Bogus babymaking crises (17 June 2008)

Via Will Wilkinson comes a link to this Reason piece about fertility fears by Kerry Howley. The upshot: social conservatives love to use demographic fears to try to roll back feminist advances, though any pragmatic effort to reverse low birth rates typically involves implementing the sort of social welfare programs that are anathema to conservatives.

Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose. From France to Poland to Singapore, governments are responding to low fertility with policies social democrats have always favored. Almost any aspect of the welfare state can be construed as encouraging procreation; more to the point, low fertility can be blamed on the lack of any particular social welfare program. A dearth of pregnancies is evidence that protections for workers are too few, social welfare allowances too small, public school days too short, mandated maternity leave too limited. Women want to fulfill their natural roles as mothers, goes the assumption, but dog-eat-dog capitalism stands in the way.

Howley points out that demographic fears are often stirred by xenophobia (a low birth rate is akin to "race suicide," as Theodore Roosevelt termed it), which is then leveraged against women, who are forced back into traditional, limited domestic roles (though this does nothing to increase fertility), nicely knitting racism and sexism together.

Periods of anxiety over “race suicide” are rarely good times for women. Protestants who were worried about the rising tide of foreign Catholics passed anti-abortion laws in the 1880s that endured until 1973, when Roe v. Wade limited their scope. Embracing historical continuity with the nativists who came before him, Mark Steyn takes time in America Alone to blame women for aborting the generation that might have stood between us and the coming Islamification of the West. It’s not surprising at all that the single greatest social anxiety of our time has been reduced to crude demographic projections that pin the blame on empty wombs.

Like concerns about abortion, concerns about fertility rates ultimately come down to checking feminism and restricting women's ability to control their own lives. Instead, their wombs are presumed to be owned by society collectively, and politically administered by the state.

Howley's conclusion explores how this sort of sexism is buttressed by nationalism.

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.
There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.
In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings.

Depopulation is basically a stalking horse for deeper problems, which appear to be inextricably bound with one another. A reminder that one can't attempt to remedy sexism without at the same time tackling other forms of bigotry.

Kids as consumer goods (3 March 2008)

From Reason's site comes this essay by Ron Bailey, which argues that couples are having fewer kids for the simple reason that many couples don't actually like them.

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that's just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don't really enjoy rearing children.

This makes intuitive sense to me. Since society has changed and women are no longer forced to be mothers, children have become voluntary, they represent choices, and the atmosphere that we are conditioned to associate with choice, the place where our choices matter, is the marketplace. Choices are less deliberative, evaluative acts than opportunities for consumption. A choice is a moment in which we can bask in all the privileges and pleasures of consumerism.

Surely, some would be appalled at the selfishness implied by viewing children as toys manufactured for the parents' amusement, but would such an attitude be so incongruent with the values generally promulgated in commercial society? In the abstract -- to the prechild couple perhaps -- children are seen as precious objects to add to a collection of quirky, self-defining things -- it's perhaps the ultimate identity good, as it's literally a piece of yourself made into something else. And children can function as lifestyle accoutrements that announce a certain set of priorities, that you subscribe in some way to "family values" and take a pride in nurturing. And children allow parents to show off a host of attendant status-signaling goods, like strollers and elite preschools.

Bailey cites happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert, who says people claim to say children make them happy because that is what they are expected to say, and because a form of the sunk-costs effect kicks in:

Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don't throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, orthodonture, and college tuitions.

That's a rather benign explanation; those with a more conspiratorial bent might attribute the cheerleading for a childcentric culture to a wish among reactionaries and conservatives to preserve the old order of gender roles: the impositions and imperatives of child care tend to lead to women doing a bunch of domestic work, rendering them less fit to compete with men in the non-domestic sphere. If women aren't staying at home altogether, they are instead working the "second shift" of managing family life and attending to its emotional and physical needs. As Tim Harford points out in The Logic of Life (citing Gary Becker), the comparative advantage women often have in performing domestic labor encourages families ("rationally") to organize the division of labor in a household so that women do most of the housework. "There is no reason to believe that men were breadwinners because they were any good at it," Harford explains. "They might simply have been breadwinners because getting them to help around the house would have been even worse." In this argument, domestic work is regarded as primary, and comparative advantage is adjusted in accordance to who best performs that fundamental labor for reproducing society. Ironic, then, that such primary work is poorly compensated and inadequately recognized socially -- in fact, society seems organized around sentimental principles that invalidate the notion that domestic work is work at all. Worshipping children is one way of negating the work of rearing them.

Baby branding (22 June 2007)

When I was a teenager, one of the main reasons I liked to write short stories was that I liked to invent names for the characters. I remember being fascinated by this passage from John Irving's The World According to Garp when the main character, a writer, spends afternoons reading the phone book looking for rich, evocative names. I thought, Wow, that's what I want my adult life to be like -- I didn't realize that the passage was about anomie and the sterility of writer's block.

Back then, I had a John Hughesian taste for names like Sloane and Chase and Ferris and Blaine; these seemed the names of privileged 1980s teendom. To my mind, if you knew people with names like that, you were running with a pretty fast set and what you were up to was almost inherently glamorous. Only later did those names seem like so much pretentious twaddle, as juvenile as the films themselves. (They seem to foreshadow the spate of suburbanized names like Travis, Cody, Kyle, Reed, etc., names that for me conjure images of bratty entitlement and Dennis-the-Menace levels of yell-talking.) But is their awfulness a matter of fashion trends changing, or is there something about the combination of syllables and sounds that make names like Claire Standish seem so implausible and absurd, so obviously made up by someone who is not a parent but a writer?

What started me thinking about this was this article from today's WSJ about the nascent baby-naming industry. Apparently people have allowed themselves to be convinced that naming is so complicated, with so many intricate prosodical and astrological, and numerological considerations to master, that a special class of experts should be consulted to navigate them through the process.

Why anyone would pay someone to come up with appropriate names for their baby is beyond me, honestly, and the article didn't really convince me that these people were anything other than idiotic. But the article did raise an interesting point about naming consciousness ands the rise of branding's importance in our culture.

Growing brand consciousness among consumers has made parents more aware of how names can shape perceptions. The result: a child's name has become an emblem of individual taste more than a reflection of family traditions or cultural values. "We live in a marketing-oriented society," says Bruce Lansky, a former advertising executive and author of eight books on baby names, including "100,000 + Baby Names." "People who understand branding know that when you pick the right name, you're giving your child a head start."

I guess that explains why Sweden had forbid parents from naming their children Ikea. It would be a blatant theft of brand equity.

Names in the past signified kinship ties in social groups that were generally small enough for that data to mean something. The explosion of cities necessitates new rationales, perhaps, for naming, and the procedures of mass marketing supply one. Not to get all Burkean here, but the fact that our culture's saturation with brands would inspire parents to turn away from tradition, reject continuity with a lost era of community and familial obligation, and embrace a synthetic individualist credo in naming seems a pretty compelling and disturbing point, proof that marketing indeed reshapes not merely our opinions toward a specific product but toward the way we comprehend the principles along which we reproduce society generally. Baby-making for the bourgeois management class begins to resemble a project-management task, with the baby being conceived and named along the same lines a company might launch a new product, only after carefully collecting the data to assure that a niche exists for it and that its name tests well with the appropriate demographic.

Marketing imperatives have so penetrated ideologically that they seem like commonsense considerations in something as time-honored and intimate as naming one's offspring. Naming one's baby to give it iconic selling power almost seems sensible. Hence the pathetic quandary of people like the following, and their desperate turn to a kind of consultancy that has never before in the history of human society had reason to exist:

Lisa and Jon Stone of Lynnwood, Wash., turned to a name consultant because they didn't want their son to be "one of five Ashtons in the class," says Mrs. Stone, 36, a graphic designer. For Mr. Stone, 37, a production director for a nonprofit arts organization, the challenge was to find a "cool" name that would help his son stand out. "An unusual name gets people's attention when you're searching for a job or you're one in a field of many," he says.

How sad is it that these parents don't think their child will be cool inherently, that they feel it needs a snappy branding to become worthy and capable of thriving in the world? And don't these clowns who sell lists of names feel ashamed for taking advantage of people in a moment of heightened insecurity? Actually, ignore that question. Of course they don't. Our economy has built entire sectors on that business model.

I can't really understand the trend toward wacky, "unique" names -- it's as if these parents believe the child's actions won't suffice to make them unique; that instead they need to be named Trafalgar or Wooster. Weird names seem like a curse to a child, who will forever stand out for a quality that he had nothing to do with. His parents' self-consciousness will hang like an albatross around his neck, making sure he is always seems like he is trying to hard (like Hughes when he conjured up Sloane Peterson), always is at one remove from himself, evaluating what superficial impression he is making. Having a jazzy name means like you are selling yourself before you even have a self to be aware of. It means going through life always dogged by unearned attention. So I'm comforted by this:

Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA and author of "The Baby Name Report Card," has conducted surveys of how people react to different names. He found that more common names elicited positive reactions, while unusual names typically brought negative responses. To him, giving children names that stand out may ultimately be no different than sending them to school with their hair dyed blue. "Yes, you can have someone stand out by being bizarre, but that doesn't mean it's going to be good," he says.

Robotic love (15 December 2006)

Even Sherry Turkle, a scientist who has long put forward the notion that "technology is not just tools," that technology changes the way we feel as well as the way we do things, is creeped out by this, about elderly patients in a nursing home bonding with robot babies.

How creeped out? Just look at this picture:

She says in the article that her research into objects designed to encourage us to form nurturing emotional bonds with them -- Tamogochis, dolls, etc. -- "gave me the chills." She also admits, "I have finally met technology that upsets and concerns me."

Here's why, from the MIT news office release:

One of Turkle's concerns was triggered by the effect of a sophisticated interactive doll, Hasbro's "My Real Baby," and of the Paro seals on the elderly. She left a few "My Real Baby" dolls (which were not a big retail hit with children) in a local nursing home, and when she returned later, she found that the staff had bought 25 of them because of the soothing effect on the residents.
"The only one who's not happy here is the sociologist," said Turkle, raising her hand.
That soothing response was based on a sham, she believes. "What can something that does not have a life cycle know about your death, or about your pain?"
She cited the case of a 72-year-old woman who, because she is sad, says she sees that her robotic toy is also sad. "What are we to make of this relationship when it happened between a depressed woman and a robot?" Turkle asked.

There are a lot of disturbing implications here: Human empathy is easy to simulate because it's mainly an illusion created by looking at someone with a thoughtful expression. Not only that, when we seek empathy from others, we're content with the illusion because we wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the other actually understanding us anyway. Psychics seem to work this way, bouncing back things you tell them in a way that allows you to feel as though something magical has happened, some secret insight has been revealed. Horoscopes, too -- they seem insightful because almost any generality can apply to our lives, but because we are so fixated on our singularity, the advice seems shockingly particular and oracular to us. We don't want new understanding, we want the understanding we already have made strange and confirmed simultaneously. We want to be able to project and then recognize ourselves, thereby extending our scope, universalizing how we feel.

Also, it suggests the process of nurturing is less a matter of communication then it is a technical operation, a set of objective conditions that can be met by any means, human or nonhuman. And it's not unusual to nurture something incapable of feelings. When we nurture, the object of our nurturing can be an infant, a houseplant, or book collection (which I invest with loving care by occasionally attempting to alphabetize them or group them by subject) -- anything that can elicit the appropriate forms of behavior and gestures. In other words, nurturing is a reflexive gesture rather than an altruistic one. It seems plausible that the effort our culture spends investing material goods with emotional qualities abets this process, reinforcing the idea that other people need not be present to complete circuits of emotional experience. Other people's feelings, after all are inconvenient and inefficient to deal with.

There's more on robotic love (via Mind Hacks) here, in this interview from the Boston Globe with Marvin Minsky, an AI researcher whose most recent book argues that emotions are just another way of thinking through a problem and thus can probably be emulated by machines. This also suggests that humans themselves are machines as well:

We don't like to think of ourselves as machines because this evokes an outdated image of a clunky, mechanical, lifeless thing. We prefer the idea that inside ourselves is some sort of spirit, essence, or soul that wants and feels and thinks for us. However, your laptop computer has billions of parts, and it would be ridiculous to attribute all its abilities to some spirit inside its battery. And a human brain is far more complex than is any computer today.

A fairly radical materialist viewpoint that dispenses with the mind/body problem -- mind is the product of the brain's processing power. (This, by the way, is how I think Battlestar Galactica ultimately ends; we find out eventually that the humans on the show never did reach Earth, but the Cylons did and we are their descendants.)

Minsky also suggests that love occurs through subtraction rather than addition:

There's short-term infatuation, where someone gets strongly attracted to someone else, and that's probably very often a turning-off of certain things rather than something extra: It's a mental state where you remove your criticism. So to say someone is beautiful is not necessarily positive, it may be something happening so you can't see anything wrong with this person.

So if you put that together with the elderly people and their robot babies, it seems that products could be designed (or are designed, or are advertised as such when they are made to be lovable) to induce this kind of forgetting, to propel this kind of screening, or turning-off, which makes the shortcomings of others (or things) and the outside world in general less recognizable, less present, and at the same time keeps the focus more securely on ourselves, the true object of our affections.

Family sentimentality (11 December 2006)

In continuing to mull over the ways in which child-care responsibilities derail women's careers, I began reading The Way We Never Were, a history of the American family by Stephanie Coontz. She puts forward the argument that in promoting individualism (and a separate private sphere), capitalism also instigates a gendered division of labor that shunts onto women all the various ways in which we remain socially dependent, locating them all within the family and outside of the public sphere and the recognized economy so that men can be productively self-seeking: "Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.... The cult of the self-made man required the cult of the True Woman" -- the "angel in the house". (This argument is echoed in Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction, which finds evidence for it in female-authored novels).

Women are presumed to be altruistic by default, while men are "rational" and businesslike in pursuing their advantage, maximizing utility and so on. And when the dog-eat-dog Hobbsean world of unfettered individualism begins to upset men, they can turn to their sheltered women, who exist above such calculation and competition, for solace. "Men began to romanticize women as givers of services and emotions that could not be bought on the open market or claimed as political tribute but seemed to flow from generosity and self-sacrifice rather than calculation of exchange." (Sociologist Arlie Hochschild's notion of emotion work, laid out in The Managed Heart is relevent to this, too; she argues that women make a economic resource of their emotional management skills after having other avenues to economic self-sufficiency systematically closed off.) From this historical account Coontz concludes that "liberal capitalism's organization of both society and family depended on a rigid division of labor by gender that denied women the assertiveness that was supposedly the basis of contract rights and denied men the empathy that was supposedly the basis of companionate marriage. The chasm...was to be bridged by love." (Laura Kipnis's Against Love has a good rundown of all the confusion, hypocrisy and injustice that stems from this sentimental arrangement.)

This, then, is the backdrop against which we are socialized into our genders. If you accept this account of capitalism's rise, the difficulty of educating away the gender gap in career outcomes becomes much more stark. Those gendered tendencies are embedded in the structures that allowed our economy to assume the form we assimilate ourselves to. The whole thing seems like an inescapable, tautological loop.

Mommies' remorse (22 November 2006)

A recent NBER study finds, unsurprisingly, that the burden of child rearing derails women's academic careers in the sciences: "Women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing."

The explanation for this seems obvious, as Matt Yglesias points out: structural sexism. "Here, as in much of life, women and men are now allowed to compete on 'equal' terms. The terms, however, were set up long ago -- by men -- before that was the case, operating under the implicit assumption that the competitors would be men who, if they had children, would have wives at home to take care of the children." Part of this structural sexism would have to be a matter of socialization, through which women are encouraged to be nurturers and to find fulfillment in the drudgery of child rearing -- thus girls are invited to see motherhood as the culmination of their existence, as the capstone that will complete them as women.

Anyway, as Julian Sanchez explains, we have to address this early socialization if we are unhappy with this outcome -- like the libertarian in good standing that he is, Sanchez implicitly argues that women should bear the responsibility of their choice to have children and its career consequences (assuming it's a choice -- the essence of social conservatism is to prevent women from making choices about motherhood. As Amanda Marcotte puts it: "anti-choicers are pretty consistent in their worldview—they believe that women are second to men, that women should be punished for having sex, and that pregnancy is god’s way of enforcing women’s second class status.") Choice in this instance is its own reward, apparently, and not a burden dumped on women (tough biological break for them) that society should structurally compensate for.

Obviously the "internalized stereotype" account points to an element of potential unfairness in the early socialization of boys and girls, but once the preferences are there, I'm not sure to what extent we should regard outcome differences flowing from them down the line as cases of additional unfairness. Or, more to the point, I don't know what the remedy could be, given that they are nevertheless now genuine preferences, beyond trying to change our educational policies for the next generation. (Raising the further thorny question what kinds of differences in socialization should be seen as inherently pernicious.) Least ambiguous seems to be the case where average levels of interest in hands-on childrearing just differ biologically across genders—here "fairness" doesn't seem to enter into it at all, unless we want to consider "maternal instincts" as a kind of unlucky genetic disability for which society should compensate people.

In other words, if we want more women to work as academic scientists, we should discourage them from motherhood early -- why? Because motherhood, is hard, distracting, indivisible work, at least in Megan McArdle's view (emphasis added):

Some things I believe:
1. For most people, the most rewarding jobs have the highest degree of autonomy and cognitive content.
2. Those jobs cannot be successfully divided. A very smart expert working 80 hours a week will be more productive than two equally smart people working forty hours a week. Because their jobs involve facts and ideas linking up in new and unpredictable ways, the more time they spend accumulating facts and ideas, the better they will be at their jobs. And the higher the informational component of the jobs, the trickier the handoff between two people. Increasing worker autonomy increases coordination problems exponentially.
3. Whether or not you think they are overpaid, most people with these jobs are making a very valuable contribution to society.
4. Whether you assign it by gender or not, the "Mommy" role is a real thing, and it is not divisible. The gay couples I know with children have found themselves falling into traditional "Mommy" and "Daddy" roles, and not because they're uncommitted to overturning traditional gender norms. Becoming a parent means taking charge of another person's entire life, and this is a difficult job to split between two people: imagine having two personal assistants, with neither one in charge, running your life. The co-ordination costs are large for the parents, and made larger by the fact that highly standardized routine is the best way to inculcate good habits in a child. Splitting the labour between two people does not mean that each of them spends half as much time on childcare.
5. Professional organisations cannot produce the same level of output with a significant number of people working half time. Such arrangements are easily incorporated when they are a few exceptions, but when half the team is unavailable at any given time, the coordination problems mount rapidly. Anyone who's worked for both European and American firms can vouch for the fact that all that glorious European vacation makes everything take a lot longer in Europe than it does in America, because at any given time someone who has a critical piece of information, or decision-making ability, is missing.
This leads to the following conclusions:
1. Even for parents who outsource most of their childcare, having children will make at least one parent less valuable to their employer.
2. The idea of (in essence) splitting one high-powered job between a couple who then spends the other half of their time on childcare, as a substitute for having one high-powered career and one stay-home spouse, is probably not going to work.
3. Ceteris paribus, couples composed of two professionals will see at least one career suffer from the decision to have children.

Her ultimate conclusion is essentially an endorsement of the status quo: that maybe girls should be socialized for motherhood (it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it), and exceptions like herself will just have to be strong enough to swim against the tide. The alternative would be for your society to die out from attrition, to suffer the decline and fall consigned by demography -- if we don't produce new generations, we have no workers to support us in our old age and no one to carry on our traditions, etc. But her reasons are interesting -- motherhood, as an irrevocable decision, may lead to greater happiness, since, as Daniel Gilbert argues, we adapt to accommodate and rationalize choices we can't reverse. There is presumably no mommy's remorse. (You can see the seductive elision available to social conservatives here -- they can try to conflate irrevocable choices with the eradication of alternatives -- shifting the irrevocable decision back to the egg's original choice of an X chromosome in the fallopian tube.) And motherhood may be a more rewarding job than the ones women typically surrender -- again, as a stolid libertarian/economistic thinker, McArdle assumes that if you choose motherhood over your job, it's because motherhood offers you more utility at the margin. (And maybe it's lamentably true that women in our current society garner more social recognition for mommying than for scientific inquiry.)

I'm less sure these "choices" women are making aren't coerced -- it's easy to authorize the coercion along the lines McArdle has delineated -- that it's for the good of society. And I think women end up with the burden of family care not because it's so fun and superior to office jobs but because men have taken care to rig society in such a way that it falls to women, leveraging advantages held over from pre-capitalist economic formations. (So basically I agree with Yglesias.) Children are necessary, but caring for them involves a lot of self-sacrifice, which capitalist economics assumes doesn't really exist; rational choice militates against having children, since it's not clear that the pleasure they may bring will compensate for surrendered wages and costs of upkeep; the magnitude of the reward is not likely to compensate us for the risks taken -- unless you a brainwashed by childcentric ideology. Thus women, in order to make such sacrifices, must simply be volunteering to remove themselves from that economy. It seems as though how the inevitable childcare burden is distributed in a society is one of the primary ways it stratifies itself. Also, is it basically true that a growth-oriented capitalist society may come only at the expense of one that truly values and rewards domesticity?

Cost of children (23 October 2006)

Economic determinism at work: My disinclination to start a family has always seemed to me a deeply personal decision based on my gut reactions to things like baby talk and steaming piles of human feces. But it may be that my reactions are colored by economic realities: In this LA Times editorial, Jacob Hacker applies the argument he presents in The Great Risk Shift, which is summarized in a series of posts on the Washington Monthly's blog, to the costs of raising children and the fact that households of single people now outnumber those of marrieds.

The family used to be a refuge from risk. Today, it is the epicenter of risk. And, increasingly, families are a source of risk as well. Because it takes more work and more income to maintain a middle-class standard of living, financial shocks are more threatening for families. What happens when a woman leaves the workforce to have children? What happens when a child is chronically ill? What happens when a spouse loses his or her job? And what happens when families fall apart?
We are not used to thinking of children as an economic liability, but the facts are clear. According to 2005 calculations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, raising a child to age 18 will cost almost $237,000 for a middle-income family. And that leaves out the upward-spiraling college tuition that is now a required ticket for admission into the middle class. Fully one-quarter of "poverty spells" — periods in which family income drops below the federal poverty line — begin with the birth of a child.
Spouses, of course, do not equally share the investment of time and money that raising children entails. Women still mostly care for the child — and bear the greatest cost. Their careers are most likely to be disrupted by family events. If they work, their jobs are most likely to be low-paying and with poor benefits. And they are most disadvantaged when families fall apart.

In short, raising a kid is expensive and extremely risky and could result in your spending many sleepless nights wondering how to pay bills and avoid the dire poverty you've set a course for. Perhaps if we had a society that truly valued family, we'd have governmental protections like they have in France, where they also have a rising birth rate and are free from hyperbolic worry of demographic disaster.

Of course we are encouraged to embrace the ideology that families are made by love, not money (which even a cursory knowledge of the history of the family disproves), and that it's callous to think of the expense of a child, to put a price tag on the miracle of life. People who prefer to treat themselves -- with free time, hobbies, solid nights of sleep, financial security, the luxuries of dining out or taking in cultural events without the stress of penny-pinching or baby-sitter hunting -- instead of make sacrifices for children are regarded suspiciously as selfish monsters (probably liberals and hence hedonistic sybarites) whose lives will ultimately lack meaning. Women are suspected of ignoring their "biological clock" and suppressing their natural maternal instinct, though as Brad Plumer explores here the maternal instinct is something of a recent invention. "In her new book, Laura Kipnis points to a related concept—the idea that mothers and infants 'bond' at birth. According to Diane Eyer, the whole notion is actually something of a scientific fiction, first pushed in the 1970s, when a large number of women where entering the labor market for the first time and messing up cultural conceptions of a woman's place in society. Many people still believe that mother-infant "bonding" exists—articles are still cropping up in the news about how painkillers and the like affect the process—but to a large extent it appears to be invented." Plumer cites this passage from Kipnis's book, The Female Thing:

With the industrial revolution, children's economic value declined: they weren't necessary additions to the household labor force, and once children started costing more to raise than they contributed economically to the household, there had to be some justification for having them. Ironically, it was only when children lost economic worth that they become the priceless little treasures we know them as today. On the emotional side, it also took a decline in infant-mortality rates for parents to start treating their offspring with much affection—when infant deaths were high (in England prior to 1800 they ran between 15 and 30 percent for a child's first year), maternal attachment ran low. With smaller family size… the emotional value of each child increased; so did sentimentality about children and the deeply felt emotional need to acquire them.

As children become more expensive, the more acute becomes our need to feel that they are worth it emotionally. The amount we love children, then, may be correlated to how much hardship they give us, how gratuitous they are to our material well-being. To use a totally trivializing comparison, this is like when I blew my allowance money on a copy of the truly awful Frankie Goes to Hollywood double album Welcome to the Pleasure Dome because I swallowed the hype about it. (I learned some hard lessons about the British music press and the costs of juvenile Anglophilia, but that's another story). I had to pretend I liked it harder and longer because I spent so much ($14 in mid 1980s teenage dollars) on it.

But if Hacker's right, the ideology of treasuring children and yearning for them only goes so far; for bourgeois folk like me, it may stop when children are no longer merely a personal inconvenience but a threat to our accustomed station, when having a kid means surrendering our class prerogatives. In response to the threat children pose, we may begin to exaggerate the other nuisances they present to solidify our resolve.