major way of, for the child to expand his capabilities and to learn. So a child's work is play. And so that is the major activity that child said children have. They are engaged in play and they are having, by nature, having fun. And it's actually something interesting that I think this perspective on things is lacking sometimes, because one thing I've noticed about there's been a big sort of to do over children's books at schools recently, and, you know, the moms for liberty types getting the vapors over various, oftentimes frivolous, sometimes frivolously over various things that are supposedly inappropriate for children in the books. I don't think that's the problem of woke children's books. I think the problem of woke children's books is that they're boring. They remind me of the old. There used to be an old set of books called the McGuffy readers, and they were a set of books used in education in, like, the late 19th century. And the thing is, it was very clear with the McGuffey readers, these books have been vetted for having a wholesome message. It's the old fashioned version of this. This isn't the woke version of it. This is the traditionalist, conservative version of it that these books had been. The book was a selection of various readings that the kids were supposed to have to read to get themselves interested in as part of learning to read. And the books were carefully selected to have a appropriate moral messages. And the problem is they're selected to have the appropriate moral message, and they end up being boring because of it. You know, they weren't selected for being interesting to read. And I see the same thing happening in the schools. Even some of the things my kids have had to read at school, where the books are selected to have a proper, socially acceptable message, but not to be interesting to read. And, of course, the most important thing is the book needs to be interesting to read. It needs to capture the child's interest, needs to pull him in. It needs to make him want to read so he will develop this important skill in life. And the best way to develop it is to be to enjoy doing it. So a child's work is play, and they are pursuing fun and excitement and adventure and reacting in a new and genuine way to every aspect of life that they encounter. So this is one of the most amazingly enjoyable things about having kids. So I could go on and on, and we could talk more later about all the things that I think are terrific, are just tremendously entertaining about having kids, including getting to share all the things that you love in life with them. I've told you before, Scott, that one of my dreams in life is to get paid to watch Star Trek with my kids. [00:10:10] Speaker A: Sure. [00:10:11] Speaker B: So one of the things that we've been doing is I finally gotten them so they go, they went through the usual Star Trek, Star wars phase, right? Because Star wars is what the kids are into when they're younger because it's less intellectually demanding. The themes are not as big and philosophical. It's the, the conflicts are more simple, of black and white, and, you know, the guy in the big, scary helmet, he's the bad guy. And as they get older, they actually get more into Star Trek, and they've made that transition. And so I've really been enjoying taking a tv series, a franchise that I like, and introducing it to my kids and getting to talk about it and having, seeing them discover it for the first time. So there's all sorts of things that you enjoy in life, you know, whether it's sports or, you know, Star Trek or whatever it is that you are interested in, that you get to then share with your kids and sort of bring to them and see them gain a new appreciation for something that you're familiar with. All right, so we can talk about all the different things that are enjoyable about having kids, but I want to back up a little bit to the theory of it as well, which is, you know, how would this, how does this fit in with the philosophy of rational self interest? Well, I think the key word there is rational self interest. This is the self interest of a rational being. Now, rational self interest implies not just that we are thinking logically, it also implies that we're thinking, we have a complex, we have a, we're self conscious. We're able to introspect into our own Minds. We're able to have a whole complex psychology. And that complex psychology then produces this whole range of psychological needs that we have in life. And one of those is a psychological need for companionship. This gives rise to the phenomena of love and friendship. And so the idea that, okay, you would have Friends that you would want to spend time with, because, you know, as a complex being with a complex brain, you need to have a whole view of the world. You need, you're able to enjoy art and music, and then you want to have somebody else with whom you can enjoy this, someone who can amplify your enjoyment of various aspects of life by, you know, sharing these things with them. And that's one of the psychological needs that you acquire as a complex thinking, rational being. And so as an extension of that, you know, you have friends, and then you might get married to someone, you might have a romantic relationship with someone. And children, of course, naturally follow from that. And the relationship you have with your children is like a kind of very close, very intense friendship. It's something that is, like I said, this ability to share all the aspects of life that you enjoy, from aspects of daily life and sharing meals together to introducing them to your favorite books and movies to going on trips with them. All these different things you get to do in life that you're able to magnify your enjoyment by sharing it with someone else, in this case, by somebody who is, you know, created and shaped by you. Someone who we've had this close relationship, literally from the instant they were born. And someone who, again, sees things from this childlike perspective of rediscover, of discovering everything for the first time. I think it's a very, you know, it's a very close, intense, refreshing way to. To enjoy this sort of very close companionship with another person. So in a way, saying, you know, would. Is it, is it, is that self sacrifice to have children? It's a bit like saying, is it a self sacrifice to have friends, or is it a self sacrifice to, you know, have a romantic relationship with. With a partner? Well, of course it is, because you get so much psychological value out of doing that. And even if it costs you certain things, it costs you time and money, a lot of money with kids, at least it costs you. Or with getting together with your friends or with a romantic partner. It's an investment of time and effort in that. But so is everything in life, right? Everything in life that you value and that you get something out of requires an investment of time and effort. It's like. So it's like asking, is it, is it selfish? Is it in your self interest to have hobbies? Well, you know, if it's a hobby of something you enjoy, the fact that you have to then put time and money into it is an investment. An investment in the enjoyment you get from doing this thing, whether it's playing a certain game or engaging in sports or going to museums, whatever it is that your particular hobby is. I'm an amateur musician. I have, you know, it cost me money to get a piano. It cost me money to get violin lessons. Various things that I've had, you know, cost me a lot of time and effort just to stay in practice on these things, which I wish I had more time to do. So, again, the fact that something requires an investment of time and effort does not make it a sacrifice if the time and effort are worth it if you're getting a return on that investment. Right? So the way I would say it is that in a philosophy of rational self interest, having kids children is in your interest because it produces this kind of particularly close relationship and close companionship with another person. Now, this is assuming, of course, that all goes well in having children, right? So, you know, there is always the risk that, you know, your kid ends up, you know, being the next serial killer, although I think serial killers usually come from pretty dysfunctional families. So maybe you should look, look and look into your own actions a little bit there. But, you know, your kid could end up being rotten. Okay? Things could go well. You were taking a chance that things will not end well with the child. But, you know, for the vast majority of people, our kids do not end up being the next, you know, Ted Bundy. They end up being somebody we like and want to spend time with and have happy memories with. So it's, again, it's a thing where for the, as with anything in life, it entails a certain risk that this could go wrong and not end well. But again, the risk is something you take as just one of the conditions of life. And the reward is that if it works out, and it usually does work out, then you have this very close and rewarding and fulfilling relationship with someone who you've known literally for your entire life. And so it becomes, my experience, a particularly close and rewarding kind of friendship. So I think that's kind of the overview. So the way of dupe, of the way I deal with the philosophical issue on this is this claim about how the assumption behind a lot of these things that this is not self interested in, that you have to sacrifice to have kids or this challenge, self interest, can't be right, because if you follow self interest, you'd never do something like have kids, is the assumption that if you're self interested, then other people cannot possibly be a value to you, that spending time with them and talking with them and companionship, that that could not possibly be something that's rewarding. And that's the assumption that is, well, I think, clearly false because, you know, most of us, just about everybody has in their lives somebody else with whom they enjoy spending time, with whom they get a benefit from that. And if you don't, you're probably upset about the fact that you don't have somebody in your life. So most people, I think, implicitly understand that companionship with other people definitely is in your interest. It's a value. It's something that you can get a great deal of enjoyment from. And so therefore, it would be valuable. It would be in your self interest, even if it requires investing some time and money and effort in cultivating that relationship. Now, you know, having children is a great deal more time and effort put into that than into other relationships. You know, the buddy you go talk to at the coffee shop every now and again, that's a low investment relationship, but the relationship is correspondingly much deeper and much more rewarding. So that's the overview I want to get, but I want to see where people stand on this and what objections they have or how they would approach it. [00:19:00] Speaker A: Great. And I welcome anyone to request to speak. I've got a ton of questions myself. I mean, doesn't some of this come back to Rand's unique definition of sacrifice and kind of a hierarchy of values? And. [00:19:17] Speaker B: I don't know if it's your unique definition of selfish self sacrifice. Can you still hear me? [00:19:22] Speaker A: Yeah, but, you know, people talk about sacrificing for their country, and they're really talking about putting a higher value above, you know, the mundane. [00:19:34] Speaker B: Well, I don't know if it's a unique definition of sacrifice. I think it's an accurate definition of sacrifice because people always sort of fudge what they mean by sacrifice. And, you know, the inaccurate one that she talks, she writes about is the idea that, you know, if, let's say you decide to stay up, you stay up your student, and you decide to stay up at night studying for the test you have the next day instead of going out to a party. Is that a sacrifice? Well, it's not a sacrifice if you want to pass the test and, you know, graduating and go out and pursue a career. It has to do with the very reason you're at school is to. Is to be able to pass these tests and get the grades and get the ability to move on in your life. That's not a sacrifice. That's something that's in your interest to stay up and study. It's not in your interest to go get blotto and not make it through to school. So, again, it's a matter of accurately defining. And that's why I like the word when you want to. But, you know, the thing is that people who are advocates of altruism have to dress it up some way to make the idea of self sacrifice seem like a good thing. So they say, well, so they will take things that are not sacrificial and describe them as sacrifices. You know, it's a sacrifice for you to. To fight against the dictatorship instead of submitting to it meekly. Well, is it really a sacrifice to submit? Not to submit meekly to dictatorship? You know, being in a free society isn't your self interest. Being in a dictatorship is going to end up very badly for you. So, you know, just giving in and not even fighting would seem to me like it's not that that would be the sacrifice, sacrificing your freedom because you're, you're not brave enough to stand up for it. So again, the, I think that's why in place of sacrifice, I think that the terminology that makes more sense to me is investment. You know, an investment is, you know, we understand in the economic realm that if you invest in something means you are foregoing the current use of some of your money. You could have gone out. You could have spent that. You could have bought a nice meal or gone on a trip or whatever. So you could have spent that money on something else. You're foregoing the current use of that, but in order to get some greater benefit later on. So I think the term investment is much more accurate to what we're talking about with the question of why would you engage in a certain action that might cost time, money, effort, and the idea, and emphasizing the idea that this is not you just giving something, giving something up. You are forgoing something in the current, the current moment in order to get something else that you have that you value more. There's something else in the other ones. Responsive. I can't remember where it was. So go ahead with the next. [00:22:31] Speaker A: You know, I agree. I think we learned from our kids. I think they can give us a kind of renewed sense of purpose, things that we weren't considering before we had the kids. Yeah. [00:22:45] Speaker B: I also think one of the things I wrote about on this is I found that the, the very fact that they, they date, you know, especially when they're very young, it's a significant drain on top time and effort. I think, you know, it's much more so when they're like, in the first three years of life, it gets easier as far as you go along. But anyway, by the time they're teenagers, which mine are now, they're, they're fairly self reliant. And it's a lot more, I find it's a lot more fun because you spend less time on the drug, on the, on the chores of taking care of the child, and more time on the real interaction with a, you know, almost fully formed a human being. So anyway, but especially early on, when there's a lot of drain of effort, it is very demanding. But I also found that helps you prioritize because there's a lot of stuff, you know, when you're young and you're just starting out and you've got all, frankly, you have, you have way too much time on your hands. I find a lot of the stuff I ended up giving up because I had kids was stuff I didn't miss. And I realized that actually I was kind of wasting my time on this. This was not, you know, some tv shows I was watching is like, I don't time to watch that anymore, but I don't really miss it because it wasn't really that good. It wasn't as good a use of my time as I thought it was. So it really does help you prioritize and really do the serious thinking about, well, what's really important in my life. What, what things, you know, when you have limits on your time, you are really forcing up front, what do I really want to make time for? What's actually important and what's sort of the philosophy of life that is not a priority. [00:24:32] Speaker A: Sure. You know, can we accept free will and still realize that there are biological forces acting on us that make it natural to want to have kids? [00:24:45] Speaker B: Well, yeah, so I don't see the biological force in the evolutionary biology type of way. I'm a skeptic on evolutionary biology as we've talked about before. I think that, I mean, the bio, the only biological force that I see is that there is an appetite, if you will, for sex in the same way that there is an appetite for food. That, you know, this other, implanted by nature, nature made sex very pleasurable. So to make sure that we do it so there'd be another generation, you know, it's rewarded by the continued existence of the species in an evolutionary sense. So that, but that, you know, that's a very simple basic, I don't think it's a drive to say to have kids because of course, you know, we live in the modern. The reason this comes up as a, as a question and as a dilemma is we're in the modern era of contraception, right, where we can choose not to have kids. But I would say that the natural desire to have kids, I would give it a different source, which is this, which is we all came into existence by being kids, right? And by having parents and by having the experience of childhood. Now we experienced it from the other end, from being the child. But if you had at all a good experience of childhood, and you, most of us, I think, do, then you regard it as something that was pleasurable, that something was, something was pleasant, something that was fun, something you have good memories of and actually, you probably have better memories than. You may even have better memories than our dessert, because there is actually a. They started over the psychology of this. There is a sort of the good old days effect, where people tend to, when they look back on previous events in their lives, they actually tend to selectively remember the good parts and forget the bad parts. The bad parts fade away in intensity and urgency, and the good parts come to the foreground. So you probably remember your child actually as better than it was or better than you felt it was at the time. Right. And maybe it's just a matter of you're getting some perspective and realizing, okay, some of the things that upset me when I was five years old weren't really that big a deal. So the fact is that all of us come out of families where we have loving relationships with adults, and we sense that. I think that's the sense in which this is natural. There's a natural desire to have kids, which is that all of us came into existence, our existence in this world. I mean, unless you had a really horrible childhood, and some people do, but it's a relatively small minority. The overwhelming majority of us came out of an environment of a. An enjoyable childhood with loving relationships with the adults who were raising us, whether they were biological parents or adoptive parents. And having come out of that, having that be the thing that produced you, that's something you naturally want to repeat. It's something you want to live through again, but from the other side. Right, from the side of being the parent. So I think that's a large. That's a. That's to extend. We say there's a natural thing to. It is by nature, and that's back up a bit. Talked about. This is rash. Man is a rational being, and that means he's a complex, has a complex consciousness. You are very capable of abstractions, the record capable of complex learning. One of the aspects of that is we take this incredibly long time to reach adulthood and to be able to live independently. If you've ever seen a. Most people haven't seen this in person these days, but you've probably seen it, at least footage of it somewhere. You've seen a horse or a cow being born, right? The calf comes out or the foal comes out, and within, you know, within an hour, it's up and it's walking and it's moving around and it's independent. And human beings take so much longer to develop. There's a couple reasons for this. One is that we have these giant heads that are there to encase these complex brains. Well, because we have these giant heads, we have to be born at a younger stage in our gestation than the younger stage in our development. Because if you waited till a human being was so fully developed, they think that there's actually really like a 18 months of development for human. For an infant, right? Nine months in the womb and nine months out. But if you waited all 18 months, you'd be too big. You couldn't fit out of the. You couldn't make it out of the womb. So all human beings are basically born premature as an evolutionary imperative in order for us to accommodate these giant heads that we have, so we can have these big brains. But what that means is we're born totally helpless and we need to be cared for. So this idea of these loving relations, these long loving relationships that we have with our parents, this close bond that a parent has with the child is a necessity of the. That comes out of the need for the development of a rational being with a complex brain. So the fact that you not only have to have this extra nine months of not even being able to walk, but also that to develop the skills you need to develop the skills it needs to live. A cow doesn't really need to do much of anything at all. It sucks milk off of its mother for a while, and then it eats grass. And that's it. That's the cow's development. It has gone through the full. It has reached the full potential that is available to a cow. Whereas for a human being to develop, to reach our full potential, you know, it takes 1520 years of learning and development and developing the ability to have good judgment, etcetera. And so basically what I'm saying is that inherent in the idea of a rational being with a complex brain capable of all this abstract learning as a necessity of that is this idea is the concept of parenthood and of childhood and of this long period of having a close relationship, a close and loving relationship with an adult who's caring for you. So that's like, that's part of the package of being a human being, of being a rational being. So there's a natural desire to you because that's so crucial and central a part of your life. There's a natural desire to then repeat that experience and to. And to do it from the other side. And I view it as not so much nostalgia, but simply as a. I won't charge as nostalgia for childhood, but as a love for the process of childhood and you getting to enjoy it. You know, first time as a child? As a kid and second time as a parent. That's kind of a long winded thing, but I wanted to develop that idea. [00:31:34] Speaker A: Well, it's great. Curious, you know, your speculation on why population rates have been falling. You know, is it that they're just kids aren't needed to survive on the farm anymore? Environmentalism with the view that humans are a cancer on the planet. [00:31:53] Speaker B: I think environmentalism has an impact. There are people who are so worked up of, oh, because of global warming, I won't have kids. And boy, are they missing out. But I think that's a very small group of people. And by definite and by necessity, that's the group of people who will tend to be selected against. Right. There won't be a second generation of those people. The people who are, who don't buy into the environmental bloom and doom are more likely to have, not just have kids, but have more kids. Right. So they'll be competitive for, again, I think, you know, for people who are interested in politics and debating philosophy and that sort of thing, these things tend to loom very large, and we don't realize that. No, actually, you know, the people you see on, on twitter or on whatever social media thing who are going on about how I won't have kids because of environmental problems, those are actually, like, a very small percentage of the population. So I don't think that's the major thing. I think the major thing is precisely what I was talking about, which is having kids is a lot of work. It's a huge investment of time. And I think it becomes more so even in an advanced technological, industrial society. Right? So I said, you know, when a cow. A cow takes, you know, a couple of months of drinking milk and it's gone through its development and reached its full potential as a cow. A human takes longer, but a human in, like, a hunter gatherer society or a simple agrarian society took less time to reach adulthood than today. Right? So, you know, if you were in a warrior in a primitive tribe, basically by the time you're 15, you're full grown and you're out there. Right? You're not. Whereas if you're in a complex technological, industrial society, well, you're gonna get to 18 and you officially reach adulthood, but then you're probably gonna go to college. Then you might go to grad school and you might be 30 years old until you have it, before you have a real job, right. Before you're fully independent and out in the world. So. And that reflects the fact that there's so much complex intellectual development that's required to be able to take on a really useful, highly productive role in such a complex and highly developed civilization. If you have to go to graduate school, and then you could be very productive, you could do amazing things. But it involves this tremendously long and intense period of education. So I think that what happens is in advanced societies, as societies become wealthier and more technologically advanced, more complex societies, the process of raising a child becomes more expensive. They spend longer time being dependent on their parents economically, and a huge investment of resources in education and that sort of thing. And so I think that that becomes, that's why instead of having, you know, a dozen kids and you send them off to start work on the farm, the minute they're able to carry a bucket, you have instead, you have only a few kids in whom you invest a huge amount of time and effort and money. And make sure, you know, I'm in the middle of the college application process with my oldest son right now. And so you're going through this whole, there's tremendous anxiety people put on thing it, this whole intensive process of trying to get him into the right college and that kind of thing. Right? So if you become a wealthier society, children are more expensive to raise, they're more intensive and resources to raise. The other thing that's happened, and I think there's a huge part of it, is that it's the entry of women into the workforce. And I think, in balance, it's a good thing. But I think it also exposes the extent to which I'm going to sound like a feminist here, but this is a real thing. The extent to which the entire human economy has for millennia been based on the unpaid work of women. And what I mean by that is that, you know, basically 100 years ago, it was fairly, it was sort of considered normal that the way the world worked as the woman, the wife would stay home and raise, the women would stay home, and they would raise and care for the kids. And the whole process, the process of child rearing, the intensive effort required for that was primarily done through the, the work of women. And that work was not, was. It was valued, but it was not valued economically. [00:36:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:36:24] Speaker B: It didn't have that economic value. And I think it's a good thing on the whole, that women, you know, no, it's absolutely good thing. Women have entered the workforce. They, they're able to use their brain power. They're able to find a fulfilling thing. They are not pigeonholed into simply that one role of the wife and mother, which can be extremely limited. And you think of how much brain power and creativity that we've lost over the years, over the millennia by women who were shunted into roles where they were not allowed to, to do anything else. But at the same time, it means there's an adjustment that has to go on socially to the fact that, well, wait a minute. The, by the way, interesting figure I just came across earlier today on this is somebody's a 67 hours paradox. This is the idea that if you look at the number of hours worked by a married couple, that it has remained even as women have entered the workforce. The number of hours worked by, by the couple taken together has stayed at about 67 to 70 hours over a very long period of time. Over, like, the last 70 years, something like that. So women have gone into the workforce and they've been working more hours, but men, correspondingly, are working less. And I think that may reflect the fact that, and the speculation this person is putting out, which I think is correct, is that while women were. So, you know, it's not that. And they say, is it strange that, you know, well, shouldn't be, shouldn't they be working? People be working more hours now that we entered the workforce? Shouldn't the couple as a whole be working more hours? And the speculation was, well, actually, back in the old days, the women were still working lots of hours. They just weren't working it in the workforce. They were doing all that work at home. They were, you know, somebody's calculating how long it took to do a load of laundry before the modern dishwasher or sorry about water washing machine, or how much did, how much time it took to do dishes before the modern dishwasher. So basically, all the time that those appliances have bought for us has been time that women were spending doing plenty of work. But in the home, that wasn't valued economically, and now it's being valued economically in the job market. But I think it does mean that we're going to have to have a way of accommodating the fact that, you know, we want women to be able to work, but at the same time that it makes very visible the amount of work they were already doing before in the process of raising kids. And I think that, I suspect a large part of the falling fertility. Well, you know, it comes from that we have methods of birth control now, so we can, people can choose to have fewer kids. And I think it's also a reflection, but I think it's partly a reflection of the idea that, you know, it's making the, the amount of unpaid work done by women in the household has been made more visible. And one of the results is that you can't simply rely anymore on the idea that, okay, you can have, you know, six kids and the woman and the, the mother is going to stay home and take care of them all. [00:39:35] Speaker A: Sure. [00:39:36] Speaker B: Well, now, by the way, there are ways to accommodate it because, like I just mentioned, six kids. Isn't Amy Coney Barrett the Supreme Court justice? You know, she's a Catholic. I think she has six kids and, of course, has been able to be a judge and go to the Supreme Court. So there are ways of accommodating it. But I think we're in a transition process where people have to figure that out. [00:39:55] Speaker A: Sure. I was going to say, you know, isn't one of the concerns that relationships between spouses changes after having kids? [00:40:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it can if. But I think that's why you have to be, you know, I think, careful. Um, uh, who you, you know, that you, you have a. How is it a very strong and, uh, well established relationship to have kids now? I find, though, that it can, and I have seen a number of people who, you know, they have kids and then three years later they're divorced. And you kind of wonder, you know, did this, the stress and pressure of having kids, you know, cause that, push them apart in some way and that that can be a factor. But I also found that if you, if you do it right, it does. I think it brings you closer together because, you know, for one thing, you know, this idea of, you have to make, through my, my attitude, you have to make the relationship work because, you know, it. If going through a divorce is bad, going through divorce with children is like, much, much worse than just going through divorce without children. So, you know, it gives you an extra incentive to work on that relationship and make sure that you keep it firm. But also the common experience of husband and wife working together to raise these kids and the common, it's a fun, enjoyable, pleasurable thing to have kids. All these great experiences you get to have. And having them together as a couple, I think, draws you closer together. I also found that it drew me closer to my own parents. I have the great, good fortune. My parents, when we had kids, they said, okay, look for a house, because they had just, they had just recently retired, and they basically said, we'll move. They wanted to move closer to us. They moved. They're 1520 minutes away from us, and they've been here to help take care of the kids, it's been a tremendous help to have grandma and Grandpa there, as are basically babysitters who are available at the drop of the hat at any point. And that's been tremendously valuable. And I found that has brought me closer together with my parents and with my wife's parents. That experience of having. Bringing the grandkids over and the enjoyment they get out of that so it can push our relationship apart, could also bring it closer together by having that sense of a common cause that you're working together with and common things that you're enjoying together. [00:42:37] Speaker A: Sure. Sometimes you have to hold the line just to keep law and order together. [00:42:43] Speaker B: Oh, well, no. Do you have a camera? You said you had a son. [00:42:47] Speaker A: Yes. [00:42:48] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. Boys are chaos, girl. My impression, I don't have any. I have two boys, but my talking to other parents, my impression is that with girls, there's plenty of chaos, but it's more like emotional chaos, whereas with boys, it's like physical chaos. [00:43:07] Speaker A: Well, I encourage anyone else with questions to come in. One thing that, you know, when we were deciding to have a kid, one of my wife's friends who wasn't having children was almost trying to discourage her. And I wonder how much of this debate is just, you know, some people want to have kids, some people don't. But then some think everyone should have their view. [00:43:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there is, there is a, you know, and especially in politics, you find this. A lot of people who made a certain decision in life, and they will. They will get into big arguments, especially on social media, they'll get into big arguments that are basically, here's me justifying my feeling. I have to justify to other people my own personal decisions in life. Right. That whatever I decided, I have to now argue that it's what everybody should do, because somehow that makes it easier for me to justify to myself that that's what I chose to do. You get the. Get what you're saying there. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I think there is a certain element to that. And I think that if, that if that gets involved in the kids versus no kids debate, that if you didn't have kids, you have to say, oh, giving kids is terrible. You shouldn't do it. It's ruins your life. That it's a way of, like, self justification for you having made that decision. Now, I have, you know, I've got. I've got a couple friends who are sort of like, I have one friend in particular who's sort of the favorite uncle, and he's actually, I should have several friends who fit that bill that they're, you know, they are. And not just for us too, but like for all of their other friends who have kids. They get to, they get to have the fun part of being, you know, they decided not to. They didn't get married, they didn't have kids, but they get the fun part of being the favorite uncle who comes and visits and has fun with the kids for a couple of days, and then he gets to go, gets to leave and go back to his horrible life and not have the responsibility. And that can be a tremendously, you know, fun. It's a fun person to have come in because it's somebody else that the kids can get to know, a good friend of our good friends of ours that the kids can get to know. And it can also be a way in which you have this sort of, the childless people get to experience some of the benefits of life with kids without having to have to go all the way, let's put it that way. [00:45:29] Speaker A: What about religion? And you see Catholics or Mormons or even Islam, and that's where the population growth is coming from. [00:45:42] Speaker B: Yes, to some extent, although I want to point out that even that isn't, that's how, that's the way you'd think it would happen. And there is a differential, but the differential is not nearly as big as you'd think. And somebody was pointing out years ago, actually, for the data started showing this, that, you know, you think there was this initial concern, oh, the muslim world is going to outbreed everybody. They're going to have so many kids that they will, they'll own the future, whereas the west is not producing enough children. This is sort of conservative talking point for a while, but it turns out the muslim world is also experiencing lower fertility rates. It really is tied primarily to sort of level of economic development. More than anything, economic and technological development. It's more a product of rising wealth. Lower fertility is proctor rising wealth. And that goes back to the reasons we talked about. And so it's less tied into religion. And that's because I think no matter what a religion nominally tells people to do, they are also making, they are making self interested decisions. They're making decisions about their own happiness. And so they will make the decisions that reflect. So I think the fundamental factor is the level of economic development of a society. And the availability, it's sort of gone down in even poorer societies are still, also still having lower fertility now because it has to do with the availability of contraception, which if you were in a very backward place. It just simply wasn't available to you. These days, it's more available than it used to be because of technological development. [00:47:29] Speaker A: So what about the relationship between technological development and relative secularization? [00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it has to do with that too. But I think it's, my point is it's a bigger factor than just secularization or religion would take into account that even when people are still religious, they will have fewer kids as society becomes more complex and develops and the investment of having a child increases, and as you have more options available to you to decide not to have kids, from condoms to the birth control pill or whatever else you use. So I think it's a matter of people will make that choice. It's not just a matter of religious belief. And spreading religious belief won't reverse the problem. I think that, you know, to the extent that lower fertility is a problem, and I think it is a problem, I think, you know, declining population, there's a lot of evidence that declining population is not good. It leads to less growth, less innovation. One of the people, somebody pointed out, older people tend to take fewer risks and do and are less innovative, tend to come up with fewer creative ideas, whereas young, you know, you need a supply of young people coming up who will do things differently and who are willing to take, you know, you're willing to take more risks in your twenties economically by doing a startup and you're working 14 hours, days or whatever, then you are when you're in your fifties or sixties. Right? So an older, an aging society is one that is less dynamic and less innovative. So there are all sorts of costs to having lower fertility. I think we're going to need to get through this. And I think my analogy here is it's a little bit like the so called obesity epidemic. And it is true. People are fatter in advanced industrial, well off societies. They're fatter than they ever were before. And that's because, you know, we evolved through thousands of years, millions of years in which food was extremely scarce. And now we've arrived just in the last hundred years to a point where food is incredibly abundant, right? So naturally, we're gonna put on a little weight, right, as a species. And I think there's, I mean, you could say the same, same thing about the impact of the Internet. You know, we did not evolve to have access to this, this incredible amount of information. And if sometimes people go a little batty, you can see this online a lot people go a little batty because there's too much of a flow of information, and they, they fall down these rabbit holes and they get radicalized. And all these, all these weird things happen to people because you were not meant to process this much information, have this much access to this much. So there's all sorts of things that have happened in the modern world where new, we've entered a new era that is different from what we're used to. And we're going to have to kind of readjust and figure out how to live under the new rules. And I think fertility is one of those issues. I think it's one of those things where it's like, okay, now that we have, you know, where raising children is an advanced technological industrial society where raising children is a longer and more expensive process. And also we have a society where women are more able to pursue a wider variety of jobs and careers. And therefore, all the unpaid work they were doing in the home now has to be sort of accounted for or has there's competition for it. We're going to have to find new ways of doing things to sort of, and possibly new social norms and new practices and maybe new technology that will help us get through this. Like, you know, we can't have those robot servants soon enough. You know, they could, they can take care of the house while we watch the kids. And it'd be a lot easier to raise a child that way. So the point is that we need to go through, we're going through this process of adjustment, and I think we have to come up with a, we have to arrive at a new equilibrium of how do you have a wealthy, advanced technological society and also have be able to have some growth in the birth rate that will contribute to the growth in society and innovation. It doesn't have to be as high a rate as it used to be, but there should be some. So I think, you know, one of the technological things I would look for now, putting in my futurist sort of perspective on this, I think the most interesting thing would be extending fertility. You know, if, what if you could go out and you could have a career for 30 years or for 30 or 40 years and then retire and have kids, right? You could take it, take, take 20 years off of your work to raise your kids and then go back to work for a second, you know, and then, and then have your regular retirement after that, or have a, you know, as if you expand human lifespans and expand human fertility. You could have this idea of, you wouldn't have to choose so much between work and a career and kids because you could have the career and then have the kids, you know, and then go back to another second career afterwards, that sort of thing. Now, this is obviously sort of pie in the sky. It's for the, you know, 50 to 100 years from now. It's not something that's imminently going to happen, but I think that's the sort of equilibrium we're eventually going to have. We're going to have to reach equilibrium. So some means like that, there's some. [00:52:55] Speaker A: Parents that have kids early and they're out of the house when they're still relatively young. [00:53:01] Speaker B: Yeah. There are people my age who are already grandparents, so cousins and things like that. Yeah. So my wife and I sort of did that. We had, you know, 20 years of our careers almost, and had kids relative, you know, in their late thirties. So relatively late in the the process. [00:53:20] Speaker A: Okay, well, best part of parenthood and most humbling. [00:53:27] Speaker B: Well, best and most humbling. That's interesting. The most humbling for me was realizing that there's no substitute for mom. So I'm on the involved. I'm way out there on the involved dad end of the spectrum. I've been, you know, one of the advantages of being self employed, working. Everybody else, you know, started working from home during the pandemic. I've been doing it all along. So working from home, having my own schedule, it allows me to be really deeply involved in my kids lives and picking them up from school and doing all sorts of things with them. Now for a while, that often meant, you know, then my work would be. I'd be up writing at 03:00 in the morning. But it allows me to be really involved, to have this close relationship with my kids. But the humbling part. Part was that for certain things, especially when they were young, very young, for certain things, I still wasn't good enough. They needed mom, and only she could comfort them in certain ways. And, you know, that. That's the special. There's something special that goes on there with the fact that, you know, she basically brought them into this world out of her own body and has this special bond that happens. Right. The most enjoyable, I think, is the fact that kids like to laugh and they like to have fun. They like jokes, they like anything that's funny is hugely motivating for them from a very young age. You know, I think that one of the best moments that when you have a newborn in the house, one of the best moments is like six weeks in when they learn, they start to smile and they start to laugh, and they'll laugh at the simplest things. The dog sneezes. And that's tremendously funny for a toddler, for a baby. And so it's that world of just enjoyment and laughter and fun that is so motivating to kids. It's so much the focus of their life. And having that sort of brought to the forefront in a constant, everyday way, that's been the most enjoyable part. [00:55:32] Speaker A: That's great. Did you know you wanted to have kids at a young age? [00:55:36] Speaker B: I kind of did, but I, you know, I was not, I was not stampeding to do it because I had, you know, I kept, so I kept waiting for my life, for my, you know, I'm a freelance writer. I kept waiting for my career to be more stable and then eventually realized at some point that's never going to happen. Especially the media business has gotten less stable and less secure basically every year with every year that has passed since I entered into it. So eventually you just reached the point where I said, well, you know what, I'm just going to have to get used to the instability and do it anyway. But, yeah, I was mostly waiting for my, for my wife to also reach that point of being ready. [00:56:17] Speaker A: Sure. Well, this has been a great topic. I'm really glad you did it. You know, maybe you can turn it into some sort of summer panel or something, if not this year, the next. [00:56:29] Speaker B: I think it'd be great. And I'm also thinking of doing an article on, looking at that issue of why are fertility rates dropping? Why aren't, why are people having fewer kids? [00:56:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And, I mean, we could have done a whole thing on Rand and her decision not to have kids, and if that affected other people in the collective. But next week, JaG is going to be in Perth, Australia, and it's actually going to be you and Antonella doing a special on Javier Millay in perspective Wednesday at 06:00 p.m.. Eastern. So we're looking forward to that. [00:57:06] Speaker B: So am I. [00:57:07] Speaker A: Good. Well, in the meantime, I'm Scott Schiff along with the Atlas Society. Thank you, Rob, again, so much for doing this, everyone who joined us, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next one. [00:57:19] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone. [00:57:20] Speaker A: Take care. Bye.