*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.
According To Hoyt 