An authoritarian wolf dressed in utopian sheep's clothing

I enjoy arguments where I recognize that we share some common assumptions and/or goals but disagree on other fundamentals.  It is invigorating and forces you to clarify your own argument.

In How Society Fails Parents by Emily Oster, she is interviewing Dana Suskind.  

I accept the premise.  Society is failing parents.  More broadly, I would argue, we used to have a family centric legislative and policy perspective and we have evolved from that to zero-sum focus on ever more marginal identity groups.  If policy is seeking to facilitate good life outcomes via families, there is a reasonable chance of achieving at least some level of consensus.  By focusing on ever more exotic fringe identities, we are no longer in the same boat and government functions via coercion rather than consent and consensus.  

Family-centered policy focuses on community health, economic vitality, family income, public education, productivity, informed decision making, etc.  All things which we have let fall to the wayside as we focus on zero-sum identity politics.  

Oster asks Suskind two important questions.  

1. One of the tensions I have always seen is that when we look at the impacts of individual parenting choices — say, whether to breastfeed, or how to sleep, or whether to use day care or a nanny, or which child care setting — it’s very difficult to find any evidence that these matter on the margin. And yet: it seems clear (from your book and others) that the first several years of life are extremely important in a broad sense for child outcomes. Do you have thoughts on how we reconcile these two ideas? Is there some missing crucial specific behavior? Or is it something more nebulous?

2.  You talk about many different policies and support systems in the book. As we’ve seen, it’s tough to pass sweeping legislation with social supports. So I’m curious: If you had to prioritize, what are the three key policy priorities you’d like to see, and why those?

Suskind has interesting but frequently, to me, unconvincing arguments rooted in unrealistic academic pieties and naive assumptions.  But interesting none-the-less.

For example, I accept a premise of hers.

I became especially aware of how much parents worry about individual choices after I published my first book, Thirty Million Words, which distilled the science of foundational brain development for parents and other adults. This, of course, is the science illustrating that foundational brain development is dependent on what happens in the first three years of life. A child’s brain will never be more receptive to experience than it is in this pivotal time. Eighty-five percent of brain growth occurs between birth and the age of 3, a period during which 1 million neural connections per second are formed, which tells us this is a period of incredible opportunity and great risk.

[snip]

But there are two crucial and specific things children need to build a healthy foundation of cognitive and socio-emotional skills that will serve them throughout life: nurturing interaction with caregivers and protection from toxic stress. 

My frustration with the answer to the first question rests on no single assertion but an overall faulty assumption.

It’s impossible to ignore the overwhelming — and seemingly increasing — stress that burdens so many parents today. 

[snip]

But the issue facing our country is that we’ve made it almost impossible for far too many parents to meet those two basic needs. We’ve erected barriers in front of almost everyone — from the mundane to the monumental. And we’re only going to move the needle on improving outcomes for kids with systematic reforms, not individual choices. I actually think this is precisely why parents feel that every decision is so critical: when you have no control over the most important things, you tend to focus on the smaller things you can control.

In recent decades, more and more economic risk has shifted from the broad shoulders of government and business onto the fragile backs of American families. Political scientist Jacob Hacker describes this as “the great risk shift,” and the result is widespread economic insecurity. 

These arguments seem to be ignoring the forest for the trees.  America is far more productive today than in the past, translating to far greater incomes across the board for all segments of society.  With increased income we have increased opportunities and therefore choices but far greater economic security than in the past.  The picture of families living in increasing economic fragility simply does not have an empirical basis.  Our bottom quintile income population have a purchasing power parity consumption lifestyle of middle income quintile European.

Labor force turnover rates (voluntary and involuntary) are the same as they have been for the past ninety years.  Additionally, even in recent decades, turnover is increasingly driven by people choosing to leave a job rather than as in the past, people being fired.  

If the two requirements are nurturing interaction and protection from toxic stress, children and families are buffered far more today than before the 1930s.  Not only has the risk/stress from employment turnover fallen, but Americans are earning far more than they used to when risk/stress was higher and incomes lower.  

In addition, pre-1930, there was no Social Security and few-to-no welfare programs.  

Today, with two-income families, everyone has the option to live more productive and lower stress lives than in the past.  If we focus on productivity and risk/stress, Suskind is simply wrong.  The economy has not created more risk for families, it has better sheltered them.  What has changed is something different than Suskind focuses on.

First, the time value of money is much clearer than it used to be.  If you take time off to care for young infants, it comes at a higher and clearer cost than perhaps in the past.  In addition, life is probably more complex than in the past.  There is stress, but not from job uncertainty and lack of job security.  There is stress from societal/technological/legislative complexity.  That is harder to measure but probably more real than arguing about economic uncertainty.

The argument that more and more risk has been transferred from strong government to fragile families seems empirically unsustainable.  There are far more government programs sheltering families from risk than pre-1930s.  Even from pre-1970s.  One might reasonably fairly characterize much or most of post-1970 legislation as being driven by ensuring greater fairness as well as far greater insurance/risk mitigation for individuals and families.

I think Suskind is broadly wrong in this part of her argument.  I would like to explore the alternative argument that increased economic productivity and improved range of choices, in conjunction with increasing complexity of technology, regulation, and healthcare might be creating stress burdens that are detrimental.  That would be interesting but is not what is advanced in this interview.

This is where the academic mindset begins to become more visible.  A naive, utopian optimism and confidence in centralized authoritarian coercive decision-making on behalf of the "beneficiaries" of such policy.  

Honestly, if I had a magic wand and could choose to (a) give the 60 million parents raising kids in this country all the right scientific insights and tools to optimize their behavior or (b) change the societal constructs in which those parents live — I would choose the latter. 

Another way to put that is that Suskind would rather redesign society according to her own worldview rather than give sixty million parents the knowledge and responsibility for making their own best decisions for their own particular circumstances to achieve their own private objectives.

This is a mindset you see all the time in much of academia.  The confidence that they know best, a preference to force solutions on everyone else, a disregard for the rights of others and an absence of confidence in ordinary people being able to make good decisions for themselves.  

This totalitarian and authoritarian worldview becomes clearer when she answers the second question.  

Ultimately, I think we need to fundamentally reorient our society around support for children and families. But you’re right, of course. Sweeping legislation is hard to come by. 

Again, there is the totalitarian mindset wanting to fundamentally transform society.  And again, an acknowledgment that democracy, people opposing sweeping legislation, is the barrier to the promised land.  Those damn peasants with their false consciousness and incapacity to accept the wisdom of their betters.

There then follows the boring old shibboleths which have been circulating for many decades - Paid Parental Leave, Expanded Child Tax Credit, Portable Worker Benefits.  Why haven't these magic wands come to pass?  Because there are costs, risks, and negative unintended consequences that go with each one of them.  Yes, they might provide some notional benefits but do the aggregate benefits exceed the measurable costs?  That is the real question and one which few such utopians can or are willing to answer.

I am sympathetic to some of Suskind's predicate beliefs and some of her desired goals and I do believe that our politics, as well as our outcomes, would materially improve were our legislators to focus on improving systemic opportunities and efficiencies for families and the middle class.

But from my reading, Suskind has multiple faulty predicate assumptions that are not empirically supportable and she demonstrates the same orientation towards centralized authoritarian coercive decision-making which is so prevalent in academia and so demonstrably ineffective in the real world.