It’s a great book, thanks for typing this up. One thing I took from Caplan’s book that I think gets missed a lot in the reviews, is that his main goal isn’t to encourage people committed to childlessness to start having kids. The real goal is encouraging people to have more kids at the margins. The book is really talking to middle class (esp. upper-middle class) folks who have small families (1-2 kids) because they have an inflated notion of what normal, minimally responsible parenting requires.
You really do see this a lot: parents obsess about getting their kids into “elite preschools”, worrying about trace amounts of chemicals in their environments, pushing them to take violin/foreign language/team sports, scheduling “play dates” with pre-approved kids who live on the other side of town, etc. Parents who don’t manage to do all of this can expect to hear about it from their neighbors: “Oh, Timmy isn’t learning any instruments? Isn’t he almost 9? Susie has been taking piano lessons since she was 6! Aren’t you worried about his mental development?”
The problem is that it is unclear how much of this amounts to status competition and how much of it is from genuine concern with the child’s well-being. If it is mostly status-competition, there is no obvious reason the book will change parental behavior, because the social cost of dropping out of the rat-race is still very real.
It’s a great book, thanks for typing this up. One thing I took from Caplan’s book that I think gets missed a lot in the reviews, is that his main goal isn’t to encourage people committed to childlessness to start having kids. The real goal is encouraging people to have more kids at the margins. The book is really talking to middle class (esp. upper-middle class) folks who have small families (1-2 kids) because they have an inflated notion of what normal, minimally responsible parenting requires.
You really do see this a lot: parents obsess about getting their kids into “elite preschools”, worrying about trace amounts of chemicals in their environments, pushing them to take violin/foreign language/team sports, scheduling “play dates” with pre-approved kids who live on the other side of town, etc. Parents who don’t manage to do all of this can expect to hear about it from their neighbors: “Oh, Timmy isn’t learning any instruments? Isn’t he almost 9? Susie has been taking piano lessons since she was 6! Aren’t you worried about his mental development?”
The problem is that it is unclear how much of this amounts to status competition and how much of it is from genuine concern with the child’s well-being. If it is mostly status-competition, there is no obvious reason the book will change parental behavior, because the social cost of dropping out of the rat-race is still very real.