February 5th, 2013
I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to get sucked into responding to people taking shots at What to Expect but I’m going to break that promise just for a moment to address Amanda Marcotte’s criticism over at Slate because I think she’s making a good-faith argument from a place of genuine concern. Now, Marcotte isn’t responding to the book so much as to the WSJ piece, and I think she’s making two central critiques.
The first is that women should not be asked to have children they don’t want just because procreation is necessary for the good of society. And here I really hope that Marcotte reads the book–because I totally, completely, agree. On just about every third page I say that we cannot and should not try to bribe people (women and men) into having the kids they don’t want. And the reason we cannot and should not is that there’s a great deal of research suggesting that such bribery is minimally effective at best.
But more importantly, if Marcotte sits down with the book I think she might be surprised to learn about the research that’s been done on the question of “ideal fertility,” which is the measure of how many children people say they would like to have in a perfect world. The first interesting thing about the “ideal” metrics is that men and women have substantially similar ideas about the number of kids that constitute the ideal. The second is that the ideal number actually shifts (for men and women, in unison) over time–20-year-olds have a lower “ideal” average than 35-year-olds. But the most surprising thing about ideal fertility in America is that our average is 2.5, and has been pretty much constant for two generations. (Because we’re all hostage to our own experiences, I’ll say this explicitly: In a country of 300 million, a 2.5 average means that lots of people will have an ideal number of zero–and there’s nothing wrong with that. We celebrate and validate those choices while recognizing that the data suggests their experiences are not the mean.)
What that means is that there’s an enormous gap between people’s ideal fertility and their achieved fertility. Which means that the problem we have in America isn’t that we’re asking people to have kids they don’t want–it’s that people aren’t having, on average, the number of kids they do want. (As you might expect, the further up a person is on the educational/income scale, the greater the gap between ideal and achieved fertility.)
If Marcotte reads What to Expect I suspect her criticism would shift once she realized that the gap we face between ideals and real life is negative, not positive. And then, I suspect, she’d construct a feminist critique of how society is keeping women and men from achieving their fertility goals. She might place the locus of blame on capitalism and the free market. And again, if she reads What to Expect, she’ll find that I don’t entirely disagree with her on that count, either.
Marcotte’s second criticism is much more foundational, and it’s the idea that society exists to serve the individual and not the other way around. I was a little surprised to see Marcotte suggest this, since it seems like a quintessentially libertarian, and not progressive, idea. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty deep point and I’m not sure how to respond to it except by vaguely suggesting that the duties which exist between society and the individual run both ways, and are not unidirectional–that this is an and/both, not an either/or kind of situation. But that’s just off the top of my head and that criticism deserves much more serious consideration.
Regardless, I hope Marcotte reads What to Expect.
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What a wonderful response to a critic. Well done.
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You ever notice how it’s always the bitter, dried-up, pinch-faced middle-aged prunes that always get so worked up about abortion? Amanda, calm down and breathe slowly into the brown paper bag—it’s highly unlikely you’ll need access to the procedure.
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So when will the Kindle version be available?
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[…] ran an essay by Last adapted from his book. Slate ran a feminist critique of the essay, which Last responded to on his […]
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[…] American demographics, resulting in the author Johnathan Last actually commenting on her post and linking to his response to her article on his own site. It does not appear that Marcotte is active on comments forums to […]
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[…] ran an essay by Last adapted from his book. Slate ran a feminist critique of the essay, which Last responded to on his […]
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Forgive me, I couldn’t resist:
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“On just about every third page I say that we cannot and should not try to bribe people (women and men) into having the kids they don’t want. And the reason we cannot and should not is that there’s a great deal of research suggesting that such bribery is minimally effective at best.”
Interesting. I say that because when I read your recent review of Eberstadt’s Adam and Eve After the Pill you don’t come off as exactly live-and-let-live about contraception and non-procreative sex. And here you are careful to say that your opposition to bribing people to have children is simply that it doesn’t work. Seems to me that you are not leaving the idea of force off the table if your pleas to increase the birthrate go unheeded.
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[…] In addition to the fact that this is a leap in logic of fairly stunning breadth, it is also the case that Marcotte’s premises are dead wrong. In the first place, the push in Scandanavian countries towards encouraging mothers to keep their kids is nothing new. Europe, as has been noted by many on the right (and in particular by Jonathan Last) is facing demographic collapse. Countries like Norway and Finland are doing essentially everything they can to ensure that their population reproduces at at least replacement rates, which is something that no doubt pisses Amanda Marcotte off to no end. […]
RonCo February 5, 2013 at 4:01 pm
Enjoyed hearing you this AM on Dennis Prager’s show. Compelling stuff, and your book is now on my list (the read/ buy list!)
Don’t know if this was brought up during your segments with Dennis – I was running chores and didn’t hear every minute – but religious belief and basic Christian theology doesn’t seem to enter into the discussion. Introducing the idea that God is pleased greatly when a new soul is brought into His creation, and that each life must be focused on doing good and pleasing Him just might bring on serious pain and suffering amongst the secular and libertarian stalwarts. Into each life a little rain must fall I suppose! But isn’t it (God’s pleasure, not ours) worth discussing? Also – Enjoyed your defense of Douthat. I like his work – it adds substance to topical discussion, as does yours.