Speaker 1: Now you sound so much better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, then we're good.
Speaker 1: Then that's the great James Lylax, not the airline pilot,
James Lylyx. We were getting before.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 3: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister Grbachov, Tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Stephen Haywood. I'm James Lylyx, and today we looked at
Tim Carney about babies. Who's making them? Do we need more?
Why aren't we?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 2: So forth? So let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 3: I would like to know what your solution would be
for gun violence.
Speaker 2: Great question.
Speaker 4: I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws,
mental health support.
Speaker 2: And community engagement.
Speaker 4: We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections,
making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building
a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think
about that?
Speaker 2: I think that's a great idea, Joaquin, I see dam
people welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven
hundred and fifty two. Why don't you join us at
ricochet dot com? Why not? There is no compelling reason
on this firmamentism and said that you shouldn't because once
you go there, you're going to find the most compelling,
stimulating conversation and community on the web, the place you've
been looking for all of these years. Ricochet dot com.
I am joined, well, I am. I should tell you
that first, James Lilas here in Minneapolis, overcast, cloudy, wind
in the trees, and I'm joined by two people I
believe are probably in unbearably sunny climbs at the moment,
Stephen Hayward in California and Charles CW. Cook in Florida. Gentlemen,
how are you to date?
Speaker 3: I'm well, James, but it's cloudy and cold and overcast
here in coastal California, believe it or not, so I
share your pain.
Speaker 1: And well, it is monsoon season, dark, angry skies, constant lightning,
the rumbling of under and rain rain, rain.
Speaker 2: Oh. I like that. Well, then we're all in somewhat
depressing climbs, but all I assume in a chury mood. Nonetheless, Charles,
do you ever have a bolt of lightning strike one
of those perambulating four legged monstrosities you have down there
and just blow it? Up. Does that ever happen? Does
anybody ever seen a crock just get atomized by a
bolt from the blue?
Speaker 1: I thought for a moment you were being rude about
my dog. I have never seen that, and I don't
know what would happen to analogate. We did have a
lightning strike recently that came very very close to hitting
our house, and it caused a brown out and everything
turned off, and then some things took a while to
turn back on again, and I put all sorts of
expletives together and was not impressed. But thankfully everything came back.
So thank you Search Protectors. You sacrifice yourself for my good.
Speaker 2: See. I would think that you tech, that you are
man who no doubt has all of his cat's six
cables arranged by color and cinched by tie zip, that
you would have a generator, and that you would, like
many men with a generator, be gladdened to the reaches
of your soul by the fact that you actually could
go over and trip on the jenny and enjoy electricity
in the boons of modern line. But you don't.
Speaker 1: Well, I've considered it. Maybe it's in my future.
Speaker 2: As have I. I've also considered a battery backup that
will enable myself to be powered for at least up
to thirty minutes until you know, I have to go
back into the darkness. Speaking of the darkness, we have
democracy dying in darkness in Texas apparently, where the Democrats
have fled rather than perform some sort of gerry manning,
gerry mandering vivisection on the beloved state. And from what
I understand, they've gone to Illinois, which, as someone once
described it, as districts that looked like somebody gave an
etcher sketch to a raccoon. It's an amusing little turn
of events. We've seen it elsewhere in Wisconsin, where the
legislators fled rather than perform their sworn duty. What's going
on in Texas? And is this going to lead, Heaven
Forfend to a nation wide reaction from the Democrats that
will force them to go against their principles and craft
districts that seem only to reflect to certain societal, racial,
and ideological components.
Speaker 5: Well, I guess I'll go first.
Speaker 3: First of all, you can hide a lot of Texas
legislators behind Governor Pritzker of Illinois, so that was probably
a shrewd place to escape fat shaming.
Speaker 2: Fat shaming not allowed on.
Speaker 3: This Okay, First of all, this is so ridiculous. Jerry
Mandering has been done forever. Everyone knows that it only
became a threat to democracy when Republicans got good at it,
which they got good at it starting twenty years ago
or so, I'm so old. I remember in the eighties
when out here in California it was generally acknowledged that
the aggressive jerrymandering netted Democrats five House seats above the
intrinsic Votingsfore what a more neutral map would have produced.
And Republicans, I think at least three times in the eighties,
put very expensive ballot initiatives on the ballot to try
and get fair redistricting and lost all three times. It
never just moves the needle with voters very much. It's
easy to campaign against. And yeah, so I mean Phil Burton,
he was the famous congressman from San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi's
predecessor in that seat. He called the California Maps his
contribution to modern art, because you know, like the Illinois
districts are all very you know, I went around here
and there. The two things interesting about this. At least
two is Democrats don't have much running room. If you
look at Illinois or Maryland or Massachusetts, where you know,
Republicans got thirty five to forty percent of the total
vote for House seats, have zero House seats. It's been
so skillfully jerrymandered that you know, they can't jerrymander it
any further if you're a Democrat. And then beyond that,
if you look ahead five years in the next census,
the blue states are going to lose I don't know,
something like ten House seats, California is gonna lose three
and so forth, and all the seats are going to
go to guess where, Texas, Florida, Tennessee. They're going to
go to mostly red states where Republicans are going to
capture the lion's share of them.
Speaker 5: And so one little.
Speaker 3: Tippet is, if you ran the reran the twenty twenty election,
I think this is right. With the vote splits that
you had, Donald Trump would have won the electoral College
because Michigan's going to lose a seat and you know
some of the other Pennsylvania is going to lose two seats,
and so suddenly the Democrats are looking at wipeout beyond
the next census in all likelihood.
Speaker 5: So I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly why the Texans decided to do this,
except I think they looked around and said, you know
what we can, so let's try it.
Speaker 1: Charles Well, I keep being asked by people if I
care about this, by which they mean am I upset
about it? And the answer is no. And the reason
that I'm not upset about it is this was just explained.
The Democrats have already done this. We already live in
a world in which gerrymandering is the norm. The term
comes from Elbridge Gerry, who's a founder, So this has
been a political question as long as the Republic has existed.
The ability to gerrymander has been increased by the advent
of powerful computers, which is why you're seeing this arms race.
But it's just totally bizarre to me to see these
complaints for a couple of reasons. First, the Democrats keep saying,
while if you do this, then we're going to have to,
uh what you already did it right? And two, we
already have a census that is out of whack with
the country as it actually exists. And I've said this
over and over and I'll say it again. I am
so sick of hearing about our democracy. Our democracy usually
means that those who won power have done something that
progressives don't like. It's not really a question of democracy,
it's a question of policy. Defund planned PARENT and defund
NPR are what you will. This is actually a question
of our democracy. This census mess up. This is the
gears of how our system works. It affects the presidency,
it affects a House of Representatives, and by extension, it
affects the Supreme Court. So I can't get upset about this.
If you ask me a different question, which is do
I like this trend? Do I think there will be
some negative consequences of this trend, I would have a
different answer. Yes, I do think there will be some
negative consequences of this trend. One example will be the
creation of more safe seats and therefore more people who
are unresponsive to democratic pressures and more people, frankly on
both sides, who are crazy. But we cannot live in
a country in which this is only a problem when
Republicans do it. And that is the way that this
has been cast. And I'm not playing along. I'm glad
Texas is doing this. Have you seen Mayorland And the
fact that they flew to Illinois, the most erubunted state
in the country, is just the icing on the cake.
And none of the media outlets that have covered this
appointed that out. It's like fleeing to Arizona to escape
the heat.
Speaker 2: Well, two things in respond to what you just said.
When you said that, the Democrats have said, well, now
we have to respond. You hear this again and again.
The Republicans do something that is outside of their usual
parameters of action, i e. They're pushing back, they're actually fighting,
they're actually standing up, they're actually not just acquiescing to
some incremental dimunation. And all of a sudden, the gloves
come out, and the Democrats say that, you know, up
to now we have been virtuous and clean and full
of fair play, but now, regrettably, with a deep sense
of dismay, we must now get down in the trenches
and fight as dirty as they do, as if somehow,
And I hear this all the time for people on
the Democratic side, that they're always being rolled by the
Republicans because they play virtuously the idea that either side,
of course has clean hands is ridiculous, but I find
that self delusion to be just hilarious. The second is
is that you said, when you're jerrymandering that it comes
from who it comes from a name of a guy,
but his name is spelled is pronounced with a heart
G as opposed to the soft G of jerrymandering. It's
like gif It's like the whole gift debate that we
seem to keep having back and back. Just as the
gift debate was spoiled by the inventor of the gift
coming out with an absolutely wrong answer to how it's pronounced.
I expect that somebody will say on the mid the
you know, the the guy who is the origin of
the gerrymander word, and and throw his his his hat
in with a with a soft G. So I'm going
to say Gary Mander from now on and have it,
and people will look at me in a peculiar fashion.
Can I just add that I hope no, you can't, Stephen, Yeah,
I can't.
Speaker 3: I just hope that Texas will preserve a seat for
Jasmine Crockett because I want her to be the face
of the Democratic part for as long.
Speaker 2: As possible, if not the rhetorical wellspring right. One more
point before we go to a guest here. There was
recently a crime in d C which was broken up
by big balls. And you don't often get the chance
to say that, especially when the person to whom the
nickname applies seemed to be the opposite of but that's him,
and there was, since it was Doge related, since it
was in a nice neighborhood I can't remember, since the
combatants were not the usual sort that you find in
DC crime stories. There have been calls by Trump and
others to federalize d C, to yank away some of
the tenets of home rule and say, no, we're going
to make this place safe again. We're going to make
DC walkup a Liverpool, et cetera. Uh, what do you
think about that?
Speaker 1: I'm totally fine with it. DC is a federal district.
It is under the plenary control of the federal government,
and if it wishes, it can set up a secondary
delegation of power to a bull or a mayor, or
really whatever form of government it wishes. That it's not
a monarchy. So if that secondary delegation, which is optional,
is not working out, the federal government can take control
of the federal district. There are some questions as to
whether or not Congress needs to get involved in this
that are important, but as a structural question it seems
to me self evidently allowable. Steve, Yeah, I mean it.
Speaker 3: Was decades ago, actually in nineteenth century when I guess
Congress ceded the Virginia side of the Potomac River back
to the state of Virginia. And I've long thought that
the best solution to all this is to take most
of the District of Columbia and cede to the state
of Maryland and just make it part of Maryland, and
then the federal government would control really the mall and
the sort of core federal buildings, you know, the parts
where the footprint is, you know, between Independence and Constitution Avenue,
maybe extending K Street. I don't know, but I'd be
small and compact and then let the rest of the
city be part of Maryland, and it's Maryland's problem.
Speaker 2: From a resident of DC, I couldn't agree more. The
idea that it somehow we become a state was always
the most laughable thing that you can think of. Before
we go to our guest, though, one little note as
far as big Balls goes, and you just don't often
get to hear somebody say that legitimately on a Ricochet podcast.
Do you guys know his real name?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Edward Korstein. Let me read you from his Wikipedia page.
Corstein was born in December two thousand and five. His
father's Charles Korstein, the CEO of a company called Lesser Evil. Okay.
His maternal grandfather, Valerie Martinov, was a KGB lieutenant colonel
executed by the Soviet Union as a double agent.
Speaker 1: Well who knew.
Speaker 2: After his execution, his widow moved with their children, including
Korstine's mother Anna, to the United States. His grandfather was
popped in lu Bianca by the KGB for being a
double agent. Yes, I know the things that you learn
sometimes when people get the bleep beaten out of them
in the DC environs, we now go happily to Tim Carney,
Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute of senior columnist
for The Washington Examiner. He is also the author of
twenty nineteen's Alienated America and more recently, Family Unfriendly. How
our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs
to be. Tim, welcome back.
Speaker 6: Hey, how's it going.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about falling fertility rates, because that's what everybody
wants to hear in a weekend, is yay or nay.
I remember growing up with a four horsemen of the apocalypse,
one of which was going to be overpopulation, starvation, planetary despoolation.
We got to stop ZPG all the rest of it
a start. Contrast to what happened after World War Two,
and everybody came home and said, here are these vast
potato tracks in Long Island. Let us fill them with
houses and populate them with kids running gambling about the
lawn on a Saturday afternoon. Was a different view of
what families should do. And now the West faces this
disinclination to have children. Why and what do we do
about it?
Speaker 6: You got three minutes, million places to go with there,
I'll start where I usually don't start, because you mentioned
the baby boom. I think that the most underappreciated factor
in our baby busts is civilizational sadness. That's a term
I came up with for the belief that we're just
not good. We being whatever humans Americans, white people, middle
class people, Brooklyn hipsters. We are just not good is
the answer that so many people in the West, in
Canada and Europe and the US, etc. Give And when
did we feel the opposite of this? The most in
nineteen forty five, when our guys got off the boat,
just having defeated two evil empires. Our women met them
on the pier, just having made all the weapons and
kept the economy running, and they smooch on the peer,
go back to the chapel, get married, and have a
ton of kids, because more than ever before, ever since,
we knew we were good. And guess where the baby
busts in the West started in the twentieth century. It
started in Germany and Japan and Italy, places where they
couldn't answer that question.
Speaker 2: Are we good?
Speaker 6: They couldn't affirmatively say that they either felt ashamed or
they felt guilt. And so where does that guilt come from?
Speaker 5: Here?
Speaker 6: Well, climate guilt is like the surface manifestation of it.
But I think it's a deeper guilt that's inevitable in
a post Christian, post religious society.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting thesis. Is Steve Heyward out in California.
Tim And by the way, I couldn't help when you
mentioned that civilizational sadness. The social scientist in me says, yeah, okay,
how do you quantify that? And I know there are surveys,
but I also remember, and James may remember this, in
nineteen eighty four, Walter Bondale would tick off the list
of interest groups that he was had affinity for, so
you know, blacks, women, gays, and the sad.
Speaker 1: But he was.
Speaker 3: We said that I'm the candidate for the sad and
of course really he was just a sad candidate, as
we know. But so though there's something to that. I
think I've long thought that there was something to that,
and I actually can point to data, right. I mean,
something I point out to students is if you look
at the long term surveys, they really start in the
fifties of people who say they had high trust or
confidence in American institutions, especially the government, it was up
around eighty percent, you know, eight zero. Today it's around
fifteen percent. And that's public sector, private sector, right, And
there's a lot to all that, but that's a huge change,
and I have lots of theories about that. But nonetheless,
if you are, if you're in a sour boot about
your current circumstances and gloomy about the future. Of course,
it's going to depress fertility rates. At one more thought,
and maybe you've written about this, is after the big
blackout in New York in nineteen sixty six and then
again in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 5: Guess what, nine months later there were full maternity rooms
because what do people do now? That didn't happen.
Speaker 6: During COVID the pandemic, correct the pandemic.
Speaker 3: And the reason was is that people knew in sixty
six and seventy seven the lights are going to come
back on, We'll get back to normal, life will return
to norm will be good.
Speaker 5: So let's make whoopee.
Speaker 3: Whereas during the pandemic there was not that confidence that
you know, what's going to happen after this? How long
is it going to go? Sorry, go ahead, I.
Speaker 6: Was gonna say. And there was the isolation. And so
you were talking earlier about trust in institutions, trust in institutions,
trust in neighbors, trust in humanity, something to lean on,
whether it's a church, a community, something like that, all
of that really matters. Like the undertaking of getting married
and raising children is not a solo undertaking. As a
wise woman once put it, it takes a village to
raise a child. Right now, she met the Department of
Health and Human Services. But anybody out there who's raised
kids knows it means their neighbor, it means their pastor,
it means the older kids down the block who babysit.
It means the younger family down the block who hires
your kids to babysit and mow the lawn. It takes
so much support to raise a family, and so you
need to trust that people are good. And then COVID
was it was really a sad period. I mean I
remember during the lockdowns thinking, we're not gonna like want
to talk about this, We're gonna be embarrassed. I mean
I spent almost a month like just I had a
nice backyard and letting my kids run around the backyard
and not seeing other people. And then I thought, what
in the world did I just do? And so so
many people just look back on that with a little
bit of embarrassment and shame and don't want to talk
about it. But it was deeply sad and it was
a lack of connection. And the people who thrived were
the people who said, all right, most of our neighbors
are being crazy. We're going to get together and we're
going to form a pod. And what was a pod?
A pod was a sort of a creation of something
that used to be a little more natural, which is
a bunch of different families hanging out without having to
schedule anything. And so a huge part of what I
write about in my book is like, that's what is
missing is the informal support from neighborhoods and from something
that you belong to, like a church.
Speaker 1: Most importantly so Atim Charles Cook, and of course we
talked about this on my podcast. I love the book.
Those are two different things you're describing. On the one hand,
you have loneliness caused in that case by COVID, but
more generally we're told people are sad and lonely and
civilizational under confidence. I understand why the Germans felt bad
in nineteen forty five, frankly, I think they still should
as the Englishman in me. But I don't understand why
so many Americans have come to believe that their country
isn't good and have started to say things like, well,
really raised children in this world? When we are, for
all our problems, very rich and fun and dynamic and
stable why do you think that has happened.
Speaker 6: No, I think that's a great question. So, first of all,
it hasn't happened equally everywhere. White liberal women are the
people who are most depressed about our society, least hopeful
about the future, most negative, have the least trusts of
everybody else. Church going people, while less happy, less trustful
than a generation ago, are more happy, more trustful than
almost anyone else.
Speaker 2: Let me let me step in for a second here.
Could it be that that first group that you mentioned,
the unhappy ones, are not having children because nobody wants
to have children with them.
Speaker 6: I think it goes both ways. Your attractiveness is definitely
uh is influenced by how how negative and unpleasant you are,
and how you look at everything as an aggression, a microaggression, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, and I see problematic, endless tiktoks with these people
in their cars with very large glasses and perhaps a
septum ring and maybe a little, you know, kool Aid
colored hair or something fulminating about this that or the other.
The idea that somebody would look at that and say
that is the person with whom I want to conjoin
my genes and bring up a new generation. They have
self I'm serious, they have self isolated by being such
miserable people and keeping the bubbles.
Speaker 6: Were the misery. The misery is rooted in ideology. I
think Charles was hinting at that, maybe, but I definitely
think it is. And I think it's rooted in a
particular flavor of materialists secularism, that people who try to
find heaven on this earth always fail and so they're
always unhappy, and that when autonomy becomes a god, then
you're never going to give it up. I mean, what
was the recent New York Times piece, the problem with mankeeping,
and the big crux of the piece was the idea
that some women are finding that their husbands really rely
on them. And then there's all the there's all these
other stories that are like that, and it's about creating,
and it's frankly, and this is a good topic to
talk about. A hyper individualism. Individualism is central to the
American dream, it's central to our identity. It's a lot
of conservatives you should just call ourselves individualists, right like
fifty sixty years ago. But also that's always been in
the US in the context of tightly knit civil society
and community. So to get back to Charles's point and
to mention an older book I wrote, Alienated America. It's
that we know each other less. The bowling alone stuff
that Robert Putnam laid out twenty five years ago is
still true. So the world is sadder if you don't
belong to stuff, if you don't know your neighbors, because
then you start to introduce new replacements. And so instead
of being involved in your community, what the left does
is they try to change the world. They get involved
just in politics, and guess what, they fail to change
the world. Trump gets reelected and Amy Cony Barricket's on
the Supreme Court. And then when they fail to change
the world, they get all depressed instead of going and like,
you know, helping build a new playground at the at
the local park.
Speaker 1: You were going to say something about immigrants.
Speaker 6: That's before I realized you were on the show, and
I didn't want to offend you. No, immigrants are more
hopeful in general in the US, and so people will
point out that immigrants have a slightly higher birth rate
than native born Americans, but that's entirely You could predict
it all either by their more hope for the future
of America, or by the fact that they're more religious
than the native born. And so it's not I mean,
Europe might have a different issue, but it's not you
know these you know, swarthy, unkempt masses coming out and
breeding like rabbits. It's people who kind of are a
little more like the Mormons getting off a boat and
showing up in the US. But it's only a slightly
higher birth rate because they often assimilate to our low
birth rate model here.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 3: So Tim, we said, I'm going to go there's sort
of two different questions, one basic fertility and the other
some of the wider social networks that are important. I
think one question that may unite those two. Somebody's going
to say this is a cliche four guys on a
podcast saying isn't part of the problem as always women
went to work. But you know, the point is if
you're working, you know, you're not out doing the pta
like my mom did, you know during the Boer War
and all the rest of that. And and then and
also it's more of an economic trade off to have
more than one child. And so there's that to reflect on.
And I'll do this sequel Somewhere in the last week
or two I saw a story I can't remember if
it was The Times of the Wall Street Journal that said, huh,
feminists have grudgingly conceded that you can't have it all,
But guess what conservative women do seem to be having
it all. And part of the hatred for Caroline Levitt,
just to pick the most representative figure, is she's a
very young mom, and boy does she look happy in
fulfill She's having the time of her life. And that
must absolutely outrage the sort of feminist left and so
forth right, So I don't reflect on that. I mean
the women workplace and stuff, right, go.
Speaker 6: Ahead, work, gender, community, birth rates, all these stuff interacting
one hundred ways. Just to list a couple, you refer
to the volunteering. Emma Green, who has written for The Atlantic.
I'm not exactly sure where she is, but she wrote
a piece a couple of years ago on how all
the volunteering in the US has basically been done by
mothers who no longer have really little kids and they
don't have a full time job. Now, some of this
was bad, like prohibition, but most of it was good, right,
even abolition, A lot of that was driven by stay
at home moms, right and so, and then in the neighborhood,
I was think of the how many people my age
who we were the most sort of running around unsupervised
super generation possibly, how many of us have the story
of doing something stupid getting yelled at by somebody else's mom,
and then thinking can I get home to explain it
to my mom before she gets a story from this
lady on her front porches. Right, and so that safety
provided by the fact that you know there's other people
out in the neighborhood watching your kids during on a
summer afternoon, that's huge. One of the ways I try
to broach this difficult situation of talking about, well, yeah,
when both parents are working, they're less likely to have
more kids, they're more likely to put off kids is
to point out that there has that. It's one of
the problems has been also men not putting family first.
Now I have to spend more than forty hours a
week working, thankfully some of it I'm like today, I'm
doing this from home. But family is more important. Like
all you men listening, your family's more important than your job. Okay,
you might have a specified role in your family of
being the primary breadwinner. But that's like, you know, if
anybody specialized role. I make the analogy to Apple. Apple
has stores that bring in all the revenue. That doesn't
mean the stores are more important than the design. And
so I think valuing stay at home wives, acknowledging stay
at home dads. They're a small minority making life better
for stay home wives. And actually my old county, Montgomery County,
which I hate on all the time, actually had a
lot of really good library and rec center programs for
stay at home moms and their little kids. There's a
lot of things we can do besides saying, all right,
you know, things were better in the nineteen sixties when
you had single breadwinner and because women didn't have as
much of an opportunity, right, men had like a sort
of affirmative action. So guys, you gotta man up, compete
with the women, get a good job, but then acknowledge
that your family is more important. And I think if
I haven't, I'm not sure of this, but I think
that when I lead with that, then it's more easier
to explain to women, not the radical feminists, but to
normal women also women stay at home wives and moms
because that's most of whom stays at home. They're good
for society, they're good for your marriage, they're good for
the kids, but they're good for everybody else's kids, and
not everybody can afford it. So you're actually doing a
benefit if you could afford it and you pull that off. No.
Speaker 2: I was a stay at home dad for many early
years of my daughter, and the idea that somehow that's
sitting with her and playing and watching Elmo and having
lunch and going shopping and going to the park. Somehow
that that was insuperior, that that was not as good
as being in an office somewhere where somebody was putting
together a spreadsheet and a slide deck to talk about
maximizing strategies for the quarter to come. It's insane, it's
so much better to be home with your kids. But
we have been told, however, I mean the society in general.
The lessons over the last twenty thirty forty years have
been that work is the is where you get your fulfillment,
and somehow the idea of girl bossing your way through
an email job until you're thirty two thirty three is
preferable to actually check out a little bit earlier and
taking time with the kids. I don't see that message
changing anytime soon unless women start to ask for something different.
Speaker 6: And I see some positive signs. And now part of
it is, you know, it's in conservative subcultures that you
see these positive signs. But I do think that, yeah,
that the idea of that marriage and family can be
fulfilling with normies, that's what we have to worry about.
Right There are going to be people who are going
to be one girl bosses, but also it's an opportunity
for schools to do something different. I always think about that.
You talk about careers, does anybody talk about which careers
are more family friendly than other careers. I always think,
on the one hand, something has a ton of flexibility,
like being a writer. On the other hand, something that
has just sort of infinite demand and a different type
of flexibility, like being a nurse. Nurses if they're like, oh,
I'm not going to work for the next four months
and then I'll call you and you'll give me shifts,
they can do that. And it's just going to get
more extreme as the population agents. So when you're in school,
when you're in leaving high school, going into college, are
you thinking I want to be a parent, which career
not only can make money, but also in one way
or another fit well within family life. Schools could lead
the role in planting that idea in people's head.
Speaker 2: How about this, Let's posit something contrapositive. Let let's let's
say that what we've seen in the last X number
of years and is an expansion of the opportunities open
to women, and that this is good and that they
are no longer locked necessarily into a profession where they have,
you know, a life where they have to be a
secretary for three years and then go home and stay
there forever until the kids are out, and then they
either do the Betty for damn thing and pop pills
or they join in our class or whatever. We have
a new paradigm where they could work, where there's more flexibility,
more understanding of diverse roles for women. And if the
consequence of this is a lower birth rate, that's not
a bad trade off to make, because we have expanded
opportunity and rights to some people and this is the cost,
but overall society benefits from this expansion of rights and
erosion of the old restrictive social model. Someone might make
that case, might they not?
Speaker 6: Yes, And I mean I've thrown a couple of things. A.
It is true that stay at home moms used to
be a lot less happy than they are today, in
large part because a lot of women were what you
were describing. They didn't choose to be stay at home moms.
But if they weren't, you know, top of the class,
absolute a plus, they were not going to have the
opportunities to stay in the workforce. So now that women
who are staying at home moms basically have chosen it,
they're a lot happier. But b if more education, more
education for women is going to translate into a lower
birth rate in most societies. But that means that we
have to ask, Okay, what are the things that we
are willing to change to help people have as many
babies as they want and want more babies than they
currently want. And for me, part of that is has
to do with revitalizing neighborhoods, making parenting more fun, making
housing more affordable. Housing is the affordability story. I can't
afford kids, that's mostly bs. But when it comes to
owning a home, I really I think the numbers really
show that that is driving down the birth right that
homes are getting. So there are all sorts of things
where if we take some moderate amount of feminism as
a given and a positive thing, we can say, Okay, hey,
let's dial back some of the autonomy worshiping feminism, but
b let's find all these other real world ways to
promote family.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, your mention of housing is a good lead in
for me wanting to go at this at the macro
level instead of the neighborhood and household level we've been
mostly talking about. And so you know, some of our
friends sake, and we have the childcare tax credit, and
a lot of our pro family friends say let's make
that bigger, and our supply side friends say, no, that
keeps us from lowering rates. It would be better. And
then I raise my hand and point to Hungary, which,
as you know, very pro family country. The third latest innovation
is if you have three children or more, you are
exempt from the income tax for life. That's the ultimate
supply side policy.
Speaker 5: Right. It's not clear whether it has moved the needle
fertility there.
Speaker 2: It's ticked up some.
Speaker 5: But the point is, is there any macro.
Speaker 3: Policies something not crazy like that, but something really out
of box like that that could reinforce this and actually
nudge the fertility rate up in a significant way.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm skeptical of some of what Hungary is doing.
Has been great and it's working, and they've just almost
setting the norm that family this is what grown ups do.
You grow up, you finish school, you get a job,
you get married, you have kids. Like, restoring that as
a norm would be good. But you know one thing
they have that underminds that norm. That tax policy you're
talking about, it only applies to women because they don't
treat the household, the family as a tax unit. They
only treat women. So our tax policy actually understands that
the money I make isn't my money, It belongs to
me and my wife and so like it basically gets
divided by two for our tax purposes. So Hungary isn't
quite doing that. I would think if if you just
said I only get to use the federal government tools,
and so I don't get to like pave new sidewalks
or like abolished travel baseball or any of the rest
of that. If I only get to use federal government tools,
I would think, what can we do to promote the
creation of new housing, and specifically, I think, and I'm
researching this now, I think sort of that there's something
between sort of large massive lots and MC mansions and
massive apartment buildings where the sweet spot lies. That's pro
family housing, town homes, that kind of thing, pro family
more housing would be a big part of it. And
I mean that would be the number one thing I
would do. And then I would make sure that employers
feel free to use a horrible word to discriminate, to
discriminate in favor of parents and families, and they do
to some extent, right Like American Enterprise in WHIT pays
my health insurance most of it. What I pay for
my premiums is equal to somebody who has one kid,
but AI then is paying for all six of mic.
So there is some pro family discrimination.
Speaker 5: Like I was glad you slip that into it. I
wanted to mention that you're doing your part.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's lead with our chin and just say no
employers are allowed to promote family, and there's reason for
them to do it, which is that fathers, married fathers
are better workers than other men. And so but yeah, really,
right now, I don't know, maybe you guys have other
macro proposals, and I'll tell you what I think of them,
but something that would promote more family housing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a question. You think that kids are
good and families are good. And you also, and we
talked about this on my podcast, brought in their religious element,
which you've mentioned here as well. From a completely agnostic,
hash even schatological view, is this choice or do we
have to do this in some form or another. Big
if you look at say the federal budget, there is
a catastrophic consequence of not having kids. Our system is
set up, not just Social Security and Medicare and other programs,
but our economy is set up atop the presumption that
either we are going to have lots of kids or
we're going to have lots of immigrants, and if we
don't do one or both of those things, it all collapses.
So is this a Tim Connie thinks or is this
actually Tim Connie knows and we're now just fighting over
the details.
Speaker 6: Well, so, a one of the things I try to
do with my books is to paint a positive vision
to inspire someone. So I start with me taking my
son to little to t ball and then realizing it
was a bunch of parents hanging around drinking and it
was the most fun thing in the world. And this
too can be yours, dear listener. But on the on
the darker side, I don't think talking about social security
and medicare is dark enough because, as Krugman says, the
sainted Paul Krugman, we could just print more money and so,
but money is really only a reflection of productive work.
And so the problem isn't just that there's going to
be fewer people paying into a retirement system for more retirees.
It's going to be the fewer people doing productive work.
And maybe Google Gemini can replace the nine to one
to one dispatcher on the other end of the phone
very adequately and we can get away with massively smaller workforce,
but maybe not, and that's a huge gamble. So fewer
people doing productive work is I think a bigger problem.
And then you mentioned immigration. A our three top sources
of immigration in the United States, the highest number of
immigrants come from Mexico, China, and India. All three of
those countries are below replacement level themselves. So if there's
one country that's not having babies and it can import babies,
that's fine. The global birth rate might be low replacement
right now, it's right out about the replacement, right, So
that's would the US win in that regard, Probably we would.
We would probably keep drawing people in. But it's also
not sustainable. I think Europe is more acute the civilizational
problems there because they're getting they're getting Muslims in a
formerly Christian world. Well, we're getting largely Christians and a
still kind of Christian world. But I think that trying
to replace babies with immigrants really doesn't work. The way
I treat my children is not a relationship of equality, right.
If we're going to treat immigrants the way adult parents
treat children, that's a pretty unstable situation. I don't know
what you think about that, but I think that immigrants
are plus in the US. But saying as Bell saw
Hill at Brookings, who she was like the hero of
one of my earlier books, but I quote her as
a foil, she says, we don't need babies. We don't
need more babies, we just need more immigrants. Think that
that is setting up that is not the formula for
social peace.
Speaker 1: I certainly agree with you that I don't want you
to treat me like you do your.
Speaker 2: Children versus immigrants. Children more likely to carry on the
nature of the character the founding precipts of the culture
into which they were born. So there's that. Then again,
when it comes to the future, people may say, well,
you know what, I am not exactly all that upset
about the idea of elon Musk optimist robots taking care
of me when when I'm in the home, singing me
a nice little song and picking me up with with gentle,
loving hands. So maybe you know, the automation will do
the rest of it. Who knows, but that there's a.
Speaker 6: Lot of people who would prefer to not talk to
another human being. So all you introvert listeners out there, like, wow,
robots so much better.
Speaker 2: Than he sounds awesome, especially since by then they'll probably
be on Mars as well, doing line dances for tiktoks,
and you know, you'll be able to communicate with you'll
be able to adopt an optimist on you do your
time sharing with a robot on Mars. I mean, entirely possible.
But and I like all these possibilities because I am
generally bullish and optimistic about humanity and its accomplishments. But
we began by talking about how there's the West has
a civilizational sads. Yes, you know, in the seventies people
were saying, I'm not gonna have kids because there's gonna
be famine. In the eighties they were saying, I'm not
gonna have kids because there was gonna be nuclear war.
And then it became I'm not gonna have kids because
it was climate change, which all sounded like excuses. What
these people really seem to come down to is what
you're saying before, is the idea not just that Western
civilization is some sort of baleful influence on the planet,
but that humanity in general is a gross imposition at best,
and a horrible virus attack on Gaya at worse, and
that we really don't deserve to have stewardship at this
place because we've done nothing but mucket up. And I
all of this comes from self detestation of culture. It
comes from you know, what people call cultural Marxism in
the rest of it. But I think you can put
it all at the feet of World War One and
what it did to the spirit of Europe. And if
I could go back in history, I wouldn't kill baby Hitler,
I'd killed baby Gobriel Princeps, because then maybe we'd have
a fighting chance in the twenty first century. Tim, it's
been great fun, I tell you what.
Speaker 6: I love that theory. That's great. That should have been
the opening to my book. Forget about the Tea Bault.
Speaker 2: There we go, family unfriendly, How our culture made raising
kids much harder than it aids to be. The later
from Tim Gurney the American Enterprise Institute, and of course
you can read them, I assume in the Washington Examiner
at regular intervals.
Speaker 6: Correct, Tim, absolutely, thank you for having me measure.
Speaker 2: We will talk to you later. See you then next book,
if not earlier. Well, that was fun. And of course
there's more things in the world to discuss, and I'm
trying to think what they might be. We have and say, okay,
we did redistricting. Right, we've already beaten a Sydney Sweeney
story into the pulp for two weeks or something like that.
What was the one to tell? Yeah, but you know
there's there's there's booting and Trump going on, and there's
the Ukraine War. I mean, I'm just I don't regard
that stuff as being Oh, I know, I know, Israel
wants to take over the entirety of Gaza. Good idea,
bad idea. If Israel is going to be seen as
the equivalent of Nanzi Germany, and its actions are going
to be seen as the equivalent of the Nazi stormtroopers
for doing what they've done thus far, there is nothing
left rhetorically for their critics to accuse them of being
if they take over the entirety of Gaza, striven of
Hamas and do what they will, you guys, what say you?
Speaker 3: Well, I think maybe they don't have a choice. I'm
sure Israel does not want to go back in and
run Gaza, and there's a reason they got out twenty
years ago.
Speaker 5: They were sick of the place.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, I think they're calling not
exactly a bluff, but I think that we can tell
that Hamas is not going to surrender. They're not going
to make a deal for any hostages, and so the
only thing left for Israel to do is finish the
job and try and find hostages. Well, Hamas put out
that gruesome video of an emaciated hostage digging his own grave.
Speaker 5: They didn't just.
Speaker 3: Put that out, you know, locally, they put it out
for the whole world to see, and maybe they're taunting
Israel to occupy the whole place. I don't know, but
I think Israel now has to completely finish them off
and root the whole place out. And it's going to
be difficult, it's going to cause a big ruckus. But
the status quo is not tolerable, and it may mean,
I hate to say this, it may mean that the
rest of the hostages are going to end up being
killed because I'm not sure anybody has complete control of them.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Nothing enriches am aw some more like defeat.
Speaker 1: Yes, Charles Well, I don't know the answer, because I'm
not sure that there is one. I do know this
that Israel is in a very difficult position because a
it is surrounded still by people who want it to
be annihilated, and that is an intolerable place for any
country to be. I've said before that if a state
were in this position that learned a nation in America,
they would of course behave in the Israel Hers they
wouldn't tolerate, they wouldn't put up with it. The New
York Times always talks about Israel as if it's desire
not to be evaporated is some foible that is unique
to it. It's actually a human trait. It is a
human inevitability, and so it's trying everything it can to
extricate itself from that position, and it's doing it while
b people are typically deranged in describing and judging it.
There is a double standard with Israel. Some of its
anti Semitism, some of it is weird progressive hierarchies in play.
But Israel does anything, and like that Donald Trump meme,
half the world comes in, it says wrong. And I
don't know what you do when you're in this terrible
situation for which there's no obvious answer, and even when
you do the right things, you're told that you are
the worst country that's ever existed. So I find it
really hard to judge. I just can't imagine the decision
making process that the cabinet is engaged in because it
doesn't obtain anywhere else in the world. There simply isn't
another situation like this. When I was a kid, there
were two supposedly intractable global problems. And I'd say this
not because I had any insight into them at all.
I knew nothing about politics. But you'd hear about it.
One was Israel and its neighbors, and the other was Ireland,
and that one was a cause very close to me
when I was ten years old. The notion that four
years hence the Irish question would be resolved was laughable.
Speaker 2: That was an.
Speaker 1: Extraordinary achievement and one that no one I knew saw
coming or believed would stick once it had been put
into place. But the actors in Ireland were different than
they are in the Middle East. They weren't twenty six,
nor the islands surrounding the south. So you have a
bizarre situation and it's impossible to know what's gonna happen next.
So yeah, this is the latest attempt to do something
about it. Will it work? I just have no idea.
Speaker 2: I just wonder what the future bringings for Israel. Says
all right, this is it. You've crossed the line. Now
we're going to move in. We're going to take over
your entire territory. We're going to build it up. We're
going to modernize the infrastructure. We're going to seal all
the tunnels. We're gonna have the hospitals not be tunnels
with terrorist centers. We're going to rebuild civil society, restaurants,
nice beaches and the rest of it. And then and
then we're going to leave. Don't make us do this,
I mean, last thing before we go. We got one
more interesting little pequin subject to discuss. But I want
to tell you that Ricochet meetups are coming. Randy's getting
a group together next weekend in Detroit August fifteenth through
the eighteenth in Detroit, in Motor City, whether it's downtown
amongst their new beautiful reef for sky scrappers, I don't know.
You'll just have to go to Ricochet and check Granny
Dude gaging interest in an upstate New York meet up
in September. So if you're a Ricochet or a Ricochet
as we'd like to say, up there, hop into the
comments and say whether or not you'd be willing to
perambulate up to there. Red Herring just posted about a
Ricochet at Sea cruise meetup to tour the Caribbean this December.
And again I'm just distempted because I love the cruise ships.
I love going on Caribbean Johnson doing nothing but basking
and eating and drinking and the rest of it. So
I don't know, maybe I don't know. Somebody want to
somebody want to float my boat there, And of course
Ricochet fantasy football is going on as well. Wait a minute,
you say, I thought this was an extremely political site
that was hyper focused on the issues of the day. No,
there's a great community there and fantasy football in addition
to the conversations about old tech and movies and radio
and sports and the rest of it. It's all there
at ricochet dot com, and the member feed is where
you will find these things. Last point, boys, Jim Acosta
had an interview with a person who no longer exists,
the digital simulacrum of somebody and asking him about gun control.
Surprisingly not the creation or demon take a choice parted
back the opinions of the Konyacenti and the Acosta segment
of things. What do you think about this? I'm not
happy about reconstituting people via AI and having them say
things from beyond the pale.
Speaker 3: Really, really, given the fact that Jim Acosta was the
primary embodiment of fake news as Trump understood it, he
just went out and ratified that, in fact, he is
the leading avatar of fake news. I mean, I just
he must really be dumb to think that this was
a good idea.
Speaker 2: Girls.
Speaker 1: It is evil, It is grotesque, and the blame in
my book goes to Acosta. I don't think even seven
years later, you can go too hot after the parents
who are still grieving. This was Macosta's responsibility to say no,
but he can't help himself. And the weirdest thing about
this James, is that in his descriptions and defenses of
what he did, he seems earnestly to believe that he
was talking to something that approximates a sentient person rather
than an answering machine. And he used it to launder
his own views and then got all outraged when people
said that there was ugly. The judgment is so bad.
It's hard to know. How could you imagine coming up
with this idea at all, but running it past literally anyone,
you know in the whole word, your craziest friend, your
drug adult, craziest friend would go out and it has
a bit much Jim, and then he went with it.
Speaker 6: How did that happen?
Speaker 2: I know? And it wasn't really very good AI at all.
The delivery was so robotic that, as I said elsewhere,
it made Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movie sound like
Paul lind in Hollywood Squares. I mean, it.
Speaker 5: Was just bad.
Speaker 2: But you know, on the other hand, you know, people
hate that, and then they will find some other little
bit of AI on the internet. Donald Trump standing on
the roof of the White House. Somebody made him perfectly
do the speech from Monty Python Holy Grail with John
Cleese taunting King Arthur. And then you say, but that's funny,
But that's good. We have no unifying moral objection to AI,
which is one of the reasons that we're just floundering
around with it and castigating this and laughing at that.
Maybe we'll fix it by next week. Maybe by next
week we'll have an AI version of me to babel
along and break and wonder and stumble his way out
of the podcast Stumble. No, I've got two signposts that
I have to tap. One of them is please do
give us those five star reviews wherever you can, and
two please not please. It's for your own good. Go
to ricochet dot com and find the member feed. Oh gosh,
you gotta pay for it, right, but it's nothing sheckls,
just pennies a day, and you will find the community
you've been looking for in the Internet all your days.
And frankly, if you don't like what we're saying there,
start your own thread, have your own meetup. It's a
community as good as the people who are in it,
and that's why it is different. Different. Also is Stephen
and Charles two the most steadfast podcasters. Has been my
pleasure to work with gentlemen again this week. I've had
a great deal of find and I hope you have
as well. Good weekend to everybody, and we'll see you
all in the comments, said Ricochet four point oh bye bye,