It’s Not Logical

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*FIRST AN ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ALL OF YOU WHO LABOR IN THE VINEYARD OF WORDS:
If you’re an indie author –fiction or non-fiction– and not afraid to be seen on my blog, post your name/facebook/twitter handle/substack site and an Amazon link to one of your books that you’d like people to read. I (actually my much abused assistant, Holly Frost) will be collecting all these for a post next Monday (April 6th), to jump start people’s Spring reading! (And give them a ready-made intro to you.) If there’s a lot of names, I’ll do them in batches at night starting on the sixth, until I’m out of names. And of course, I’ll share these posts at Instapundit for greater impact. GO. -SAH*

Yesterday a friend sent me a substack post he thought I want to share at instapundit. I did, but I had several problems with it, including the fact that her solutions would essentially need to be financed by the taxpayer. But there was something more that bothered me greatly about it, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Of course I woke up with a blog post, because that’s actually the way my brain works. I do my best work, fiction and non fiction while asleep. Older son says that’s because my pre-frontal cortex filters my ideas otherwise, and — he doesn’t say this, but I’m telling you — OBVIOUSLY my pre-frontal cortex — like China — is a**hole. (This also explains — if anything does — why I’ve had entire trilogies “download” when I’m sick or just plain exhausted. Picture my brain desperately waiting for the pre-frontal cortex to go off line and then core dumping all the creative or analytic stuff into my mind.)

So, if you don’t want to go through the link (TLDR — too linky, didn’t read) that article has the premise that Motherhood while emotionally and psychologically rewarding has a massive cost in potential for damage or death (less every year, and what is she whining about, again?) and also loss of career potential and earning potential and social status.

Her recommendation is to pay women to have children. No, seriously. Some kind of subsidy for staying home with your kids, a higher social security payment for mothers, whatever. I read it last night, so I might have missed something. In her mind, this will raise the social profile of motherhood and rush people to the delivery wards.

I might have missed something through the gritting of my teeth at “give people money taken from other people to have more children.”

Spoiler: it wouldn’t work.

She would know this if she had studied the history of such efforts, from Rome giving mothers of more than x children an award, to the USSR doing the same, to the Scandinavian countries in the eighties (I don’t know now. I haven’t been talking to engineers from Sweden and Norway as I used to do for work) paying per child and giving mom and dad maternity and paternity time off paid, and having social workers come and look after the wee ones, and what not… It doesn’t work. You get a brief bump in births, but then it goes back to not happening and entering population down spiral.

Yes, “raising the social profile of Motherhood” and making it admired WOULD work. The problem with doing that is that motherhood is inherently NOT glamorous.

When my older son was one and a half, I came across an article I think in some woman’s magazine — let me explain, through no fault of older son, and having nothing to do with being a mom, in that case. I read anything I could get for free. I think MIL sent me a subscription to Good Housekeeping or the like — that clicked with me so hard that I used it all through the kids’ childhood.

The woman writing was about where I was. I think she had two little ones at that point. Anyway, she had just seen her mom heading out to a lunch with friends, dressed to the nines and with fully done makeup and hair, and she felt more depressed than ever, covered in baby spit up and smelling a little funky because the toddler had wiped his hands on her and his hands had SOMETHING. And then she came up with the perfect metaphor: she was at the beginning of her mom career, on the factory floor, sweating and working overtime, with her hair pulled back in a knot, no time to do makeup and smelling a little funny. As the kids grow, you go up through the ranks. By the time they’re in high school you’re a middle manager, and dress a little better, but you’re still hassled and overworked. When they’re in college, you ascend to the executive suite, but you still sweat and live in fear of what the people you manage might do to break everything. It’s only when you retire that you have time to dress well and go to lunch with other retired executives and laugh about the struggles back at the old firm.

I can’t begin to tell you how real this is, having gone through it and being now a retired executive who has pivoted into another job, started when I was a middle manager, because I knew I’d hate doing lunch.

The problem is that making Motherhood prestigious or glamorous is as unlikely as making factory floor work glamorous or prestigious. I mean Mike Rowe kind of does, but not really. He just points out these jobs are important and lucrative. Honestly he should do a segment on Motherhood as a dirty job. Because it is essential and it is rewarding.

It’s just not upfront, in your face, economically rewarding.

Trying to pay women to have children is just another iteration in trying to make it an obviously economic decision. And that doesn’t work.

Because that’s what got us where we are. Breaking the culture and looking at men and women as ONLY economic units. I can’t begin to tell you how profoundly wrong that is.

My own internal conspiracy theory for which I have no proof partly because I think it’s a prospiracy, is that shoving all women into the work place and convincing them that their highest purpose was to follow a male life path into the OUTSIDE THE HOME workplace and the executive suite (where again, only less than 1% of people male or female make it) was the equivalent of opening the borders under Auto-pen. It was a ploy to flood the job market and therefore devalue labor, which allows greater profits and of course makes it imperative for women to join the work force, because “no one can live on one salary.” (This is wrong too, but that’s another story.) Once they had sucked all the women (more or less) into the labor force, they started in on the H1B visas and the open borders.

Look, it’s great for profits and for the increasingly sick partnership between business and government. But it’s bad for everything else, including people.

Leaving that aside, though, the way to tackle the birth dearth — which is starting to tackle itself, believe it or not — beyond making it affordable. (The chick at substack says everyone can afford to have kids. Look, I’d like to have a word with her. And by word I mean a metaphorical baseball bat. Sure, everyone can afford kids, if they don’t mind living on pancakes, renting in a dangerous part of town and having their entire entertainment be from the dumpster behind used bookstores (or the little rejected shelf up front.) THAT’s a really high bar.)

Making it affordable passes by things like “forgiving student loans.” But Sarah! That means taking money from people’s pockets too! Oh, can it. You don’t understand “economics” as applied by our government which is funny money all the way down. THEY ALREADY TOOK THE MONEY OUT OF OUR POCKETS by printing money for those “loans.” That money has been spent. The money in your pocket has been inflated away. All you gain by sticking it to the loan debtors is “suffer you idiot, for believing what everyone including your parents told you.” Kindly admit you’re a sadist and go satisfy your kink in a healthier way. Yes, the good kids are on plans where they’re paying 20% of what they make into the loans, to retire them in ten years. For many of them this leaves them where they absolutely would have to live in the dangerous area of town and eat pancakes four times a week. This doesn’t kill them. And having the kids in these circumstances won’t kill them. Ask me how I know. BUT IT’S A REALLY HIGH BAR. If I’d known how broke we’d be because number one son’s birth was a medical nightmare that costs us back then slightly more than my husband made a year which — being insane — we decided to pay back in three years, would I have done it? Would I have gone through all the medical treatments to have the kid? I don’t know. And it’s likely I wouldn’t. So, if we already had the debt and were living just slightly above that: say dinner out once a month and the depressing but not dangerous apartments, would I have been willing to plunge into actual danger and near-starvation and SLOG for three years? Look, I’m going to say it’s doubtful. (And that’s me speaking against interest, since younger son and his wife might read this.) It passes by other things too, like “Why are we willing to make entire parts of our cities Indian Country, too dangerous for anyone but the highly trained. Why don’t we fight that with rigorous law enforcement?” (Sure, the Nazis did that, but that’s not what made them bad. The Nazis also (I HEAR) drank water. And no one tells you to stop drinking water.) “Why don’t we — if not putting them in prison like mad houses — mandate that the people who are a danger to themselves and others live in certain homes where they have supervision and are given the drugs they need to act sane.” “Why don’t we do something about rampant drug addiction?” etc. etc. etc. This is actually a whole article, and I’d be happy to write it at another time, because there are at least for SOME of the problems far less authoritarian solutions than it sounds like. That’s another time.

But beyond that… Sorry people, it’s the culture.

Thinking of everything in economic terms — men and women are widgets and economic units — is a Marxist thing, a perversion of functioning human society (as Marxist everything is) and it gives us not just birth dearth but abominations like euthanasia for the poor and the depressed not to mention the old, the deformed, the unsightly.

The fact is that the Nazis worse excesses came from Marxism. It is impossible to reduce men and women to nothing but economic units without ending up with eugenics, culling, extreme authoritarianism and wars of conquest. (The later because this kind of thing destroys productivity and you need to keep the population quiet.)

And yes, saying we need to turn the culture away from Marxism is pretty, but hard. Hard partly because we’re still propagating the idiotic “men and women are economic units” everywhere, from schools to well-meaning substack articles.

Of course, it’s changing on its own, because humanity abhors being extinct, and the herd is starting to panic. We’re seeing a revival of the more traditional religious beliefs and the faiths that value family. And yes, that is a way to engineer.

Listen: Even though I’m Catholic and even though I’m a believer and even though I struggle daily to follow my faith (and mostly fail, because failing is one of my core competencies.) I don’t think we should repose that kind of cultural architrave on religious faith.

Oh, maybe they can do it in Spain and Portugal, and perhaps even France (though France is funny and was more or less always funny) if they run the socialists out of everything, including the Catholic church, and become sincere Catholics again. Maybe the path to rescue Britain from its shallow grave at a crossroads in a bad part of history is for them to run the atheists in robes out of the church of England, perform an exorcism on Charlie the Unthinking and return to sincere and militant Anglicanism. (This is where I confess to a somewhat shameful fondness for old time Anglicanism. Don’t tell my dad. He’ll worry.)

But in the US? It would be a nightmare. Unless you’re willing to do a modified German solution, where each state has a “state religion”and you either conform or move out, it would be a nightmare. And if you do that, it will be a nightmare of another type. If I were younger and you tried to do that, I’d run away and join the Amish, just to get away from state religion.

Fortunately we don’t need to do that, because we have a civic religion that says that individuals have value as individuals, not as economic units. And this should be taught in schools. Every day and twice on Friday to last you through the weekend.

Yes, even the weak, the old, the poor, the sick. Because they are individuals like us, and they too are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the measure of the possible. (Hear me out: when you devalue other people who look and are to an extent like you, in the end you devalue yourself. It’s impossible not to.)

More importantly, we need schools and society — and oh, my my bunny! Companies too, though that requires getting rid of half a dozen “funny” laws and Supreme Court decisions — to stop thinking in SHORT TERM economic dividends.

As long as we think in short term economic payout terms, we will continue to suck women into the work force. We will continue to open the borders and given H1Bs away like candy. We will continue to send our industry abroad including to countries that are basically slave states, or even dangerous to us (Hi China!). Because that’s what short term economic payout DICTATES. It’s not the greed of the individual CEOs. It’s what they have to do to obey law and regulation.

Teach economics in school. Real economics. Sowell foremost and use most of the economic theory garbage of the last century ONLY as comic relief.

Because here’s the dirty secret: Yes, motherhood is emotionally and psychologically satisfying. Those years on the factory floor were amazing, because I was learning so much. And I was young (my thirties) so I had the energy to work insanely.

BUT more importantly, I learned so much that helps me now in everything else I do. No, seriously. I learned my limits. I learned that things like my job being really sucky (remember I had one working from home, and ooh boy, it sucked for twenty years) matters way less than how much I learned to do and enjoyed in raising the boys. I learned that money matters less than how you spend it. I learned that yes, I could learn to do things from scratch and it wasn’t even that hard. I learned to reality-test my neurosis and fears. (You can’t survive life without that.) I learned how to multitask, till the entire house ran on slightly creaky wheels and I could still write six books a year while keeping us in sanitary conditions, cooking two meals a day, talking over life and everything with the boys, AND not stressing too much or tiring myself into the ground.

And the kicker? It was more rewarding financially too. Uh? Come again? Well, imagine Dan and I had no kids and I actually stuck with the translator job (this is unlikely for other reasons. Or at least we’d be unlikely to still be married, because both working sixteen hours a day, including some weekends doesn’t make any sense with a marriage.) We worked so hard that we ate out most days. And I — more than once — bought new clothes because I didn’t have time to do the laundry or the mental “give” to send it out. Overall, we profited maybe 2% after taxes over what we’d have profited from only Dan working.

But once I came home to raise the kids, I did all the cooking. I had the time to do the laundry. And this left Dan time to concentrate on his career. (Even if sometimes I had to remind him where his socks were on the dresser, and buy him shirts behind his back because he had no time t go shopping.) For a vast part of our young years we had one reliable car (which I drove, because kids) and an utter completely near death beater, which he drove only to work and back. (Mine was a beater too. If you read Deep Pink…. well, my car was a seventies (I THINK) Suburban with a missing front bumper, one side stuck in, just missing the light, and the world’s ugliest paint job. We bought it to tide us over till insurance paid on the car someone had totaled by crashing into it was parked up front. It cost us $1500. There were chickens living in it. Took forever to clean. But the d*mn thing just WENT.) When his cars (usually $500 and under) died, he’d drive mine till we found another one. And we could afford to buy falling-apart houses in good neighborhoods, which I then rebuilt while living in them and sold at double price later.

In the long run, though it didn’t feel like it at the time, we’re much richer because I punted to the factory floor, instead of being the harassed specialist in the cube farm. And not just psychologically. On the money front too. Oh, because it more importantly taught us that status symbols are bullshit. Yes, we do sometimes go out to very expensive restaurants for special occasions or just because we want to try them out. But we also go out to tiny, funky, sounds interesting holes in the wall because we want to try them out. Or we know they’re good and it’s a special occasion. While friends who stayed stuck in the career ladder would tell me things like “I hope no one sees me going into Pete’s Kitchen. What will they think.” (Uh? Does not compute.)

The truth is from an economic stand point none of life is RATIONAL. No, hear me out: Economically, the most rational thing I could have done is never get married.

I knew this, btw. Getting married and tying my financial and professional future to another person whom I couldn’t control was neither rational nor economically sensible. This is why I rejected six proposals between 18 and 22.

Heck, moving out of my parents’ house wasn’t rational. It wasn’t like I was being beaten, even if dad kept telling me in a forlorn voice, that the Chinese character for war is two women under the same roof. In fact, as I started tutoring and making my own money, while taking way too many classes, the house was just a place where I slept and sometimes mooched some food. Why bother moving out?

More importantly, why would I move to another country where my almost guaranteed employment degree would become useless? It’s not rational.

Do I need to tell you that if I had followed the rational path I’d have been miserable, or more likely dead because I’m a depressive?

Humans are not clockwork economic units. Just because something isn’t financial rational, it doesn’t mean it’s not what needs to happen.

Man — and verily and maybe particularly — woman doesn’t live from paychecks and corporate titles alone.

The solution is to see humans as humans and recognize that we have certain life trajectories that worked for the culture for generations, and those were NOT to work at some job for your entire life so some company has more short term profits and you never experience what it’s like to be human.

You are not a machine. You don’t owe it to anyone to sell out your life for cash in hand. You are a human being, and human beings need a group. The most fundamental and basic of those groups is the family. And being a part of a family, always with some exceptions, is the most rewarding thing you can do long term.

Turning the culture around, away from putting a dollar price on people, and towards making people the center of society is what we need to do. And the cure for what hails us.

87 thoughts on “It’s Not Logical”

  4. Paying women to have children in the here and now is one thing. Credit toward social security (future) is another, and might have very different incentive effects. Or maybe not, but they should be examined as different cases until we know they are not.

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  6. First a comment on your post. (Comment on announcement to follow.) I saw that so much with women I worked with. One friend did the math and realized that her take-home pay went mostly to having strangers take care of her kids (aka daycare) and fast food/eating out because she had no time to cook. I had one colleague who felt she had the best of all worlds because she had already raised her kids as a stay-at-home mom and then got into a good career later in life.

    And yes, life is rarely rational. I loved my wife and married her despite knowing that her family was literally crazy. And she married me despite her mother’s accurate description of me as “that bum”. The real solution is less government, not more. Kill the regulations that make housing unaffordable, that make transportation unaffordable. (You have to own a limo to fit legally mandated 4 car seats in one vehicle with a driver.)

    As to student loans…, they were never about making college affordable. Just chart the rise in tuition to the availability of bigger and easier student loans. They were about making colleges richer. Why do the most expensive colleges have so many foreign students? Because they can charge over the top tuition to foreigners. Like most everything these days, it’s a tragedy of government’s making.

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    1. I had one colleague who felt she had the best of all worlds because she had already raised her kids as a stay-at-home mom and then got into a good career later in life.

      That’s how I always thought the ideal course of a woman’s life should go.
      I just missed the “getting married and having kids to raise” part.

      (I suppose helping out with any grandkids might be a reasonable alternative to the career.)

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      1. Helping out with the grandkids is almost always preferable to daycare, but today’s mobile world can make that difficult with families sometimes separated by multiple time zones. (Don’t get me started on the Interstate Highway Bill and the unforeseen changes it caused. That’s a story I’m still waiting to write.)

        My wife and I never had kids. She made the classic mistake of wondering too much how a woman in the bible who had hemorrhaged for 12 years could still be alive. Sadly, she found out. She also made the mistake of occasionally asking the Big Guy what to do. And you wonder where all those “wishes gone bad” stories come from?

        Still, life is what it is. Home is decorated with a plaque that reads, “It Is What It Is”. It hangs sideways as a reminder. Sharon had to settle for being The Apostle to the Lost Souls rather than being a mother.

        Cosmic hugs @FeatherBlade!

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      2. I would have liked that route, myself – stayed at home and raised my daughter; maybe even if things had worked out with her father (they didn’t, catastrophically) I would have had more children after her, instead of just one. But they didn’t – and I coped as best I could, depending on base day-care, certain military-spouse friends, and my daughter being an independent and unusually mature kiddo after the age of 10 or so. At long last, I’ve gotten to the retired executive stage, where my time is truly my own – to write, garden, read, refinish furniture and build miniature scenes. It honestly makes sense for women to have some kind of training for a career, though – but put it aside to stay home for those years when the children absolutely need you, rather than work and have all your salary go to day-care and take-out meals.

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  7. “I might have missed something through the gritting of my teeth at “give people money taken from other people to have more children.”

    Spoiler: it wouldn’t work.”

    :coughs: Ahem. Has she ever, in her life, visited the welfare districts of town? Because there are women and even families living off welfare, having lots of kids and never you mind the status, they need to have another one because the welfare check shrank now that the extant kids are growing older.

    You want an American example of “pay people to have kids,” there you go. Pay people welfare to take care of their kids and there will always be some who make that their sole job, living on the dole. “Pay mothers to be respectable” – yeah, tried that, how well has it worked out?

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    2. A perfect example of a liberal policy of “helping” that has too often backfired. I think it was Ben Franklin who said something along the lines of “If you want to get people out of poverty do not make them too comfortable in it”.

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      2. What you subsidize you get more of. What you penalize, you get less of. Duh!
        So we subsidize homelessness and fatherless families, and we tax income.
        Tell me again, how that works?

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    4. Incentives matter. Thus regulations that result in having another kid with the biodaddy of that mommas previous kid paying less in benefits than having a kid with a completely new biodaddy yields babymommas with multiple different biodaddies to benefits-max.

      Worse for the kids? So what?

      That is what you get putting a bureaucracy in that loop.

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    5. There’s a movie(?) or something with a preface that reads, approximately, “This is a true story, even though it didn’t happen.”

      IDK if this is real, but:

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  8. Response to announcement:

    I don’t do social media (except for posting notes on other’s Substack essays), but I have my own website at https://frank-hood.com.

    My first book is A Geek’s Progress: Navigating a Software Career from the 80’s to the 20’s and my first novel is Advance Guards.

    Who am I? On panels, when I sit next to Joe Schmoe, PhD, I’m Frank Hood, NtM (Nobody that Matters). I’m just a voice crying in the wilderness or maybe the old man yelling at clouds, but on my best day I might be that still soft voice in your ear worth listening to.

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  9. Specific thought about the whole short-term payoff widgetry – I think it has a great deal to do with the rise of the MBA _and_ the ‘3 month financial reporting/profit projections’ nonsense. Increase that timeline to say, 3 years for publicizing but annual internal audits, and you’d see companies at least _able_ to make long-term plans for R&D, etc… at least, that’s my thought.

    As for the rest, amen and amen for most of it at least.

    My fiancee and I are going to try very hard to do the stay-at-home mom, homeschooling thing. That’s _her_ goal, and I was well-pleased to hear it.

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    1. My thoughts on the business world and short-term thinking are in my essay The Bottom Line is Wrong. There’s always the temptation to short-term thinking. Southern California is so addicted to growing populations that they’ve hollowed out the populace. Cities like Los Angeles and San Diego are only noticing it now because of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. For years young people with productive careers have had to flee SoCal and its absurd housing prices, but the politicians are only noticing now that the cheap replacements aren’t coming in and their total population is slowly declining. Not that they’ll do anything rational about it, but, to quote John McLane, “Frickin’ California, man!”

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      1. There are a few background that is missing.

        “want to sell gasoline, you need to invest in the infrastructure to extract and refine the oil before you can sell it.“

        –

        Before some items like gasoline were “direct costs”, they were “ethereal infrastructure” costs. Why? Gasoline was an unused, therefore unwanted, byproduct of tar, then diesel, until someone found uses for it. Now it is the product, and the rest is the byproduct.

        “Ethereal infrastructure (like software, stories, or art) is harder to measure, however. Because of that, many economists have lamented the failure to capture the productivity of high tech.“

        –

        Truth.

        Good analysis.

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    2. There needs to be some financial incentive favoring longer time horizons on corporate performance, something vaguely along the lines of the short term vs. long term capital gains treatment on stocks, to somewhat discourage short term trading.

      Not sure on details. Skipped getting an MBA. Quite happy about that life choice.

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      1. Yeah right now all the incentives are _apparently_ “Well, what’s your payoff for next quarter?” and if it doesn’t pay off that quick, why bother? Doesn’t incentivize planning, loyalty/retention, merit-based anything, etc. Just the Quick Stock Pump. I speak from bitterness and what is visible as a lowly worker bee, mind you…

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  10. All species are hard-wired to have children. Something seems to have short-circuited that wiring in today’s wealthier societies.

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  11. The only stuff I have out in the wild that I’m willing to cop to is on Royal Road, Scribblehub, and WordPress. If you actually find any of that other stuff it’s totally not me (it was/is bad bad). Currently working on Doc Z, the Doc Z companion stories, the undead chronicles, and a few other shorts when I can.

    Problem with the companion stories is they are so varied. There’s noir, action, suspense, mil-sf, space opera (scope), and, of course, post-apoc stuff. Clubfist and his girl Vita, the cranky old janitor, the prisoner without a name, the battleship crew and so on.

    One of these days I need to get to the finish part and edit, cut to fit, sand off the rough edges, and slap a coat of sealant on it to sling it to the ‘Zon.

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    2. That Clubfist intro you posted as a promo a few months back? There’s still a hook in my uvula! PLEASE do whatever’s left undone to make that one available!

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  12. Regarding the “buy a run-down house in a good neighborhood, fix it up, then sell”. Not quite the same, but how my uncle and aunt built their business. She ran the office and books, while raising children. He was a contractor. Their take. Build the first house, live in it, while building another. Put both on the market to sell. Which ever sold first, they lived in the second, even if meant moving. Got to where finances were live in one, build two, put three on the market. Got to the point they bought their mini-ranch, lived there while all 3 went through HS, while they built whole neighborhoods, and commercial. Eventually sold, and retired to the house on the river.

    If housing market had been like the last few decades, the have two houses on the market, while living in one, might have been challenging. Both would have sold before the for sale signs went up. Good financially, but now where does the family live? They also went through housing where selling homes and neither would sell. They sold their business in two parts, one to their son, and the other part to aunt’s younger brother, both who had worked for the company for the same length of time (close in age. Happens when younger brother is only two when getting married, and firstborn son comes 10 months later.)

    I was shocked when, in college, I found someone, and we married. Only then did I think “children”. When career didn’t work out, I fully intended to stay home and have children. It was when children didn’t come that I pivoted. Then a child did come. We explored me staying home. But when “lack of work” was a good portion of the year, even with unemployment, and (usually) guaranty of going back to work, there was a huge gap. Even with me working, we saved one salary, which allowed safety when both salaries were gone at the same time, and put us where we are today. Yes, the second career suffered because I put motherhood and family over the code. They got slightly over the salaried 8 hours/day, average. They did not get the 70-hour weeks that were “expected”. Not even hubby did that unless they paid for it (salary not-exempt, OT > 8 hours/day). In general, we worked it so someone was there most the day, and daycare was limited; paid play date. School? Home-schooling definitely would do now. Now working from home is an option. Then? Even if possible, not with resources available. As it was, we monitored and tutored.

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    1. They got slightly over the salaried 8 hours/day, average. They did not get the 70-hour weeks that were “expected”

      Yeah, don’t ever fall for that. When I was young and enthusiastic about showing my worth at work, I called my wife a couple of times saying I was working late, and she gave me a talking to. She loved me and wanted to live with me, not some empty space. Same reason we chose to rent and live where my commute was short. My career never really suffered because I was able to deliver the work.

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  14. There used to be a provision from the monarch’s privy purse for Irish women to claim a half crown, (five shillings) called the Royal Bounty. The last claim was made around 1940. Given the stereotype about the Irish’ breeding one might wonder why such was necessary, and it wasn’t explicitly aimed at having more children but at aiding women, especially with twins.

    In 1944, the DeValera government introduced a family allowance of two and sixpence for every child after the second. This was conflated with the Queen’s half crown and produced many somewhat ribald songs.

    Twas lately DeValera set out in the Dail,
    Said the population of Ireland was beginning to fall;
    And then to prevent it and not let it down,
    To every child born he’d give a half crown.

    I’m a young single man and I’m fed up of life,
    I lately set out in search of a wife,
    I married a widow and we both settled down,
    And I’m doing my best for the blooming half crown.

    The job, it proved harder than people may think.
    The night we got married, sure, I ne’er slept a wink.
    The wife, she keeps at me, she calls me a clown,
    And said I’m doing nothing for the blooming half crown.

    I’m a young married man and I’m tired of life;
    Half killed and half crazy from this strap of a wife;
    If we haven’t a family ‘tis me she will drown.
    I’m in a hell of a fix for the blooming half crown.

    Since the blooming thing started I’m nearly half dead;
    Last night we broke down all the springs in the bed;
    Said, she, “it’s no us, for I’m now sixty three.”
    “Oh bedad then”, says I, “there’s no half crown for me.”

    So now I resemble a half hungry goose;
    Every bone in my body disjointed and loose;
    The people when pass me, they say with a frown;
    “The cause of your death will be the half crown.”

    So all ye young fellows who are about to be wed;
    Check your wife’s age before going to bed;
    Don’t have her to tell you, as mine told me;
    There’s no half a crown from a three score and three

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  15. First, a comment on women working outside the home. It was pushed as economic necessity when Nixon closed the gold window and inflation went nuts in 1971. Without two incomes people just could not afford to live a middle class life style. If you wanted kids most people pretty much had to let the state raise them in public schools. This terrible idea then had the hell promoted out of it as a great step forward for women. Today we’re back at the people can’t afford to live stage, with no easy fix like putting the wife to work. Not sure what they will do but it will be ugly.

    I don’t use social media so social media doesn’t get to use me. I have a funky web site I may check every few weeks at: https://mackeychandler.com/. I have over 30 publications, all on Amazon. Most are in two series that span different times. April is the start of the first series at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077EOE2C Family Law is the far future continuation at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GQSZVS

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  16. Well, motherhood’s not rational if you don’t age. If you’re functionally 23 for the next 60 years, you might not need a family. I’ve now witnessed my parents’ generation’s old age. I suspect the economic calculation’s skewed a wee bit, and that if you stretch the calculations to include old age care, the early investment in children pays off.

    You could not pay for the depth of care a functional family can provide. Scratch that–there’s a shortage of carers for old people. There isn’t anyone around looking for care jobs to BE PAID. I limit the concept of “carers” to honest, ethical, caring individuals who won’t abuse their charges. It also extends to the casual help of small things like, “can you give me a ride to the doctor’s office?” Or, “I’ve fallen and can’t get up.” Such help can lengthen the time old people can live independently.

    Without motherhood, there is no family. It seems to me that there are too many articles in progressive media portraying families as oppressive and unhappy. For many people, families provide structure and joy. It makes a difference if there are people who give a d**n about you. I guarantee a case worker is no replacement for a cousin.

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    1. The Reader is living this. Only son passed last year. The Reader’s sister lives in Maine and her kids are not in any discussion – they managed to not acknowledge my son’s passing in any fashion last year. The Reader’s better half has one nephew and grand niece / grand nephew. After discussions with him, the Reader and better half are planning on moving reasonably close to him after this year’s round of surgeries are complete so that there is someone to keep an occasional eye on us. The fact that the Commonwealth has turned into California East is an additional motivation

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  17. No spouse, no children, and likely never will be. I had the career, until I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to quit. I assumed the goal was to focus on my writing, but I spent the next ten+ years as primary caretaker for my parents.

    Now I have my dream life.

    @laurenritz1

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  18. Several years back, I read an article on a study that they had done on the declining birth rate in various Western countries. Notably, they featured several European countries and the US. Italy was one that they focused on, as it has (at the time) the lowest birth rate, despite religious pressure and economic payouts for births.

    This was contrasted to the two highest rates, one in a Scandanavian country (probably Sweden), and the other in the US. Obviously, the social policies around motherhood couldn’t be more different, with Sweden having the extremely extended maternal (and paternal) leave policy, while the US is commonly known as having six weeks, unpaid. So the article came to the conclusion that it obviously wasn’t that.

    You know what conclusion they came to? Italy can’t fire people at will.

    Italy—along with most of the European countries—makes it extremely difficult to fire anyone, even for cause. Which means that there are not job positions opening up. Which means that once you leave the workforce, you’re gone. So if you’ve clawed your way into one of the increasingly rare positions available, there’s no way you’re going to have more than one kid. One kid is a maybe.

    It doesn’t matter if you get a fiscal bonus when a kid is born if that’s the only income you get. People like to be busy—you can see how chronic welfare cases are broken by the lack of meaningful work. If enforced inability to be productive is staring you down, forever and after, yeah, you’re not going to risk having a kid, because after they’ve left, you will have nothing to do. Thus Italy has a negative birth rate.

    In the US—even though it has been long enough since this article that the job market has gone through some things—if you have to drop out of the workforce for some years, you can get back in. Not easily (I know someone who has finally gotten some employment after literal years of searching, but she’s still single-momming it, so timing restrictions have been a factor), but it can be done, and children are not an employability death sentence. And that’s because they can fire people without having to sue the government to do so.

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    1. People like to be busy—you can see how chronic welfare cases are broken by the lack of meaningful work.

      Which is why I don’t think Elon’s AI “work is optional” Utopia is going to work out the way he thinks it will.

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    2. Company I worked for ’96 – ’02, bought a small firm in France. All so they could sell hardware as a European country. Sounds good, right? Except to let someone go, it was (probably worse now), a minimum 2-year severance. Made things a bit awkward, and honestly for the American employees, resentful, when the downsizing started to stave off bankruptcy. Two weeks severance, plus outstanding vacation and sick, is what we got; with a non-compete and no sue for “why you”, clauses. Ultimately the French office probably got nothing, as there was nothing to get, but I don’t even know about that.

      “Why you”? Not a problem. By then percentage of department, not hardware VS hardware. I lost. The non-compete? That I ignored. Didn’t matter because we weren’t moving anyway. But headspace was “Sorry, you let me go. Non-compete does not apply.”

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    1. Oh, brother. “It’s all his fault! I’m the victim here!” So why are you dating someone you consider immature? I sincerely hope her “partner” isn’t reading this.

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      1. Ah, but one cannot maintain one’s victim-of-the-patriarchy card while also being both empowered and responsible for the consequences of one’s choices. One must identify, through deep scholarship, the inevitable overpowering externals to which one can assign all agency and thus blame, or one’s entire worldview could be shattered. I couldn’t help myself!

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  22. FB: Jeff Duntemann. X: @JeffDuntemann

    I’ve been professionally published since 1974, first in SF and later technical articles and books. I’ve had two SF shorts on the final Hugo Awards ballot (didn’t win, but hey, I came close!) and now in retirement I’m self-publishing my fiction. The item linked below is a double novel, both stories set in my Drumlins universe–same universe as The Everything Machine–one by me, and another by one of my best friends, Jim Strickland, who introduced me to Sarah at a MileHighCon back in the oughts. As you might guess, I owe him.

    Now, the alien machines called thingmakers: Imagine an 8′ wide bowl of grey dust and two pillars beside it. Tap a total of 256 times on the pillars, and something forms in the dust. Simple tap patterns create simple, useful things. Complex tap patterns create…weird things. How many possible things? 2E256, which is 1.16 X 10E77. Lots.

    https://www.amazon.com/Drumlin-Circus-Gossamer-Wings-Duntemann-ebook/dp/B004YF4Q7K/

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  23. hmmmm.

    American citizen woman has a kid, 10% off her owed federal, state, and local income tax. If married, applies to the joint income.

    Per kid.

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  24. About “giv[ing] people money taken from other people to have more children,” we already do that, to some extent. Others have already mentioned welfare, but even the per-child tax credit can count depending on your income. It’s a refundable credit, you see, which means that if you owe less in taxes than the total amount of the credit, then you still get to claim the total amount of the credit, and the IRS will pay you the difference. I.e., you have three children and the credit is $2,000 per child (those were the numbers two years ago, I believe the credit has gone up for the 2025 tax year), so you get a $6,000 child tax credit. Your taxes owed, after calculating deductions, were $5,500. Your bottom line is $-500 total taxes owed, meaning that the IRS will not only refund you all the money withheld from your paycheck over the year, but will also give you an extra $500 taken from what other taxpayers paid them.

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  27. Your post reminded me of something I’m writing:

    “The road was well-made. I know now why. Someone grieved, and instead of letting the grief become only loss, they made it into something a stranger could walk on. I walked on it. I didn’t know, until someone told me, that I was walking on grief. It didn’t feel like grief. It felt like good ground.“

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  31. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » HUMANS ARE NOT MERELY UNITS OF PRODUCTION:  It’s Not Logical.

    1. Probably just means that wordpress updated some automod list with some random word, or that they broke something weird again for no reason.

      One or two days in the last week or three, one of my browsers ate posts until it started working again.

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  34. I will say, about American speech, adn Fukushima Daiichi, I always felt that the Japanese over reacted in the changes they made to their energy policy, but I also understood that the cultural context they brought to /their/ decisions was not my cultural context.

    (I quite like fission reactors.)

    I did some reading about the specific reactors, designs, history, and all that. I am not a nuclear engineer, a meteorologist, or seismologist.

    The Japanese are mostly not malicious. (Okay, being a large population, they have idiots, and they have criminal actors, such as the Yakuza.)

    If we want to talk about malicious acts of so called engineering, then a lot of the CCP’s big brain investment schemes have entered the chat.

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    1. Apparently foreign powers have also been relentlessly shaming them for the Fukishima disaster. It’s not just internal; it’s bad actor’s targeting their cultural vulnerabilities to exploit them.

      X’s auto-translate rolling out, and the average Japanese discovering the average American has pretty much the exact opposite feelings about the disaster and their handling of it has been a very emotional event for a lot of them. A very positive one.

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  35. Publicity?!? I’m in!
    Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Spaceship-Joe-Doug-Irvin-ebook/dp/B0CSTKPXZK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RNWN1VTSVS7E&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.6vjuZd_S0eri1OBvJNGbFVssqYijFYp376b1cw87xBAEeHyFSmC2-CgRr-zhnywZMM0UwjHhbNvnNeq0Mw3Nn8j3zc6Lb3vl0T2UBrakwKzbf3l0khUaPP4eb3yU3hcJpVtLzesvjnBxw5TsPnQfJLQI91pRRheeXUIcXu5FHAKtptwvKYiEI6LhTqMoM2WH.kMfC9SEpxipcj62Yvd0yjZUq3TC8VldtU2kddS13wpk&dib_tag=se&keywords=Doug+Irvin&qid=1775052627&sprefix=doug+irvin%2Caps%2C309&sr=8-1

    Social Media – Facebook: dougirvin53@yahoo.com; codywest1976@yahoo.com

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  36. My mother taught high school practically up until I was born, and she said that compared to classrooms full of nutty high school students, one placid, easy-going baby was no problem at all. Of course, I was an easy baby—I took life as it came to me, was very healthy, and loved everybody. How I became the misanthropic Blackadder-alike I’ve become is a long story, which does not belong here.

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  37. David Lloyd Sutton. Longest Run on Amazon. A specifically Libertarian variant 1K years post-dystopian.

    I’d love to be listed on your blog!!

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  38. WE ALREADY PAY WOMEN TO HAVE BABIES. Remember the comment from Jesse Jackson (before he got smothered by the wokies for saying such things) deriding women on welfare who “used their wombs like an ATM?” Welfare-class women get more government money for each child. How’s that working out?

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    1. That got fixed back in the ’90s, though some of the fixes have been “waivered” back.

      There’s also the related claim that child support is paying women to have babies.

      I’ve also seen social security, and the foster care system, pointed to as “paying people to have babies.”

      The one I’ve actually seen folks objectively doing for money was fostering, and those two creeps would’ve been stopped by basic fraud countermeasures since it was part of a network of techniques they applied.

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  41. Pay people with long time horizons to have kids by making half of the social security payments made by these kids go directly to Mom & Dad for their lifetimes. We’re already taxing that money, and the labor of raising the kids who will pay taxes when you retire is just as important as paying taxes now.

    This won’t put money in anyone’s pockets until retirement, but at least it will decrease the extent to which parenthood is forced to subsidize social security.

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    1. “making half of the social security payments made by these kids go directly to Mom & Dad for their lifetimes.“

      –

      Not the way it works. But it kind of is. We used to joke that our SS was paying grandparents and parents SS. Now hubby tells those that are still working, especially the self-employed 15%-ers, “thank you”.

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  43. Sorry, jumping ahead after reading your observation that motherhood and factory work will never be glamorous got me thinking.

    You are right, they are not glamorous, but they are epic, to make something beautiful.

    I suspect it will be convincing people that life has value, and is worth the sacrifice to bring it forth. And I think as the deatheaters lose their grip on society, we will see that again.

    The Automatic Singer recently did a video on the Prime of Life. It is incredible, probably his best yet. Hollywood could not make it.

    “Where nothing stands, life must arise,
    I shall bless the void with living skies
    Soul within matter becomes first rite,
    Birth transforms emptiness into light.”

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