I like them both. They are batting the ball back and forth on substack about fertility, quite respectfully, from what I have seen. Some of the cross-purposes seems to be that Lyman is focused on overall societal fertility and finding interventions that encourage women to have more children, while Ruxandra is focused on women not being punished in the marketplace for having children. She introduced the idea of "greedy" careers: Not that women are greedy for wanting to go into them, but that there are careers such as law and entrepreneurship that are greedy for your time if you want to succeed.
One can see how there would be overlap but disagreement.
My own view is that finding ways for ambitious women to also have children may be a good thing in itself - they are our wives and sisters, after all - but it is not going to change the overall fertility much. I don't see that there has been a cultural shift of women suddenly wanting to imitate Amy Coney Barrett. Therefore, the question becomes how much should a society try to accommodate or compensate each other for differences in biology. The inequality inherent in childbearing, and possibly even -raising, was not set forth in the Constitution or any institutions of humankind. They just is.
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On "greedy careers:" yes, the stated careers do demand unbounded time from workers. However, many people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. It is rational to limit demands on your time which are extraneous to the task at hand, even for people who do not dream of making partner or winning the Nobel Prize. Should limited public daycare slots go to a cancer researcher, or to a housekeeper earning 30% of the researcher's salary?
Postponing childbearing through technology wouldn't help, in my opinion. Sure, your career might be established by your mid-30s, but many people with prestigious, high-paying careers discover their employers are happy to lay off expensive employees in their 40s and 50s. There isn't a happy time when one can coast and raise children. Survivor bias might lead one to think so, of course. (It's interesting to notice that Elizabeth Holmes got married and had two children, once her career went down in flames.)
In some careers, there are boutique firms founded by women who want a better work-life balance than Big Law or Big Accounting are willing to offer. I gather they're quite successful.
Well, Cranberry, here is a fun thought-experiment for you. In Western Europe where there is almost painfully equal opportunity for women, they are more likely than men to take lesser status and paying jobs in interactive fields, such as nursing or social work, or to work part-time instead of full, so that they can have life balance with their (few) children. Conservatives have taken to pointing this out as evidence that this is what "women" want, or at least what Western women want. But that may be going too fast. It IS what Danish women want, or a large percentage of them. We can tentatively assume that a lot of American women might think the same. Yet I think it is highly likely that there is a greater percentage of American women who do actually want greedy careers than we would find even in France, Britain, or Australia.
If America has more of such women than other countries, then that is part of who we are as a society. And with that statement I am not even touching the question of black, Hispanic, or Asian women and what their percentages are. I am not saying this to advocate in any direction. I frankly don't know my own opinion on accommodation and encouragement. Teslo is British, Stone is Canadian. That's as close as we are likely to get to American, but still not the same. I think I am only cautious about making assumptions about "what women want." Different women want different things.
I gather in many European countries, there are limits on the number of hours permitted in a work week. I don't believe we have that here, so there are differences in societies which influence all sorts of life decisions.
Many of the "greedy careers" are in fields with strict hierarchies, a limited number of seats, and an oversupply of people competing for the seats. Medicine. Academia. Law. Finance. The conditions are grueling for men, too; witness the recent death of a Green Beret at Bank of America: https://nypost.com/2024/05/09/business/wall-street-bankers-death-ignites-anger-at-long-workweeks-could-prompt-walkout/.
At some point, leaders in such fields should consider whether they bear some responsibility for inhumane conditions in their companies and organizations.
My reading of Ruxandra's position is that she is focused on medical innovations that could expand the high-probability fertility window. She did use the term 'greedy careers' (time-greedy) but I think her use of the term was descriptive rather than intended to point to something that could be fixed by social reorganization.
One thing that would help is eliminating requirements for post-college studies for jobs that don't really need them. Expanding college from 12 years to 14 or 16 years or even more hits right at the intersection of the career-launch window and the fertility window.
I don't know, David. Grad school is pretty compatible with children. My son used to read The Hobbit in the back of philosophy class. You just have to make sure they know how to behave.
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