"They want a massive revival of religious life, a turnaround of fertility trends, a revolution in gender relations. But none of the policy ideas on any side of these various debates are remotely scaled to those objectives."
In the particular case of "a revolution in gender relations," I believe part of the problem is that the Right misunderstands the leftward changes that they see occurring in gender relations. They look at the growing acceptance of e.g. same sex marriage, and think that it happened recently, easily, and effortlessly. How did those devious Lefties pull off this "revolution in gender relations" in just a few decades? Surely they must have used one weird trick -- and if so, then the Right can use the same weird trick to accomplish a counter-revolution in gender relations.
They don't see why their "policy ideas" should have to be "scaled to those objectives," because they keep thinking that the Left pulled off massive changes with tiny policy levers, or maybe no policy levers at all.
And so they flail around, trying to find their one weird trick: maybe banning abortion? all contraception? no-fault divorce? all divorce? allowing prayer in schools? compelling prayer in schools?
But they never consider that the rise of freedom in personal relations has been the work of centuries, starting well before the Protestant reformation and running right through the Declaration of Independence to the defeat of fascism in WWII. It has not been quick and it has not been easy. To that extent, the most honest of the Righties are those who declare outright that they want to return us to the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages weren't really all that prudish. Most common folk barely got married because there weren't always enough priests to go around marrying them; that's why "common law marriage" is a thing. Medieval and Renaissance-era literature is full of bawdy jokes and situations that indicate a pretty libertine sexual life among the common folk; the harangues and tirades from religious officials and nobles that we more closely associate with the time period are actually more indicative of a populace that barely listened to them, not one that obediently lived under the prudish thumb of religiously-motivated sexual oppression.
Most of what we consider "traditional" sexual and marriage morals came out of the Victorian Era, where the rapidly expanding and prospering middle class sought to emulate a set of noble-class moral values that the nobles themselves mostly observed in the breach.
Just on a personal note, the Victorian Era is the same one that gave us gems like "Columbus was a hero who valiantly spoke truth to power", foisting him on my own Italian-American community when there were so many other good role models like Philip Mazzei who were right freaking there for the idolizing. Soooo, maybe we shouldn't base our ideas on those of a bunch of 19th-century WASPs?
I don’t really know how much we should credit the tropes of medieval literature. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a common occurrence and an obsession.
I’m not saying it’s rock-solid. I’m saying it’s more convincing based on the comedic way they were written that these were tales describing common occurrences, rather than being mere farce.
Or a woman hanging her bum out a window so a blindfolded man will kiss her and feel "whiskers". The point is, the writing implies that the audience wouldn't see this as a complete farce, but rather an exaggerated version of commonfolk hijinks.
“Exaggerated” doesn’t imply statistical exaggeration or even severity exaggeration. I can also make up a total caricature that doesn’t exist at all to exaggerate *what I think of whatever I’m exaggerating*.
This comment veers dangerously close to taking “the arch of history bends toward Justice” too literally. Fact is we don’t know how macro trends work and why they seem to “reverse” sometimes or apply in one place and not another. Until merely around two decades ago USA was commonly understood as the exception to the western (read: Western European) secularization trend. The Muslim world has in many ways been undergoing a reverse trend over the past half century. As has Israel. As perhaps also India.
On other fronts too macro trends are hard to predict. The economic consensus of 1945 broke down by 1975 clearing the way for Reagan and thatcher (and yet continental Europe didn’t quite subscribe to this “inevitable” change). Since 2008 the paradigm seems to be in flux once more and yet to stabilize. Is it the leaders who create the trends? Accelerate them? Merely benefit? Difficult questions to answer.
The point is this: please let us who support some of the currently triumphant trends not grow complacent! These victories aren’t just “hard won” they also require serious maintenance and constant vigilance.
“For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”
Let me ask you a simple question - have you seen photos of the streets not just of Kabul or Tehran but Cairo (not to mention Istanbul) say in the 1960s? Do the women there look more or less western, more or less secular than in 2023? With all due respect to NYT understanding of foreign affairs generally and the Muslim world specifically (which I have very little) i believe my eyes more.
I think it's telling you cite pictures from the capitals of these countries as evidence of their relative secularization. Would you consider the street life of Dupont Circle in DC to be reflective of the social views of the average American today? Or the insta feed of an influencer, as cameras then would have been a luxury afforded only to the upper class.
The changes in the muslim world in relative secularization hasn't been a mass phenomenon but an elite one. The first half of the 20th century saw middle eastern elites attempt to emulate western ones as a means of securing legitimacy and to "modernize" their nations to be equal with the West. For a variety of reasons the incentives for this changed and the elites did with it.
I don't know if you pay attention to Adrian Vermeule but he's an excellent example of someone committing this analytical error--he thinks same-sex marriage etc. was basically an elite conspiracy so why can't we do the same to impose Catholic authoritarianism?
Hence what's happened politically pre and post Dobbs. One reason GOP was successful pre Dobbs was most of their moves seemed to be attacking edge cases that made "the people" uncomfortable. It gave the impression that regular people were fully on board with full abortion bans and going back to a pre 1973 status quo when it was more that most people just didn't want to think about it.
Yeah. I suspect this goes back to at least some degree to the “those people” problem. It’s “those people” who have irresponsible sex and then can’t deal with the consequences. Same way it’s “those people” want “hand outs” whereas I just want what’s rightfully owed to me.
My only kind of pushback is I think this thinking is more widespread then just among “non college” voters; especially on abortion. Lots and lots of “country club” types who look down on “irresponsible” lower class ppl. but have a golf buddy doctor who can “take care of” his mistress’s “complication”.
I'm sure the people you're describing exist, but I feel obligated to give voice to the significant number of my pro-life relatives that are acutely aware of their own failings rather than merely projecting them onto others.* They conceive of these restrictions as a way to create disciplinary structures to support their own choices. I recently became more sympathetic to their point of view seeing someone close to me consumed by alcoholism. In a world ruled by prohibition, his life might be much better.
That's not to say I agree with them (I don't, on either abortion or, hypothetically, prohibition) but I think it's politically constructive to recognize their motivations; in my experience they are more common than the types you described, but that may just be a "same world, different planets" thing.
* This includes a pastor that had a shotgun wedding - he would be the obvious butt of jokes if he weren't so clearly humbled by self-awareness.
"They" isn't a single coherent entity IMO. Self described "Conservatives/conservatives" are in an internecine battle now that the historical conservative fusionism is dead. I don't think we'll see much in terms of coherent policy ideas until this resolves.
"The most honest of the Righties are those who declare outright that they want to return us to the Middle Ages" doesn't really add up with talking to average GOP voter or pundit. I think people will figure out the gender/religious business if you can just reduce the scale of the state involved in those things; allowing more private religious schools to operate and curbing unnecessary higher ed subsidy can do plenty of that. David Frum basically got this right in Dead Right (1994), conservatives have to realize the limits of cultural commentary and focus on curtailing the scale of the state in politics.
Bush and Trump's tax cuts have mostly successfully kept the fight on % GDP spending between the 40 yard lines, but the next big fight will be in 2025 as numerous budget items expire and Medicare's cost curve continues to grow. Republicans will have to prepare for that; I agree with Matt that it's not a matter of big ideas per say. On Social Security, allowing younger workers to opt into a lower % payroll tax in exchange for a flat anti-poverty pension is an idea that would actually deliver a smaller SocSec system targeted to those who need it while allowing more people more freedom to invest their money. The Bush 2004 plan was truly the worst of both worlds; enormous scale of money taxed and invested in mandatory stock indexes doesn't curtail government, and indeed CBO found it slightly increased Social Security's size by 2060!
Thankfully since Trump, Republican policy people have increasingly learned to not talk about big ideas as much. That's one merciful development of the Trump years, even if it has clearly been corrosive to have a bad character leading a party. The developments Yglesias wants are probably underway, but I don't think they'll look like the Cost of Thriving Index.
I've said many times that the reason conservatives never seem to exploit various progressive errors and weaknesses to the extent they could is the absence of answers on core policy issues and concerns for regular people. The result is exactly what Matt says, where they can ride economic tides to thermostatic successes or win here and there on backlashes to various progressive cultural insanities but at the end of the day they have no substantive agenda on any issue. Contrast this to the broader center left that probably punches below its weight due to inability to appropriately sideline its weirdos hellbent on making it impossible for the grown ups to problem solve. Though I guess any time I check into any conservative space my take is that they are all weirdos talking about baseless election conspiracies and vaccine hoaxes.
It is slightly worse than this in that the only actual policies that conservatives seen to care about are tax cuts for the rich and deficits, immigration restrictions, and less free trade that push toward a slower growing and more more unequal incomes that probably hurt regular people even more than they harm elites.
I feel like we keep skipping over abortion as an issue conservatives really do seem to care about and unfortunately, are making progress reinstating restrictions across the country.
I think it's clear they care, I don't think we know yet what they actually want now that they're allowed to do something.
They certainly cared about over turning Roe, but I don't think we know what they really care about replacing it with. Either because they're sincere, or just as a knee jerk reaction to the freedom to do so, the elected lawmakers imposed draconian restrictions. But they're experiencing pushback, including from they're own committed voters. Those voters who are very religiously motivated have one view, but it looks like the less religious don't share the same extreme view and may in fact be in favor of something less draconian. What form that will take isn't what proponents of full reproductive rights want, but it may well turn out to be less than the hard core religious want.
I guess I'm picking this up differently. We're downstream of OP stating conservatives "have no substantive agenda on any issue". I just think the 15-20 different state abortions restrictions passed since Row was over-turned indicate there's real action built into this. IMO, this is dystopian: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1139039767/georgia-supreme-court-reinstates-abortion-ban
I dunno, Herschel Walker was caught having paid for multiple abortions, including some quite recently, and I don't recall conservative getting all that worked up about it. If they really did care as much as they claim to, I would have thought they'd trash someone who in their view was a serial accessory to murder, but they just kept right on backing the guy, saying obvious nonsense like "He's a man of God now".
Either conservatives are not as worked up about abortion as they claim, or they don't think murder is actually all that big of a deal. Or maybe it really is just controlling women.
Well ... Walker also lost. He under-performed Kemp by 10%p. Now, he was a uniquely terrible and unqualified candidate but his abortion history played a role.
I think that in an important sense conservative intellectuals / media voices / shitposters and voters don't care *that* much about tax cuts. They are just attached to the Republican Party, which is a machine designed to cut taxes and deregulate.
You can say that their revealed preference is for tax cuts & that isn't wrong, but the disconnect between what they convince themselves they care about and what they actually do is wide.
Maybe they do care that much, they just don’t get that much of the benefit (unless they’re in a high income group)? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone complain about a tax cut (aside from progressives).
True, but as Matt says the regulatory state is extremely complex and you need some legit policy chops to do deregulation well. GOP deregulation seems to mostly revolve around targeting regulatory rollbacks to their biggest donors and damning the torpedoes about outcomes.
Reducing regulation in the banking sector is kinda-sorta economic policy, but a lot of the thinking behind it undoubtedly came from GOP-friendly bank lobbyists looking for a payday.
Mostly agree, but I'd push back on the idea that GOP actually are about deficits. I actually think this canard was probably untrue as early as GHWB (see backlash to his pretty reasonable attempt to deal with budget deficits and the debt), but became extremely hard to square post Trump. One of the reasons that Obama pivoted kind of disterously in 2011 to deficit reduction is too many mainstream pundits took it at face value that Tea Party activists ad politicians actually had intellectually sincere beliefs regarding deficits.
I actually read this as being a statement that the R's are pro-deficit, in the sense that the Republican playbook is pretty clearly "cut taxes, do nothing to increase revenue or (at least nontrivially) cut spending and quite possibly increase spending, let the Democrats handle the deficit and take the heat when they're in power."
That may not have been the intent, but it seems like a plausible interpretation (and consistent with your view).
I think some do care about deficits, but it’s another example of the topic of the post. The principle might be there, but if you ask them how they’d balance the budget, there are no serious answers to be had.
Partially agree. I’m more cynical maybe because of everything that happened pre and post 2011. Also was working for DNC in 2009 doing field work for ACA. Over and over again listened to people tell me ACA was out of control spending. Literally spewing back stuff I saw O’Reilly or Hannity talk about. And then watched those same people be die hard Trump supporters.
My point is I probably have an even more cynical view of this stuff than even other Democratic voters.
I don't think you can include anti-free trade as part of that. Republicans were more free trade than Democrats within the last 10 years and it's not clear how much Republican enthusiasm for protectionism will survive Trump's eventual demise. I'd expect a reversion to mean under the influence of large donors absent Trump.
I don't see how you figure immigration restrictions and less free trade push toward more unequal outcomes. It seems to me very nearly the opposite is true. Both liberalized trade and lax immigration tend to increase inequality at least in recent experience.
The tax cuts part of you comment makes better sense to me however.
In a way, this mindlessness on the right and the rearguard struggle to keep the leftist weirdos in check by the center-left is part of why I'm actually kind of dreading a second Biden term, despite my devoutly wishing for it.
I assume the entirety of the Biden message will be: "the economy is great and let's keep it going! [hoping this is true] and Trump back in power will destroy our democracy and hurt women and minorities." A good enough campaign message, but what would be the program (or "mandate" though Presidents really never have those) that Biden and the Democrats would pursue? I'm guessing that it will be paltry no matter how long the program part of the party platform will be.
Most second terms are dreary without much getting done. Reagan, with bipartisan immigration and tax reform, is a notable exception, which does kind of recommend the benefits of having a President with increasing dementia. But a President in his mid-80s presiding over a period of stasis, inertia, and meaningless bickering in Congress? Yikes.
I wouldn’t count on the gratitude of newly naturalized citizens to vote D, they will bring the whole of their experience to their decision and Democrats should be prepared to persuade them (which should
The problem is the map. If West Virginia is gone, Democrats don't get to 51, full stop. There's a decent chance Democrats keep the presidency and win back the House but lose the Senate all at once
Genuine question - do you think this is distinctly a US conservative problem, and conservative politicians / thought leaders in other countries have been able to do better on putting forward policy changes? Or is it global?
I think it is somewhat uniquely challenged in the US by the two party system that for a really long time and still on paper pairs laissez-faire economics with social conservatism. It results in a party that desperately wants to govern to particular social ends but at the same time has no idea how to do it and operates with an inherent skepticism towards the state. I'm not a conservative though, so just my take from the outside.
Yeah, though the Tories here in the UK have had exactly the same problem. They coasted for a while on “Brexit means Brexit!” without any idea how to actually leave the EU without destroying the economy or resolve the Irish border, but now that that’s mostly been cobbled together, they’re out of ideas except trawling up culture war nonsense.
Yeah that’s my sense - I also think most of them are actually constrained by national norms into being less “conservative” (eg you don’t see many of them trying to dismantle socialized medicine or similar programs).
They're much less likely to come from the liberal political tradition (which both US parties come from) and so tend to be much more comfortable with using the state as a solution to problems and much less hostile to tax-and-spend.
Within the liberal tradition, tax-and-spend is very much a left-wing position, but it's not if you don't come from liberalism. National conservatism (by which I mean something like Gaullism, or pre-Thatcher British Conservativism, or the Spanish PP) identifies with the state as the representative of the national tradition, and tends toward paternalism, which brings support for the welfare state. Religious roots for a right-wing position (Christian democracy, for instance, like in Germany) are different again, and may be hostile to government spending, preferring the money spent on social programs to go through the church, but they certainly don't have the same kind of basic discomfort with taxation (or tithes) that right-liberals do.
I wish I could like this essay 100 times, not only for the rebuke of conservatism but mainly for the whole "details matter" theme. I'd go a little further as you do at the beginning of the essay and say that this is maybe not a liberal/conservative thing but an "elite" thing in general, which is part of the general complaint that too many Ivy+ students end up in McKinsey-type firms and come away with an appreciation for the big picture and not enough for consequences of the implementation. On the political spectrum, we may see it more in conservatism since a lot of these think tanks are funded by billionaires with very specific thoughts about how the world should work and push for research demonstrating it (and which may be part of the reason it's an increasing problem with liberalism as well, though as you state, not nearly to the same extent).
But the big picture vs. details issue seems to plague a lot of business culture; I see this where I work (pharma), where big picture-types get promoted up the chain and implement sweeping ideas without sweating the details of how to actually do it. Or, they have this management-style attitude of "let a hundred flowers bloom" and trust their subordinates to "figure it out" without giving much guidance.
If I may needle you a little bit: this is part of my objection to a lot of your science pieces! It's fine to say "let's do challenge trials" or "pharma should be funded by prizes and not through patent protections" but without a lot of details, these sorts of proposals are unworkable.
I agree with 95% of this - but as someone who works for a top consulting firm I will note that a lot of the work we do actually is implementation of the strategies we devise. The perception that we just drop a 200 page slide deck on someone’s desk and say “good luck, see ya later” isn’t reality.
Agreed. Every consultant I've worked with has always been eager to continue cashing checks to assist with "implementation" for as long as it takes. ;-)
I knew that comment would rankle some consultants. :) I'll take what you say at face value and defer to the fact that since you work in that industry, you'd know it better.
I'd counter with this: the ideas I've seen presented are either (a) what management was already planning to do, but under the guise of "consultant recommendation" to give them cover (frequently layoffs or offshoring, though not always), or (b) "one weird trick" type solutions that never actually solve the problem but are someone's pet idea. Having said that, I'll note that I've never seen a lot of the consultant proposals and am merely getting a filtered message, so it's possible and/or likely that management ignores the implementation recommendations and is just cherry picking what they like. So I suppose my larger objection is not to consulting per se, but to business culture.
Totally understand, and I’m definitely not an apologist for business culture! Many of my clients have huge knowledge / thinking gaps, and it’s kind of amazing they’re running any sort of company at all. We often manage to convince them not to do something that would have been even worse than what they ultimate decide to do.
This is completely correct. In my experience consultants almost never are onboard to provide actual ideas or content- it's to provide pretext/scapegoats to allow leadership to make changes and resolve issues that the leadership already perceives but can't move on for one reason or another (e.g., they'd be unpopular, or someone powerful on the inside hates it).
Interesting. I can only speak to the mid-2010s period but it felt like most of BCG engagements were handed off to Deloitte for the implementation work. The bill rates just couldn't support it. The exceptions were the mega mergers (e.g., BCG ran the United and Continental EPMO or PMI Office - I can't remember what they called it). If that's changed (i.e., maybe McKinsey Implementation really got off the ground) -- very interesting, and perhaps a little sad.
It depends on what type of implementations - agree we hand over the big tech implementations (that’s kind of Accenture’s world) and similar things where it’s more rote work.
But things like PMO (even for smaller mergers or internal transformations), organizational design, sales force incentives, pricing, supplier negotiations, etc — where there is problem solving and troubleshooting to be done during implementation — are very much in our wheelhouse to see through.
I think Spain was just thrown out as an example of hiring people from other countries who are good at transit and having them do that here (instead of hiring Americans who seem to be bad at it, or are bad at hiring the Americans who are good at it).
My org had a high level manager push a change initiative. They tagged it with a cool title and tapped a butch of the cool kids on the shoulder and had them participate in a very expensive and time consuming process to make two organizational changes. Many, many meetings and off-site training sessions were done. Neither change proposed took root. From what I can tell the only benefit was those who participated got to network and enhance their organizational status (very non-inclusive). While I do believe we should always try to be a little better the change as a culture thing is a bit of a boondoggle.
Oh, that manager got promoted to the big seat and acts like the whole thing was a success. No one questions the actual outcomes...at least not openly.
On challenge trials, in the specific context of SARS-CoV-2 there was an urgent need to try things on a much quicker basis to stem the damage. That could be the case again for a future pathogen that triggers a massive pandemic, and perhaps not so much for pathogens that aren't as immediately threatening.
Even accepting this statement as fact (which I don't, given that the COVID vaccines that were developed first were done so a full three years faster than any other vaccine previously had been, and that manufacturing constraints were the limiting part of the process in late 2020/early 2021 and not approvals): how specifically, would a challenge trial be designed? This is what I mean by details matter, and what I said at the time when MY was arguing for it in the summer of 2020. You had a disease with a lot of unknowns, reports of "young, otherwise healthy" people being unable to function for months after having acute symptoms, and well over 100 vaccine programs ongoing (most of which turned out to be duds). So how do you design a challenge trial that mitigates potential harm against volunteers, manages to have enough testing to provide enough statistical power for both safety and efficacy, and do it faster than we did it in the real world?
Definitely true in technology too...by and large the people who get promoted are those that weave a great story, and can tell it in front of a room full of people. The skill they’re best at is not making great decisions, being a great administrator or a leaving now inspiring leader...it’s simply ‘managing up’
Once in a blue moon the EVP/C-level sniffs out the bullshit being dished by the VP/SrDir level, but 95% of the time they can’t be bothered to pay attention.
Regarding the science pieces, are these proposals unworkable or just untested? The two examples you cite seem like areas where we could just do some A/B tests for a while and compare the results of new and traditional approaches. What am I missing?
Well, prizes for pharma would require legislation to completely overhaul the current patent system, so it's not something you can test.
I mentioned this all in my comment to City of Trees, but briefly: how do you design a challenge trial that goes faster than current drug development, provides adequate protection for your volunteers, and has enough statistical power for both safety and efficacy? Not saying it's impossible, but the onus is on those advocating for it to design a trial accordingly.
The places which are prepared to tolerate the least capable 20-30% starving in the street in their old age are not, in the main, good places to live for all but a few of the remaining 70-80%.
I don’t think it’s possible to craft a society which actually has a state capable enough to provide the common defense, public health, regulation of private markets, fair-handed rule of law, public safety, etc… and not also have a fairly robust social safety net come along for the ride.
I follow, I am agreeing with you, that in principle it may be possible to have a capable state that doesn’t exercise any sort of paternalism, but in practice it seems impossible.
Amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics.
I lived through the Brexit madness, where moron politicians just knew that Brexit was a good idea but had no idea why, or what they wanted from it. The right - and I would say the US right is even worse - just doesn't seem to want to think about what they want and how to achieve it. They just incoherently babble about stuff they don't like or get distracted by conspiracy theories. This is not going to turn around soon.
Wasn't Brexit basically about wanting border control both internal and external to the bloc that membership in the EU was not going to afford Britain? It seems like for all its outcomes it was a reasonable policy attempt at implementing that particular desire -- at a minimum, remaining *in* the EU was tantamount to a legal commitment *not* to have said border control.
Well, sort of. It seems that Brexit was about trying to shed the perceived negatives of EU membership, without sacrificing the benefits, and that was always going to lead to an insane outcome. The UK was never going to keep their Spanish holidays and open capital flows, while keeping out the Polish plumbers.
This is pretty fair. Brexit seems like madness to me but I don’t think you can say it wasn’t focused on achieving a real policy goal of restricting immigration flows from Europe.
The larger problem here is that the conservative leadership in the west reacts to their base like paparazzi does to culture issues. It's all just red meat politics made for an era of social media, serious people got run out of the party years ago. Look at the healthcare proposal that the GOP put up when trying to get rid of Obamacare unsuccessfully, it was something that a college freshman could draft up. Now without even those people around, the conservative policy world is nothing more than messaging bills and disasters that get overturned at the next opportunity
The last time America became a more religious society with higher marriage and fertility rates was the baby boom. Before the late 1940s, a significant portion of working class men never married and only a minority of families regularly attended church.
The causes of this conservative policy win were mainly serendipitous. World War Two destroyed the infrastructure of our major industrial competitors, left American industry dominant, forced workers to save at artificially high rates for a few years and let American workers achieve higher wages than any of their predecessors anywhere. Women generally needed to marry to enjoy these wage gains, which went mainly to men. Many working class men were eager to lean into middle class forms of respectability like marriage and church going. Of course a third of all 1950s brides were pregnant on their wedding day, unplanned pregnancies were a huge spur to marriage and family formation.
If you wanted to re-engineer the 1950s, you would subsidize salaries in male-dominated industries and then use the tax code to encourage men to spend this money on wives and children. Coincidentally, this is basically what the Iraq war did-- it created hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs that went overwhelmingly to men, many of which were used to support traditional families. The military is possibly the best microcosm of the 1950s we have left.
Some conservatives seem to want to literally reengineer the 50s, but I think the rest of us need to start thinking about how to come up with new approaches to some of the same goals, like a birth rate at or near replacement levels. My best bets are universal parental leave and cheaper childcare.
The dynamic where women don't want to marry down and men don't seem to care enough about impressing women is a little harder. I'm not sure how to get significantly more men into impressive jobs or how to get women to care less about their partner's status.
We have parental leave and cheaper child care in many countries throughout the world and their birthrates are steadily trending down.
I suspect that cheap, effective, widely-available contraception is the irreversible cause of declines in fertility rates. Across the world, if young people don't have to have children, they won't.
Yes, the trend is secularly down, and studies so far on the impact of family friendly policies show mixed results. I think they would still be worth trying in the US in particular since we're outliers on the downside in terms of leave and cost of childcare.
The truth is, I'm all for trying pro-natalist policies that show any promise at all, and I think we can also stop digging the hole we're in, by at least removing barriers (in the tax code, with car seat regulations, etc.) But I am deeply pessimistic about our ability to move the needle with social policy. My best hope is in enhanced reproductive longevity (combined with some improved individual longevity), since that seems compatible with human psychology, at least. But even that's pretty far-fetched and might just lead to more time on the hedonic treadmill.
In the bad old days, women married mediocre men because the alternative was penury. Being a spinster was a privilege of a well bred woman whose father (or brothers) could support her. Everyone else had to either find a man or go into domestic service.
Why should women marry mediocre men now that they don’t need to?
Specifically, my hypothesis is that there are men out there who would make good partners overall, but who don’t scan as appealing choices due to things like education and profession. The idea is that some of these women and men would be happier and more fulfilled getting married and having kids, but that they’re kind of stuck in a single equilibrium currently. But I’m just speculating.
This isn’t the issue. The issue is that when women get financial independence (either from government assistance, or her own career), they find their partners frustrating enough that they prefer to be single.
It speaks to the male bias in Matt’s comments section that this type of female behavior is attributed to “hypergamy.” Women who get divorced still see their standard of living drop. They have children, which will make it more difficult to find another partner. There is, believe it or, more to it than being “impressive.” The number one reason cited in divorces is infidelity. This strongly suggests that women have always cared a lot about male fidelity, but could not prioritize this because they couldn’t support themselves otherwise.
Men also tend to conflate the drop in marriage rates with their own difficulties convincing women to have sex. But of course, these aren’t the same thing. If a man ultimately wants to get married, he can’t necessarily find a girlfriend and then wait for her to drag him into a commitment.
Being the 28-year-old third wife of the executive, with 2 kids, might be a great gig. Being the 35-year-old divorcee of the executive with 2 kids and no job, less so. This polygamy idea would immiserate a lot of women after they were discarded.
the backstop for women who are discarded is divorce law. that is true whether the man had one wife or four. i will not defend islamic divorce law, i’d welcome a quasi feminist alternative that empowered subsequent wives of polygamists in a fair and proportional way
This feels like what Matt is talking about—a simplistic proposal (for polygamy in this case) that is not yet sufficiently worked out. You can postulate some as-yet-unspecified divorce law, but actual existing divorce law leaves women worse off and men better off.
respectfully, i think the comments sections are the place for half baked ideas. the only thing im pretty sure about is that polygamy would increase fertility.
the fact that many cultures practice polygamy makes it, at a minimum, worthy of serious study. i don’t have much hard data, but would appreciate links
If you actually want to increase the birth rate, then surely the obvious thing to do is to shift the bias in income more towards women. If women earn significantly more than men, then they can afford to have children without having to worry about whether the father will stay and support those children.
The really obvious approach is to fill the C-suite with 40-year old women with four kids each.
> If women earn significantly more than men, then they can afford to have children
This implies an assumption that women all very much want to have children, but financial health is holding them back and preventing them.
I would vehemently reject this premise, and propose the opposite. Increased wealth makes it *less* likely to have kids, not more. It turns out that having kids, while it brings benefits, is actually kind of a huge pain in the ass, and it's more fun to vacation in Tahiti instead.
Motherhood is difficult, biologically, financially, emotionally, etc. And I think it has gotten worse over time. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like my mother, who let us roam the streets most days and occasionally stuck her head out the door and yelled for us to come home for dinner/bed/etc, and who never had to walk me to the bus or pick me up from it, was a LOT less stressed than a typical mother today, who walks her kids *everywhere*, never allows them any unsupervised time, breastfeeds much longer, etc etc.
I don't necessarily want to go back to the days when our parents had us riding in the back of the pickup truck, and would occasionally check and see if we were all still there by braking hard and counting the thumps, but I do think we should find ways to dial the stress of parenthood WAY back from where it is now.
Women in polygamous marriages are generally miserable. They appreciate help with the childcare, but they are consumed with jealousy. And ironically enough, many of them contribute financially, often by being on welfare, since they qualify as single mothers.
This is just one more extremely male idea based on male sexual preferences with basically no understanding of what women want, or how their choices have been constrained in the past. Polygamy is only practiced in societies where women are completely subordinated to men. And of course, it leaves a lot of men with no way to form their own families.
I could imagine a drive to "legalize polygamy" would be turned by some on the new-right into yet another part of the elite class-warfare "war on men!!"--they'd argue the nefarious elite are only doing this so that the elite men could have multiple wives and more children while taking away reproductive partners from less-highly-educated men.
In re your last sentence, it's probably worth noting that polygamy is not usually practiced even in countries where it's legal (see especially the Arab states of the Mediterranean basin) and there are plenty of countries that historically had high TFRs despite polygamy being illegal in them.
the biggest determinant of polygamy is age structure. there is lots of polygamy in botswana because population is growing, so the ratio between 20 year old women and 40 year old men is large and there aren’t enough plausible husbands for 20-year old botswanan women.
polygamy is much less common in iran, which has an age distribution similar to Greece or Turkey. unless there is a large disparity between. the number of nubile women and middle aged men, only elites get multiple wives
Re: your second paragraph— I actually think that a lot of the issue is that the lowest-earning men also don’t tend to bring much to the table as partners in household management or child-rearing. If you restrict to guys who are conscientious, kind, and emotionally stable, income gaps don’t seem to be as much of a big deal. (Marriages where the wife is a nurse and the husband is a less educated and somewhat lower-earning cop or tradesman seem pretty common, as are marriages with a husband who’s a teacher, academic, artist, or civil servant with a wife who’s a doctor, lawyer, or other higher-earning professional.)
Actually, I've observed some young women (mid-to-late 20's) who -- in my opinion -- married "down", and it turned out fine because the guy had less employment and was able to stay home and help with kids. That ended up being a critical win-win for the couple: she was rising in her organization but still wasn't making enough to cover daycare, and his presence at home helped them bridge that gap.
Yeah, it's certainly not a magic wand. Having said that, I do think the cost and sheer effort involved in parenting result in people having less kids than they would otherwise, so I am still optimistic that those policies would have some positive effect. I wonder if economists have found any good natural experiments with the implementation of policies like these that could shed more light on the actual effect.
One overlooked driver of 1950s social conservatism is the gender ratio. We lost hundreds of thousands of men in WW2, enough to make men slightly more "in-demand" afterwards, which let men have more influence than normal times on dating and relationship patterns. (My guess is based on Jon Birger's Date-onomics, which I found compelling.)
I think that the “pay attention to international comparisons and recognize when you’re dealing with a long-term global trend” point is a really good one which deserves more exploration in future columns.
With respect to some of the specific issues we’re discussing here, I think that American and European conservatives could learn a lot by noticing that in the developed countries where the state, public discourse, and social norms are most explicitly pro-patriarchy and anti-feminist (Japan, South Korea, parts of Eastern Europe, Italy), women have mostly responded by opting out of marriage and childbearing at higher rates than their counterparts in more feminist countries.
A simple model that fits this data is that marriage and child rearing are disproportionately likely to be a raw deal for women, women with decent jobs (both a cause and side effect of economic development) have a strong BATNA and can choose to opt out, and, at the societal level, the cluster of political changes and social norm shifts that fall under the “feminist” label are basically ways to sweeten the deal so that getting married and having kids are still at least sort of attractive.
I think this is correct but the logic of the position relies on women being able to find substantial income outside the home. It's probably true that you would encourage both marriage and childbirth if you made it difficult for unmarried women to support themselves by working and for married mothers to work outside the home. Obviously these are not good policy ideas.
If your rich country kicks half of the adult population out of its formal workforce, it will stop being a rich country pretty quickly. I imagine that some rich-country social conservatives have considered walking down the Taliban path, but it seems to be a fringe position even on the far right.
I do think the “anti-woke” strand has a relatively concrete policy agenda: establish and enforce a “colorblindness” standard of civil rights, and that “disparate impact” is not sufficient evidence of discrimination. Those would be pretty big changes.
Implementing the first part has not been easy. In California we passed a proposition banning affirmative action in the UCs and Cal States, but no one thinks that's actually been done. So the policy details still matter.
“But I think it’s turned out over the past several generations that while standing athwart history yelling “stop!” might be a good election strategy and occasionally block some bad ideas, it cannot reverse the big underlying trends.”
I think this is exactly right. As someone who has worked in conservative policy circles, this recognition is what is driving the attraction to the different varieties of post-liberalism, including the more extreme anti-democratic varieties.
The section on marriage today, showing skepticism that promoting it can be something the government can pull off as the article looks at the failures the Bush administration had in that regard, feels like a bit of turnaround from Friday's mailbag [https://www.slowboring.com/p/dog-days-of-mailbag-857], where Matt was thinking "we should try to nudge adults in committed romantic relationships to get married", and proposed a Pigouvian tax on lavish weddings that I thought was unworkable.
The "two-parent families improve children's life chances" thing seems like a good example of why correlation doesn't prove causation.
As far as I know, nobody's disproved the null hypothesis, which is "Having parents who stay married doesn't make you better off. What's being observed is a set of genetic traits that predispose some people to be more successful than others at maintaining romantic relationships *and* at completing many years of schooling, obtaining highly paid jobs, et cetera "
(I don't necessarily think this is all about genetic variations in intelligence, although those probably do matter. There are other factors like time preference and conscientiousness that smart people can often be bad at.)
Am I wrong about this? Is there social science research that's succeeded in picking out this possibility and refuting it?
These look potentially persuasive, but I can see issues with the study designs. (Maybe men who expect to cheat on their wives choose professions where they can meet more women?)
I still think the ideal control group might be people who had one parent die in early childhood.
To me, Occam's Razor screams there's virtually no chance your (complex) hypothesis is correct. But admittedly, different people have different intuition on these sorts of things.
But in any event, even if the "two-parent advantage" thing were substantially driven by genes, it would still be the case that the "good DNA" humans who bring children into the world after coupling up with a spouse would still be providing a more optimal situation for their offspring than the "good DNA" humans who eschew marriage.
I don't think it's likely to be correct either. That's not what a null hypothesis is for.
Look at it this way. An argument like "Children of single parents are more likely to have problems in adulthood, therefore children are harmed when their parents choose not to stay together" is similar to "Children from wealthy families are more likely to be admitted to Ivy League colleges, therefore the US educational system is unfair".
Divorce probably is somewhat harmful to kids and the US school system probably is somewhat unfair. But unless you know how large a role inherited traits play in these outcomes, there's no way to know how much harm/unfairness is actually occurring.
The only justification for ignoring genetic factors in either case would be if you've demonstrated that they play no role at all. That hasn't been done yet and it seems very unlikely a priori, but the debate still proceeds as if those factors were irrelevant.
"I don't think it's likely to be correct either. That's not what a null hypothesis is for."
Actually, if you read Fisher, that is *precisely* what a null hypothesis is for. (I recognize that formulating null hypotheses in this way is no longer standard in the social sciences, but we shouldn't encourage the misuse of statistics.)
I'm probably not phrasing it well. Maybe a better way to say it would be this:
The available evidence is consistent with a causal effect of zero. That doesn't mean it's likely to be zero, but it does mean we don't know whether the actual magnitude of the effect is large or small. And if we don't know that, we don't know what policy levers we should be looking at.
If the direct harm caused by single parenthood is large (the standard conservative view), that's a reason for the government to discourage divorce and births out of wedlock. If the direct harm is small but the indirect harm from higher child poverty rates among single-parent families is large (the standard progressive view), then that approach is mostly pointless and we should focus on things like creating a cash child benefit.
I lean towards the second view but I'll admit that a third view is also pretty plausible (note that this is *not* the null hypothesis). It may be that single parenting per se is slightly harmful to kids and that child poverty caused by single parenthood is somewhat more harmful, but that most of the disparity in children's life outcomes isn't caused by either factor. It may just be a correlation with a common set of heritable causes.
As Matt has pointed out, there's a lot of evidence that programs which alleviate child poverty, such as food stamps, cause children to be more successful in adulthood. That's great and it's a strong argument for expanding that type of assistance.
But I don't think anyone is claiming that kids whose families get food stamps will be as successful, on average, as kids whose families weren't poor enough to qualify for food stamps. Unless you disbelieve completely in genetic factors, you shouldn't expect that.
As with any IV analysis these won't tell you the average impact of divorce, just the effect related to the instrumental variable. This probably matters for both papers but I think it's particularly noteworthy for the one about more women in the workplace, which is going to be a distinct causal pathway for divorce relative to (say) severe interpersonal problems between the couple.
I think it is confusing cause and effect. People who have their priorities in order and understand the long term benefits tend to get married, have kids in wedlock, etc. But getting a bunch of people who for whatever reason don't have their lives in order to get married is not going to suddenly fix their priorities.
At the same time, "predisposition to have one's priorities in order" doesn't really explain the decline in marriage and childbearing within wedlock over the past 80 years. The base assumption has to be that such predispositions are transmitted pretty faithfully across generations.
I think ultimately "cause and effect" is the wrong mode of analysis. When there's evidence on either side of the arrow of causality, it's kind of wierd to decide that you HAVE to pick one side to just plain ignore.
No, you recognize that the analysis is actually one of "virtuous vs. vicious cycles". And the two clearest trends that have turned "vicious" in the past 80 years WRT marriage and childbearing are (1) the secularization of society (with all its attendant sub-trends), and (2) the ramping up of the supply-side/cost-disease crisis [note: I'm not making any value judgments here about whether EG secularization is "vicious", I'm just saying that from the perspective of marriage, secularization has fueled a cycle of decline which we canonically name "vicious"].
The first one can't be reversed on any meaningful time scale and with any meaningful fidelity by politics alone; the second can be reversed, but basically means NatCons/FreeCons/whoever-is-doing-this-on-the-right have to reverse-engineer supply-side progressivism all by their lonesome and without the progressive values that underpinned that whole project. Best of luck to them, but these sorts of astroturfing efforts tend to fail.
Hard to disagree with you but I have to note that this would seem to be equally vexxing to the progressive project of uplifting the economically downtrodden, including perfunctory nod to those demographics most impacted. Right now we operate as though secularization liberals have (rightly IMO) championed doesn't necessitate this trade off. However, and without endorsing all manner of cranky and reactionary conservative critiques of womens equality, modernity, sexual freedom etc. I think we as the broader left may need to ask the uncomfortable question: what if it does?
Indeed. The progressive project is quite a mess in that regard. While it has an *answer* to the "race-class narrative", an answer I nominally agree with, I don't think it's ever succeeded in showing that that particular answer can reliably win elections and societies at large. Which leads me to question how complete the answer truly is.
There's a philosophical assumption built in here which is that it's always better (at least for populations in the millions) to have less people at a higher standard of living than more people at a lower standard/adding extra people with lives worth living to the world is not good in itself. This is intuitive to a lot of people*, but some of the leading moral philosophers in the English-speaking world have offered strong arguments against it: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0060/pdf/Climate%20change%20and%20population%20ethics.pdf I *suspect* it's still the majority view, but hard to tell.
I think your view is *probably* still the majority view amongst ethicists, but I've never seen any data. Of course, maybe it's reasonable to say "who cares what professional philosophers think", but it's not clear the public agrees with you either: http://files.luciuscaviola.com/Caviola-et-al_2022_Population-ethical-intuitions.pdf
Regardless of what the philosophers think, there's also the sheer practicality to contend with. An overwhelming majority of the 8B+ humans alive today believe on some level that they have a fundamental right to live and reproduce as they see fit.
Just because a bunch of pinheaded Western intellectuals come up with a bit of fancy rationalization for why (THIS time) it's not actually imperialist (anymore) for them to make prescriptions about what non-Western populations do with their natural rights, doesn't mean those non-Western have any obligation nor propensity to agree with them. Population dynamics are going to forge ahead regardless of the whatever the latest fashion is in post-Malthusian thought.
I agree with this, although there probably is some financial benefit to the familes/kids of “forcing” marriage (eg don’t need to spend twice as much on rent so there is more money to spend on nutrition, after school activities, etc that should lead to better outcomes for kids).
But we have moved away from the idea that a decision (have a baby) has consequences (get married to someone less-than-perfect, maybe sacrifice some personal happiness & freedom). So we are left with the decision, no consequences and kids who are worse off. But at least the unmarried parent isn't inconvenienced by societal expectations! yay!
I think this is overly simplistic. The norm that if you get pregnant (or get someone pregnant), you must get married, depended on the norm against premarital sex. And the norm against premarital sex depended on the absence of widespread reliable contraception. And that genie is out of the bottle.
There are other dynamics too. Stigma around out-of-wedlock birth affects women most harshly since pregnancy after a certain point is publicly manifest and in the vast majority of cases the mother is the custodial parent. This poses obvious fairness issues since in many (most?) cases it's the man who is less committed. (As a practical matter, conservatives are less enthusiastic about stigmatizing out-of-wedlock birth these days since they realize that it encourages abortion.) Even if she does get married it's not a guarantee of two-parent childrearing, given divorce, and even if we made divorce laws stricter it wouldn't stop marital separation or other kinds of lack of commitment within the framework of a de jure marriage. This system was never especially invested in the well-being of women but it's particularly poorly suited for a world where mothers have educational and employment aspirations that may not be compatible with the fathers'.
Interestingly, the concept of what is best for the child didn't enter into your comment.
Yes, there are situations where the marriage would be bad -- abusive, violent, etc. But there are many more where the marriage is just less-than-ideal. The adults might not be as happy as possible, but providing the two-parent household is chosen since it is better for the child.
I would rather invest in child well-being with generous child-centered transfer programs, which unlike norms around marriage really are directly a public policy choice, and which have pretty good evidence for efficacy at improving outcomes. A lot less costly to other goals too than forcing marriage where it will often be inappropriate.
I am also unpersuaded that any on-the-table policy option today in this area to restigmatize single parenting would actually improve child outcomes. Reducing transfer payments to single mothers would probably have the opposite effect. Even politically implausible restrictions on divorce availability probably wouldn't fundamentally change the picture (it doesn't stop someone from leaving or even from forming a new family, or of course from not getting married in the first place). I suppose you could try to reinvigorate fornication and adultery laws, or to ban contraception, but good luck with that.
It seems to me there are only two real paths to turn that around. The first is inverting the Will & Grace hypothesis, ie using soft power to 'glamorize' female subservience, so tradwives on social media etc. The legislative path is banning abortion and potentially no-fault divorce as well. And the former of those is a mainstream Republican position, which is proving unpopular, while the latter looks a political non-starter (though I've seen some fringe types advocating for it). But you can of course advocate for those paths, it's just that those policy options seem completely at odds with the 'encouraging thriving' framework. Not many people are going to perceive being stuck in a marriage they hate as 'thriving'.
I mean, beyond the logistical problems of figuring out how to sustain societies with ~1.7 TFRs, I don't see anything more normatively right about that than the previous system of "you get one shot at marriage and then kids within wedlock, and if you mess up at any step along the way, you get shunned".
Not to mention, (1) while that IS considered to be what passes for "traditional morals", it wasn't even all that common among the common folk throughout European history -- we're really just reverting to the mean -- and (2) that system kind of only worked while there were a massive global reconstruction and a massive baby boom fueling a golden economic age.
I did a bit of digging on that, and as best I can tell, your numbers are correct but incomplete. In 1980, about 18% of children were born to unmarried women. That then rose doubled by the mid 90s and trended upward to 40% by 2010 around where it has hovered ever since.
4 out of 10 kids are born to unmarried women in the US. That seems very high.
How much of that is delaying marriage because of the reduction in the expectation that the parents will pay for marriage and the increase in the cost of marriage?
If, say, about half of those parents intend to eventually marry, then it would be much less concerning.
Sure, some of them wouldn't actually marry: but how much better is that than those couples divorcing after a few years?
Obviously, it's harder to get these figures, and there's a delay, but what percentage have two living married parents on their 18th birthday? I get the impression that delaying marriage tends to mean less likelihood of divorce.
I think the point that the marriages that policy (any policy) can affect are the marginal marriages. You're not getting great marriages, and the likelihood is that you're getting below average marriages.
This is always the bit that gets to me: is a below-average marriage better than being single? I mean, maybe it is, but you can't compare averages as the married/unmarried groups are self-selecting.
Probably so. And in fairness it probably did 'work' to some degree when you had a combination of overwhelming social pressure and lots of decent enough jobs down at the plant pulling a lever all day. But neither of those things are coming back.
Oh gosh. This is so wrong, man. Read history please. Historically just about everyone had “fear of god” and on average anti social and criminal behaviors were WAY worse. As for Kiryas Yoel. Don’t buy the BS. It’s not high religiosity, it’s a cult. Plenty of bad stuff happening but they won’t complain to the police. Maybe their streets look fine but what’s going on behind doors? Listen to some interviews with people who got out of these communities.
I think the teaching obedience to a creed and the 70% below poverty rate in Kiryas Joel are causally connected. The people there can do what they want, but why would we think it in the best interests of children to see them consigned to a group that will keep them mired in poverty, no matter how well behaved?
It's their right to live the way they want, but I don't find it admirable.
It's probably all of those. I mentioned the likely genetic component because to whatever extent it's the cause of the correlation, to that extent single parenthood isn't causing worse outcomes for kids.
If (hypothetically) it were 100 percent a matter of genetics, then growing up with a single parent would have zero negative effect on your future success. I don't think that's likely but I do think it's likely that the genetic component is substantial, and that the negative impact of single parenthood is a lot smaller than everyone in this debate is assuming.
I still don't see why genetics is special? Wouldn't "cultural traits" operate in the same way? Or "traits you learned from your own parents" if that makes my meaning clearer?
I also don't see why genetics would be a particularly likely suspect here when it's so abundantly clear that culture, environment, societal forces and learned behavior are all so clearly and enormously powerful, but links to genetics have to be tenuously hypothesized?
I have a page on immigrant statistics and one of the variables you can select from the dropdown is marriage rates. Would you hypothesize that people from India and the Arab world share a "marriage gene"? I would guess culture is the easier explanation.
Well, yes. In cultures where divorce and single parenthood are very rare, you'll still see some kids doing better than others but the fact that their parents stayed together won't distinguish them from the kids who did less well.
My point was that *if* there's such a thing as "genetic predisposition to having your shit together, across multiple domains", it will correlate with having two married parents in cultures like the US, where divorce and single parenthood aren't strongly stigmatized. The fact that it won't have that correlation in more traditional cultures doesn't demonstrate that no such genetic factor exists.
I wasn't arguing in favor of the null hypothesis, just to be clear. My point was that it doesn't seem to have been conclusively rejected. (David Shor linked to a couple of studies suggesting that single parenthood does have an independent negative effect, but it would be good to have more data.)
If you think there is a significant genetic component, then do you think we'll be able to genetically modify away most of this negative behavior at some point?
I imagine that inherited genetic or cultural characteristics explain a decent chunk of the “married parents” bonus, but the main alternative mechanism of action— two-parent families have more resources to dedicate to their children— seems to have major benefits when states provide it through other delivery mechanisms like child allowances.
Absolutely true— and the fact that providing even part of that package has significant benefits suggests that the broader “resources” explanation has some heft.
I don’t know if anything that addresses that question, but you could get a guess at it by looking at education rates and marriage... and look, that favors your hypothesis!
Maybe a natural experiment would be to look at the educational achievement and adult earnings of kids born to married parents, whose fathers died when they were very young and whose mothers didn't remarry before they turned 18
If there were such evidence, it would be of only indirect help in designing policies promote two-parent families. Too often this claim is made just to "own the Libs" (and I'll bet they'd stop if the Libs would just stop being owned). I say this because the people making it seldom go on to in fact USE their shiny new fact to actually design those policies.
In re "how do you actually" cause "Muslim-majority countries to become prosperous liberal democracies incorporated into the U.S.-led alliance and trading system," here's my two cents:
I was 100% opposed to the Iraq war at the time it happened and remain so opposed to this day, but here's what I told people I thought the US should do if it was serious about democratizing Iraq in any meaningful way:
(1) EVERY Iraqi (regardless of age, former political alignment, etc.) is offered a 6-week intensive English course in Iraq, with some sort of financial incentive to participate.
(2) EVERY Iraqi high school student who demonstrates a certain (relatively low) level of fluency in English is offered the opportunity to do a one-year study abroad in the US at a public high school, with a stipend paid to their family in Iraq and a stipend paid to American host families.
(3) EVERY Iraqi with the equivalent of a high school degree or greater, ages 18 to 35, and who demonstrates a certain (moderate) level of fluency in English is offered a full-ride four-year scholarship with modest requirements for maintaining grades/course hours to any accredited public university or college in the US that admits them.
(4) ANY Iraqi who participates in one or more of these programs gets preferential treatment for receiving a US work visa.
My logic for this proposal was that, in my view, the inherent problem with most countries that might be targeted for democratization/liberalization in the 21st Century is that there are hardly any "native" liberals present in them -- they are societies that have no recent history of liberalism and most locals who might have been predisposed to liberal ideas fled decades ago. The starting point thus would have to be as massive an injection of "liberalism" into the society as possible and the best way to do that is almost certainly heavy exposure to the English language and American culture.
(And yes, I know people always say, "What about the Axis powers after WW II? They didn't go through that sort of process." To which my response would be that Germany, Italy, and even Japan all had more history of domestic liberalism prior to their turn to fascism between the late 1920s and early 1930s than Iraq did in 2003.)
I'll note that I didn't say it was guaranteed to work, but I suspect that the net effect would have been more beneficial than harmful. Also, to repeat, my preference would be no invasion (and thus, no "nation building") to begin with!
My late father's proposal was 50 years of running Iraq as a colony, which he assumed was what the Bush government was actually planning on the assumption they were lying about that and not lying about WMDs. I think he was more annoyed that they held national elections in Iraq than he was that the WMDs didn't exist.
His proposal was basically: take over Iraq. Bring in an entirely new legal code, disqualify every Iraqi lawyer, police officer, judge, etc. Ship in a complete, trained, Arabic-speaking set of lawyers, judges, police officers, etc, from the USA. Build an entirely new secular education system from scratch until you have universal education, and widespread university education. Obviously, all the teachers have to come from the USA to start with. The medical profession doesn't have to be completely replaced from the ground up, but will need massively expanding. Build out infrastructure so Iraqis can travel and their businesses can trade right across the country, rebuild homes, put in water and sewerage everywhere, etc, etc.
Zero out Iraqi taxes and pay for the whole thing out of the US federal budget for at least the first ten years.
Once you've stabilised things and the rule of law is functioning, gradually increase Iraqi taxes to pay for it all. Also, start conducting local elections and giving locally elected city councils the right to be consulted, and then gradually give them real powers (at the same time that taxes appear). Establish the same at provincial level after a couple of rounds of elections, then do the same at national level. Need to give it at least 20 years before there are any national elections.
Gradually pull back and let the Iraqis start running their own country.
It's going to be expensive - expect it to cost 5% of US GDP for at least 20 years. He didn't think it was worth it, but he couldn't believe they were prepared to do an invasion without that sort of commitment.
“ Their solution was rooted in an idea that I think is correct: if a much larger share of children were born into and raised by stable two-parent families, that would ameliorate many pressing social problems.”
If more kids were born to the types of stable responsible parents who enter into stable long term relationships, sure. Simply forcing unstable and uncommitted people to stay married won’t move the needle in terms of childhood outcomes.
Has the percentage of people who are stable enough to get 1950s married changed? Some of those marriages had issues but are most "missing marriages" marriages that would have failed or succeeded?
I don't know but I doubt people have changed so much we couldn't support a higher marriage rate.
But you assume having these people be married would benefit the children. You need to separate the largely heritable personality traits they result in someone being in a stable long term relationship vs. the simple fact of being together.
No one is doubting that the type of people who form stable long term marriages pass those genes into their children and pass on the benefits of a stable loving household. But what are the benefits for those who aren’t those type of people?
Fair, I'm assuming that the people who would have gotten married in 1950 but not now are net positive(in aggregate) for children, and it's hard to tease that out.
I get that, I'm just trying to figure out the whole of your statement of "[f]orcing poor parents to stay married mostly is in fact good for the kids.". You mentioned economic benefits, and I was trying to see if there's anything else out there considered, even if the net still ends up positive for you.
I think separation involves a whole host of intense challenges compared to the single variable of parents who fight a lot or don’t seem to love each other very much.
The shuffling around between households, the tightened finances as Foooooo says, the introduction of new maybe-step parents and their kids if they have them... Those things are really hard on kids, and their life is literally less stable on a daily basis because of all the shuffling.
Perhaps reinforcing the thermostatic view of government, it’s worth pointing out that the Bush administration followed the Clinton administration which was smitten with the ideas of “Reinventing Government”, which basically was focused on measuring how well government services worked and determining what could best be accomplished by outsourcing. If memory serves, Al Gore ran a program as VP specifically referencing the Reinventing Government framework. But for bad ballot design, questionable Supreme Court reasoning and Al Gore’s respect for democratic processes, we may have had a world focused on government effectiveness, rather than “one big ideaism” and culture war fights.
Isn’t the problem here the conflict between religious values and Friedman-esque economics? For example, I’ve often wondered why conservatives haven’t made a fuss about things that make church going difficult like the end of Sunday closing and the relentless rise of travel sports. These are issues government actually could do something about
Go take a look at Lyman Stone's Twitter feed, he hates sports and wants to bring back blue laws. Doesn't seem like he gets much traction on either, though.
Reminds me of something my wife told me. She used to be junior clergy at a church bordering fraternity row in College Park MD. When one parishioner lamented that attendance had dropped from the good old days in the fifties and sixties, another parishioner noted that in the good old days the Greek organizations required members to attend “the church or synagogue of their choice.”
It's true that the Social Security system could take on a higher average rate of return in exchange for higher risk. That's true whether or not it's privatized. (The same point could be used to support a sovereign wealth fund; governments can generally accept more risk than individuals.)
But the price is higher risk. So you can't just look ex post and say, look it would have turned out better.
Errrrr... maybe. That assumes people would be making good investments, but it's pretty easy to imagine an industry of hucksters popping up to take advantage of less than knowledgeable investors. But either way, they all would've been a lot poorer in 2008-9, to the point where there would've had to have been a politically popular bailout of Social Security on top of everything else that happened.
We, collectively, are unwilling to allow people to live with the consequences of their decisions, if those consequences are especially bad. I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but it is why privatizing social security will never work.
Social Security is insurance. If we privatize it, as well as the first order effects would turn out for most here, we will end up recreating another old age insurance program for all those who don’t end up benefitting.
It seems like a good thing when the whole point of a safety net is that you’re not supposed to take it away (even if you might be the best circus performer).
I don’t think this is actually true. If you make idiosyncratic bad decisions, American society is perfectly willing to let you take the hit.
Interventions tend to show up in cases where individuals’ bad decisions are highly correlated— and it makes sense that they do, because big hits to aggregate demand cause pain for everyone.
That has always struck me as the most likely scenario. Some people would have done really well, some so so, but then you'd have the additional social burden of the people who screwed up or got taken for a ride slowly building up into demand for a subsidy, which of course would defeat the purpose of the whole idea of privatization.
This was and is 100% the risk of privatizing social security as proposed by Bush. Requiring people to be competent investors as a condition of retirement security seems like it subverts the basic point of "retirement security."
This also risks being obviously unfair from a distributive point of view - without an incredibly strong norm such that even people in the rust belt who have never owned stock know what to do when prompted to invest (per Gallup, 39% of Americans don't own stock!), you're just stacking the deck in favor of the people who already know what to do and against those who don't -- more-informed parties preying on weaker-informed parties is what the stock market exists to facilitate basically *by design!*
The best way to mitigate this risk that I'm aware of would be to basically tell people what to do (e.g, "buy VTI, don't sell when the market is down"[1]), with a lot of hoops for allowing alternative investment - at which point why doesn't the government just do this for them in the first place rather than privatizing things if we already know how to maximize average return though investment for the overwhelming number of Americans? What's the gain by letting people fuck up through individual discretion? The people who are good at picking stocks that outperform the market don't need the retirement help and may well already be employed on Wall Street!
Was the privatization proposal based on the idea that people could choose any investment? I thought that there were guardrails around the choices, eg index funds or other more generic investments.
Of course the idea that people could invest their retirement savings with any huckster would have had the results you allude to. But was that in fact the proposal?
My non-Social Security retirement savings are in index ETFs, and before those existed they were in index funds, and before those existed they were in big no-load funds that broadly follow the indexes. I often regret that I didn't buy Apple or Google or Tesla, but it's more likely that generic investments have saved me from own bad decisions.
And of course there was a period (1929-1939) barely within historical memory when the stock market was down or flat for a long period, but that's an outlier.
Properly designed, some kind of partial privatization would be a good idea. The devil is in the details. Illustrating Matty's point.
The Dow Jones was one of the first "indexes" used to track the markets. Its been around for a long time and people are used to hearing it. But as a metric for tracking the market, its pretty bad. Part of its formula is based on share price which often has little do with the overall value of a company. S&P 500 is good, but focused on large companies. The S&P 1500, Russell 3000, or Wilshire 5000, are much more modern and effective composite indexes at tracking the market.
But people have been hearing DJIA for a long time, are familiar with it, and so it keeps getting used.
Based on that chart, I'm confused by the statement that the market was down or flat "1970 to 1988" -- it looks like 1966 to 1982 would be the relevant period to describe the market as being down or flat. (Still a 16 year-period, importantly, but as someone who lived through the 1980s it immediately sounded very strange to describe that as an era when the market was down/flat outside of the 1987 drop.)
This is helpful information, but if the government thinks it appropriate to cabin individual discretion in terms of investment selection to limit downside risk, why provide options at all rather than shoving the Social Security Trust Fund into VTI and/or VOO? It's not like individual brokerage accounts don't already exist for people who want to exercise discretion with non-retirement monies.
(ED: should have probably responded to Allan below.)
It's a good point. Where do you limit individual discretion? If everybody's in the Russell 3,000 or S&P500, the government might as well invest for everyone.
As I see it, there are three or four levels of choices:
1. Accept a guaranteed Social Security return (inflation + X%) or divert part into the broad market. Limited to some percentage. For those who choose to divert, limit loads and management fees and mandate a broad index.
2. Allow people to choose among indices and perhaps play with the sector weights.
3. Give participants a choice between actively and passively managed funds. Again, still limiting fees, since those actively managed funds can be expensive.
4. Let people pick stocks, still limiting fees.
Again, all of this is for some predefined limited percentage of your retirement portfolio. Most of it is still conventional Social Security.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of details, but you could draw the line in several places. Including, as you suggest, the government investing for you should you choose to divert a percentage into the market.
At the time of social security privatization being proposed, most investing was done via active management, no? And the main thing we know is that the median active manager fails to beat their benchmark after fees. So the main result would probably have been a much larger and more powerful fund management industry - perhaps powerful enough to block the ETF revolution through regulation - and the American economy would be more unequal, with worse capital allocation, and less productive (since fund managers are just rentiers and their innovations are useless - see underperformance point above) as a result.
Australia did social security privatisation and people seem happy with it. You don’t have to turn pensions into an Ayn Rand novel, there is a lot of regulation and a basic level remains provided by the government. It’s one of those bizarre things where supposedly ruthlessly capitalist America won’t consider things more socialist countries have already done. It’s pretty weird that Australians are investing their social security in the US stock market but Americans can’t.
Australia's system (just from reading about it now) sounds like basically they have a public means-tested pension system combined with a mandate for employers to set up and provide contributions to retirement accounts. This isn't so different in principle from the public-and-private mix in the US though it sounds like the public expenditure portion in Australia is relatively smaller (and of course contributions to 401(k) plans are encouraged by the tax code but not actually mandated). My biggest worry about this is that it increases risk in a way that by default would be absorbed by individuals; in Australia the losses are partly socialized by the public pension system, and it looks like during the Great Recession the government took steps to cover even more of it.
Australia's system is fine, but there's no getting around the reality that preserving old, non-workers from penury involves limiting the consumption of those who do not fall into this category. We could transition into an Australian system if we wanted, but there's no magic box of free money. Essentially we'd be asking younger workers to decrease consumption now in exchange for enjoying more resources when they're retired. Which is also what we'd be doing if we hiked Social Security taxes.
Productivity growth is the magic pot of money. Giving people a wider range of investment options, and entrepreneurs a wider source of funding sources, seems productivity enhancing to me.
You, like the Estate of Bob Saget, appear to have mastered the ability to post comments from beyond the grave. RIP, Allan, since you must have passed away before January 20, 2017.
right exactly -- Trump did much more to erode democratic norms and was a huge national embarassment, but when it came to foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, handling major disasters, etc. Trump was better than Bush.
Bush is undoubtedly a better guy, but also a worse president. (Trump was bad, don't get me wrong)
I feel like there's still a lot of history that's left to be unfolded before we can fully come to a conclusion here on the worse president front. (Worse person is pretty clear, though.)
This is fundamentally a mistake in understanding what matters. We've had a number of bad presidents before make foolish mistakes on Bush's scale. It was primarily bad in that we wasted resources, but even more importantly discredited the establishment part of the Republican party. We have had very few president's do things that could break the entire constitutional order of our government.
He handled COVID less bad (Operation Warp Speed, although with a lot of bitching about lockdowns along the way) than Bush handled 9/11 (use it to destabilize the whole Middle East and cost huge numbers of lives and massive amounts of American money to turn Iraq from a shitty dictatorship to a more typically crappy Third World country).
Social Security is, and has always been, a wealth transfer from currently-working people to formerly-working people. Privatizing (even part) of it doesn't mesh with how the wealth transfer actually works. The money you pay in isn't yours. It goes to someone else. And someone in the future will pay for you.
If Social Security had been privatized during the second Bush administration, the 2008 recession would have been much worse because the stock market crash would also have completely tanked most retirees’ incomes and consumption.
At a macroeconomic level, privatizing the social safety net turns a countercyclical policy instrument into a procyclical one; think it’s a bad idea unless you create a bunch of new automatic stabilizers to go along with it.
Assuming the timing of the recession was the same, it actually shouldn't have had much effect at all -- the changes to Social Security were only for people under age 55 and there was supposed to be a three-year phase-in with the first year that people would be eligible to open individual retirement accounts being 2009: https://money.cnn.com/2005/02/02/retirement/stofunion_socsec/
It would have been fine if he had given people investment accounts in addition to, rather than in place of, social security. Too bad he was trying to do the latter.
It's also fine if people give themselves investment accounts. Many Americans do just that. Which I realize you're aware of. But the problem in the US (as always) isn't being experienced by the affluent. The problem (of elderly poverty) is overwhelmingly suffered by Americans who were low earners during their working lives. We could give such workers an Australian-style system. We could also simply make Social Security more generous at the lower end.
Because you assume that the same amounts are being saved but the saving are going into private investment that has a higher return than the average Federal expenditure?
OK but which taxes are raised to fill the hole that decreased revenue created? [SS was cash positive during GWB's time.] Or which expenditures are reduced? If you don't know, don't feel bad, GWB's "compassionate conservatives" could not figure it out, either.
"They want a massive revival of religious life, a turnaround of fertility trends, a revolution in gender relations. But none of the policy ideas on any side of these various debates are remotely scaled to those objectives."
In the particular case of "a revolution in gender relations," I believe part of the problem is that the Right misunderstands the leftward changes that they see occurring in gender relations. They look at the growing acceptance of e.g. same sex marriage, and think that it happened recently, easily, and effortlessly. How did those devious Lefties pull off this "revolution in gender relations" in just a few decades? Surely they must have used one weird trick -- and if so, then the Right can use the same weird trick to accomplish a counter-revolution in gender relations.
They don't see why their "policy ideas" should have to be "scaled to those objectives," because they keep thinking that the Left pulled off massive changes with tiny policy levers, or maybe no policy levers at all.
And so they flail around, trying to find their one weird trick: maybe banning abortion? all contraception? no-fault divorce? all divorce? allowing prayer in schools? compelling prayer in schools?
But they never consider that the rise of freedom in personal relations has been the work of centuries, starting well before the Protestant reformation and running right through the Declaration of Independence to the defeat of fascism in WWII. It has not been quick and it has not been easy. To that extent, the most honest of the Righties are those who declare outright that they want to return us to the Middle Ages.
Just one REALLY important historical note...
The Middle Ages weren't really all that prudish. Most common folk barely got married because there weren't always enough priests to go around marrying them; that's why "common law marriage" is a thing. Medieval and Renaissance-era literature is full of bawdy jokes and situations that indicate a pretty libertine sexual life among the common folk; the harangues and tirades from religious officials and nobles that we more closely associate with the time period are actually more indicative of a populace that barely listened to them, not one that obediently lived under the prudish thumb of religiously-motivated sexual oppression.
Most of what we consider "traditional" sexual and marriage morals came out of the Victorian Era, where the rapidly expanding and prospering middle class sought to emulate a set of noble-class moral values that the nobles themselves mostly observed in the breach.
Just on a personal note, the Victorian Era is the same one that gave us gems like "Columbus was a hero who valiantly spoke truth to power", foisting him on my own Italian-American community when there were so many other good role models like Philip Mazzei who were right freaking there for the idolizing. Soooo, maybe we shouldn't base our ideas on those of a bunch of 19th-century WASPs?
I don’t really know how much we should credit the tropes of medieval literature. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a common occurrence and an obsession.
I’m not saying it’s rock-solid. I’m saying it’s more convincing based on the comedic way they were written that these were tales describing common occurrences, rather than being mere farce.
Like someone fucking a pie?
Or a woman hanging her bum out a window so a blindfolded man will kiss her and feel "whiskers". The point is, the writing implies that the audience wouldn't see this as a complete farce, but rather an exaggerated version of commonfolk hijinks.
“Exaggerated” doesn’t imply statistical exaggeration or even severity exaggeration. I can also make up a total caricature that doesn’t exist at all to exaggerate *what I think of whatever I’m exaggerating*.
This comment veers dangerously close to taking “the arch of history bends toward Justice” too literally. Fact is we don’t know how macro trends work and why they seem to “reverse” sometimes or apply in one place and not another. Until merely around two decades ago USA was commonly understood as the exception to the western (read: Western European) secularization trend. The Muslim world has in many ways been undergoing a reverse trend over the past half century. As has Israel. As perhaps also India.
On other fronts too macro trends are hard to predict. The economic consensus of 1945 broke down by 1975 clearing the way for Reagan and thatcher (and yet continental Europe didn’t quite subscribe to this “inevitable” change). Since 2008 the paradigm seems to be in flux once more and yet to stabilize. Is it the leaders who create the trends? Accelerate them? Merely benefit? Difficult questions to answer.
The point is this: please let us who support some of the currently triumphant trends not grow complacent! These victories aren’t just “hard won” they also require serious maintenance and constant vigilance.
“For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”
Let me ask you a simple question - have you seen photos of the streets not just of Kabul or Tehran but Cairo (not to mention Istanbul) say in the 1960s? Do the women there look more or less western, more or less secular than in 2023? With all due respect to NYT understanding of foreign affairs generally and the Muslim world specifically (which I have very little) i believe my eyes more.
I think it's telling you cite pictures from the capitals of these countries as evidence of their relative secularization. Would you consider the street life of Dupont Circle in DC to be reflective of the social views of the average American today? Or the insta feed of an influencer, as cameras then would have been a luxury afforded only to the upper class.
The changes in the muslim world in relative secularization hasn't been a mass phenomenon but an elite one. The first half of the 20th century saw middle eastern elites attempt to emulate western ones as a means of securing legitimacy and to "modernize" their nations to be equal with the West. For a variety of reasons the incentives for this changed and the elites did with it.
My parents grew up in one of those and my wife's in the other in those times and I'm with Frigid on this one :P
As for India - rise of Modi is what, precisely?
Anyone who knows anything about Israel will confirm that this is pretty radically overstated with Israel.
I don't know if you pay attention to Adrian Vermeule but he's an excellent example of someone committing this analytical error--he thinks same-sex marriage etc. was basically an elite conspiracy so why can't we do the same to impose Catholic authoritarianism?
Just amazingly smart thinking.
Hence what's happened politically pre and post Dobbs. One reason GOP was successful pre Dobbs was most of their moves seemed to be attacking edge cases that made "the people" uncomfortable. It gave the impression that regular people were fully on board with full abortion bans and going back to a pre 1973 status quo when it was more that most people just didn't want to think about it.
Yeah. I suspect this goes back to at least some degree to the “those people” problem. It’s “those people” who have irresponsible sex and then can’t deal with the consequences. Same way it’s “those people” want “hand outs” whereas I just want what’s rightfully owed to me.
My only kind of pushback is I think this thinking is more widespread then just among “non college” voters; especially on abortion. Lots and lots of “country club” types who look down on “irresponsible” lower class ppl. but have a golf buddy doctor who can “take care of” his mistress’s “complication”.
I'm sure the people you're describing exist, but I feel obligated to give voice to the significant number of my pro-life relatives that are acutely aware of their own failings rather than merely projecting them onto others.* They conceive of these restrictions as a way to create disciplinary structures to support their own choices. I recently became more sympathetic to their point of view seeing someone close to me consumed by alcoholism. In a world ruled by prohibition, his life might be much better.
That's not to say I agree with them (I don't, on either abortion or, hypothetically, prohibition) but I think it's politically constructive to recognize their motivations; in my experience they are more common than the types you described, but that may just be a "same world, different planets" thing.
* This includes a pastor that had a shotgun wedding - he would be the obvious butt of jokes if he weren't so clearly humbled by self-awareness.
"They" isn't a single coherent entity IMO. Self described "Conservatives/conservatives" are in an internecine battle now that the historical conservative fusionism is dead. I don't think we'll see much in terms of coherent policy ideas until this resolves.
" "They" isn't a single coherent entity IMO."
They shouldn't feel bad about not being a coherent entity. I isn't one either.
"The most honest of the Righties are those who declare outright that they want to return us to the Middle Ages" doesn't really add up with talking to average GOP voter or pundit. I think people will figure out the gender/religious business if you can just reduce the scale of the state involved in those things; allowing more private religious schools to operate and curbing unnecessary higher ed subsidy can do plenty of that. David Frum basically got this right in Dead Right (1994), conservatives have to realize the limits of cultural commentary and focus on curtailing the scale of the state in politics.
Bush and Trump's tax cuts have mostly successfully kept the fight on % GDP spending between the 40 yard lines, but the next big fight will be in 2025 as numerous budget items expire and Medicare's cost curve continues to grow. Republicans will have to prepare for that; I agree with Matt that it's not a matter of big ideas per say. On Social Security, allowing younger workers to opt into a lower % payroll tax in exchange for a flat anti-poverty pension is an idea that would actually deliver a smaller SocSec system targeted to those who need it while allowing more people more freedom to invest their money. The Bush 2004 plan was truly the worst of both worlds; enormous scale of money taxed and invested in mandatory stock indexes doesn't curtail government, and indeed CBO found it slightly increased Social Security's size by 2060!
Thankfully since Trump, Republican policy people have increasingly learned to not talk about big ideas as much. That's one merciful development of the Trump years, even if it has clearly been corrosive to have a bad character leading a party. The developments Yglesias wants are probably underway, but I don't think they'll look like the Cost of Thriving Index.
Which Republican governors are calling for bans on divorce or compelling prayer in schools?
Besides Ron DeSantis? https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-middle-east-prayer-bills-education-52741efc03b880ac3499c90e8896a66d
And Phil Bryant? https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/is-prayer-coming-back-to-public-schools
Neither of those articles are about requiring prayer. Go ahead and read them if you don't believe me.
They are not requiring prayer, but they are the best those governors could do to require prayer without going against the law.
"They are not requiring prayer..."
Yeah, no kidding.
I've said many times that the reason conservatives never seem to exploit various progressive errors and weaknesses to the extent they could is the absence of answers on core policy issues and concerns for regular people. The result is exactly what Matt says, where they can ride economic tides to thermostatic successes or win here and there on backlashes to various progressive cultural insanities but at the end of the day they have no substantive agenda on any issue. Contrast this to the broader center left that probably punches below its weight due to inability to appropriately sideline its weirdos hellbent on making it impossible for the grown ups to problem solve. Though I guess any time I check into any conservative space my take is that they are all weirdos talking about baseless election conspiracies and vaccine hoaxes.
It is slightly worse than this in that the only actual policies that conservatives seen to care about are tax cuts for the rich and deficits, immigration restrictions, and less free trade that push toward a slower growing and more more unequal incomes that probably hurt regular people even more than they harm elites.
I feel like we keep skipping over abortion as an issue conservatives really do seem to care about and unfortunately, are making progress reinstating restrictions across the country.
I think it's clear they care, I don't think we know yet what they actually want now that they're allowed to do something.
They certainly cared about over turning Roe, but I don't think we know what they really care about replacing it with. Either because they're sincere, or just as a knee jerk reaction to the freedom to do so, the elected lawmakers imposed draconian restrictions. But they're experiencing pushback, including from they're own committed voters. Those voters who are very religiously motivated have one view, but it looks like the less religious don't share the same extreme view and may in fact be in favor of something less draconian. What form that will take isn't what proponents of full reproductive rights want, but it may well turn out to be less than the hard core religious want.
I guess I'm picking this up differently. We're downstream of OP stating conservatives "have no substantive agenda on any issue". I just think the 15-20 different state abortions restrictions passed since Row was over-turned indicate there's real action built into this. IMO, this is dystopian: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1139039767/georgia-supreme-court-reinstates-abortion-ban
I dunno, Herschel Walker was caught having paid for multiple abortions, including some quite recently, and I don't recall conservative getting all that worked up about it. If they really did care as much as they claim to, I would have thought they'd trash someone who in their view was a serial accessory to murder, but they just kept right on backing the guy, saying obvious nonsense like "He's a man of God now".
Either conservatives are not as worked up about abortion as they claim, or they don't think murder is actually all that big of a deal. Or maybe it really is just controlling women.
Well ... Walker also lost. He under-performed Kemp by 10%p. Now, he was a uniquely terrible and unqualified candidate but his abortion history played a role.
I think that in an important sense conservative intellectuals / media voices / shitposters and voters don't care *that* much about tax cuts. They are just attached to the Republican Party, which is a machine designed to cut taxes and deregulate.
You can say that their revealed preference is for tax cuts & that isn't wrong, but the disconnect between what they convince themselves they care about and what they actually do is wide.
Maybe they do care that much, they just don’t get that much of the benefit (unless they’re in a high income group)? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone complain about a tax cut (aside from progressives).
True, but as Matt says the regulatory state is extremely complex and you need some legit policy chops to do deregulation well. GOP deregulation seems to mostly revolve around targeting regulatory rollbacks to their biggest donors and damning the torpedoes about outcomes.
Reducing regulation in the banking sector is kinda-sorta economic policy, but a lot of the thinking behind it undoubtedly came from GOP-friendly bank lobbyists looking for a payday.
Tax cuts are also sometimes good
Mostly agree, but I'd push back on the idea that GOP actually are about deficits. I actually think this canard was probably untrue as early as GHWB (see backlash to his pretty reasonable attempt to deal with budget deficits and the debt), but became extremely hard to square post Trump. One of the reasons that Obama pivoted kind of disterously in 2011 to deficit reduction is too many mainstream pundits took it at face value that Tea Party activists ad politicians actually had intellectually sincere beliefs regarding deficits.
I actually read this as being a statement that the R's are pro-deficit, in the sense that the Republican playbook is pretty clearly "cut taxes, do nothing to increase revenue or (at least nontrivially) cut spending and quite possibly increase spending, let the Democrats handle the deficit and take the heat when they're in power."
That may not have been the intent, but it seems like a plausible interpretation (and consistent with your view).
I think some do care about deficits, but it’s another example of the topic of the post. The principle might be there, but if you ask them how they’d balance the budget, there are no serious answers to be had.
Partially agree. I’m more cynical maybe because of everything that happened pre and post 2011. Also was working for DNC in 2009 doing field work for ACA. Over and over again listened to people tell me ACA was out of control spending. Literally spewing back stuff I saw O’Reilly or Hannity talk about. And then watched those same people be die hard Trump supporters.
My point is I probably have an even more cynical view of this stuff than even other Democratic voters.
I don't think you can include anti-free trade as part of that. Republicans were more free trade than Democrats within the last 10 years and it's not clear how much Republican enthusiasm for protectionism will survive Trump's eventual demise. I'd expect a reversion to mean under the influence of large donors absent Trump.
I don't see how you figure immigration restrictions and less free trade push toward more unequal outcomes. It seems to me very nearly the opposite is true. Both liberalized trade and lax immigration tend to increase inequality at least in recent experience.
The tax cuts part of you comment makes better sense to me however.
In a way, this mindlessness on the right and the rearguard struggle to keep the leftist weirdos in check by the center-left is part of why I'm actually kind of dreading a second Biden term, despite my devoutly wishing for it.
I assume the entirety of the Biden message will be: "the economy is great and let's keep it going! [hoping this is true] and Trump back in power will destroy our democracy and hurt women and minorities." A good enough campaign message, but what would be the program (or "mandate" though Presidents really never have those) that Biden and the Democrats would pursue? I'm guessing that it will be paltry no matter how long the program part of the party platform will be.
Most second terms are dreary without much getting done. Reagan, with bipartisan immigration and tax reform, is a notable exception, which does kind of recommend the benefits of having a President with increasing dementia. But a President in his mid-80s presiding over a period of stasis, inertia, and meaningless bickering in Congress? Yikes.
Generally second term is a big foreign policy push. Plenty of opportunities there.
I wouldn’t count on the gratitude of newly naturalized citizens to vote D, they will bring the whole of their experience to their decision and Democrats should be prepared to persuade them (which should
...not be that hard if the other side is pushing crazy stuff.
Those would all be great. None of those will happen, especially with (at best) a 50/50 Senate (West Virginia is gone).
I'll be happy if they get permitting reform done in the second term. Past that, anything would be gravy.
The problem is the map. If West Virginia is gone, Democrats don't get to 51, full stop. There's a decent chance Democrats keep the presidency and win back the House but lose the Senate all at once
The filibuster is gone or reduced in strength when one party has the power to enact something they really want that has >=50 votes but <60 votes.
Oh for sure. But, ceteris paribus and the future is impossible to predict, I would be dreading 2028.
Genuine question - do you think this is distinctly a US conservative problem, and conservative politicians / thought leaders in other countries have been able to do better on putting forward policy changes? Or is it global?
I think it is somewhat uniquely challenged in the US by the two party system that for a really long time and still on paper pairs laissez-faire economics with social conservatism. It results in a party that desperately wants to govern to particular social ends but at the same time has no idea how to do it and operates with an inherent skepticism towards the state. I'm not a conservative though, so just my take from the outside.
Yeah, though the Tories here in the UK have had exactly the same problem. They coasted for a while on “Brexit means Brexit!” without any idea how to actually leave the EU without destroying the economy or resolve the Irish border, but now that that’s mostly been cobbled together, they’re out of ideas except trawling up culture war nonsense.
Yeah that’s my sense - I also think most of them are actually constrained by national norms into being less “conservative” (eg you don’t see many of them trying to dismantle socialized medicine or similar programs).
They're much less likely to come from the liberal political tradition (which both US parties come from) and so tend to be much more comfortable with using the state as a solution to problems and much less hostile to tax-and-spend.
Within the liberal tradition, tax-and-spend is very much a left-wing position, but it's not if you don't come from liberalism. National conservatism (by which I mean something like Gaullism, or pre-Thatcher British Conservativism, or the Spanish PP) identifies with the state as the representative of the national tradition, and tends toward paternalism, which brings support for the welfare state. Religious roots for a right-wing position (Christian democracy, for instance, like in Germany) are different again, and may be hostile to government spending, preferring the money spent on social programs to go through the church, but they certainly don't have the same kind of basic discomfort with taxation (or tithes) that right-liberals do.
Interesting, thanks!
I wish I could like this essay 100 times, not only for the rebuke of conservatism but mainly for the whole "details matter" theme. I'd go a little further as you do at the beginning of the essay and say that this is maybe not a liberal/conservative thing but an "elite" thing in general, which is part of the general complaint that too many Ivy+ students end up in McKinsey-type firms and come away with an appreciation for the big picture and not enough for consequences of the implementation. On the political spectrum, we may see it more in conservatism since a lot of these think tanks are funded by billionaires with very specific thoughts about how the world should work and push for research demonstrating it (and which may be part of the reason it's an increasing problem with liberalism as well, though as you state, not nearly to the same extent).
But the big picture vs. details issue seems to plague a lot of business culture; I see this where I work (pharma), where big picture-types get promoted up the chain and implement sweeping ideas without sweating the details of how to actually do it. Or, they have this management-style attitude of "let a hundred flowers bloom" and trust their subordinates to "figure it out" without giving much guidance.
If I may needle you a little bit: this is part of my objection to a lot of your science pieces! It's fine to say "let's do challenge trials" or "pharma should be funded by prizes and not through patent protections" but without a lot of details, these sorts of proposals are unworkable.
I agree with 95% of this - but as someone who works for a top consulting firm I will note that a lot of the work we do actually is implementation of the strategies we devise. The perception that we just drop a 200 page slide deck on someone’s desk and say “good luck, see ya later” isn’t reality.
Agreed. Every consultant I've worked with has always been eager to continue cashing checks to assist with "implementation" for as long as it takes. ;-)
I knew that comment would rankle some consultants. :) I'll take what you say at face value and defer to the fact that since you work in that industry, you'd know it better.
I'd counter with this: the ideas I've seen presented are either (a) what management was already planning to do, but under the guise of "consultant recommendation" to give them cover (frequently layoffs or offshoring, though not always), or (b) "one weird trick" type solutions that never actually solve the problem but are someone's pet idea. Having said that, I'll note that I've never seen a lot of the consultant proposals and am merely getting a filtered message, so it's possible and/or likely that management ignores the implementation recommendations and is just cherry picking what they like. So I suppose my larger objection is not to consulting per se, but to business culture.
Totally understand, and I’m definitely not an apologist for business culture! Many of my clients have huge knowledge / thinking gaps, and it’s kind of amazing they’re running any sort of company at all. We often manage to convince them not to do something that would have been even worse than what they ultimate decide to do.
That's somehow both amusing and depressing! Seems like every large corporation needs a panel to inform them when they're wearing their Bad Idea Jeans.
Liked for the Bad Idea Jeans reference! Youngs, ask your parents...
This is completely correct. In my experience consultants almost never are onboard to provide actual ideas or content- it's to provide pretext/scapegoats to allow leadership to make changes and resolve issues that the leadership already perceives but can't move on for one reason or another (e.g., they'd be unpopular, or someone powerful on the inside hates it).
My experience in this realm is consistent with yours.
The whole reason the slide deck is 200 pages is so the client is terrified of implamentation and hires you for the afterwork!
Interesting. I can only speak to the mid-2010s period but it felt like most of BCG engagements were handed off to Deloitte for the implementation work. The bill rates just couldn't support it. The exceptions were the mega mergers (e.g., BCG ran the United and Continental EPMO or PMI Office - I can't remember what they called it). If that's changed (i.e., maybe McKinsey Implementation really got off the ground) -- very interesting, and perhaps a little sad.
It depends on what type of implementations - agree we hand over the big tech implementations (that’s kind of Accenture’s world) and similar things where it’s more rote work.
But things like PMO (even for smaller mergers or internal transformations), organizational design, sales force incentives, pricing, supplier negotiations, etc — where there is problem solving and troubleshooting to be done during implementation — are very much in our wheelhouse to see through.
My favorite is "let's bring transportation planners from Spain over here to implement our transit programs." One weird trick!
Who's getting transit consultants from Spain? - (Curious from my perspective from a U.S. transit background.)
I think Spain was just thrown out as an example of hiring people from other countries who are good at transit and having them do that here (instead of hiring Americans who seem to be bad at it, or are bad at hiring the Americans who are good at it).
It's kind of an Yglesias tjing.
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My org had a high level manager push a change initiative. They tagged it with a cool title and tapped a butch of the cool kids on the shoulder and had them participate in a very expensive and time consuming process to make two organizational changes. Many, many meetings and off-site training sessions were done. Neither change proposed took root. From what I can tell the only benefit was those who participated got to network and enhance their organizational status (very non-inclusive). While I do believe we should always try to be a little better the change as a culture thing is a bit of a boondoggle.
Oh, that manager got promoted to the big seat and acts like the whole thing was a success. No one questions the actual outcomes...at least not openly.
On challenge trials, in the specific context of SARS-CoV-2 there was an urgent need to try things on a much quicker basis to stem the damage. That could be the case again for a future pathogen that triggers a massive pandemic, and perhaps not so much for pathogens that aren't as immediately threatening.
Even accepting this statement as fact (which I don't, given that the COVID vaccines that were developed first were done so a full three years faster than any other vaccine previously had been, and that manufacturing constraints were the limiting part of the process in late 2020/early 2021 and not approvals): how specifically, would a challenge trial be designed? This is what I mean by details matter, and what I said at the time when MY was arguing for it in the summer of 2020. You had a disease with a lot of unknowns, reports of "young, otherwise healthy" people being unable to function for months after having acute symptoms, and well over 100 vaccine programs ongoing (most of which turned out to be duds). So how do you design a challenge trial that mitigates potential harm against volunteers, manages to have enough testing to provide enough statistical power for both safety and efficacy, and do it faster than we did it in the real world?
Definitely true in technology too...by and large the people who get promoted are those that weave a great story, and can tell it in front of a room full of people. The skill they’re best at is not making great decisions, being a great administrator or a leaving now inspiring leader...it’s simply ‘managing up’
Once in a blue moon the EVP/C-level sniffs out the bullshit being dished by the VP/SrDir level, but 95% of the time they can’t be bothered to pay attention.
Regarding the science pieces, are these proposals unworkable or just untested? The two examples you cite seem like areas where we could just do some A/B tests for a while and compare the results of new and traditional approaches. What am I missing?
What specifically are the proposals?
The challenge trials and science prizes you mentioned originally.
Which, as I stated, were bereft of details and could not be properly evaluated accordingly.
Yes, to which I responded that we should evaluate them by testing them and comparing the results. Now we’re all caught up.
Well, prizes for pharma would require legislation to completely overhaul the current patent system, so it's not something you can test.
I mentioned this all in my comment to City of Trees, but briefly: how do you design a challenge trial that goes faster than current drug development, provides adequate protection for your volunteers, and has enough statistical power for both safety and efficacy? Not saying it's impossible, but the onus is on those advocating for it to design a trial accordingly.
I just want the technocratic rigor without the technocratic paternalism. Is that too much to ask?
Conceptually, no. In reality, yes.
The places which are prepared to tolerate the least capable 20-30% starving in the street in their old age are not, in the main, good places to live for all but a few of the remaining 70-80%.
I don’t think it’s possible to craft a society which actually has a state capable enough to provide the common defense, public health, regulation of private markets, fair-handed rule of law, public safety, etc… and not also have a fairly robust social safety net come along for the ride.
My critique is not directed at our social safety net, per se. I support what we have today, and would, in fact, expand it in some meaningful ways.
I follow, I am agreeing with you, that in principle it may be possible to have a capable state that doesn’t exercise any sort of paternalism, but in practice it seems impossible.
What about actually _technocratic_ paternalism. Sorry, children, we are going to balance the budget however long you thrash around on the floor.
Sounds great, but those non-children children get a vote, and govt reflects that fact to some extent.
I'd like that too, but it's very, very rarely seen in practice. So I think in terms of how humans think, it's at least somewhat baked-in.
Amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics.
I lived through the Brexit madness, where moron politicians just knew that Brexit was a good idea but had no idea why, or what they wanted from it. The right - and I would say the US right is even worse - just doesn't seem to want to think about what they want and how to achieve it. They just incoherently babble about stuff they don't like or get distracted by conspiracy theories. This is not going to turn around soon.
Wasn't Brexit basically about wanting border control both internal and external to the bloc that membership in the EU was not going to afford Britain? It seems like for all its outcomes it was a reasonable policy attempt at implementing that particular desire -- at a minimum, remaining *in* the EU was tantamount to a legal commitment *not* to have said border control.
Well, sort of. It seems that Brexit was about trying to shed the perceived negatives of EU membership, without sacrificing the benefits, and that was always going to lead to an insane outcome. The UK was never going to keep their Spanish holidays and open capital flows, while keeping out the Polish plumbers.
This is pretty fair. Brexit seems like madness to me but I don’t think you can say it wasn’t focused on achieving a real policy goal of restricting immigration flows from Europe.
The larger problem here is that the conservative leadership in the west reacts to their base like paparazzi does to culture issues. It's all just red meat politics made for an era of social media, serious people got run out of the party years ago. Look at the healthcare proposal that the GOP put up when trying to get rid of Obamacare unsuccessfully, it was something that a college freshman could draft up. Now without even those people around, the conservative policy world is nothing more than messaging bills and disasters that get overturned at the next opportunity
The last time America became a more religious society with higher marriage and fertility rates was the baby boom. Before the late 1940s, a significant portion of working class men never married and only a minority of families regularly attended church.
The causes of this conservative policy win were mainly serendipitous. World War Two destroyed the infrastructure of our major industrial competitors, left American industry dominant, forced workers to save at artificially high rates for a few years and let American workers achieve higher wages than any of their predecessors anywhere. Women generally needed to marry to enjoy these wage gains, which went mainly to men. Many working class men were eager to lean into middle class forms of respectability like marriage and church going. Of course a third of all 1950s brides were pregnant on their wedding day, unplanned pregnancies were a huge spur to marriage and family formation.
If you wanted to re-engineer the 1950s, you would subsidize salaries in male-dominated industries and then use the tax code to encourage men to spend this money on wives and children. Coincidentally, this is basically what the Iraq war did-- it created hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs that went overwhelmingly to men, many of which were used to support traditional families. The military is possibly the best microcosm of the 1950s we have left.
Some conservatives seem to want to literally reengineer the 50s, but I think the rest of us need to start thinking about how to come up with new approaches to some of the same goals, like a birth rate at or near replacement levels. My best bets are universal parental leave and cheaper childcare.
The dynamic where women don't want to marry down and men don't seem to care enough about impressing women is a little harder. I'm not sure how to get significantly more men into impressive jobs or how to get women to care less about their partner's status.
We have parental leave and cheaper child care in many countries throughout the world and their birthrates are steadily trending down.
I suspect that cheap, effective, widely-available contraception is the irreversible cause of declines in fertility rates. Across the world, if young people don't have to have children, they won't.
(Edit - concluding "don't" -> "won't")
the best way to increase fertility is to deny women access to education and employment. i’d rather not
and, given that there are 7.8 billion humans, this is not a policy failure. if there are only 7.5 billion when i die, that’s ok!
Yes, the trend is secularly down, and studies so far on the impact of family friendly policies show mixed results. I think they would still be worth trying in the US in particular since we're outliers on the downside in terms of leave and cost of childcare.
The truth is, I'm all for trying pro-natalist policies that show any promise at all, and I think we can also stop digging the hole we're in, by at least removing barriers (in the tax code, with car seat regulations, etc.) But I am deeply pessimistic about our ability to move the needle with social policy. My best hope is in enhanced reproductive longevity (combined with some improved individual longevity), since that seems compatible with human psychology, at least. But even that's pretty far-fetched and might just lead to more time on the hedonic treadmill.
In the bad old days, women married mediocre men because the alternative was penury. Being a spinster was a privilege of a well bred woman whose father (or brothers) could support her. Everyone else had to either find a man or go into domestic service.
Why should women marry mediocre men now that they don’t need to?
Because most people , of either sex , are mediocre ?
Paging U.S. Senator Roman Hruska. Paging U.S. Senator Roman Hruska. Your presence in a Slow Boring comment thread is requested.
I think when people evaluate how mediocre they themselves are, the Lake Woebegone reference is more apt.
the last time you had mediocre sex, did you think “i just had mediocre sex, time to lock this down and settle into monogamy?”
there has to be a stick to get women to marry mediocre men. the carrots are insufficient
I don’t how to put this exactly, and I mean no offense, but your views of relationships, sex and esp women always strike me as… strange ?
Specifically, my hypothesis is that there are men out there who would make good partners overall, but who don’t scan as appealing choices due to things like education and profession. The idea is that some of these women and men would be happier and more fulfilled getting married and having kids, but that they’re kind of stuck in a single equilibrium currently. But I’m just speculating.
This isn’t the issue. The issue is that when women get financial independence (either from government assistance, or her own career), they find their partners frustrating enough that they prefer to be single.
It speaks to the male bias in Matt’s comments section that this type of female behavior is attributed to “hypergamy.” Women who get divorced still see their standard of living drop. They have children, which will make it more difficult to find another partner. There is, believe it or, more to it than being “impressive.” The number one reason cited in divorces is infidelity. This strongly suggests that women have always cared a lot about male fidelity, but could not prioritize this because they couldn’t support themselves otherwise.
Men also tend to conflate the drop in marriage rates with their own difficulties convincing women to have sex. But of course, these aren’t the same thing. If a man ultimately wants to get married, he can’t necessarily find a girlfriend and then wait for her to drag him into a commitment.
Permitting polygamy would boost the fertility rate, give women better access to good husbands and empower female choice.
Being the third wife of a successful executive is a better gig than being the only wife of an abusive/addicted/badly under-employed nonentity.
It’s worth noting that islamic societies have high fertility rates
"Being the third wife of a successful executive is a better gig than being the only wife of an abusive/addicted/badly under-employed nonentity."
I think the set of women in a polygamous society for whom those would be the two most likely choices has a vanishingly small population.
Being the 28-year-old third wife of the executive, with 2 kids, might be a great gig. Being the 35-year-old divorcee of the executive with 2 kids and no job, less so. This polygamy idea would immiserate a lot of women after they were discarded.
the backstop for women who are discarded is divorce law. that is true whether the man had one wife or four. i will not defend islamic divorce law, i’d welcome a quasi feminist alternative that empowered subsequent wives of polygamists in a fair and proportional way
This feels like what Matt is talking about—a simplistic proposal (for polygamy in this case) that is not yet sufficiently worked out. You can postulate some as-yet-unspecified divorce law, but actual existing divorce law leaves women worse off and men better off.
actual divorce law does not leave men better off, they usually face straightened financial circumstances
respectfully, i think the comments sections are the place for half baked ideas. the only thing im pretty sure about is that polygamy would increase fertility.
the fact that many cultures practice polygamy makes it, at a minimum, worthy of serious study. i don’t have much hard data, but would appreciate links
If you actually want to increase the birth rate, then surely the obvious thing to do is to shift the bias in income more towards women. If women earn significantly more than men, then they can afford to have children without having to worry about whether the father will stay and support those children.
The really obvious approach is to fill the C-suite with 40-year old women with four kids each.
> If women earn significantly more than men, then they can afford to have children
This implies an assumption that women all very much want to have children, but financial health is holding them back and preventing them.
I would vehemently reject this premise, and propose the opposite. Increased wealth makes it *less* likely to have kids, not more. It turns out that having kids, while it brings benefits, is actually kind of a huge pain in the ass, and it's more fun to vacation in Tahiti instead.
Motherhood is difficult, biologically, financially, emotionally, etc. And I think it has gotten worse over time. I have no data to back this up, but I feel like my mother, who let us roam the streets most days and occasionally stuck her head out the door and yelled for us to come home for dinner/bed/etc, and who never had to walk me to the bus or pick me up from it, was a LOT less stressed than a typical mother today, who walks her kids *everywhere*, never allows them any unsupervised time, breastfeeds much longer, etc etc.
I don't necessarily want to go back to the days when our parents had us riding in the back of the pickup truck, and would occasionally check and see if we were all still there by braking hard and counting the thumps, but I do think we should find ways to dial the stress of parenthood WAY back from where it is now.
i think that would crater fertility
Women in polygamous marriages are generally miserable. They appreciate help with the childcare, but they are consumed with jealousy. And ironically enough, many of them contribute financially, often by being on welfare, since they qualify as single mothers.
This is just one more extremely male idea based on male sexual preferences with basically no understanding of what women want, or how their choices have been constrained in the past. Polygamy is only practiced in societies where women are completely subordinated to men. And of course, it leaves a lot of men with no way to form their own families.
I could imagine a drive to "legalize polygamy" would be turned by some on the new-right into yet another part of the elite class-warfare "war on men!!"--they'd argue the nefarious elite are only doing this so that the elite men could have multiple wives and more children while taking away reproductive partners from less-highly-educated men.
In re your last sentence, it's probably worth noting that polygamy is not usually practiced even in countries where it's legal (see especially the Arab states of the Mediterranean basin) and there are plenty of countries that historically had high TFRs despite polygamy being illegal in them.
the biggest determinant of polygamy is age structure. there is lots of polygamy in botswana because population is growing, so the ratio between 20 year old women and 40 year old men is large and there aren’t enough plausible husbands for 20-year old botswanan women.
polygamy is much less common in iran, which has an age distribution similar to Greece or Turkey. unless there is a large disparity between. the number of nubile women and middle aged men, only elites get multiple wives
I do not think Islamic societies are something to be emulated.
Re: your second paragraph— I actually think that a lot of the issue is that the lowest-earning men also don’t tend to bring much to the table as partners in household management or child-rearing. If you restrict to guys who are conscientious, kind, and emotionally stable, income gaps don’t seem to be as much of a big deal. (Marriages where the wife is a nurse and the husband is a less educated and somewhat lower-earning cop or tradesman seem pretty common, as are marriages with a husband who’s a teacher, academic, artist, or civil servant with a wife who’s a doctor, lawyer, or other higher-earning professional.)
Yeah, anecdotally it seems like there used to be more bums who somehow got married and had kids anyway. Life as a bum has gotten less rewarding.
Actually, I've observed some young women (mid-to-late 20's) who -- in my opinion -- married "down", and it turned out fine because the guy had less employment and was able to stay home and help with kids. That ended up being a critical win-win for the couple: she was rising in her organization but still wasn't making enough to cover daycare, and his presence at home helped them bridge that gap.
> My best bets are universal parental leave and cheaper childcare.
Don't lots of European companies with these things also struggle with birth rates?
Yeah, it's certainly not a magic wand. Having said that, I do think the cost and sheer effort involved in parenting result in people having less kids than they would otherwise, so I am still optimistic that those policies would have some positive effect. I wonder if economists have found any good natural experiments with the implementation of policies like these that could shed more light on the actual effect.
One overlooked driver of 1950s social conservatism is the gender ratio. We lost hundreds of thousands of men in WW2, enough to make men slightly more "in-demand" afterwards, which let men have more influence than normal times on dating and relationship patterns. (My guess is based on Jon Birger's Date-onomics, which I found compelling.)
Dont bring your facts to conservative world of the Id, they dont want to hear it. They just want to be mad
I think that the “pay attention to international comparisons and recognize when you’re dealing with a long-term global trend” point is a really good one which deserves more exploration in future columns.
With respect to some of the specific issues we’re discussing here, I think that American and European conservatives could learn a lot by noticing that in the developed countries where the state, public discourse, and social norms are most explicitly pro-patriarchy and anti-feminist (Japan, South Korea, parts of Eastern Europe, Italy), women have mostly responded by opting out of marriage and childbearing at higher rates than their counterparts in more feminist countries.
A simple model that fits this data is that marriage and child rearing are disproportionately likely to be a raw deal for women, women with decent jobs (both a cause and side effect of economic development) have a strong BATNA and can choose to opt out, and, at the societal level, the cluster of political changes and social norm shifts that fall under the “feminist” label are basically ways to sweeten the deal so that getting married and having kids are still at least sort of attractive.
I think this is correct but the logic of the position relies on women being able to find substantial income outside the home. It's probably true that you would encourage both marriage and childbirth if you made it difficult for unmarried women to support themselves by working and for married mothers to work outside the home. Obviously these are not good policy ideas.
If your rich country kicks half of the adult population out of its formal workforce, it will stop being a rich country pretty quickly. I imagine that some rich-country social conservatives have considered walking down the Taliban path, but it seems to be a fringe position even on the far right.
I do think the “anti-woke” strand has a relatively concrete policy agenda: establish and enforce a “colorblindness” standard of civil rights, and that “disparate impact” is not sufficient evidence of discrimination. Those would be pretty big changes.
Implementing the first part has not been easy. In California we passed a proposition banning affirmative action in the UCs and Cal States, but no one thinks that's actually been done. So the policy details still matter.
“But I think it’s turned out over the past several generations that while standing athwart history yelling “stop!” might be a good election strategy and occasionally block some bad ideas, it cannot reverse the big underlying trends.”
I think this is exactly right. As someone who has worked in conservative policy circles, this recognition is what is driving the attraction to the different varieties of post-liberalism, including the more extreme anti-democratic varieties.
The section on marriage today, showing skepticism that promoting it can be something the government can pull off as the article looks at the failures the Bush administration had in that regard, feels like a bit of turnaround from Friday's mailbag [https://www.slowboring.com/p/dog-days-of-mailbag-857], where Matt was thinking "we should try to nudge adults in committed romantic relationships to get married", and proposed a Pigouvian tax on lavish weddings that I thought was unworkable.
The "two-parent families improve children's life chances" thing seems like a good example of why correlation doesn't prove causation.
As far as I know, nobody's disproved the null hypothesis, which is "Having parents who stay married doesn't make you better off. What's being observed is a set of genetic traits that predispose some people to be more successful than others at maintaining romantic relationships *and* at completing many years of schooling, obtaining highly paid jobs, et cetera "
(I don't necessarily think this is all about genetic variations in intelligence, although those probably do matter. There are other factors like time preference and conscientiousness that smart people can often be bad at.)
Am I wrong about this? Is there social science research that's succeeded in picking out this possibility and refuting it?
If you google “impact of divorce on child outcomes instrumental variables” you’ll find a bunch of stuff.
These are the papers on the topic I usually link to:
http://www.economics.jku.at/papers/2016/wp1604.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/423155
These look potentially persuasive, but I can see issues with the study designs. (Maybe men who expect to cheat on their wives choose professions where they can meet more women?)
I still think the ideal control group might be people who had one parent die in early childhood.
To me, Occam's Razor screams there's virtually no chance your (complex) hypothesis is correct. But admittedly, different people have different intuition on these sorts of things.
But in any event, even if the "two-parent advantage" thing were substantially driven by genes, it would still be the case that the "good DNA" humans who bring children into the world after coupling up with a spouse would still be providing a more optimal situation for their offspring than the "good DNA" humans who eschew marriage.
I don't think it's likely to be correct either. That's not what a null hypothesis is for.
Look at it this way. An argument like "Children of single parents are more likely to have problems in adulthood, therefore children are harmed when their parents choose not to stay together" is similar to "Children from wealthy families are more likely to be admitted to Ivy League colleges, therefore the US educational system is unfair".
Divorce probably is somewhat harmful to kids and the US school system probably is somewhat unfair. But unless you know how large a role inherited traits play in these outcomes, there's no way to know how much harm/unfairness is actually occurring.
The only justification for ignoring genetic factors in either case would be if you've demonstrated that they play no role at all. That hasn't been done yet and it seems very unlikely a priori, but the debate still proceeds as if those factors were irrelevant.
"I don't think it's likely to be correct either. That's not what a null hypothesis is for."
Actually, if you read Fisher, that is *precisely* what a null hypothesis is for. (I recognize that formulating null hypotheses in this way is no longer standard in the social sciences, but we shouldn't encourage the misuse of statistics.)
I'm probably not phrasing it well. Maybe a better way to say it would be this:
The available evidence is consistent with a causal effect of zero. That doesn't mean it's likely to be zero, but it does mean we don't know whether the actual magnitude of the effect is large or small. And if we don't know that, we don't know what policy levers we should be looking at.
If the direct harm caused by single parenthood is large (the standard conservative view), that's a reason for the government to discourage divorce and births out of wedlock. If the direct harm is small but the indirect harm from higher child poverty rates among single-parent families is large (the standard progressive view), then that approach is mostly pointless and we should focus on things like creating a cash child benefit.
I lean towards the second view but I'll admit that a third view is also pretty plausible (note that this is *not* the null hypothesis). It may be that single parenting per se is slightly harmful to kids and that child poverty caused by single parenthood is somewhat more harmful, but that most of the disparity in children's life outcomes isn't caused by either factor. It may just be a correlation with a common set of heritable causes.
As Matt has pointed out, there's a lot of evidence that programs which alleviate child poverty, such as food stamps, cause children to be more successful in adulthood. That's great and it's a strong argument for expanding that type of assistance.
But I don't think anyone is claiming that kids whose families get food stamps will be as successful, on average, as kids whose families weren't poor enough to qualify for food stamps. Unless you disbelieve completely in genetic factors, you shouldn't expect that.
As with any IV analysis these won't tell you the average impact of divorce, just the effect related to the instrumental variable. This probably matters for both papers but I think it's particularly noteworthy for the one about more women in the workplace, which is going to be a distinct causal pathway for divorce relative to (say) severe interpersonal problems between the couple.
I think it is confusing cause and effect. People who have their priorities in order and understand the long term benefits tend to get married, have kids in wedlock, etc. But getting a bunch of people who for whatever reason don't have their lives in order to get married is not going to suddenly fix their priorities.
At the same time, "predisposition to have one's priorities in order" doesn't really explain the decline in marriage and childbearing within wedlock over the past 80 years. The base assumption has to be that such predispositions are transmitted pretty faithfully across generations.
I think ultimately "cause and effect" is the wrong mode of analysis. When there's evidence on either side of the arrow of causality, it's kind of wierd to decide that you HAVE to pick one side to just plain ignore.
No, you recognize that the analysis is actually one of "virtuous vs. vicious cycles". And the two clearest trends that have turned "vicious" in the past 80 years WRT marriage and childbearing are (1) the secularization of society (with all its attendant sub-trends), and (2) the ramping up of the supply-side/cost-disease crisis [note: I'm not making any value judgments here about whether EG secularization is "vicious", I'm just saying that from the perspective of marriage, secularization has fueled a cycle of decline which we canonically name "vicious"].
The first one can't be reversed on any meaningful time scale and with any meaningful fidelity by politics alone; the second can be reversed, but basically means NatCons/FreeCons/whoever-is-doing-this-on-the-right have to reverse-engineer supply-side progressivism all by their lonesome and without the progressive values that underpinned that whole project. Best of luck to them, but these sorts of astroturfing efforts tend to fail.
Hard to disagree with you but I have to note that this would seem to be equally vexxing to the progressive project of uplifting the economically downtrodden, including perfunctory nod to those demographics most impacted. Right now we operate as though secularization liberals have (rightly IMO) championed doesn't necessitate this trade off. However, and without endorsing all manner of cranky and reactionary conservative critiques of womens equality, modernity, sexual freedom etc. I think we as the broader left may need to ask the uncomfortable question: what if it does?
Indeed. The progressive project is quite a mess in that regard. While it has an *answer* to the "race-class narrative", an answer I nominally agree with, I don't think it's ever succeeded in showing that that particular answer can reliably win elections and societies at large. Which leads me to question how complete the answer truly is.
"Fewer people are having kids out of wedlock."
This is contrary to what I have read. Can you provide where you got this?
There's a philosophical assumption built in here which is that it's always better (at least for populations in the millions) to have less people at a higher standard of living than more people at a lower standard/adding extra people with lives worth living to the world is not good in itself. This is intuitive to a lot of people*, but some of the leading moral philosophers in the English-speaking world have offered strong arguments against it: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0060/pdf/Climate%20change%20and%20population%20ethics.pdf I *suspect* it's still the majority view, but hard to tell.
(See also: https://philarchive.org/archive/ZUBWSW Though it's probably a bit too compressed to follow if you haven't done any academic philosophy.)
I think your view is *probably* still the majority view amongst ethicists, but I've never seen any data. Of course, maybe it's reasonable to say "who cares what professional philosophers think", but it's not clear the public agrees with you either: http://files.luciuscaviola.com/Caviola-et-al_2022_Population-ethical-intuitions.pdf
Regardless of what the philosophers think, there's also the sheer practicality to contend with. An overwhelming majority of the 8B+ humans alive today believe on some level that they have a fundamental right to live and reproduce as they see fit.
Just because a bunch of pinheaded Western intellectuals come up with a bit of fancy rationalization for why (THIS time) it's not actually imperialist (anymore) for them to make prescriptions about what non-Western populations do with their natural rights, doesn't mean those non-Western have any obligation nor propensity to agree with them. Population dynamics are going to forge ahead regardless of the whatever the latest fashion is in post-Malthusian thought.
Mike is on a real tear of wrongness lately, to make me agree with you so frequently.
I agree with this, although there probably is some financial benefit to the familes/kids of “forcing” marriage (eg don’t need to spend twice as much on rent so there is more money to spend on nutrition, after school activities, etc that should lead to better outcomes for kids).
It most definitely would lead to better outcomes.
But we have moved away from the idea that a decision (have a baby) has consequences (get married to someone less-than-perfect, maybe sacrifice some personal happiness & freedom). So we are left with the decision, no consequences and kids who are worse off. But at least the unmarried parent isn't inconvenienced by societal expectations! yay!
I think this is overly simplistic. The norm that if you get pregnant (or get someone pregnant), you must get married, depended on the norm against premarital sex. And the norm against premarital sex depended on the absence of widespread reliable contraception. And that genie is out of the bottle.
There are other dynamics too. Stigma around out-of-wedlock birth affects women most harshly since pregnancy after a certain point is publicly manifest and in the vast majority of cases the mother is the custodial parent. This poses obvious fairness issues since in many (most?) cases it's the man who is less committed. (As a practical matter, conservatives are less enthusiastic about stigmatizing out-of-wedlock birth these days since they realize that it encourages abortion.) Even if she does get married it's not a guarantee of two-parent childrearing, given divorce, and even if we made divorce laws stricter it wouldn't stop marital separation or other kinds of lack of commitment within the framework of a de jure marriage. This system was never especially invested in the well-being of women but it's particularly poorly suited for a world where mothers have educational and employment aspirations that may not be compatible with the fathers'.
Interestingly, the concept of what is best for the child didn't enter into your comment.
Yes, there are situations where the marriage would be bad -- abusive, violent, etc. But there are many more where the marriage is just less-than-ideal. The adults might not be as happy as possible, but providing the two-parent household is chosen since it is better for the child.
I would rather invest in child well-being with generous child-centered transfer programs, which unlike norms around marriage really are directly a public policy choice, and which have pretty good evidence for efficacy at improving outcomes. A lot less costly to other goals too than forcing marriage where it will often be inappropriate.
I am also unpersuaded that any on-the-table policy option today in this area to restigmatize single parenting would actually improve child outcomes. Reducing transfer payments to single mothers would probably have the opposite effect. Even politically implausible restrictions on divorce availability probably wouldn't fundamentally change the picture (it doesn't stop someone from leaving or even from forming a new family, or of course from not getting married in the first place). I suppose you could try to reinvigorate fornication and adultery laws, or to ban contraception, but good luck with that.
Absolutely! But you're going to need another word to sell that other than 'thriving'.
We also somewhat moved away from the idea that it’s a “decision” (at least in those states now outlawing abortion) !
It seems to me there are only two real paths to turn that around. The first is inverting the Will & Grace hypothesis, ie using soft power to 'glamorize' female subservience, so tradwives on social media etc. The legislative path is banning abortion and potentially no-fault divorce as well. And the former of those is a mainstream Republican position, which is proving unpopular, while the latter looks a political non-starter (though I've seen some fringe types advocating for it). But you can of course advocate for those paths, it's just that those policy options seem completely at odds with the 'encouraging thriving' framework. Not many people are going to perceive being stuck in a marriage they hate as 'thriving'.
I mean, beyond the logistical problems of figuring out how to sustain societies with ~1.7 TFRs, I don't see anything more normatively right about that than the previous system of "you get one shot at marriage and then kids within wedlock, and if you mess up at any step along the way, you get shunned".
Not to mention, (1) while that IS considered to be what passes for "traditional morals", it wasn't even all that common among the common folk throughout European history -- we're really just reverting to the mean -- and (2) that system kind of only worked while there were a massive global reconstruction and a massive baby boom fueling a golden economic age.
I did a bit of digging on that, and as best I can tell, your numbers are correct but incomplete. In 1980, about 18% of children were born to unmarried women. That then rose doubled by the mid 90s and trended upward to 40% by 2010 around where it has hovered ever since.
4 out of 10 kids are born to unmarried women in the US. That seems very high.
How much of that is delaying marriage because of the reduction in the expectation that the parents will pay for marriage and the increase in the cost of marriage?
If, say, about half of those parents intend to eventually marry, then it would be much less concerning.
Sure, some of them wouldn't actually marry: but how much better is that than those couples divorcing after a few years?
Obviously, it's harder to get these figures, and there's a delay, but what percentage have two living married parents on their 18th birthday? I get the impression that delaying marriage tends to mean less likelihood of divorce.
I think the point that the marriages that policy (any policy) can affect are the marginal marriages. You're not getting great marriages, and the likelihood is that you're getting below average marriages.
This is always the bit that gets to me: is a below-average marriage better than being single? I mean, maybe it is, but you can't compare averages as the married/unmarried groups are self-selecting.
Interesting discussions of policy details and possibilities for women and families in our society and the world by men.
Probably so. And in fairness it probably did 'work' to some degree when you had a combination of overwhelming social pressure and lots of decent enough jobs down at the plant pulling a lever all day. But neither of those things are coming back.
"there probably is some financial benefit to the familes/kids of “forcing” marriage (eg don’t need to spend twice as much on rent)"
Yet another reason to reduce rents through YIMBYism.
More seriously, what are these "financial benefits"? Aside from rent, how big are they really? I can think of:
* Food is slightly less expensive in bulk.
* You can share a car, but only if you don't both work or your area has decent public transportation.
Are these really going to pay for "after school activities, etc that should lead to better outcomes for kids"?
Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Housing makes up roughly 25% of total costs for the average American - more for lower income people.
That’s really the only benefit that I was thinking of, but it’s huge!
And even if rents were lower, they’re not going to be zero, and two rents will always be roughly 2x as costly.
Oh gosh. This is so wrong, man. Read history please. Historically just about everyone had “fear of god” and on average anti social and criminal behaviors were WAY worse. As for Kiryas Yoel. Don’t buy the BS. It’s not high religiosity, it’s a cult. Plenty of bad stuff happening but they won’t complain to the police. Maybe their streets look fine but what’s going on behind doors? Listen to some interviews with people who got out of these communities.
I think the teaching obedience to a creed and the 70% below poverty rate in Kiryas Joel are causally connected. The people there can do what they want, but why would we think it in the best interests of children to see them consigned to a group that will keep them mired in poverty, no matter how well behaved?
It's their right to live the way they want, but I don't find it admirable.
Why would the null be about *genetic* traits rather than just *traits* that could be cultural, personal, genetic, etc?
It's probably all of those. I mentioned the likely genetic component because to whatever extent it's the cause of the correlation, to that extent single parenthood isn't causing worse outcomes for kids.
If (hypothetically) it were 100 percent a matter of genetics, then growing up with a single parent would have zero negative effect on your future success. I don't think that's likely but I do think it's likely that the genetic component is substantial, and that the negative impact of single parenthood is a lot smaller than everyone in this debate is assuming.
I still don't see why genetics is special? Wouldn't "cultural traits" operate in the same way? Or "traits you learned from your own parents" if that makes my meaning clearer?
I also don't see why genetics would be a particularly likely suspect here when it's so abundantly clear that culture, environment, societal forces and learned behavior are all so clearly and enormously powerful, but links to genetics have to be tenuously hypothesized?
I have a page on immigrant statistics and one of the variables you can select from the dropdown is marriage rates. Would you hypothesize that people from India and the Arab world share a "marriage gene"? I would guess culture is the easier explanation.
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/immigrant_paradox
Well, yes. In cultures where divorce and single parenthood are very rare, you'll still see some kids doing better than others but the fact that their parents stayed together won't distinguish them from the kids who did less well.
My point was that *if* there's such a thing as "genetic predisposition to having your shit together, across multiple domains", it will correlate with having two married parents in cultures like the US, where divorce and single parenthood aren't strongly stigmatized. The fact that it won't have that correlation in more traditional cultures doesn't demonstrate that no such genetic factor exists.
I wasn't arguing in favor of the null hypothesis, just to be clear. My point was that it doesn't seem to have been conclusively rejected. (David Shor linked to a couple of studies suggesting that single parenthood does have an independent negative effect, but it would be good to have more data.)
If you think there is a significant genetic component, then do you think we'll be able to genetically modify away most of this negative behavior at some point?
I imagine that inherited genetic or cultural characteristics explain a decent chunk of the “married parents” bonus, but the main alternative mechanism of action— two-parent families have more resources to dedicate to their children— seems to have major benefits when states provide it through other delivery mechanisms like child allowances.
Absolutely true— and the fact that providing even part of that package has significant benefits suggests that the broader “resources” explanation has some heft.
I don’t know if anything that addresses that question, but you could get a guess at it by looking at education rates and marriage... and look, that favors your hypothesis!
Maybe a natural experiment would be to look at the educational achievement and adult earnings of kids born to married parents, whose fathers died when they were very young and whose mothers didn't remarry before they turned 18
If there were such evidence, it would be of only indirect help in designing policies promote two-parent families. Too often this claim is made just to "own the Libs" (and I'll bet they'd stop if the Libs would just stop being owned). I say this because the people making it seldom go on to in fact USE their shiny new fact to actually design those policies.
In re "how do you actually" cause "Muslim-majority countries to become prosperous liberal democracies incorporated into the U.S.-led alliance and trading system," here's my two cents:
I was 100% opposed to the Iraq war at the time it happened and remain so opposed to this day, but here's what I told people I thought the US should do if it was serious about democratizing Iraq in any meaningful way:
(1) EVERY Iraqi (regardless of age, former political alignment, etc.) is offered a 6-week intensive English course in Iraq, with some sort of financial incentive to participate.
(2) EVERY Iraqi high school student who demonstrates a certain (relatively low) level of fluency in English is offered the opportunity to do a one-year study abroad in the US at a public high school, with a stipend paid to their family in Iraq and a stipend paid to American host families.
(3) EVERY Iraqi with the equivalent of a high school degree or greater, ages 18 to 35, and who demonstrates a certain (moderate) level of fluency in English is offered a full-ride four-year scholarship with modest requirements for maintaining grades/course hours to any accredited public university or college in the US that admits them.
(4) ANY Iraqi who participates in one or more of these programs gets preferential treatment for receiving a US work visa.
My logic for this proposal was that, in my view, the inherent problem with most countries that might be targeted for democratization/liberalization in the 21st Century is that there are hardly any "native" liberals present in them -- they are societies that have no recent history of liberalism and most locals who might have been predisposed to liberal ideas fled decades ago. The starting point thus would have to be as massive an injection of "liberalism" into the society as possible and the best way to do that is almost certainly heavy exposure to the English language and American culture.
(And yes, I know people always say, "What about the Axis powers after WW II? They didn't go through that sort of process." To which my response would be that Germany, Italy, and even Japan all had more history of domestic liberalism prior to their turn to fascism between the late 1920s and early 1930s than Iraq did in 2003.)
Let a thousand Sayyid Qutbs bloom.
I'll note that I didn't say it was guaranteed to work, but I suspect that the net effect would have been more beneficial than harmful. Also, to repeat, my preference would be no invasion (and thus, no "nation building") to begin with!
“…I suspect that the net effect would have been more beneficial than harmful”
So do I.
My late father's proposal was 50 years of running Iraq as a colony, which he assumed was what the Bush government was actually planning on the assumption they were lying about that and not lying about WMDs. I think he was more annoyed that they held national elections in Iraq than he was that the WMDs didn't exist.
His proposal was basically: take over Iraq. Bring in an entirely new legal code, disqualify every Iraqi lawyer, police officer, judge, etc. Ship in a complete, trained, Arabic-speaking set of lawyers, judges, police officers, etc, from the USA. Build an entirely new secular education system from scratch until you have universal education, and widespread university education. Obviously, all the teachers have to come from the USA to start with. The medical profession doesn't have to be completely replaced from the ground up, but will need massively expanding. Build out infrastructure so Iraqis can travel and their businesses can trade right across the country, rebuild homes, put in water and sewerage everywhere, etc, etc.
Zero out Iraqi taxes and pay for the whole thing out of the US federal budget for at least the first ten years.
Once you've stabilised things and the rule of law is functioning, gradually increase Iraqi taxes to pay for it all. Also, start conducting local elections and giving locally elected city councils the right to be consulted, and then gradually give them real powers (at the same time that taxes appear). Establish the same at provincial level after a couple of rounds of elections, then do the same at national level. Need to give it at least 20 years before there are any national elections.
Gradually pull back and let the Iraqis start running their own country.
It's going to be expensive - expect it to cost 5% of US GDP for at least 20 years. He didn't think it was worth it, but he couldn't believe they were prepared to do an invasion without that sort of commitment.
“ Their solution was rooted in an idea that I think is correct: if a much larger share of children were born into and raised by stable two-parent families, that would ameliorate many pressing social problems.”
If more kids were born to the types of stable responsible parents who enter into stable long term relationships, sure. Simply forcing unstable and uncommitted people to stay married won’t move the needle in terms of childhood outcomes.
Has the percentage of people who are stable enough to get 1950s married changed? Some of those marriages had issues but are most "missing marriages" marriages that would have failed or succeeded?
I don't know but I doubt people have changed so much we couldn't support a higher marriage rate.
But you assume having these people be married would benefit the children. You need to separate the largely heritable personality traits they result in someone being in a stable long term relationship vs. the simple fact of being together.
No one is doubting that the type of people who form stable long term marriages pass those genes into their children and pass on the benefits of a stable loving household. But what are the benefits for those who aren’t those type of people?
Fair, I'm assuming that the people who would have gotten married in 1950 but not now are net positive(in aggregate) for children, and it's hard to tease that out.
How do the economic benefits compare against any psychological drawbacks that come from being around people that no longer want to be together?
I get that, I'm just trying to figure out the whole of your statement of "[f]orcing poor parents to stay married mostly is in fact good for the kids.". You mentioned economic benefits, and I was trying to see if there's anything else out there considered, even if the net still ends up positive for you.
I think separation involves a whole host of intense challenges compared to the single variable of parents who fight a lot or don’t seem to love each other very much.
The shuffling around between households, the tightened finances as Foooooo says, the introduction of new maybe-step parents and their kids if they have them... Those things are really hard on kids, and their life is literally less stable on a daily basis because of all the shuffling.
You’re assuming two incomes not a dad playing video games all day.
Perhaps reinforcing the thermostatic view of government, it’s worth pointing out that the Bush administration followed the Clinton administration which was smitten with the ideas of “Reinventing Government”, which basically was focused on measuring how well government services worked and determining what could best be accomplished by outsourcing. If memory serves, Al Gore ran a program as VP specifically referencing the Reinventing Government framework. But for bad ballot design, questionable Supreme Court reasoning and Al Gore’s respect for democratic processes, we may have had a world focused on government effectiveness, rather than “one big ideaism” and culture war fights.
Isn’t the problem here the conflict between religious values and Friedman-esque economics? For example, I’ve often wondered why conservatives haven’t made a fuss about things that make church going difficult like the end of Sunday closing and the relentless rise of travel sports. These are issues government actually could do something about
Go take a look at Lyman Stone's Twitter feed, he hates sports and wants to bring back blue laws. Doesn't seem like he gets much traction on either, though.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll take a look.
Reminds me of something my wife told me. She used to be junior clergy at a church bordering fraternity row in College Park MD. When one parishioner lamented that attendance had dropped from the good old days in the fifties and sixties, another parishioner noted that in the good old days the Greek organizations required members to attend “the church or synagogue of their choice.”
Those days aren’t coming back either.
The place where I remain the most Ayn Rand sympathetic is the ways in which government and Religion are two sides of the same con.
Also NFL games at 10 AM Pacific
Bush was the worst president of my lifetime but if social security was privatized, current retirees would be a lot richer than they are now.
It's true that the Social Security system could take on a higher average rate of return in exchange for higher risk. That's true whether or not it's privatized. (The same point could be used to support a sovereign wealth fund; governments can generally accept more risk than individuals.)
But the price is higher risk. So you can't just look ex post and say, look it would have turned out better.
Errrrr... maybe. That assumes people would be making good investments, but it's pretty easy to imagine an industry of hucksters popping up to take advantage of less than knowledgeable investors. But either way, they all would've been a lot poorer in 2008-9, to the point where there would've had to have been a politically popular bailout of Social Security on top of everything else that happened.
We, collectively, are unwilling to allow people to live with the consequences of their decisions, if those consequences are especially bad. I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but it is why privatizing social security will never work.
Social Security is insurance. If we privatize it, as well as the first order effects would turn out for most here, we will end up recreating another old age insurance program for all those who don’t end up benefitting.
It seems like a good thing when the whole point of a safety net is that you’re not supposed to take it away (even if you might be the best circus performer).
I don’t think this is actually true. If you make idiosyncratic bad decisions, American society is perfectly willing to let you take the hit.
Interventions tend to show up in cases where individuals’ bad decisions are highly correlated— and it makes sense that they do, because big hits to aggregate demand cause pain for everyone.
I think it is a good thing on average though a few of the "details" could be improved. The big problem is which taxes finance it.
That has always struck me as the most likely scenario. Some people would have done really well, some so so, but then you'd have the additional social burden of the people who screwed up or got taken for a ride slowly building up into demand for a subsidy, which of course would defeat the purpose of the whole idea of privatization.
Not if your "purpose" was to empower Fox News advertiser types. :)
BUY GOLD!
This was and is 100% the risk of privatizing social security as proposed by Bush. Requiring people to be competent investors as a condition of retirement security seems like it subverts the basic point of "retirement security."
This also risks being obviously unfair from a distributive point of view - without an incredibly strong norm such that even people in the rust belt who have never owned stock know what to do when prompted to invest (per Gallup, 39% of Americans don't own stock!), you're just stacking the deck in favor of the people who already know what to do and against those who don't -- more-informed parties preying on weaker-informed parties is what the stock market exists to facilitate basically *by design!*
The best way to mitigate this risk that I'm aware of would be to basically tell people what to do (e.g, "buy VTI, don't sell when the market is down"[1]), with a lot of hoops for allowing alternative investment - at which point why doesn't the government just do this for them in the first place rather than privatizing things if we already know how to maximize average return though investment for the overwhelming number of Americans? What's the gain by letting people fuck up through individual discretion? The people who are good at picking stocks that outperform the market don't need the retirement help and may well already be employed on Wall Street!
[1] Not investment advice.
Was the privatization proposal based on the idea that people could choose any investment? I thought that there were guardrails around the choices, eg index funds or other more generic investments.
Of course the idea that people could invest their retirement savings with any huckster would have had the results you allude to. But was that in fact the proposal?
My non-Social Security retirement savings are in index ETFs, and before those existed they were in index funds, and before those existed they were in big no-load funds that broadly follow the indexes. I often regret that I didn't buy Apple or Google or Tesla, but it's more likely that generic investments have saved me from own bad decisions.
And of course there was a period (1929-1939) barely within historical memory when the stock market was down or flat for a long period, but that's an outlier.
Properly designed, some kind of partial privatization would be a good idea. The devil is in the details. Illustrating Matty's point.
There were several other periods when the market was down or flat for substantial periods (eg., 1940 to 1953, 1970 to 1988): https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart
That doesn't include dividends and reinvestment which has often made a significant portion of market gains.
Also, the DJIA is a terrible index and people should stop using it.
"Also, the DJIA is a terrible index and people should stop using it."
Could you elaborate?
The Dow Jones was one of the first "indexes" used to track the markets. Its been around for a long time and people are used to hearing it. But as a metric for tracking the market, its pretty bad. Part of its formula is based on share price which often has little do with the overall value of a company. S&P 500 is good, but focused on large companies. The S&P 1500, Russell 3000, or Wilshire 5000, are much more modern and effective composite indexes at tracking the market.
But people have been hearing DJIA for a long time, are familiar with it, and so it keeps getting used.
Based on that chart, I'm confused by the statement that the market was down or flat "1970 to 1988" -- it looks like 1966 to 1982 would be the relevant period to describe the market as being down or flat. (Still a 16 year-period, importantly, but as someone who lived through the 1980s it immediately sounded very strange to describe that as an era when the market was down/flat outside of the 1987 drop.)
This is helpful information, but if the government thinks it appropriate to cabin individual discretion in terms of investment selection to limit downside risk, why provide options at all rather than shoving the Social Security Trust Fund into VTI and/or VOO? It's not like individual brokerage accounts don't already exist for people who want to exercise discretion with non-retirement monies.
(ED: should have probably responded to Allan below.)
It's a good point. Where do you limit individual discretion? If everybody's in the Russell 3,000 or S&P500, the government might as well invest for everyone.
As I see it, there are three or four levels of choices:
1. Accept a guaranteed Social Security return (inflation + X%) or divert part into the broad market. Limited to some percentage. For those who choose to divert, limit loads and management fees and mandate a broad index.
2. Allow people to choose among indices and perhaps play with the sector weights.
3. Give participants a choice between actively and passively managed funds. Again, still limiting fees, since those actively managed funds can be expensive.
4. Let people pick stocks, still limiting fees.
Again, all of this is for some predefined limited percentage of your retirement portfolio. Most of it is still conventional Social Security.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of details, but you could draw the line in several places. Including, as you suggest, the government investing for you should you choose to divert a percentage into the market.
I don't believe the plan allowed for people to buy individual stocks
At the time of social security privatization being proposed, most investing was done via active management, no? And the main thing we know is that the median active manager fails to beat their benchmark after fees. So the main result would probably have been a much larger and more powerful fund management industry - perhaps powerful enough to block the ETF revolution through regulation - and the American economy would be more unequal, with worse capital allocation, and less productive (since fund managers are just rentiers and their innovations are useless - see underperformance point above) as a result.
Australia did social security privatisation and people seem happy with it. You don’t have to turn pensions into an Ayn Rand novel, there is a lot of regulation and a basic level remains provided by the government. It’s one of those bizarre things where supposedly ruthlessly capitalist America won’t consider things more socialist countries have already done. It’s pretty weird that Australians are investing their social security in the US stock market but Americans can’t.
Australia's system (just from reading about it now) sounds like basically they have a public means-tested pension system combined with a mandate for employers to set up and provide contributions to retirement accounts. This isn't so different in principle from the public-and-private mix in the US though it sounds like the public expenditure portion in Australia is relatively smaller (and of course contributions to 401(k) plans are encouraged by the tax code but not actually mandated). My biggest worry about this is that it increases risk in a way that by default would be absorbed by individuals; in Australia the losses are partly socialized by the public pension system, and it looks like during the Great Recession the government took steps to cover even more of it.
Australia's system is fine, but there's no getting around the reality that preserving old, non-workers from penury involves limiting the consumption of those who do not fall into this category. We could transition into an Australian system if we wanted, but there's no magic box of free money. Essentially we'd be asking younger workers to decrease consumption now in exchange for enjoying more resources when they're retired. Which is also what we'd be doing if we hiked Social Security taxes.
Productivity growth is the magic pot of money. Giving people a wider range of investment options, and entrepreneurs a wider source of funding sources, seems productivity enhancing to me.
You, like the Estate of Bob Saget, appear to have mastered the ability to post comments from beyond the grave. RIP, Allan, since you must have passed away before January 20, 2017.
I think Trump's unique terribleness has made people forget how bad of a president W was.
right exactly -- Trump did much more to erode democratic norms and was a huge national embarassment, but when it came to foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, handling major disasters, etc. Trump was better than Bush.
Bush is undoubtedly a better guy, but also a worse president. (Trump was bad, don't get me wrong)
I feel like there's still a lot of history that's left to be unfolded before we can fully come to a conclusion here on the worse president front. (Worse person is pretty clear, though.)
Fair!
This is fundamentally a mistake in understanding what matters. We've had a number of bad presidents before make foolish mistakes on Bush's scale. It was primarily bad in that we wasted resources, but even more importantly discredited the establishment part of the Republican party. We have had very few president's do things that could break the entire constitutional order of our government.
I'd be curious to hear which of Trump's domestic policies were better? And which major disasters he handled better?
He handled COVID less bad (Operation Warp Speed, although with a lot of bitching about lockdowns along the way) than Bush handled 9/11 (use it to destabilize the whole Middle East and cost huge numbers of lives and massive amounts of American money to turn Iraq from a shitty dictatorship to a more typically crappy Third World country).
I give Trump high marks for three things:
-- Firing Comey (though for bad reasons)
-- Operation Warp Speed (and a special shoutout to Mnuchin for supporting relief payments)
-- Losing the 2020 election so he wasn't able to destroy our democracy
Trump is the Republican president this century whose coup *didn't* work though.
Social Security is, and has always been, a wealth transfer from currently-working people to formerly-working people. Privatizing (even part) of it doesn't mesh with how the wealth transfer actually works. The money you pay in isn't yours. It goes to someone else. And someone in the future will pay for you.
If Social Security had been privatized during the second Bush administration, the 2008 recession would have been much worse because the stock market crash would also have completely tanked most retirees’ incomes and consumption.
At a macroeconomic level, privatizing the social safety net turns a countercyclical policy instrument into a procyclical one; think it’s a bad idea unless you create a bunch of new automatic stabilizers to go along with it.
Assuming the timing of the recession was the same, it actually shouldn't have had much effect at all -- the changes to Social Security were only for people under age 55 and there was supposed to be a three-year phase-in with the first year that people would be eligible to open individual retirement accounts being 2009: https://money.cnn.com/2005/02/02/retirement/stofunion_socsec/
It would have been fine if he had given people investment accounts in addition to, rather than in place of, social security. Too bad he was trying to do the latter.
It's also fine if people give themselves investment accounts. Many Americans do just that. Which I realize you're aware of. But the problem in the US (as always) isn't being experienced by the affluent. The problem (of elderly poverty) is overwhelmingly suffered by Americans who were low earners during their working lives. We could give such workers an Australian-style system. We could also simply make Social Security more generous at the lower end.
Sure but people who wanted to retire in 2010, or whatever the next equivalent of 2010 is, would be pretty screwed.
Because you assume that the same amounts are being saved but the saving are going into private investment that has a higher return than the average Federal expenditure?
OK but which taxes are raised to fill the hole that decreased revenue created? [SS was cash positive during GWB's time.] Or which expenditures are reduced? If you don't know, don't feel bad, GWB's "compassionate conservatives" could not figure it out, either.
that's a tough question, but my assumption is that things would be phased in and that would mitigate any big budgetary shocks