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.

You know, after thinking it through for 10 minutes, I kind of welcome the idea of Tagg Romney running for Kerry’s Massachusetts Senate seat. I mean, why not?

It looks like this Tagg thing is going to happen sooner or later, so why not just get it out of the way now? I mean, it’s not like anyone ever turned a blow-out Senate loss in Massachusetts into the springboard for a national political profile just because they had barrels of money.

(Get it? “Tagged as”?)

Is it me or did the national media suddenly swerve on Ray Lewis? I’ve been in a bit of a bubble the last couple days but it seems like suddenly people pulled up short on Lewis and realized that maybe they shouldn’t build that much of the Super Bowl story around him. Because . . . you know.

So instead we get Harbaugh and Flacco as the big stories and Ray-Ray just shuffles off to the NFL old folks home. It would be funny if what turned people on Lewis was the fear of the post-Armstrong world, instead of the real unpleasantness. Who knew?

Galley Friend Ramesh Ponnuru did me a solid this morning a month ago, when I was otherwise indisposed.

Even so, Awesome Level: High.

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So the WSJ was nice enough to give me a ton of space today in the Review section to talk about the book and make some trouble. You can see it online here, but I highly recommend picking up a print copy. Because the layout nerds did a beautiful job of setting up the piece. I’m really grateful to the whole shop up there.

Starting tonight the big media push begins. The After Words episode runs on CSPAN 2 tonight at 10:00 pm. The people who watch CSPAN 2 at 10:00 pm on Saturday nights will no doubt be transfixed. Then on Monday I’ll be on one of the morning shows. The rest of the week will be spent hopscotching across the cable and radio spectrums. Hilarity will ensue.

In all of this I hope to be guided by the sage wisdom Larry King passed on to my buddy Tucker Carlson, when he was first starting out in TV:

“The secret,” King said, “is that you have to give a shit. But not really.”

Long live the King.

And this is why it would be helpful for any of you who’ve read the book to post a review:

3.0 out of 5 stars Watered Down Buchanan? February 1, 2013

By Brent F.

Format:Hardcover

Austin Ruse has an incredibly thoughtful piece about demographics and What to Expect over at Crisis. My favorite graph:

We had our first child seven years ago and my wife left full time employment. I estimate her missed wages in those seven years to be roughly half a million dollars. There’s less coming in and plenty going out. The cost of our daughters’ grade school — we now have two little takers — comes in at $12,000 per year, almost ten times what I spent for yearly college tuition.

What to Expect is now officially live at Amazon.

Which means that if you wanted to write a review after you read it–before the Amazon trolls come after me–that would be awesome.