Knowing and Having Kids
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Amazon Knows. Amazon created the everything store, video and music streaming and “smart speakers” with mics. Plus they’ve bought wifi company Eero, video doorbell company Ring, doctors office One Medical, grocery store Whole Foods, and pharmacy PillPack. Have they combined all this data? How do they use it? They may know your purchases, internet usage, what you say to your kids & spouse, who is coming in and out of your home, and your medical history. And if they don’t know everything about you specifically, as you don’t use the relevant service, enough people like you do that they can predict the answer. What comes next?
You Know. Our son is taking a philosophy class. That put me in the position of explaining to my father the meaning of epistemology (the study of knowledge: how we know what we know, how do you decide what is true, etc.). In some ways epistemology has blossomed with the rationalist/Baseyians movement (see LessWrong and Rationally Speaking), the rise of cognitive biases awareness, more discussion of critical rationalism, and the tour de force of summarizing the mainstream understanding: Pinker’s book Rationality. On the other hand, we have deepfakes, QAnon, the Big Lie, and the rise of people claiming personal experience as the highest form of evidence. That leaves me thinking that more of us should be thinking about how we know things: Authority, what scientists report, what the media reports, what we experience, conjecture and criticism, or something else?
What Do we Know about Kids? In the late 1960s, we worried about a population explosion. Now many countries, including the US, have birth rates that are below replacement levels. Lower birth rates seem associated with secularism, wealth and women’s education. Can you have the former without a shrinking population? Freedom to choose is great but something is driving lower sperm counts so it is not all by choice. Plus people are having fewer children than they tell pollsters they want. Is it about economics and logistics? Do cheaper childcare and subsidies for parents make enough difference? Is it about how we treat parents culturally? Or expectations for a high investment model of parenting? And while we’re asking questions, is more children a good thing for parents? Is it good for the rest of us? I think so! Technology has played a big role in getting us here - will it play a big role in what comes next? Please tell me what you know on this topic.
Until next week,
Miles
As a working mother of an only child I think it comes down to not having paid parental leave in the US and also not enough resources to pay for everything that comes with a child. Childcare is very expensive as we all know. Parents who used to help their children with grandkids are also now having to work to make a living. No longer do people work hard all their lives with the expectation of being able to retire at one point. Everybody’s working all the time to survive. American dream is slipping away.
People are not having more children because they just do not have the bandwidth to do them justice. Take car ownership as an example of how much our quality of life has deteriorated without our realizing it. In the 1950s, you bought a car, usually for cash. It might have been a new Desoto or it might have been a clunker, but you registered it for a nominal fee, got in it and drove. When you bought the car, you didn’t have to think about the environment, gas mileage, emissions or tolls. You didn’t sit in a dealership for a full day negotiating and filling out paperwork. You just bought what you could afford, got in it and drove. Then came interstate highways and taxes, and emissions, followed by chips and parts that failed a lot faster, and with interstate highways came commuting farther and farther to work. What once took only a few hours of your time per year slowly crept to a few hours per month and then a few hours per week. And bureaucracy exploded. It once took me six trips to the DMV to get an out-of-state used car registered for lack of bureaucratic willingness to look at a dozen required documents upfront.
Where does the time come for our new and improved modern-day world, where everywhere you go there is a set of rules to be processed by our brains and procedures to be physically followed, right down to waiting for bicycle lane red lights for the 1% of county residents who bike in a winter-laden northern state, while the 99% motorists wait—having their most precious commodity, time, wasted? It comes from the time they would otherwise devote to family. That’s why there are fewer children.