Parenting

Maia on the Barbie movie

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

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.

Maia wrote this killer tweet:

The following are links to Maia’s posts:

The Economics of the Barbie Movie: She’s everything. He’s just Ken. (Maia has earned today’s post a parenting tag because she brings in the economics of motherhood.)

Life In Plastic Ain’t So Fantastic: The girlypop economics of Barbie “… she’s always been about being a young professional, living on her own, and hanging out with her friends and boyfriend (not husband) Ken”

Maia even did something relevant leading up to the release of the movie: House of the Mouse: Disney Princesses have only been an official thing for 18 years. Why?

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.

Smoky Mountains Tourism

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

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.

Awards for young talent are antinatalist

Joy Buchanan7 Comments

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.

The Cost of Raising a Child, Revisited

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

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.

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Is Your Head in the Arm Hole of Your Dress?

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

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.

Minor Investment

Zachary Bartsch8 Comments

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.

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The Leading Causes of Death Among Elementary-Age Children

Jeremy Horpedahl7 Comments

You might have seen this chart recently. It comes from a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2022. The data comes directly from the CDC. It shows the leading causes of death for children in the US. You will notice that firearm-related deaths have been rising for much of the past decade, and in 2020 eclipsed car accidents as the leading cause.

Many are sharing this chart in response to the recent elementary school shooting in Nashville. It’s natural to want to study these problems more in the wake of tragedies. After the Uvalde shooting last year, I tried to read as much as I could about the history of homicide and gun violence in the US, and to look at the research on what might work to reduce gun violence, which is summarized in a post I wrote last June.

That being said, I don’t think the chart above accurately characterizes the problem of elementary school shootings. It might accurately describe some broader problem, but it’s misleading with respect to the shooting we all just witnessed. The most important reason is that the definition of “children” here extends to 18- and 19-year-olds. Much of the gun-related homicides for “children” shown here are gang-related violence, not random school shootings at elementary schools. It’s not that we shouldn’t care about these deaths too — we very much should care — but the causes and solutions are entirely different from elementary school mass shootings.

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Complacency and American Girl Dolls 2

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

It’s time to revisit American Girl Dolls and the Saturn V rocket. The trending topic among millennials is the new “historical” American Girl doll who lives in the year 1999.

Previously, I blogged about the historical Courtney doll from 1986 in “Complacency and American Girl Dolls.” I used Courtney’s accessories to illustrate stagnation in the physical environment (within rich countries) of recent decades. Courtney has a Walkman for playing cassette tapes and she has an arcade-style Pac-Man game to entertain herself. I pointed out that ’80’s Courtney had to be given the World War II doll Molly just to keep life interesting.

What do Isabel and Nicki have a decade later in 1999?  

They have a personal CD player and floppy disks. It’s cute and the toys will sell. However, it does not seem like innovation has introduced many new capabilities. Isabel can listen to music through her headphones and be entertained on screens, just like Courtney could.

Isabel eats Pizza Hut and has dial-up internet access. There is no sense of sacrifice or expanding the frontier. The world was settled, and history had ended.  

What counts for adventure in 1999? Shopping vintage clothing. Just like Courtney, Isabel revisits the past to get a sense of purpose or excitement.

This is Isabel’s diary. Having nothing to do besides look at clothes from past decades, she obsesses over status. Presumably “Kat” complimented her hat in person. Facebook didn’t start until 2004, so Isabel is not worried about “Likes” in social media.

So, what did I do with my kids for their school break on Presidents’ Day?  We went to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to see the Saturn V rocket.

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The Economics of Brushing Teeth and the Tooth Fairy

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

There are many papers with titles in the style of “The Economics of X” with X covering a wide variety of topics, some deadly serious (“Economics of Suicide“) and others more trivial or unintentionally hilarious (“The Economics of Sleep and Boredom” comes to mind). There is a related genre of papers on “The Political Economy of Y,” once again with papers that are both serious and occasionally silly (or sometimes deadly serious papers with silly-sounding titles, such as “The Political Economy of Coffee, Dictatorship, and Genocide“).

But perhaps the best paper of this sort is a 1974 article on the Journal of Political Economy by Alan Blinder, titled “The Economics of Brushing Teeth.” It is, as you might guess, a paper that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek (tongue-in-teeth?), but the paper carefully follows the formal style you would expect from a JPE paper in 1974. I recommend reading the paper in full, and I can assure you that it is not at all like pulling teeth. But if you prefer not to look a gift horse in the mouth, here are a few favorite parts.

The paper is, of course, full of tooth-related puns, even in the footnotes, such as this acknowledgment: “I wish to thank my dentist for filling in some important gaps in the analysis.”

There are also plenty of jokes about human capital theory, jokes that only an economist could love, such as: “The basic assumption is common to all human capital theory: that individuals seek to maximize their incomes. It follows immediately that each individual does whatever amount of toothbrushing will maximize his income.”

Another section manages to poke fun at both sociologists and economists. In reference to a fake paper (no, there is no Journal of Dental Sociology), Blinder chastises the fake sociologist for misattributing a change in brushing patterns (assistant professors brush more) to advancing hygiene standards over time. No! It must be about maximizing income: “To a human capital theorist, of course, this pattern is exactly what would be expected from the higher wages received in the higher professorial ranks, and from the fact that younger professors, looking for promotions, cannot afford to have bad breath.”

And what good is a paper without a formal model of teeth brushing? This is the kind of model that many young economists cut their teeth on in graduate school.

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