Professor Irwin Sandler of Arizona State University spoke at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017. He was introduced as “an expert on children in high stress situations, including divorce.”
Sandler said that research psychologists had put a lot of effort into figuring out how badly damaged children were by divorce, by living primarily with one parent, and by low-quality parenting. He has been experimenting instead with training parents to do a better job. He and his colleagues run training programs for both mothers and fathers and then interview children. Based on the data from children, Sandler says that the training has been effective for both mothers and fathers and that it works best for adults who exhibited “poor parenting to begin with.”
(By “poor parenting” he wasn’t talking about the stuff that the $600/hour litigators throw around, e.g., one parent lets the kid stay up late. This program is run in cooperation with the local court system so the participants sounded as though they were struggling low-income types.)
What I found most interesting about the talk was that we run a family court litigation system that, compared to a European-style system, shrinks our GDP by about $500 billion per year (source). Most of this expenditure is ostensibly for the welfare of our children. Yet, assuming Sandler’s data are correct, if we put $500 billion of time and effort into training parents, both together and separated, our society’s children would be vastly better off. Since we aren’t trying this, must we infer that most Americans don’t actually care about how well the next generation turns out? (obviously they do profess to care, especially on Facebook!)
So long as we have immigration to drive our economy, we don’t have an incentive to care about how the next generation turns out.
“Yet, assuming Sandler’s data are correct, if we put … time and effort into training parents, both together and separated, our society’s children would be vastly better off.”
Sounds like a great idea.
“Since we aren’t trying this, must we infer that most Americans don’t actually care about how well the next generation turns out?”
That inference only holds if you believe that most Americans are perfectly well-informed and rational. I’m skeptical that this is what you actually believe!
I did two parenting-training things as part of my divorce and a later modification to the terms. One was an in-person class about co-parenting. Given that my ex flatly and openly refused to cooperate with me in any way, it was a waste. The other was an online workshop called Up to Parents. I learned things from it but it’s not clear my ex did by her continued bad behavior in things the training specifically called out.
In other words, you can lead a horse to water…
One might argue that it would be money better spent on therapy for divorced parents to help them through their bitterness.
One problem with this kind of intervention is that they can be hard to scale, but I assume scalability is kind of implied by the “assuming Sandler’s data are correct” qualifier. What I’m wondering is who would pay for it.
Jim: The training described was not about “co-parenting” nor the “be less bitter about not being a parent anymore and having to pay your former partner to have sex with other people” promise that the therapy industry makes (in exchange for cash, of course!). It was more about parenting per se, what to do when with a child, etc.
So the fact that two adversaries in an adversarial litigation-based system like U.S. family court reject therapists’ call to cooperate (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts , for example, where such cooperation might result in a plaintiff losing 30-50 percent of personal spending power) doesn’t mean that people who aren’t great parents can’t learn how to be better. The Arizona experiment was face-to-face classes that were at least weekly and went on for weeks. It wasn’t a one-shot “so you sued your co-parent looking for max cash, but here’s some stuff relating to your kid that you might want to hear” and then back to the lawyer for coaching on how it is really done.
Neal: Who would pay for this? We have a huge budget of tax dollars supporting the current divorce, custody, and child support industry. Roughly $6 billion in tax dollars are spent on a child support enforcement bureaucracy (people whose job is to hunt down defendants, set up court dates for them to be prosecuted, etc.) plus we spend tax dollars imprisoning defendants who don’t pay the court-ordered amount (there doesn’t seem to be any accounting for this). We also spend tax dollars cleaning up after a police officer kills an uncooperative child support defendant who doesn’t want to go back to prison, e.g., Walter Scott in South Carolina.
Neal: If there’s a course which is likely to make me a better parent, I’m definitely willing to pay for it myself! I expect that a lot of parents would feel the same way. So then it’s more figuring out how to improve awareness that these programs are available. Maybe provide some subsidies to make them accessible to low-income parents.
@Russil Wvong: Alas, I expect people who are willing to pay for the class are less likely to need it (not because they are inherently superior but because they are more likely to have already obtained that information from other sources). Mainly though, it seemed like our host was proposing a new government program and I wanted hear it out loud.
Neal: A lot of children in the U.S. are themselves the result of government programs. So as long as the government encourages people who wouldn’t otherwise be parents to go into the parenting business, I guess it would make sense for the government to then try to make sure that these cash-recipients do a reasonably good job.
[Why are children the result of government programs? Americans get tax deductions, tax credits, free K-12, free food, and free health care for kids. An American who has a child becomes eligible for a wide range of welfare benefits without for which the childless are ineligible. An American who obtains a child by having sex with a partner whose income is at least middle-class can benefit from lucrative child support payments under government-promulgated formulae.]
(As a libertarian I guess if I were the boss of everyone I might tear down all of these and neither encourage nor discourage child production. At that point it is possible that much of the bad parenting would disappear because people who didn’t want to be parents wouldn’t be parents.)
Phil, as a libertarian, what would your position be on birth control/abortion if you were everyone’s boss/emperor? Would you allow states to deny people access to these things? Would you pay to make them free to people?
Given that Americans, when given the opportunity, vote for socialism/planned economy, it is not very productive to speculate about what a libertarian society would look like here in the U.S.
That said, I can’t think of any reason why, in the event that abortion were legal, a libertarian would set up a government program to use tax dollars to pay for abortions. It might not be relevant because tax rates would be a lot lower and citizens would have a much higher spending power. People passionately pro-abortion would be able to set up charity abortion clinics if desired.
I don’t think that libertarianism provides any guidance on the abortion dispute. “Libertarian” doesn’t mean “Anarchy” and everyone can do whatever they want. It would be illegal in a libertarian society to kill your next-door neighbor or 1-year-old child. So it would come back to the same issue that non-libertarians debate: when does human life begin? (and therefore when does an embryo or fetus acquire the right not to be murdered)
Probably most abortions would end up being legal, as a practical matter, because libertarians want to loosen up regulation of pharma. Therefore people would be able to buy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misoprostol and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifepristone (I did a quick Google search and think maybe one can already do this for $125 at http://www.abortionpillsrx.com/mtp-kit.html ; the world price of these generic drugs is a tiny fraction of this cost)
Well, it seems silly to pretend biology doesn’t exist (or to think that the majority of people will use abstinence as a birth control method), so I was curious as to how contraceptive technology would fit into into “neither discouraging nor encouraging child production”. The abortion debate is less interesting than the question of what “neither discouraging or encouraging” really means.
If birth control isn’t free and easily accessible, more people will not use it than if it is free and easily accessible. Similarly, if abortions are not legal and safe, a woman who gets pregnant and doesn’t want a child may still choose to not have an abortion if she has reason to believe that abortion will kill her or cause her to go to jail.
I’ve heard the argument against government funded abortions that “I don’t want to pay for other peoples mistakes”. That argument seems fair to me, except that paying for the K-12 education of that mistake seems a lot more expensive than paying for the abortion, and paying for that mistake to occupy a jail cell is even more expensive than that (I don’t know if unwanted children are more likely to end up in jail than wanted children, but some fraction of people will end up being criminals and going to taxpayer-funded jail). As you said, libertarian doesn’t mean anarchy, so libertarian societies presumably still have jails, even if they don’t necessarily have public schools.
Yz: I don’t have the answers to these questions. As far as I know, the standard libertarian perspective is that, with lower taxes and a smaller government, Americans would have more spending power and costs for currently regulated items, such as generic birth control pills, would fall.
http://dailysignal.com/2015/11/12/planned-parenthood-paid-3-for-birth-control-but-billed-medicaid-35-former-manager/ says that the U.S. wholesale price is about $3/month. Retail is $9/month (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/business/28drug.html ).
One of the things that Americans in a libertarian economy would be able to do with their spending power is give money to charity (charitable organizations were more common before the government took over responsibility for most stuff).
Consider Jill Democrat, a Manhattan resident who attended a $33,400/person fundraiser for Hillary Clinton (see http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/clinton-campaign-raises-8-million-at-manhattan-fundraiser-216925 ). Assume that Jill earns $1 million/year on Wall Street and currently pays a tax rate of approximately 50 percent. Under a libertarian system she might end up paying closer to 30 percent in taxes (the U.S. is never going to be as efficient as Singapore!), so that leaves her with $200,000 per year in additional spending power.
If Jill Democrat is as passionate about free birth control as you are, she can use that $200,000 to buy birth control pills, at current inflated-by-regulation wholesale rates, for $5,555 women. Citizens who aren’t passionate about free birth control (and those, such as Catholics, who believe that birth control pills are immoral) are not coerced into participating.
[You could also use this as an example of why libertarianism will never be adopted in the U.S. Americans can’t remember a time when the Great Father in Washington didn’t take care of most of their needs. They can’t even imagine how they survived in 2012 prior to the implementation of Obamacare. You’re concerned about how, under an alternative political system that has no chance of being adopted, in a country where median household income is over $50,000/year, a $36/year expense would be paid for (for comparison, the Obamaphone phone program costs taxpayers about $367/year per beneficiary; see http://www.newsmax.com/US/obama-phone-costs-billions/2013/02/12/id/490022/ ).]
“As a libertarian -”
Whoa, when did that happen? Back in 1996 you were talking to Chomsky for the concluding chapter of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing. Later on you would make references to libertarian friends. When did you start thinking of yourself as a libertarian?
“- tax rates would be a lot lower and citizens would have a much higher spending power.”
Is this assertion based on theory, the idea that taxes and public spending are a drag on the economy, particularly because the people benefiting from spending and the people paying for it are different? Or is it based on your belief that the US government is peculiarly incompetent and wasteful, so that when other countries are able to take advantage of efficiency gains from public programs funded by taxes – collective purchasing of certain goods and services, basically – it doesn’t tell us anything?
Neal: As a parent, there’s actually lots of things I’m not sure about, where getting some advice and feedback would be useful. In particular, the pace of social and technological change means that many aspects of my own experience growing up in the 1970s and 1980s may no longer be relevant.
Before getting married my wife and I went to a workshop on communication for couples which was very helpful. There’s similar workshops available for parents, but before reading Philip’s post it hadn’t occurred to me to look for them!
Russil: Talking to Chomsky doesn’t mean that I agreed with him on every issue!
I never supported the War on Drugs, so in that area I was already libertarian in the 1970s (both Democrats and Republicans have supported various forms of the War on Drugs more or less continuously since the 1930s(?)).
Growing up in D.C. in the 1970s I thought that Big Government was great. As I got older I began to notice that America’s government-run systems tended not to function that well and/or they cost a fortune.
Also, I used to think that there was a limit to the number of Americans who would collect welfare rather than work (or work full-time anyway). But that turned out to be only because welfare wasn’t very lucrative during my formative years. Public housing was dangerous and dirty, for example, and higher quality private housing was within reach of people who got a median-paying job (whereas today in the Boston area, you would have to earn 3-4X the median income to afford an apartment of the same quality (including location as a factor) as the better public housing units).
Why do high tax rates give us a low spending power? I see where you are going with this. If Amanda gives the government 100% of her income and the efficient government bureaucracy buys Amanda everything that she would have bought, but at lower prices due to collective purchasing power, Amanda actually has more spending power with higher tax rates. Maybe that would be possible in a society where work was valorized. But we’ve run the experiment in the U.S. and there is no social stigma attached to letting other people pay one’s bills, whether through means-tested welfare programs, child support extracted via litigation following a one-night sexual encounter, or Florida’s “permanent alimony” after a 7-year marriage (14 years if a plaintiff wants to be sure of collecting forever). So Amanda is likely to withdraw much of her efforts and hours from the workforce (and/or switch to some job that is fun for her).
The analysis is the same, but the effects are smaller at lower tax rates. If the argument about collective purchasing made sense, the Soviet Union would have outperformed the West. And keep in mind that the Soviets had a lot of programs to discouraging shirking (“parasitism”). A comrade who had sex with a dermatologist wouldn’t be able to relax in a luxurious home for 23 years collecting child support. A comrade who had once been married to a factory manager wouldn’t be able to live off alimony for the rest of his or her life. A comrade who wasn’t physically disabled needed to work in order to have an apartment, food, etc. The coercive measures that the Soviet Union took to get people to work would shock an American do-gooder today. Can you imagine the police going into public housing units and taking away the Xboxes of families where nobody had worked in the preceding month?
So high tax rates plus a lucrative welfare state plus a society where there is no stigma attached to living off others cannot have economic growth.
[Since we need economic growth to pay our debts, including Social Security and Medicare, we can, in the short run, patch things up with population growth, especially via immigration. But what do we do once the U.S. hits 600 million or 1 billion people and we need more growth to pay for the Social Security and Medicare of the immigrants who came in 2017?]
Thanks, Philip. (Not that it matters, but I disagree with nearly everything Chomsky has to say about politics and foreign policy.) I remembered that back in 1996 you had a proposal for welfare reform (re-reading it, you talk about the freeloader problem, but you don’t think it’s important enough to kill the proposal). Maybe back in the 1990s, with Clinton in the White House, and George H. W. Bush as the most recent Republican president, everyone had more faith in the basic competence of the US government.
According to economists and game theorists, free-riding is actually a universal problem. Whenever the benefits of an action are spread out over many people, while the costs are borne by a single individual – in other words, whenever you have a collective action problem – you get free-riding: people hang back and wait for someone else to do it. And then, because everyone else does the same thing, there’s almost nothing to free-ride on. In The Efficient Society, Joseph Heath gives a striking example:
Heath notes: “During the winter of 1609, the period of most acute starvation, the population of Jamestown was reduced from five hundred to just sixty.”
So 100% taxation, or equivalently the abolition of private property, is a terrible idea. The historical record of Communist regimes demonstrates this pretty well. They attempted to make up for the lack of incentives provided by private property with a tremendous amount of coercion and violence, and they still failed to keep up to their capitalist neighbors (East Germany vs. West Germany, North Korea vs. South Korea, Maoist China vs. Taiwan).
Don’t get me wrong, competitive markets are awesome; they’re the foundation for the material abundance that we enjoy. They work by taking advantage of collective action problems: competing suppliers are locked in a collective action problem, forced to lower their prices, raise their product or service quality, or innovate. On the other side, competing purchasers are forced to bid against each other, raising prices to the market-clearing level.
So wherever possible, we should rely on competitive markets. However, there are specific situations where collective purchasing provides efficiency gains, making society richer. Joseph Heath gives a simple example in Economics Without Illusions, Chapter 4:
Extending this analysis to public goods and services:
Heath summarizes:
Of course these insurance programs can be run well or run badly, and it’s arguable that the political system in the US is more prone to paralysis and drift than in most democracies. Still, in health care, it’s hard to overlook the fact that private insurance companies in the US seem to do a far worse job of cost control than provincial governments in Canada, or even the US federal government.
In 2015, the US spent 17.8% of its GDP on health care, while Canada spent 10.9%. For Canada, the difference between 10.9% of GDP and 17.8% of GDP is $110 billion. That’s how much we save every year by having a more efficient health care system than the US.
A concrete example, from 1997:
>there is no social stigma attached to
>letting other people pay one’s bills,
>whether through means-tested
>welfare programs, child support extracted
>via litigation following a one-night sexual
>encounter, or Florida’s “permanent alimony”
>after a 7-year marriage (14 years if a
>plaintiff wants to be sure of collecting forever).
>So Amanda is likely to withdraw much of her
>efforts and hours from the workforce
>(and/or switch to some job that is fun for her).
The data suggest that these are minor, not major factors in declining US participation rates. Female participation in the labor force has expanded concurrent with the expansion of the child support system which preferentially benefits women. The report on male labor force participation you (philg) linked to a few weeks ago concluded that entitlements were not a major factor in the trend observed. Perhaps this is because the US welfare state is not really as generous as has been claimed. I’ve read regularly in these pages that a US person can obtain a bucket of benefits worth over 50K per year without working, yet tens of millions of Americans stubbornly continue working often dirty, demanding, and dangerous jobs for a lot less than that. US labor force participation is declining, especially among males. The largest single factor is probably simply the aging population. The child support system and entitlements no doubt make a small contribution. I don’t know what explains the balance. Perhaps more males or being supported by women and more young people (of either sex) are being supported by their parents. The idea of reforming the child support and/or entitlement systems has merit (depending on the specific reforms proposed), but reversing declining labor force participation does not provide a very compelling justification for doing so.