Greedy Jobs, Reproductive & Human-Capital Biological Clocks, & Men Who Do Not See What Is in Front of Their Faces

A short note inspired by reading Virginia Postrel’s “Three Basic Facts That Affect Fertility”…

The extremely sharp Virginia Postrel is much more conciliatory than I would be, in commenting on a bunch of men who are, I think, being much less perceptive than they have any right to be about childbearing and childrearing in our society.

However, I think she looks at only one aspect of the knotty question of whether the low birth rate is a problem and what to do about it—the “how to rejigger society so that it makes sense for ambitious women with lots of potential social power to have more children” aspect. But on that aspect, she is spot-on. So let me focus on that:

The solution: (a) Create many paths to high-powered jobs with lots of social power in your 40s and 50s that (b) allow you to have children in your 20s and early 30s.

That is, create a real rather than a fake mommy track, involving what Claudia Goldin calls “non-greedy” but high-prestige and high-respect jobs.

Indeed, we have long known—or, at least, had no excuse for not knowing—that this is the biggest element of the problem for the potentially ambitious and high-powered. Indeed, twenty years ago Larry Summers’s lunchtime talk on diversifying the STEM workforce was primarily devoted to trying to convince the audience that this problem of greedy jobs is the most serious part of the problem:

Lawrence Summers: Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce: ’If you look at the top [prestige-job] cohort… the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children… There are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work… hours in the office… flexibility of schedules… continuity of effort through the life cycle… a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women….
What fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young men make a decision that they’re unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week?…
Is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity?….
It seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that… the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity…. We would like to believe that you can take… three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it… really doesn’t have any fundamental effect on the career path…. A whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements….
What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for employers trying to be the employer who responds to everybody else’s discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care…. There’s a strong case for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect….
Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought… <https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-speeches-summers/2005/remarks-at-nber-conference-on-diversifying-the-science-engineering-workforce/>

Share Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality

Unfortunately, the only person I ever knew at all well who found this easy and straightforward to do was my (briefly: she lectured for half a course I took) teacher and my teachers’ teacher, the great late Judith Nisse Shklar (1928–1992), who landed into a job as a half-time Lecturer at Harvard. The way she put it was: “teach a year, take a year off, have a kid, rock the cradle, and write a book, teach a couple more years, have another kid…”

At the age of 11, while she was living in Riga, Latvia, where she had been born, Judith N. Shklar’s uncle put her and her family on a plane to Sweden. Her memory does not quite add up—she says they left for Sweden “just before” Stalin arrived (which happened in June 1940), and that they remained in Sweden “far too long… well after the German invasion of Norway” (which happened in April 1940). They then managed to get out of Sweden to Japan via Russia and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, somehow evading detention as Lithuanian—hence after June 1940 Soviet—nationals. In Japan they bought—she does not say whether via bribery or not—a visa to Canada. Landing in Seattle in, I think, 1941, they were locked up as illegal “oriental” immigrants, before managing to get to Montréal and regularize their status. I never heard her say anything about this experience She did write that her standard answer when asked was that it “left [her] with an abiding taste for black humor”.

There are fewer Jews in the world today than there were in 1939 for Reasons.

College at McGill immediately after World War II, which she says she did not like save for two of the very most important things: first, meeting her husband Gerald M. Shklar, who became Professor of Oral Pathology at Harvard Dental School; second, American political theory and history professor Frederick Watkins. Moving with her husband Gerald to Harvard in 1949. Getting into the Government Department as a graduate student—which cannot have been straightforward. Loving Harvard, especially Widener Library, from the very beginning—in spite of its many, many imperfections:

McCarthyism debilitating in a “subtle and latent” way,
young scholars who “boasted of not being intellectuals”,
“unappetizing dirty-socks and locker-room humor”,
callow and dweeby young men vaunting “false and ostentatious masculinity”,
“a slavish admiration for the least intelligent, but good-looking, rich, and well connected undergraduates”
with a culture “of protected juvenile delinquency”,
“private school products… [of whom] few could put a grammatical English sentence”, and
“if they knew a foreign language, they hid it well”, all plus:

so many people who should have known better, scorned the poor, the bookish, the unconventional, the brainy, the people who did not resemble the crass and outlandish model of a real American upper-crust he-man whom they had conjured up in their imagination…