Well, we're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily
Jishinski, culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email
the show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of our website as well. We're joined today by someone
that I would have on the show every day if I could, but he
actually has a life. Tim Carney's the author of the new book Family Unfriendly.
He works at the American Enterprise Institute the Washington Examiner. He's my former
boss. Tim. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Emily, Welcome
back to the show. You are frequently a presence on the show because a
reference Alienated America in particular is so often also the big ripoff. But it
is a good place to start because you have a chapter title on in your
book book called It Takes a Village. This is in the new book Family
Unfriendly. It Takes a Village as your chapter title. It sort of piggybacks
off of arguments that you made in Alienated America about community and civil society.
When you're talking about this sort of fertility overall fertility question, why people aren't
having so many kids. You address so many different topics, ranging from travel,
sports to potential government incentives. But when you're talking about community in particular,
was there something that brought you from Alienated America to Family Unfriendly? Is
there? It's kind of a kind of a sequel. Yeah, oh yeah,
So well I'm going to go way back. This is now going to
become a writer conversation, so I hope I won't bore your non writer listeners.
But so, the first couple of books I wrote, you mentioned the
Big rip Off. My second one was Obama Nomics. They were all on
a certain theme. And then I read Andy Ferguson wrote an article once about
what he called non book books, which was basically, you know, twelve
chapters stapled together, and I realized that my first two books could have been
called non book books, and that was a little less. So when I
was writing Alienated America, I wanted to think, how can I make this
be a book book? You have to be able to make arguments later in
the book that you couldn't have made earlier. There's an arc. There has
to be a beginning and an end. And as I was saying about the
end, I was started thinking about Shakespeare. And I don't even know if
this is true, but something I was told in high school about Shakespeare that
the comedies basically all end in weddings. The ones I can think of tend
to ed and when weddings, interestingly, not always the weddings of the main
characters. So it's not like a happily ever after thing, but you know,
there's a wedding. And so I thought I should somehow end my book
with a wedding, and so I wrote it around the last chapter there the
solutions chapters about building real local communities, and the most important ones are going
to be religious congregations. And as I was thinking about what's the most important
thing that a religious congregation can do, you know, it helps you when
you as far as worldly stuff, it helps you when you are sick,
it helps you, you know, find a job, YadA YadA. But
ideally it helps you help your children find somebody, get married, start a
family. And so the last scene in Nalienated America is sort of in my
vision, was me like walking my daughter down the aisle of the same aisle
that she puked in at church as a seven year old or whatever. And
so I realized, if that's the most important thing that a community does,
then the loss of community, the most one of the most important losses,
is going to be the loss of family formation. And then when I looked
at the falling birth rate, and then when I looked at the rising anxiety
among kids and talking to parents who are like, this is so much more
stressful. Why can't I just simplify my life? That's when I realized that
the I think the most important story of the last thirty years has been and
the collapse of community. The most important story of the next thirty years is
going to be the shrinking family, the reduction in marriage and baby making,
and that I mean, you see how that changes a culture in these other
countries, and I think in the United States it will be. So that's
how it's sort of a sequel. Yeah, that's really interesting for a number
of reasons. In one thing you write about in the book, and I
was fascinated by it, is the question of happiness. I think I have
the quote here, but basically you say something they said that like, the
happiest people have children the earliest. Yes, that's kind of the order.
You obviously are at Ai where Arthur Brooks for a really long time and still
is doing not at AI, but in general really important work on that question
of happiness. We've seen as material wealth increases, happiness decline in the United
States, more broadly in the Western world. How is happiness, in your
estimation, affecting fertility? So I think, well, first of all,
whenever two things are interact, the right answer is almost always that they're causing
each other. That you know, happiness is causing happiness causes people to have
babies, and people having babies makes them happy, and the in verse.
A sadder society will have less babies. In a society with less fewer babies
will be a sadder society. I think it goes together in a few ways.
One, I think a big part of happiness is hope and a belief
in your own kind of goodness. This is where the book ends up.
I talk about civilizational sadness that we don't actually believe in our own goodness,
especially white liberals in America think, you know, climate change is destroying the
planet, We're a racist country, that we're not ultimately good, and that
that's what I call civilizational sadness. You don't want more of us if you
think we're not ultimately good. If you have hope and a belief that,
despite all of your flaws and sins, actually like good. And I see
it in religious terms like God loves me, but also that that you're good,
that you're a force for good, that you know other people love you,
you're you're good enough, you're you're smart enough, et cetera. That
those people will be more likely to have kids, And then having kids makes
you step outside of yourself. And I think one of the core causes of
sadness is just really looking in at yourself constantly all the time. That's why
I never saw that show Black Mirror. Did you see that show? Like
one episode? Okay, it's I thought that might have been one of those
shows you young people would always talk about at the Examiner. But but that
just seemed like a perfect description of what social media does too, in this
dark way causes us just to look in on ourself. And when you are
married and raising kids, you're constantly you sort of get dragged almost against your
will, to be thinking about something big, which is exactly by the way
what community and belonging does as well, So that would be one of the
main ways I say is that you you were made happier when you're actually living
for other people. The do you know, Pearl Pearl Davis? Okay,
I assumed you did. She would say that in order to make this a
good deal, you know, having children getting married for men, you know,
you have to reform alimony, you have to reform child support, you
have to reform divorce because right now it's not a good deal for men.
And she actually debated Michael Knowles on this recently. But the reason I pose
this to you, Tim is I'm curious about your taste on the differences between
men and women's sort of civilizational pessimism. Is there is it, you know,
affected by one sex being really pessimistic therefore the other sex just can't find
enough mates that are interested in having children. Or is this kind of across
the board everyone's really pessimistic. So there's it's kind of a we need to
have a rising tide that lifts both boats. I think that the negativity and
like the gender wars like rises together and would go down together at the same
time. I don't think men are more dour than women, or vice versa.
When you look at South Korea, they there they have the lowest birth
rate in the world, less than one baby per woman, and they also
seem to have this immense split, like just division between men and women,
where women, like starting to happen in the US, actually have more career
success than men do, and that a lot of men react to that,
not by saying, Okay, well maybe I could be a stay at home
dad, but by saying no, you know, these women they just they
don't actually want men. They or you know that in cell behavior kicks in,
and then it becomes this awful spiral and then women start to think,
well, men are just you know, our freeloaders are et cetera. And
could that happen in the US? Absolutely it could. Are we seeing the
beginning of it. It's possible. That's part of what I think some of
the sadness is. So they're real awkward questions here, Except birth rates go
up a little bit when men's income goes up. Birth rates go down when
women's income goes up. So women making more money and having more career success
for reasons you could guess, you know, opportunity costs doesn't help people make
start more families, so that sadness, the sex is being at each other's
throat. That's a vicious circle. So many of these things are vicious circles.
And if Pearl Davis thinks you can sort of reset it by rigging things
a little dore in favor of men, I think that that's wrong. I
offer us or what I call family friendly feminism, which is so the family
unfriendly feminism is that okay, women need to become more like company men,
and it just becomes a workism, and it makes everybody less happy in the
long run. It definitely leads to falling birth rates, more anxiety, et
cetera. My argument is not that women become company men, but that company
men become family guys. My family friendly feminine and not become like women.
But do the dad stuff do? I always sometimes I post on Twitter pictures
of me playing my kids in basketball. I have one son who's taller than
me, but I still can beat them because I'm more wily than him.
I have another middle son who I be and then I have a nine year
old who I just absolutely demolish in basketball. I can't actually dunk, but
if I could, I would just dunk on Sean all day long. But
I had my seven year old Eve took a video of me playing sewn because
and I just set up so that he would take a shot, and I
just jumped in the air and I swatted the heck out of it. Like
so far, it was my greatest block shot of Violet, yes exactly,
and I look like to Camp Bay Matambo compared to this night. It is
so much fun. My kids love it. I love it. This is
what makes being a dad fun. My wife, she wouldn't get much joy
out of beating our kids basketball, because being a dad is its own joy
and that needs to be held up. So if I were to debate Pearl
Davis, I think I would talk about how being a dad is awesome.
Dads need to do that more, and that would be part of it.
But I wouldn't place more of the onus on the men or the women.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. You've probably noticed volatility
in the market lately. The stock market has seen unprecedented fluctuations over the last
three years, and silver has historically been considered a safe haven asset during times
like this of market volatility. When that uncertainty rises, investors will often turn
to precious metals like silver to preserve wealth and to hedge against economic instability.
One of the reasons is because silver is a tangible asset. Owning physical silver
coins provides you with that tangible You can hold it in your hand, and
in times of economic uncertainty, having tangible assets can provide that sense of security
and peace of mind. Don't forget that coins hold both intrinsic and numismatic value.
While you're stacking silver in the form of bars or rounds, it holds
that intrinsic value. Of metal coins, and especially those certified coins, hold
the additional numismatic value of being a historic collectible. Now. CSN Mint has
been providing US mint collectible coins and precious metals for over twenty years. They're
one of the most trusted names in numismatics. You can explore CSN Mint's extensive
catalog of bullion, bars, coins and numismatic collectibles. Whether you're a seasoned
investor or a passionate collector, you will find a diverse range of products to
suit your needs and your preferences. At CSN Mint, trust is paramount rest
assured that every product you purchase includes the original certificate of authenticity or is actually
certified and graded by a third party grader to ensure origin and purity. So
with CSN mint, you can build your collection with confidence. You can experience
that world class customer service and support with CSN mint too. Their team of
knowledgeable professionals is there to assist you every step of the way, from product
selection all the way to order fulfillment and even beyond. So if you're going
to collect something, it might as well be money. Go to csnmint dot
com, slash Federalist and use promo code Federalist at checkout to get a free
silver American Eagle over thirty dollars in value with your purchase of seventy five dollars
or more. Tim Kearney prescribing feminism to listeners in a pink shirt. That's
what's happening. If if you think blocking shots is feminist, if you should
take it up with the Cambay. Okay, that's true. You also seem
to be suggesting that there are hardwired biological differences between men and women, a
controversial position now, but you do do. Don't tell anybody I said that.
We'll cut that part out but there is a part in the book where
you address kind of transhumanism I think as it's been described. And what's interesting
about that is the dovetailing with the IVF conversation, which I'm sure you've been
thinking about a lot recently. Is a lot of people have been thinking about
recently. There's this character in vander Pump Rules, which is a show on
Bravo, So indulge me for a moment, tim Her name is Lala.
She had a wildlife, then got pregnant with her fiance, had a baby.
She loves being a mom now loves it more than anything in the world,
and just wants to have more children. She wants to have all of
them via IVF because she quote doesn't want a baby daddy, because she has
this heartbreaking experience of having to share her daughter with this man who cheated on
her and was awful to her. And it calls to mind this idea now
that women want to have babies without men because there are problems with men.
Men come with baggage. And so I say that as a preface to this
question for you, how does this superhuman acceleration of technology affect the way that
we see marriage and children. Well, now I wish I had known about
this character while I was writing the book, because that fits perfectly into the
tech chapter. I call it post human, and I didn't realize that that's
what I thought I was writing about, just like phone addiction or porn.
And then my editor was like, you're writing about us trying to escape our
physical reality. And so that's why I use that term for that chapter.
And that idea that wanting to escape connection. That's a huge part of the
modern project. And marriage is a connection and it's not a transaction because it's
hard to pull out. It's not just a contract between two people. Parenthood
is a connection that again you're not allowed to just sort of plug into and
unplug from. And that idea of connection. And so I quote Christine Emba
in the book a few times she wrote rethinking sex, and she says sort
of she equates the words freedom with a lack of connection. And I quote
Kate Julian writing that the hookup culture is really a lack of relationship culture,
and so it's no wonder that it's kind of led to a sex recession.
So that idea of I want the one connection, I want the baby,
but I don't want the husband. That vulnerability connection, that that exposes us
to harm is something people want to avoid. Now that's as old as history
that really, you know, vulnerability is at the heart of love and so
we can be afraid of it. I mean there's a million stories like that.
I think I saw Far from the Matting Crowd of Tom Hardy novel that
I was tarting in a movie, and that was part of it, was
like the unwillingness to be vulnerable to somebody, etc. But nowadays there's a
belief, Okay, well we should just not be vulnerable. We're just airing
in that direction. And I think that tech feeds into that because of this.
The medium is the message is something people say a lot. I think
that the medium of social media, especially an infinite feed that uses an algorithm
that judges your behavior and then shows you what it thinks you want to see,
that is that black mirror that turns you in on yourself, and it
makes you either resent people who seem to have something better than you or distrust
people because you're constantly learning about how bad the rest of the world is.
And it makes us think of ourselves as people who can just write our own
life script sort of on a blank page. Weirdly enough, I was just
on MSNBC and Al Sharpton asked me a question about my book, and it
was the best question I got on MSNBC. He said, when I was
growing up in Brooklyn in the church, we saw ourselves as part of a
continuity of generations, that there was a really old people, the old people,
us young people, and that we were passing something down, and so
it just made sense to have a next generation and pass stuff down. But
yeah, social media is about it's a very individualistic thing. It's about crafting
from scratch, just like that woman makes grillchy sandwiches from scratch for her children
on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. We're supposed to create from scratch our own
identity, our own personality, instead of our identity being formed by the things
we belong to the people were connected to. And so if we're creating that
from scratch, it becomes something a little less human. Why should I have
to be binary? Why should I have to stay the race, the sex,
whatever that I was? And certainly the unchosen obligations they have no place
in there. So who's your brother, who's your mom, who's your dad,
what's your hometown, what religion were you brought up in, what's your
ethnicity? All of those things were unchosen, So those have no place in
that script of your life that you're writing on a blank page. So something
about social media I think drives us to see our lives, to see our
project in life as writing a script of our life on a black, blank
page. Curious about your experience with cross cultural examples, because there were you
know, pre Christian societies obviously that had high levels of fertility, secular societies
that maybe now have high levels of fertility. I don't know, because to
me, when you're talking about this, it sounds like it's all downstream of
secularism. As soon as you lose your sense of purpose, you lose your
drive to be social and to engage in these institutions, whether their marriage or
civil society. What role do you think? This is maybe the deepest question
possible, But I know we're on a podcast, We're not you know,
you could write a whole book just on this. But as you look at
all of these symptoms, do you see them as being downstream of a secularizing
society or is there no way to kind of pin it to one thing.
The reason I I mean, it's complicated if but I would be willing to
pin into a secularizing society because of this. I looked around for subcultures in
the US or cultures anywhere basically, but especially in the West, that have
a high birth rate, and the only ones I found were religious. So
some Catholic subcultures mine, me and my friends we get together, there's like
six adults, twenty four kids. It's normal. But the Israel, well,
let me qualify that the Mormons, Israel, et cetera. But in
Israel even the secular Jews have two point zero babies, while Europe's at one
point five. The US is at one point seven. So it's a religious
culture can be a family friendly culture. So in the abstract, as demonstrated
by the secular Jews in Tel Aviv still having babies. In the abstract,
you don't need religion to have a family friendly culture. But in practice,
nobody has shown me a really family friendly culture that was secular, the one
that's big enough to kind of show up on a map. I'm sure there
are perfectly nice towns in Vermont or whatever that would fit this, but not
not significantly large ones. But one interesting point about history that didn't make it
into the book. Christianity actually ended up reducing birth rates because the idea of
monogamy, the idea that marriage and pro creation belonged within sex, the idea
that women actually you know, had to consent to marriage and to sex.
These were these were forces that were pro family, but not pronatal in a
numerical way. Progressive. Yes, yeah, really, Yeah, that's actually
an interesting I hadn't thought about that, and yeah, that makes a lot
of sense now, that was I don't. I sort of did this in
the opposite way that a lot of people would. I kind of want to
talk about the big picture stuff and then get specific because I just wondered if
we were skipping to that because you know, we've known each other for ten
years and everything else was already said. But yes, no, because for
me, it's sort of like a logical proof. And that's why I like
really reading your writing and your books do this too. You have an amazing
you have two amazing chapter titles. You probably know which ones I'm talking about,
But the first one I want to talk about is have lower ambitions for
your kids, which is just an excellent chapter title, but also I think
a really really important point when you're talking to other parents. I mean,
first of all, give us a little taste of that argument. People should
buy the books, but give us a little taste of that argument. But
when you're talking to other parents, what is the way to make that argument,
especially because you live outside Washington, d c. Where arguably the highest
concentration of overly ambitious people. Yes, so have lower ambitions for your kids?
Is it starts with like it starts with my son Charlie showing up.
We let him try out for travel baseball team because I thought he would get
cut. And then he goes out and he makes it. And so then
they say, all right, winter workouts start in January. Now this is
twelve year olds. They're not supposed to They're supposed to be sledding or playing
basketball or whatever in January. But they you know, we have this indoor
practice and the first practice a coach says to him, to the whole team,
baseball isn't fun. Winning baseball is fun. So this is the twelve
year olds, So the have lower ambitions for your kids? Is winning baseball
shouldn't be the goal? Baseball should be the goal having the same son like
plays guitar. Now he's never going to do anything with the guitar except like
sing around a campfire and entertain me when I'm tired and want to lie on
the couch. And that's great, that's a great thing to do with the
guitar. I talked to this one music teacher who she was asked once in
an interview by someone else, is your dream, she teaches inner city students,
band, is your dream to see one of your students rise out of
poverty and end up on the Kennedy Center stage. And she almost laughed out
loud, and she said, no, let me tell you my favorite former
students. This guy named Victor, and he's currently a park ranger learning ballroom
dance. I don't even know if he still plays a piano, but he's
music helped make him into an expansive person, was a term she use,
And I just love that word of thinking of childhood being expansive rather than intensive.
And so you should want your kids to try a bunch of things.
You know that people make fun of the jack of all trades, master of
none. No kid should be a master of any trade. The childhood should
be about trying different things and maybe hopefully finding something that you love enough that
pursuing it doesn't seem as much like work. But instead they make sports becom
and music become a job, and even on academics. And this is the
one where I need the reminders because it's the kid's primary sort of occupation is
at academics. But even there to realize that high achievement in academics is not
the goal of school is what they should be working towards. But if they
work towards it and they fall short of it, they still got the benefit
of working towards it. And so how do I sell it? It's a
hard sell. It's an easier sell to a religious audience because ultimately, I
say, my ambitions for my kids are not low. I want them to
be saints. So it's the highest ambition you could have. But as far
as baseball, or music, or even academics, it's I don't think their
achievement really reflects It doesn't reflect their value, it doesn't reflect their character necessarily.
And so one way, if you can't explain it to somebody by saying
that God loves your son no matter what, you can't explain it by pointing
out a lot of that stuff you're trying to do. It's not going to
work anyway, and it's going to backfire. So that's two parts. It's
not going to work because as one I quote an athletic director saying, you're
going to give your kid all this training, his own private coach, etc.
And then some other kid who's never played the sport before and it's just
super athletic, is going to jump in and take a spot. So Jacob
de Gram, who in my opinion is the greatest pitcher of the last twenty
years, he didn't start pitching until halfway through college. The guy who is
a goalie for the men's Olympic soccer team, he didn't start playing goalie until
at some point in high school. So these guys just went ahead and they
took a job of somebody probably who had dedicated their whole life to this one
achievement. And it backfires because specialization is bad for kids' bodies, it's bad
for kids' psyches, and that the lack of sort of childhood independence is the
root cause of childhood anxiety. According to you know, basically, that's the
conclusion that the pediatricians and the psychiatrists are coming to So you're giving your kid
an anxious childhood and you're not even guaranteeing their success at what you're making them
specialize in. Today's episode is brought to you by surf Shark. Surf Shark
is a cybersecurity product that improves your online privacy and protects you from hackers.
How well. Their main product, VPN, basically acts as a shield and
hides your IP address, so everything you do online actually stays private, whether
it's reading the news, maybe googling some dodgy info, which as a journalist
you have to do all the time, streaming some shows, listening to podcasts,
or honestly anything else. Plus, if you use a VPN, you
can virtually travel the world from the comfort of your own home, and surf
Shark gives you over one hundred countries to choose from. Once you change your
virtual location, you'll be able to bypass censorship and restrictions. You can find
your favorites on Netflix or Hulu or other streaming services, and even access new
libraries to watch even more content. So maybe you can't see YouTube because of
your location, just use surf Shark VPN. Maybe you can't access that one
website to buy let's say limited edition sneakers, use surf Shark VPN. Try
surf Shark today totally risk free with a thirty day money back guarantee. Get
surf Shark VPN at surf Shark dot deals slash Federalist enter promo code Federalist for
three extra months for free. And you heard me right, that's three extra
months for free. So surf Shark dot deals slash Federalist. Yeah, you're
right about travel sports, which is obviously one of your buggobooes for for good
reason, as I don't know if you did travel sports as a kid.
I did travel sports as a kid, but my parents cut it off after
a certain point because it gets so ridiculous. How did we let ourselves normalize
the culture of travel sports And it's it's not just travelsports also like travel academics,
it's not that's not as like high house travel sports, but there are.
It's a culture of just intensity, as you've just discussed, how did
we let that culture happen? So one term I use at one point in
the book is letting the logic of capitalism slip into our social arrangements. What
capitalism does is it allows us and this is why it's great, and it
makes us all wealthy. It sort of allows us to identify what's most promising,
pump a ton of resources into it, and turn it into a success.
And I think I think of like tennis camps as being the things that
did this where they realized, wait a second, you know, one in
one hundred kids who play tennis might become super good at and be able to
be a tennis star and then provide you know, college scholarships or wealth to
their parents. And so we started trying to find a way to identify those
kids who would be great baseball players and across players and make them be something
big. And so that involved us forgetting that the point of youth sports is
not to make sure the best baseball players make it to the major leagues.
That's the point of like investors shopping around the market. That's not the point
of parent The point of youth sports is exercise is good. Losing games is
good, Winning games is good. Being a team captain is good. Learning
to be the last guy on the bench is good. Having somebody who's not
your dad telling you to do something, because you're more likely to listen to
him, because he wasn't also telling you to clean up your room earlier in
the day. That all these benefits we forgot them, and we thought that
the point of youth sports was winning and getting scholarships and just there is a
virtue of trying hard and becoming good at something. And so if you see
a kid do that, even if he doesn't ever pick it up again,
parents are like, that was just great to watch him have to learn how
to you know, a great marching band, Like the people who were in
really good marching bands always remember that, and so we do. I that
the pursuit and the attainment of excellence in youth is a good thing, but
then we let that one good crowd out all the other goods of just sort
of fun in childhood. There were days in high school where I would have
soccer practice, basketball practice or game, sometimes another soccer practice and then marching
band. It's and that wasn't that, I mean, it wasn't that unusual
in twenty is the aughts? Yeah, I hope that's declined. I don't
know, it seems like maybe I don't think it has, and not where
I live in the in the suburbs of DC, the elite stuff is still
is still pretty bad. And then again you hear well intentioned parents say,
oh, well, the problem with Little league is, you know, the
coaches are all just volunteers, like wall, that's an actual that's it.
Yeah, it's like they don't really know what they're doing. Now, sometimes
a coach who doesn't know what he's doing is horrible because precisely because he dried
the kids too hard, he doesn't realize it's supposed to be fun. But
my experience in travel baseball was it was exactly those were the worst coaches.
That was the worst coach we ever had was a travel ball coach because he
thought that his job was to win baseball games. And when he quit,
he said, I'm washing my hands of this mess, meaning his kids who
were one had one win and six losses this mess. Yes, fair enough.
The other chapter title that you probably already know that I'm going to bring
up is fecundity. Uh, yes, what is it? It's like facundity.
I want fecundity in the sheets. You need walkability in the streets.
Blockability in the streets was I think I should I should get a T shirt
that says that somebody a podcast host that he was going to get that T
shirt. Was I realized I should get that too. Yeah, you absolutely
should. But this is basically a chapter on city planning, and you have
a lot of Terence trying to make it sound more exciting. So, well,
you're city planning very exciting, but you have personal experience with us that
you've written about before too. How did you go down the city planning rabbit
hole? And what does it have to do with fertillay? So I don't
even tell this story in the book, but I remember living on Capitol Hill
twenty years ago before he got married, and there's a guy running for city
council and he said for a more walkable DC, and I was just like,
how is that an important enough issue that contain sign? I mean for
me? Yeah, I just didn't even walkability just seemed like an insane,
niche issue. And then I didn't realize, though, what my privilege was
as a kid to live in a town where if I walked out my front
door, I could just go all over town. I would walk to my
friend's house before I had a driver's license, we would ride our bikes.
I would explore the town on my bike we would. Once we walked in
Mike Boyle and I walked into the Bronx so far and we had to like
walk on the side of the road, which wasn't optimal walkability because we got
a bunch of tics. But the point is where we lived, there was
lots of places we could walk and explore and have that sort of unstructured play.
But if you hadn't said the Bronx, by the way, I guarantee
you listeners would have been thinking that you were describing rural Mayberry. And that's
actually both sad and interesting. You grew up in Greenwich Village and so it's
it's absolutely essential for parents too, right, what we as parents need is
to be able to ignore our kids while they have fun. But in the
places I've lived in the suburbs of DC are not that are not that walkable.
Sometimes there's little pockets of it. But if my kids have a social
life, we need to be able to drive them to all their parties and
then even if they wanted to. We had a grocery store basically across the
street from our house when we lived in Montgomery County, but the road was
four lanes in each direction, so the kids. It wasn't until they were
ten that we let them go to the grocery store. While when I was
a kid in Greenwich Village, again it was like eight just because the streets
were narrow or the cross the drivers weren't going one hundred miles an hour.
And so that need for childhood freedom, physical freedom. It's not just I
get to read what I want or whatever. It's to roam, to meet
up with friends, to walk over to friend's house, so walk to the
basketball court and play pick up basketball. I used to just go take the
newspaper and go and sit on a bench and read it. I once saw
an older kid doing that. I thought that looked really cool. So I
started doing that when I was twelve. And so that physical freedom requires walkability.
But so many of our suburbs are built for town I mean for cars
rather than for people. And if it's built for cars, that means parents
have to take you everywhere. It means it's less safe for kids across the
street. It means there's no corner store within two and so the kids are
going to have to get a ride to do anything, get dropped off at
the mall. You know, then they get to walk around within the mall,
but it's better if they can just walk out of the house. And
so liberating kids, which thus liberates adults, requires it being sort of safe
and fairly convenient for kids to walk to places. So that involves a little
more density than some excerbs especially want, but it certainly involves just things like
sidewalks and bike trails. That's a perfect segue to one question I wanted to
ask, actually because and there's another thing you've written about, sort of reconciling
the limited government mentality of books like The Big Ripoff It, which is an
anti cronyism and for good reason, and it's something that a lot of conservatives
should absolutely still embrace, even though some are pushing it aside. But reconciling
that with what you just described, which would be maybe dismissing the guy and
tied Ie on the city council twenty years ago who was asking for a walkability
and saying, you know, if there was a demand for walkability, the
businesses and the city would respond to that demand and create walkability. But you
also write about things like the trod tax credit and the demand for or whether
there's a demand for that or need for that whether it works, and that's
a debate that people have devoted book lengths to before. But what room do
you think there is for policy incentives, if any, in that conversation.
So, first, infrastructure is a place of government. So family friendly infrastructure
is again they're going to pave a street, and when they pave it wide
with a high speed limit, they're not being neutral. They're picking cars over
kids. And so that's one where the government's involved, and I'm saying they
should pick children and walkability over cars. Then you look at a lot of
the you know, whether it's Hungry that a lot of our friends on the
right will point to as a pronatal state, or Northern Europe, the social
states up there that our friends on the left who actually like kids, they'll
point to those as successes. None of those are successes. None of those
they all have lower birth rates basically than the US. Hungary kind of dropped
stopped its fall, so it's maybe done a little bit of good. France
has a one point nine birth rate, which is higher than the US,
but it's below replacement. And it's not just immigration. Native born French have
one point eight babies, so that's again higher than the US, but they
spend so much money in Hungary and France to get these small gains in the
birth rate that it can't be it's not plausible in the United States that we
would pull that off. But I defend a child tax credit just on fairness
grounds that and I wrote a Wall Street Journal a lot ed that kind of
to still the argument from the book. But I just compare sort of a
bachelor pad of five guys. I had this baseball teammate and he lived in
the suburban house in my neighborhood, so everybody else was a family, but
he had five guys living there, and the next door family had, you
know, a mom, a dad, and three kids. And I realized
that if those five guys had made a combined one hundred and twenty five thousand
dollars, so they're all working like part time jobs Maurissa's uber or whatever,
and then the married couple, also five people two incomes added up to one
hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Without a child tax credit, that married
couple would pay twice as much in taxes as the five single guys, just
because of the way we have a standard deduction is per adult per tax filer,
with the tax rates and the brackets are per tax filer, and so
all that a two thousand dollars tax credit does is equalize the treatment of these
two houses. And so that means that if you don't have any child tax
credit, if you object to there being anyone at all, you're saying kids
should encount as humans. And so that's that's a fairness measure that I have.
I would increase it a little bit. It's annoying that it stops when
your child's sixteen. The year that your child's going to turn seventeen, you
no longer get it. Well, you're still paying for all their stuff and
now paying for their travel, sports, their car insurance in my case.
But also it hasn't been indexed for inflation. So I actually went out to
study the question of the child tax credit when I was working on this,
getting excited saying, I don't know where I'm going to end up, and
I assumed I was going to end up with either scrap this thing or quadruple
it, and that would have been a more viral take, but instead I
ended up with increase it a little bit, which again I'm hamstrung by only
being able to advise what I think is actually good policy. But those European
countries that just spend a ton, they're not getting a lot of bang for
their buck. Another area where there's synergy with Alienated America is this question you.
I have the quote here you write about how the baby bust is not
correlated with poverty but health. And this goes to the point about Lena Dunham
you make in Alienated America, which is probably your most quoted point from my
perspective. I just love the way that you put it in that book,
but you're right about it here too. Can you just flesh out a little
bit about that correlation what we actually see in the data. Yeah, so,
I mean there's there's a lot going on here, but mostly I'm trying
to argue that money affordability is not the cause of the baby busts. People
say, why aren't millennials having kids? Well, they can't afford it.
It's just not It doesn't stand up to analysis. Millennials are not poorer than
Gen X was adjusted for inflation. Wealthier Americans don't have more kids unless you
go into like the top one percent of the one percent. And it's basically
like NFL players and Elon Musk they have a ton of kids, but for
the most part, wealthier families don't have more kids. Wealthier countries definitely don't
have more kids. So in some ways, like an alien in America,
you could say the baby bus is two different stories. There's the upper class
baby bus and the lower class work baby bus. The upper class baby bus
is people who are bringing their kids to across tournaments in Delaware every weekend,
who feel that they should only have as many kids as they can provide with
all the best of absolutely everything, and they end up giving their kids anxiety,
and they have anxiety and they can't imagine having more than one or two.
The working class baby bus is about a lack of stable marriages and a
lack of stable communities. They So the upper class that's not having kids is
not that they're Lena Dunham, who's you know, swingers, sleeping around refusing
to settle down. It's that they are being too intensive in their parenting.
And the working class it is more that there's not stable marriage, there's not
monogamy, and but it doesn't lead like some conservatives thing to like welfare moms
having twelve babies most of what it leads to is a girl gets pregnant at
twenty and doesn't end up marrying the father, and then she raises that one
kid alone. And so both of these things there are two very different stories
in some way, but they both result from a lack of communities that would
point you towards family formation. So again, secularization. If what we belong
to was churches, working class would belong to more churches and they would be
more likely to get and stay married. And the upper class would belong to
more churches and they would be less likely to think that the point of life
is making your kid a high achiever? Where have all the Friday jobs reports
gone? The Washed Out on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day
Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects your
wallet. The White House used to gloat about their incredible job numbers. The
latest report was off by forty percent. They are lying to you. What's
the real truth about the jobs reports? It's all fake. Whether it's happening
in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed.
Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple,
Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanted to ask, ultimately,
if you're optimistic because one of the interesting things about this book is the level
of specificity in some of your prescriptions and some of your diagnoses. You know,
we're talking about travel sports and the layout of cities and the obsession with
cars. At one point I even talked about apartment buildings having two staircases being
a bad thing. So that's real specific. Yeah, Well, since you
brought it up, you now have to explain us regulations require apartment buildings to
have two staircases on every floor. This is for in case there's a fire
in one of them. But what that ends up doing, and regardless of
how many elevators you have, what that ends up doing is requiring a certain
structure of building where every apartment is just like a bookshelf, a book on
a bookshelf, where they have to be long and thin. It's hard to
have multiple bedrooms more than two, et cetera. And it makes it harder
to build apartment buildings with like good common areas on the floor. In a
lot of Europe they don't require the two staircases so there's just one central staircase,
and there might be a big lobby on each floor where people hang out.
There might be a four bedroom apartment, a three bedroom, and an
efficiency all on the same floor. And so I found this out from weirdo
liberal urbanists who were complaining about this regulation, and I was like, they're
right about this regulation. So anyway, but that's just one example of how
regulations make it harder for the market to provide housing that's good for families.
It could actually have been in the big ripoff, could be ripped right out
of the page. Yeah, rip off. So that's where one. On
the one hand, because there's so much specificity in this book, it feels
really daunching and overwhelming. And I wonder if that's a sensation that you had
while you were writing it, because there are so many ways as you describe
that our culture is family unfriendly to quote the title of your book. So
does that leave you ultimately optimistic or pessimistic? You know, optimistic in the
sense that if we have a shift, some of these things will sort of
be downstream of any large cultural shift and sort of work themselves out, or
pessimistic because there is no one big thing that could come in and happen,
and so we're still going to be structurally unfriendly. How do just leave you?
So I don't think I ever really believe in one big fix. So
it doesn't depress me. But I mean, again, you were in the
Washington, DC area, and that's always what people want. What's the solution?
What bill could Josh Howley propose that would make America family friendly? And
there obviously isn't one. Though I think I could convince him to outlaw travel
sports. That would be fun, but that wouldn't solve the problem. The
reason for optimism is this because I said, the causality and everything ends up
going both ways, and so if you build some positive momentum, it often
gains on itself. So one of the arguments I make is we need more
stay at home moms and more say at home dads, and if you can
get a few more of them through some local institutions saying hey, we're going
to support you. Anytime you want to drop off your kid, you can
do it. You want to have a mommy and me yoga or whatever.
I always say people who want more gender equity should propose like daddy and me
would working with the four year olds in their hometown and their public library,
just a little bit of that. Once you have more say at home parents,
you'll get more stay at home parents because it becomes less isolating, it
becomes more fun, more rewarding, there's more of a support network. Similarly,
once a place is more walkable and more families send their kids out to
run around the neighborhood, the more that other families will be like, oh,
actually, our kids could be pretty attained and safe because there's more eyes
on the street. Let's send our kids out. So the reason for hope
is I think that little tweaks can create a positive momentum in lots of ways.
But you're right that it's difficult when the problem is a culture. That's
sort of like if you ever played on a sports team where you're like,
the problem is our team chemistry. That was always the toughest thing to solve.
But unlike the team chemistry here, I think actually just trying harder will
can turn the culture around. My last question is sort of a specific one,
and it is should conservatives make fun of cat ladies or not? And
I say that as somebody who's firmly in the not camp. Because you know,
this is a very real problem, and there are obviously a lot of
deficiencies in the Democratic Party and the liberal approach to these questions that are miserating
young women. Where do you fall on this tim So part of what I
try to do with this book is not wag my finger at anybody and say
you should have a lot more kids. Try to say these are the problems
that are deterring people from having kids, but then ultimately say you can overcome
these problems. So rather than mock or scold cat ladies, encourage them,
paint a picture of life, of the future of the world that makes it
seem okay, plausible and desirable and attainable to get married and have kids,
regardless of the obstacles that we face in the world. And so and also,
I don't think everybody is called to marriage and parenthood. I'm a Catholic.
All of my favorite priests are unmarried and childless, so I don't think
they have cats. I'm pro dog. I'm ambivlent on cats. Dogs as
a practice. Kids I'm in favor of and b they like. I think
they're good for kids. But as far as you know, attacking people for
their individual choices. I'm not so much into that because A, not everybody's
called to marriage in parenthood. But B if we start building a culture that's
more family friendly, I think a lot of those marginal cases will tack in
the direction of family. The book is called Family Unfriendly. Timothy P.
Karney is a father of six. He's at AEI the Washington Examiner, the
author of many books, and again this one is called Family Unfriendly. You
should absolutely buy it. There's so much to this book. Even if you're
you know, unmarrited, childless like I am. There's so much to love
about Family Unfriendly. Tim Carney, thank you so much for joining the show.
Thank you, Emily, you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm em Aleidjashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist. Will
be back to with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious
for the friend. You got me right, but you wrong. H