As someone who takes your side of this debate 100%, I’d like to add that this post was a master class how to disagree: on the merits, respectfully, and giving your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt where possible.
Thanks, I really appreciate this. Here's a story for you: A most esteemed Tenured Phd from a Land Grant agricultural school took 3 years off in the late peak of his career to do a mission when he was about 60, then walked right back into his job when he returned. It never occurred to me until now, after reading your rebuttal (not the piece, tho), that this was actually a lot like waiting until you got tenure to have a kid. I'll note that the woman who most capably filled in for him while he was gone has still not had a child. Maybe soon, idunno. None of my business either way.
My wife was 39 when we married. She had a MS (just a BA for me) and a nice career just starting at the University, but quit it to marry me, and now we are biz partners! No kids was our decision, but even so, she said we could try right away if that was a critical thing for me. Guess it wasn't, no regrets.
Anyway, why shouldn't women have more time to make such decisions, this guy got to wait until he was 59 to take a 3 year hiatus! All you are asking for is 49! Seems more than fair.
And as far as whether or not that increases fertility, who cares and who's counting? Have kids if you want, don't if you don't.
I’m still not really a fan of this argument, even though I basically agree with all of your points. For me, the better argument is that extending the fertility window is an unalloyed good because it provides people with more options, which they can use to maximize their personal utility. This might mean you can focus more on your career when you are young, or it might mean the ability to have even more children. But if you say that it will make it possible to “have it all”, I don’t believe that, because now that’s a question of status. If you "have it all", you don't envy anyone while everyone envies you, in which case what is necessary will always expand according to what is possible.
The question is, “why do you want to make it?” One answer is that tenure or fame frees you to stop hustling, so you can get down to the “real work”. If that’s the case, then it’s exactly the worst time to have a child. There’s another answer, which is that after you’ve reached “escape velocity”, you can take it easy and just coast. But this is a bad system! The interns are working 80 hours a week while the boss is out DJing. The postdocs do all the work while credit goes to the principal investigator, but they can’t do anything on their own because the NIH gives less than 4% of their funding to researchers under the age of 35. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for 37 years, and people can’t tell if they want her to stay or leave because no one is ready to step up. The thing is, I would much rather read Ruxandra or even some entirely unestablished hungry young writer if their content is good, versus a Matt Yglesias who’s merely phoning it in.
It’s totally understandable why individual actors in the system want to be made. But it doesn’t feel like a persuasive argument that reproductive technology should be developed, because then I personally can obtain more status, since implicit in status games being zero-sum implies this is at the expense of everyone else. The result should be positive-sum, something along the lines that that more research will be produced with more women at the highest levels. If that’s the case, we’re actually back at the start: either the worst time to have a child is after you’ve made it, or we need to acknowledge that the grind is actually wasteful and inefficient, and that it should be possible to do good work without requiring excessive hours.
I suppose it’s ultimately a question of how utopian you want to be. I sort of took the hypothetical that great advances in technology are occurring, in which case we might as well add a few other items to the cart. For example, we’re subject to winner-take-all effects right now because technology has increased reach, without yet doing much for legibility. We use status as a means to allocate attention, but unfortunately, status markets are not efficient. But if we can fix legibility with AI-assisted matchmaking, the impossibility of Goodharting across 1000s of dimensions could render it easy to find someone who is “good enough” or “best-suited” for any task. Then you can start playing Moneyball, instead of always competing with everyone else for whoever is reputed to be the best.
If you only change fertility but leave everything else the same, the underlying rationale just feels like representation politics to me, which is a lot less inspiring. But now that I think about it, perhaps for people who are in positions to determine what gets funded, status-based arguments could be highly salient. I suppose I'll get behind it, if that’s what it takes to get to the outcomes that I want.
hmmm "The question is, “why do you want to make it?” One answer is that tenure or fame frees you to stop hustling, so you can get down to the “real work”. If that’s the case, then it’s exactly the worst time to have a child. There’s another answer, which is that after you’ve reached “escape velocity”, you can take it easy and just coast. But this is a bad system! The interns are working 80 hours a week while the boss is out DJing. The postdocs do all the work while credit goes to the principal investigator, but they can’t do anything on their own because the NIH gives less than 4% of their funding to researchers under the age of 35. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for 37 years, and people can’t tell if they want her to stay or leave because no one is ready to step up. The thing is, I would much rather read Ruxandra or even some entirely unestablished hungry young writer if their content is good, versus a Matt Yglesias who’s merely phoning it in." -- I would not say it's about "coasting". It's more about whether taking a break will derail your career A LOT or not. in this case -- when kids are very young
Ok, I guess I didn't consider just how short maternity leave is in the United States.
Although if you use the rationale to support people who want to take a short break, I feel like the population that's being covered is very small: attached enough to go through the first couple years themselves, but detached enough that they can fully return to the grind afterward.
For the most part, I don't really believe it's just about taking a short break. The graph you provide on lawyers seems to indicate that after making partner, both men and women start working less (and I'm not sure if they're accounting for how the incentive is for partners to pad their billable hours), which indicates that some coasting is occurring. That this effect applies more to women seems to indicate that this is because of children, and if there were more children, then this effect would presumably be even more pronounced.
It's important to this that technology is not autonomous. To some extent it can be aimed at constraints. Aren't most technologies developed past basilic basic research developed with an eye on being useful = alleviating a constraint? Indeed, I interpret Teslo's socializing the technologies she does as a welcome call for more such.
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is by far the least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I have all sorts of nitpicks (after long enough out of the public eye even Yglesias would be forgotten), but your basic point is extremely sound: the exigencies of human biology impose a large problem on women in their 30s who want kids and a career. I've often thought this in some ways this is a technical problem that becomes a a social problem. After all, we've found ways around the linkage of pregnancy and sex, and found ways to kill lots of infectious diseases.
The problem is biology (as you know better than me) is harder to find cheap workarounds for, and the bar is much higher here. Since almost no technology works perfectly upon initial development, the struggle to figure it out would produce all kinds of babies with birth defects that would horrify the general public. If there's some solution that produced fertile kids from a 45-year-old woman with IQs 10 points below average few people (and certainly not the sort of women interested in such a thing) would take it; people want their kids to have the best chance possible in life.
Great article! You're talking about a very specific issue, but it's so intertwined with others about fertility & having children, it's hard not to get distracted by them.
Said of Dr. Svetlana Mojsov: "But after the birth of her children her career stalled. She never ended up establishing her own lab and ended up working as a Staff Scientist for someone else"
Clearly that outcome is a product of culture. I'm not persuaded that it can be addressed with technology.
Technology has been giving women increasing control over their fertility for at least 70 years along with dramatic reductions in infant and childhood mortality that began long before that. Why would further control, for eg extending a woman's window of fertilty, not simply be gobbled up by that woman's greedy career as has been the case ever since women moved into the male oriented economy?
Rather than more technology, I suggest further reform of our workplace cultures is needed to eliminate or reverse the personal costs of child bearing and rearing borne by women actively contributing to the economy.
"Technology has been giving women increasing control over their fertility for at least 70 years along with dramatic reductions in infant and childhood mortality that began long before that." - hm I do not think technology has given women that much control over their fertility. Can you enumerate exactly what are you thinking about?
Birth control enabled my wife to plan with reasonable precision when she got pregnant. Though we didn't anticipate her first pregnancy coming from her first unprotected cycle, having been warned that getting pregnant in one's 30s could be difficult. The next 2 kids arrived as anticipated. Her last pregnancy was in her early 40s and was somewhat delayed by a miscarriage and then came about after 3 or 4 unprotected cycles.
Great writing as usual Ruxandra! I'm not sure what to take away from all of this, but I'll attempt a bad synthesis anyways. Improved fertility technologies will lower the motherhood penalty for a subset of ambitious women and allow them to "have it all". This will be a great boon to those women and so is a worthy endeavor in its own right. We might see more women at the top of their fields, more women in greedy careers and more children raised by those women.
At the same time, this subset is small enough that we should not expect this tech on its own to translate into higher fertility rates society-wide. It seems the causes or interventions for lower fertility rates remain elusive (or beyond the paywall in Lyman's post :))
There is a third possibility, of which I am an example. The woman marries in her 20s and works all the time in her 30s, fully aware that she is not going to have children as a result. It is both a choice and a sacrifice.
Wonderfully argued. The history of technology is the history of expanding human freedom – freedom from want, from disease, from limitations. In the near future I hope technology can offer freedom from deeply ingrained biological and societal constraints, like the agonizing choice between career and family. For women in demanding jobs during their crucial thirties, this translates into a powerful, practical freedom. It's the freedom from the old, heartbreaking trade-offs. It's technology finally allowing women to have both a high-impact career and the children they desire – the real freedom to have it all.
I have a different POV. Yes, the point of technology is to reduce hard trade-offs. And yes, scientists should work on making that happen.
But, the best time to have children is as early as possible. Reasons:
1. The earlier you have them, the more years you get to spend with them. This will matter a lot as you age.
2. The earlier you have them, the more they get to see their parents prime.
3. The earlier you have them, grandparents get to see them more, and the lesser chance of the burden of taking care of young kids and aged grandparents coinciding.
4. The earlier you have them, the more you can have. Having a single child is sub optimal in many ways.
5. The earlier you have, the easier it becomes later on in your life. Parenting is harder as one ages.
IMO, technology can't change the fact that the later you have children, the harder it is and you are missing out on spending more time with them (irrespective of when people die). As we age, we get worse. So have children early.
I agree and we'll be encouraging our children to start younger than we did. There's an assumption here that the choice is take time off in thirties to have kids or wait until forties, but there's a third option: twenties.
I greatly enjoyed reading your original piece as well as the back-and-forth with Stone. I've been reading/hearing about these issues for years now, and yet you've both given me new things to consider.
I have a very in-the-weeds question: given the current structure of academia and current limits on fertility, when do you think is the best time for a woman to have a child? Grad school, postdoc, early career...? Looking at my colleagues, I've seen all options be made to work but with varying levels of impact. Even a tenured PI can be derailed if their grants lapse without successful renewal.
(To be fair, I've also seen a lot of effort to make academia more amenable to having kids, but incentives are still what they are.)
As someone who takes your side of this debate 100%, I’d like to add that this post was a master class how to disagree: on the merits, respectfully, and giving your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt where possible.
Thank you!
Thanks, I really appreciate this. Here's a story for you: A most esteemed Tenured Phd from a Land Grant agricultural school took 3 years off in the late peak of his career to do a mission when he was about 60, then walked right back into his job when he returned. It never occurred to me until now, after reading your rebuttal (not the piece, tho), that this was actually a lot like waiting until you got tenure to have a kid. I'll note that the woman who most capably filled in for him while he was gone has still not had a child. Maybe soon, idunno. None of my business either way.
My wife was 39 when we married. She had a MS (just a BA for me) and a nice career just starting at the University, but quit it to marry me, and now we are biz partners! No kids was our decision, but even so, she said we could try right away if that was a critical thing for me. Guess it wasn't, no regrets.
Anyway, why shouldn't women have more time to make such decisions, this guy got to wait until he was 59 to take a 3 year hiatus! All you are asking for is 49! Seems more than fair.
And as far as whether or not that increases fertility, who cares and who's counting? Have kids if you want, don't if you don't.
I’m still not really a fan of this argument, even though I basically agree with all of your points. For me, the better argument is that extending the fertility window is an unalloyed good because it provides people with more options, which they can use to maximize their personal utility. This might mean you can focus more on your career when you are young, or it might mean the ability to have even more children. But if you say that it will make it possible to “have it all”, I don’t believe that, because now that’s a question of status. If you "have it all", you don't envy anyone while everyone envies you, in which case what is necessary will always expand according to what is possible.
The question is, “why do you want to make it?” One answer is that tenure or fame frees you to stop hustling, so you can get down to the “real work”. If that’s the case, then it’s exactly the worst time to have a child. There’s another answer, which is that after you’ve reached “escape velocity”, you can take it easy and just coast. But this is a bad system! The interns are working 80 hours a week while the boss is out DJing. The postdocs do all the work while credit goes to the principal investigator, but they can’t do anything on their own because the NIH gives less than 4% of their funding to researchers under the age of 35. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for 37 years, and people can’t tell if they want her to stay or leave because no one is ready to step up. The thing is, I would much rather read Ruxandra or even some entirely unestablished hungry young writer if their content is good, versus a Matt Yglesias who’s merely phoning it in.
It’s totally understandable why individual actors in the system want to be made. But it doesn’t feel like a persuasive argument that reproductive technology should be developed, because then I personally can obtain more status, since implicit in status games being zero-sum implies this is at the expense of everyone else. The result should be positive-sum, something along the lines that that more research will be produced with more women at the highest levels. If that’s the case, we’re actually back at the start: either the worst time to have a child is after you’ve made it, or we need to acknowledge that the grind is actually wasteful and inefficient, and that it should be possible to do good work without requiring excessive hours.
I suppose it’s ultimately a question of how utopian you want to be. I sort of took the hypothetical that great advances in technology are occurring, in which case we might as well add a few other items to the cart. For example, we’re subject to winner-take-all effects right now because technology has increased reach, without yet doing much for legibility. We use status as a means to allocate attention, but unfortunately, status markets are not efficient. But if we can fix legibility with AI-assisted matchmaking, the impossibility of Goodharting across 1000s of dimensions could render it easy to find someone who is “good enough” or “best-suited” for any task. Then you can start playing Moneyball, instead of always competing with everyone else for whoever is reputed to be the best.
If you only change fertility but leave everything else the same, the underlying rationale just feels like representation politics to me, which is a lot less inspiring. But now that I think about it, perhaps for people who are in positions to determine what gets funded, status-based arguments could be highly salient. I suppose I'll get behind it, if that’s what it takes to get to the outcomes that I want.
hmmm "The question is, “why do you want to make it?” One answer is that tenure or fame frees you to stop hustling, so you can get down to the “real work”. If that’s the case, then it’s exactly the worst time to have a child. There’s another answer, which is that after you’ve reached “escape velocity”, you can take it easy and just coast. But this is a bad system! The interns are working 80 hours a week while the boss is out DJing. The postdocs do all the work while credit goes to the principal investigator, but they can’t do anything on their own because the NIH gives less than 4% of their funding to researchers under the age of 35. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for 37 years, and people can’t tell if they want her to stay or leave because no one is ready to step up. The thing is, I would much rather read Ruxandra or even some entirely unestablished hungry young writer if their content is good, versus a Matt Yglesias who’s merely phoning it in." -- I would not say it's about "coasting". It's more about whether taking a break will derail your career A LOT or not. in this case -- when kids are very young
Ok, I guess I didn't consider just how short maternity leave is in the United States.
Although if you use the rationale to support people who want to take a short break, I feel like the population that's being covered is very small: attached enough to go through the first couple years themselves, but detached enough that they can fully return to the grind afterward.
For the most part, I don't really believe it's just about taking a short break. The graph you provide on lawyers seems to indicate that after making partner, both men and women start working less (and I'm not sure if they're accounting for how the incentive is for partners to pad their billable hours), which indicates that some coasting is occurring. That this effect applies more to women seems to indicate that this is because of children, and if there were more children, then this effect would presumably be even more pronounced.
It's important to this that technology is not autonomous. To some extent it can be aimed at constraints. Aren't most technologies developed past basilic basic research developed with an eye on being useful = alleviating a constraint? Indeed, I interpret Teslo's socializing the technologies she does as a welcome call for more such.
yeah I mean that's true
Hi
As you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is by far the least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I want to be that scribbler.
Thanks,
I have all sorts of nitpicks (after long enough out of the public eye even Yglesias would be forgotten), but your basic point is extremely sound: the exigencies of human biology impose a large problem on women in their 30s who want kids and a career. I've often thought this in some ways this is a technical problem that becomes a a social problem. After all, we've found ways around the linkage of pregnancy and sex, and found ways to kill lots of infectious diseases.
The problem is biology (as you know better than me) is harder to find cheap workarounds for, and the bar is much higher here. Since almost no technology works perfectly upon initial development, the struggle to figure it out would produce all kinds of babies with birth defects that would horrify the general public. If there's some solution that produced fertile kids from a 45-year-old woman with IQs 10 points below average few people (and certainly not the sort of women interested in such a thing) would take it; people want their kids to have the best chance possible in life.
Still, doesn't mean it'll never happen.
I'll write aBout this -- there were meetings at the FDA about how this tech would be first tested in non humans
Interesting! Thank you!
Great article! You're talking about a very specific issue, but it's so intertwined with others about fertility & having children, it's hard not to get distracted by them.
Thanks
Said of Dr. Svetlana Mojsov: "But after the birth of her children her career stalled. She never ended up establishing her own lab and ended up working as a Staff Scientist for someone else"
Clearly that outcome is a product of culture. I'm not persuaded that it can be addressed with technology.
Technology has been giving women increasing control over their fertility for at least 70 years along with dramatic reductions in infant and childhood mortality that began long before that. Why would further control, for eg extending a woman's window of fertilty, not simply be gobbled up by that woman's greedy career as has been the case ever since women moved into the male oriented economy?
Rather than more technology, I suggest further reform of our workplace cultures is needed to eliminate or reverse the personal costs of child bearing and rearing borne by women actively contributing to the economy.
"Technology has been giving women increasing control over their fertility for at least 70 years along with dramatic reductions in infant and childhood mortality that began long before that." - hm I do not think technology has given women that much control over their fertility. Can you enumerate exactly what are you thinking about?
Birth control enabled my wife to plan with reasonable precision when she got pregnant. Though we didn't anticipate her first pregnancy coming from her first unprotected cycle, having been warned that getting pregnant in one's 30s could be difficult. The next 2 kids arrived as anticipated. Her last pregnancy was in her early 40s and was somewhat delayed by a miscarriage and then came about after 3 or 4 unprotected cycles.
Great writing as usual Ruxandra! I'm not sure what to take away from all of this, but I'll attempt a bad synthesis anyways. Improved fertility technologies will lower the motherhood penalty for a subset of ambitious women and allow them to "have it all". This will be a great boon to those women and so is a worthy endeavor in its own right. We might see more women at the top of their fields, more women in greedy careers and more children raised by those women.
At the same time, this subset is small enough that we should not expect this tech on its own to translate into higher fertility rates society-wide. It seems the causes or interventions for lower fertility rates remain elusive (or beyond the paywall in Lyman's post :))
thank you! my original article Lyman commented on was never about rising birth rates. That was a small point in it.
I do have an article about Culture and birth rates though: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/culture-over-policy-the-birth-rate
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was summarizing Lyman's points in that second paragraph.
There is a third possibility, of which I am an example. The woman marries in her 20s and works all the time in her 30s, fully aware that she is not going to have children as a result. It is both a choice and a sacrifice.
of course :)
Wonderfully argued. The history of technology is the history of expanding human freedom – freedom from want, from disease, from limitations. In the near future I hope technology can offer freedom from deeply ingrained biological and societal constraints, like the agonizing choice between career and family. For women in demanding jobs during their crucial thirties, this translates into a powerful, practical freedom. It's the freedom from the old, heartbreaking trade-offs. It's technology finally allowing women to have both a high-impact career and the children they desire – the real freedom to have it all.
Thank you :)
I have a different POV. Yes, the point of technology is to reduce hard trade-offs. And yes, scientists should work on making that happen.
But, the best time to have children is as early as possible. Reasons:
1. The earlier you have them, the more years you get to spend with them. This will matter a lot as you age.
2. The earlier you have them, the more they get to see their parents prime.
3. The earlier you have them, grandparents get to see them more, and the lesser chance of the burden of taking care of young kids and aged grandparents coinciding.
4. The earlier you have them, the more you can have. Having a single child is sub optimal in many ways.
5. The earlier you have, the easier it becomes later on in your life. Parenting is harder as one ages.
IMO, technology can't change the fact that the later you have children, the harder it is and you are missing out on spending more time with them (irrespective of when people die). As we age, we get worse. So have children early.
I agree and we'll be encouraging our children to start younger than we did. There's an assumption here that the choice is take time off in thirties to have kids or wait until forties, but there's a third option: twenties.
I greatly enjoyed reading your original piece as well as the back-and-forth with Stone. I've been reading/hearing about these issues for years now, and yet you've both given me new things to consider.
I have a very in-the-weeds question: given the current structure of academia and current limits on fertility, when do you think is the best time for a woman to have a child? Grad school, postdoc, early career...? Looking at my colleagues, I've seen all options be made to work but with varying levels of impact. Even a tenured PI can be derailed if their grants lapse without successful renewal.
(To be fair, I've also seen a lot of effort to make academia more amenable to having kids, but incentives are still what they are.)