On X.com Matt Yglesias posted a chart that sparked some conversation about child safety:
One thing about the much-lamented rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities is that kids have in fact become a lot less likely to die. pic.twitter.com/MTjR7spLM8
Of course, it was probably more his comment about the “rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities” that generated the feedback and pushback. And I assume his comment was partially tongue-in-cheek, as often happens on Twitter, and designed to generate that very discussion. Still, it is worth thinking about. Exactly why did that decline happen?
I’ve posted on this topic before. In my March 2023 post, I looked at very broad categories of child death. While all death categories have declined, about half of the decrease (depending on the age group, but half is about right) is from a decline in deaths from diseases, as opposed to external causes. And fewer disease death can largely be attributed to improvements in healthcare, broadly defined. Good news!
Of course, that means that about half of the decline is from things other than diseases. What caused those declines? Let’s look into the data. Specifically, let’s look into the data on deaths from car accidents.
Many households are now 2-income households. And that can make parenting a slog.
You go to work for 8-10 hours, you may or may not need to provide transportation for children to/from school, and child-care can eat a substantial portion of income. If the children are small, then the parents clean the floors, the dishes, and the clothes. Not to mention any home improvements or repairs. And food! Do you want to eat a home-cooked meal as a family? If both parents work typical hours, then prepare to eat no earlier than 6 PM, and maybe as late as 7:30.
Hey but there’s the weekend, right? NOPE! Someone has to do that big weekly shopping trip. How long is that going to take? The whole ordeal is enough to make someone think twice before having that 2nd kid. After all, if one kid getting sick throws a wrench in even a single day’s routine, then the whole week can be affected. How many sick kids before things stop getting done? Having a grandparent around to help would be a huge privilege and blessing.
At this point, I think that I can begin to call myself an experienced parent. I’ve got 4 kids who are ages 6 and younger. Plenty of modern conveniences make life easier. Many groceries can be purchased ahead of time for ‘order pick-up’ or online for delivery. Nice. Books are super cheap, and so are bubbles and drawing supplies. If I have to get some work/chores done while the kids are awake, then I can buy myself some time. But, like it or not, when the kids are asleep in the evening is when most chores will get done.
Parenthood rapidly became much easier and safer between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labour-saving devices in the home such as washing machines and fridges made raising children easier; improvements in medicine making childbirth safer; and easier access to housing made it cheaper to house larger families.
Anvar Sarygulov & Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield
I hate to be the next person publicly talking about Joe Jonas and Sophia Turner. I wish them both the best, and this kind of attention is probably hard on their kids. Anyway… what interests me about this case is that parenting seems to have been hard on them, even though Joe Jonas is worth $50 million. They could have a washing machine on every floor of their huge house. So, do the Works in Progress authors really understand the Baby Boom?
Short post today because I’m busy watching my kids, who had their school canceled because of excessive heat, like many schools in Rhode Island today.
I thought this was a ridiculous decision until my son told me he heard from his teacher that his elementary school is the only one in town that has air conditioning for every classroom. Given that, the decision to cancel given the circumstances is at least reasonable, but the lack of AC is not.
It’s not just that hot classrooms are unpleasant for students and staff, or that sudden cancellations like this are a major burden for parents. Several economics papers have found that air conditioning significantly improves students’ learning as measured by test scores (though some find not). Park et al. (2020 AEJ: EP) find that:
Student fixed effects models using 10 million students who retook the PSATs show that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging. Weekend and summer temperatures have little impact, suggesting heat directly disrupts learning time. New nationwide, school-level measures of air conditioning penetration suggest patterns consistent with such infrastructure largely offsetting heat’s effects. Without air conditioning, a 1°F hotter school year reduces that year’s learning by 1 percent.
This can actually be a bigger issue in somewhat Northern places like Rhode Island- we’re South enough to get some quite hot days, but North enough that AC is not ubiquitous. Data from the Park paper shows that New York and New England are actually some of the worst places for hot schools:
This is because of the lack of AC in the North:
The days are only getting hotter…. it’s time to cool the schools.
Where is my 600 words on the Barbie movie? I’m trying to get ready for the Fall semester, which includes two classes that I have never taught before. In the university slang, that would be “two new preps.” There is someone out there living my dream of dropping hot current cultural takes on schedule. I’m going to direct you over to Maia Mindel. Along with Adam Minter, she is someone I would love to meet.
For more economics of Barbie, Jeremy wrote “Barbie Dolls and Women’s Wages“. “… the gains for women in the labor market since the introduction of Barbie are large and worth celebrating.”
For more on film, I did list some thoughts and links for Oppenheimer.
Here is the Box Office Mojo report on 2023 American theater sales, as of August 2023. In less than a month, Barbie reached #2! And Oppenheimer is doing well for a serious historical movie.
The area from Sevierville, TN to the peak of the Smoky Mountains is a popular destination for summer road trips.
Much of the American Southeast is too hot in July for hiking. The nice thing about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is that you can keep driving up in elevation until you get to 70 degrees F or less.
The problem with the Smoky Mountains is that too many people want to go. The economist Donald Shoup has written about The High Cost of Free Parking. Entry to the national park is still free, however as of 2023 parking is paid. Good for them. The fee is very cheap. You can print a pass before you go or easily buy one on the way in.
The parking pass didn’t deter many people when we went in 2023. I recommend going early if you want to be able to park near a trailhead, or if you want to avoid a line getting into the Clingman’s Dome parking lot.
Our family has a running joke about “the pancake cabin people”. As we drive into the mountains in the morning, we pass parking lots full of cars outside of restaurants called pancake cabins. As long as you are up early enough to beat the pancake cabin people, you should be able to park where you want to.
There are more attractions in the national park than you could see in one day. The most dramatic view is at the top of Clingman’s Dome. The most historic educational sites are at Cades Cove. The best swimming (that I know of) is in the creek at Chimneys picnic area.
There are dramatic lookouts that you can drive right up to. Cades Cove is mostly a driving experience with lots of optional stops (closed to cars on Wednesdays).
With little kids in tow, it’s hard to make progress on the hikes. The map says just 2 miles to a waterfall. Sounds great. We make it 0.3 miles in. Then someone demands to be carried. Someone trips and breaks down crying. Our snacks are gone. We turn around and return to the car… it’s all good as long as you get excited about leaves and bugs. If you are in the stroller stage of life, don’t expect to get far on any hikes.
If you get a hotel within an hour of the national park on the Tennessee side, there is a lot to do. I might call it “the Orlando of the mountains.” Dollywood is darling at Christmas time.
Years ago, I sent out a note from Chattanooga, a few hours away in Tennessee. That’s another cute green place with hiking and restaurant options, on a smaller scale than the Smoky’s area. Their aquarium is fantastic. It’s neat how their “River building” starts by showing how small streams in the Smoky Mountains feed into the Tennessee River.
Another announcement just went out in my field to apply for an award for research support. This one is for early-career people. There are parameters about who can apply.
I know one of the men on the committee, and it would never occur to him in a thousand years that the structure of this prize discriminates against mothers. He probably thinks he’ll give equal consideration to everyone, which might be true in a sense, but there are a lot of people who are not allowed to put themselves in the pool. For this specific research prize, they don’t actually list an age limit, but they care about how fast you have progressed through the PhD->job track.
Let’s just say that this blog post is about every “under 30” or “under 40” prize that you can think of. Any prize that is age-limited sends the message that you had better accomplish whatever you are going to accomplish professionally first. Having kids needs to be the afterthought, chronologically.
Biologically, for men and especially women, having a kid before you turn 30 makes sense, if you ever want to have one. Professionally, there are a lot of implicit barriers to doing this. One of the few remaining explicit barriers that I can think of is these age-stage-specific prizes.
In case someone out there is thinking that IVF solves this, I’d like to point out that it’s really miserable and of course does not always work. In case someone out there is thinking “Bryan Caplan already showed that parenting is easy, so why does this matter?” I have a whole rant about that from last year.
Last week my post was about a new article I have with Scott Winship on the “cost of thriving” today versus 1985. That paper has gotten quite a bit of coverage, including in the Wall Street Journal, which is great but also means you are going to get some pushback. Much of it comes in the form of “it just doesn’t feel like the numbers are right” (see Alex Tabarrok on this point), and that was the conclusion to the WSJ piece too.
Here’s a response of that nature from Mish Talk: “There’s no way a single person is better off today, especially a single parent with two kids based on child tax credits that will not come close to meeting daycare needs.”
He mentions daycare costs, but never comes back to it in the post (it’s mostly about housing costs). Daycare costs are undoubtedly an important cost for families with young children (though since Cass’ COTI is about married couples with one earner, they may not be as relevant). And in the CPI-U, daycare and preschool costs only getting a weight of 0.5%. Surely that’s not reality for the families that actually do pay daycare costs! If only there was an index that applied to the costs of raising children.
In fact, there already is. Since 1960, the USDA has been keeping track of the cost of raising a child. Daycare costs are definitely given much more weight: 16% of the expenditures on children got to child care and education. And much of that USDA index (recently updated by Brookings) looks similar to what COTI includes: housing, food, transportation, health care, education, but also clothing and daycare. I wrote about it in a post last year and compared that cost to various measures of income (including single-earner families and median weekly earnings). But what if we compared it to Oren Cass’ preferred measure of income, males 25 and older working full-time? Here’s the chart.
There is something morally instructive about watching a preschooler melt down. It was the morning of my __th birthday yesterday. Kids still had to be dressed and fed and shipped to school on time.
My daughter, who is almost 5, was screaming on the stairs instead of coming to breakfast. Upon inspection, I realized that her head was through the arm hole of the sleeveless dress she had chosen to wear to school. I offered to help her. She screamed louder and lurched away from me. Her pride was more hurt than her neck at the thought of accepting help. She was not yet really wearing the Anna (the character from Frozen) dress because of the snafu of the sleeves. She stomped around screaming for minutes, refusing all offers of help or comfort from me.
Adults do this kind of thing all the time, although it looks different. People do the stupidest things and then dig in instead of accepting help and reversing course.
My daughter is exceptionally brilliant and kind. She is loved by everyone she meets. Even she has these moments, because we all do. That is some behavioral economics for you.
Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate in economics, applied economic reasoning to social circumstances and particularly to families. He argued that children are a normal consumption good, and people consume more children with higher incomes. However, he also emphasized a quantity-quality trade-off. More children in a family means fewer resources and attention for each child. Higher-income couples may opt to invest in classes, training, and spend more time with a unitary child rather than increasing the number of children.
However, goods have multiple attributes and children do not merely provide a stream of consumption value while in the household. They offer access to future resources when they become employed themselves. Having more children or higher-quality children increases the economic benefits that older parents can enjoy, such as more help with household activities and the ability to travel with their adult children. Old-age benefits such as social security now serve the function of insulating people from their prior investments in future consumption.
Economist Writing Every Day 