10k AMA
A Bet On It celebration
Yesterday afternoon, while flying from Phoenix back to DC, the number of Bet On It subscribers finally crossed 10,000. Welcome to all the new folks, and many thanks to my long-term readers.
To celebrate, I’m having an Ask Me Anything… starting now. Just write your questions about anything on your mind down in the comments, and I’ll try to respond today or tomorrow.
This AMA is open to all, but I will continue having special AMAs, written and Zoom, for paid subscribers. Honestly, I was amazed by all of the people who pledged support when I wasn’t even asking, which inspired me to launch some premium features to reciprocate. If you yearn to express a little gratitude, I invite you to upgrade your account. But either way, I hope to meet you in-person, either here in DC or on the road around the world.
P.S. Announcement coming New Year’s Day.
Howdy! Sorry in advance for being lengthy in all this. (The second one isn’t a question, just gratitude, if it makes a difference.)
1. For Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, your argument is roughly that parents put in a ton of effort, and that effort doesn’t really have significant long term effects; therefore, parents can stop that. This will make having kids a net positive in terms of personal happiness, since it’s already barely a negative anyway. That sounds very plausible, but my trouble with the argument is this: Baumeister discusses the exact same problem of kids being a net negative for parental happiness in his Meanings of Life (1991), using a lot of really old data. So, this effect seems relatively constant for a pretty long time. Yet levels of parental involvement with their kids have surely increased over the past fifty or so years. If parental involvement were the big cause of parents being less happy than non-parents, then we should have seen a change in the extent to which becoming a parent negatively affects happiness. And yet, with it being so close to a wash as you find it, that means that I’d expect reversed findings altogether from data coming from, say, the 1960s or thereabouts. Do you have any thoughts on this discrepancy—am I just plain wrong about something? Basically, I think you can’t explain a constant with a variable, and relative parental unhappiness seems constant, while levels of parental stressing over their kids (helicoptering) seems like a variable over the decades.
2. Not a question, but I just wanted to let you know, while you rightly brag about the positive effects of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids for others, your other books haven’t lacked a positive effect, either. The Case Against Education persuaded me not to pursue a career in academia after my PhD; since I was doing historical political theory, almost literally any other line of work will end up producing more good than what I would’ve done otherwise. More broadly, I care a lot less about esoteric intellectual crap and a lot more about motorcycles, guns, and punching things hard, thanks to the shift your work provided in my thinking. Even my remaining intellectual concerns are a lot more practical, now. It’s not having a kid, but Case Against did help me focus on more important things in life, so thank you.
What are your thoughts on Milei? I believe you said you would write on this, but haven't seen it