As an ambitious woman reading this is so uplifting!! I live in San Francisco and many of my friends have husbands who don’t do as much parenting even if they are both working. In my household we have 3 kids and we spend most of our childcare time with one parent taking care of all the kids and that’s both been very egalitarian as well as given us more free time.
I wrote more about it here: https://joyfulparentingsf.com/p/outnumbered-how-to-parent-multiple
I don’t think it’s as simple as “well low income countries just need to follow the science of development”. And it’s definitely not simple if you’re implying that people in rich countries should be helping poor countries do that. There is a history of even the World Bank giving low income countries bad advice especially regarding free market principles versus intentionally growing local skills and capabilities under protective tarrifs to the point of competitive exports (in the 80s and 90s). And you can also read about how scientifically sound development initiatives fail in books such as The Anti-Politics Machine (also written in the 80s—there’s a review that covers the main concepts here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics?hide_intro_popup=true ). Also, low income countries need good leaders who are dedicated to increasing the GDP in a scientific way, but even if they are lucky enough to have elections, the people on the ballot are not that—this is why land reform, an important part of how some Asian countries developed in to releatively rich countries today is not likely to work (https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/intervention-report-agricultural-land-redistribution/). Institutional development economics doesn’t say anything about what to do when a country is stuck in bad political equilibria, which seems to be the main barrier to development right now.
While there’s probably some necessary role for people from high income countries engaging with low countries to get them to try development interventions (especially when it comes to issues like corruption and election tampering where an outside power can make a big difference), i think it would be much more meaningful for high income countries to get their act together and be well run so that there’s a clear north star for what good policy and good governance looks like. It doesn’t work right now because there aren’t any high income countries who have good policy and good governance who are obvious examples for other countries to look up to. And I think a big part of the reason why is that we treat poor people within high income countries the same way we treat low income countries—as an individual failure rather than a policy failure.
Done right this would look like strengthening antimonopoly laws so that anyone who has a good idea can bring it to market. Limiting campaign finance so that corporations don’t have more say over laws and regulations than regular citizens, so that they can’t enrich shareholders at the expense of the public good (Uber and Lyft’s 180M dollar opposition to giving gig drivers employee benefits in California stands out to me). Reducing public input on new developments to prevent home owners from obstructing new construction to raise their own home values (and everyone else’s rent). I live in California and I want to demolish Prop 13 to bring back public school funding so that education can be the great equalizer, instead of transmuting education value from younger generations into wealth for older generations who were lucky to buy their homes before the housing crisis. Essentially, this is about bringing back the American Dream, the idea that if you work hard you will make money and be able to improve quality of life for you and your loved ones. If it works here then it will be much easier to export and make it the global dream.
This isn’t about making rich countries richer, it’s about aligning incentives so that the money you make is more closely related to how much value you add to the world. It’s about having a system that intrinsically maximizes good.
I am, I am !!!
I hope that this is the start of a cultural shift from zero-sum thinking to abundance mindset: Imagine if instead of people trying to remember to turn off their lights to save energy, people were thinking of ways for everyone in the world to have energy abundance. And if instead of thinking about ways to convince people in rich countries to donate to poor countries to save lives, more people were working on figuring out how to grow the economies of poor countries so that they aren’t poor anymore. This thinking exists in the progress studies and abundance agenda movement, and I hope that it grows into the dominant cultural narrative in my lifetime. And yes, if the point is to build a movement, it does make sense to start in rich countries, because that’s the flow of how ideas (policy ideas, business ideas) tend to spread.
I’m dreaming of a future where Givewell is obsolete because the interventions that are the best are the kind that are eradicating poverty by increasing people’s incomes, and may not even be nonprofits at all. Let’s fcking goooo !!!!
In writing this, I drew heavily from a book: Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration, by David Dagan and Steven M. Teles
You may find this helpful as a primer on how reform actually gets passed and implemented, in addition to Mark Kleiman’s work about what should be done.
I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it’s possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she’s had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.
Yup, and specifically in Aurora’s case, low ability to empathize with others who aren’t her friends, and low ability to recognize that she should not be mediating a situation where she’s friends or dating one of the parties and not close with the other.
I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.
Yes, I do think that most parents in the bay area are too nervous about taking care of other people’s kids (maybe it gets better when the kids are 6+ years old and people are more willing to e.g. drop them off at birthday parties where the parents leave). It also requires a certain type of personality to be okay with whatever parenting style your friends or loved ones have when they are taking care of your kids for free, and be OK with their diet, nap schedule, etc slipping while you’re gone.
That’s incredible!! New hero. Thank you!!
basically nobody besides grandparents or people you pay seems to be interested in helping take care of children in modern Western society.
I feel like this is more true in the Bay area than in other places. Not sure why. Anyways, if you are in San Francisco and looking to make parent friends where you can have play dates at each other’s houses and potentially drop off your kids at each other’s houses if there’s some kind of child care gap, we should be friends. I live in the Mission district and have a 3.5 and 1.5-year-old and want to build this kind of friend/support network locally.
Thanks so much for your reply! Yes, grandparent help can make this whole project so much more manageable. We don’t have grandparents nearby but our nanny is able to take care of both kids if the preschool closes or the kids aren’t feeling well, and it’s a godsend.
That’s very inspiring that Hilary Greaves has kids! Do you know how many?
I wonder if that’s just the nature of earning-to-give careers? That if you do the same thing for a while just to make money that you will eventually get bored and not want to work that hard at it? Versus direct work which seems to me to be easier to feel personal fulfillment around.
I’m ecstatic that AMF was able to arrange for you to work part time!! I’ve also been surprised by what good luck I’ve had with being able to get very flexible part time internships during my maternity leave and being able to go part time until my baby turned one at my day job. My advice for others on this is that if you’ve already cultivated a previous relationship with the people you work for or want to work for, it doesn’t hurt to ask for a non traditional work arrangement. And then more generally, I think that people who want to have impact and also want to have kids can sometimes find creative solutions to have both.
Hi Michelle, really appreciate you writing this out. I’m also a parent of a 3 year old (and his little brother who’s 1). I hope you’ll indulge me a few questions. Would you be able to say a little more about
Your outside of daycare support, like how much friends or family you have nearby to help with childcare? Or other arrangements?
How you and your partner ended up arranging your parental leave? How long did you have? Did you stagger your leaves? And did you go back to work full time right away at the the end of leave or did you work part time for a while?
If you think your assessment that having children didn’t make any difference to the impact you have over your life time would have changed if you had multiple kids?
I really liked this post. I think that the author raises a good point at the end, saying that for practical purposes, all these different paradigms basically lead to wanting to keep people alive and getting the ones who have less money more money.
But I found this to be a much more intuitive framework for me personally: from a systemic change standpoint it’s probably easier/cheaper to increase the mental health of rich people who have poor mental health, but more difficult to increase the wellbeing of poor people who are suffering a similar amount. Maybe not based on the number of dollars you give out to two individuals in these separate situations, but based on the amount of effort it would take to systemically prevent or reduce the prevalence of the type of suffering. I like that the capabilities approach takes a strong stand that systemic change to reduce poverty is worth doing even if it’s really hard, and worth prioritizing over e.g. rich people with poor mental health.
yes, this drives me a little bit crazy about EA. by definition “effective altruism” should include any kind of altruism that someone is trying to do effectively. But what is actually practiced by the capital letters Effective Altruism movement is actually “altruistic rationality”.
As Julia Galef mentions in this 2017 EAG panel, people have three buckets through which they spend their money: personal, personal causes (e.g. the university you went to or homelessness in the city you live), and EA causes (global make-the-world-better type things). Trying to guilt people to move money between buckets, e.g. “your $5 coffee in the morning is killing children in africa” is ineffective outreach. EA has got the third bucket covered, and I don’t see why the second bucket shouldn’t be included too. Getting people to think about philanthropy and volunteering more rationally in terms of effectiveness is generally good no matter what people’s motivations are, and increasing people’s rationality in the context of charity IMO will ultimately lead to more people naturally wanting to donate to the global EA cause bucket in the end.
I recommend (and did a part-time internship with in the past) the Coalition on Homelessness. What really inspires me about them is that they did Prop C in 2018, where companies making over 50M per year in San Francisco were taxed a small percentage into a fund specifically for homeless exits. Before COVID, this fund was accruing 200-300M per year. The money was locked up for a few years from companies suing the city, but after the city finally won, it budgeted for 4000 homeless exits—a 4X increase. This would have made a big dent (5000 people become homeless each year in San Francisco), but it turns out only 2000 of those exits were realized (that’s still a 2X increase). Basically i think a big reason that not all the exits were able to be realized is because housing is so stupid expensive in San Francisco. So I think a combination of donating to the Coalition on Homelessness and California YIMBY (which seems the most effective at making regulations that encourage more housing) would be good.
In an ideal world, housing would be an essential good, not an investment vehicle, and cities should function properly where taxes from successful businesses who bring in high salary employees pay for everybody else in the city to still be OK in terms of infrastructure and social services.
Ah, so your perspective is not about increasing the number of future people but fighting for rights for people who you would say already exist. Just to be clear: you would support interventions that reduced unintended pregnancy before conception, such as long-acting contraceptives? The OP seems unsure on this point.
It’s not too crazy; being a pregnancy surrogate is something women can get paid to do and doesn’t really require any altruism. This is for an IVF baby generally, not carrying a baby with your own genetic material. The demand for babies is real. Selling eggs or sperm to gay couples trying to conceive is similar.
Edit for numbers: I think in California people pay surrogacy agencies $70,000 for everything and the women who carry the babies get about half that amount.
What a thoughtful and comprehensive post! Well done! Changed my mind on the Price, Taste, Convenience Hypothesis being sufficient to change people’s habits.