Two Simple Policy Goals

Maybe I'm simple minded but I don't think that policy has to be terribly complex.  

A great test of your economic policy is how easily someone can start a new business that has a legitimate chance of creating wealth and jobs.

A great test of your social policy is how easily a single mom can raise a child who has a legitimate chance to be happy and productive.

Doing well on those tests is not trivial. If you are successful at popularizing entrepreneurship you have a great education system, easy access to capital markets that are well regulated and reward people who invest well and punish people who abuse investors or borrowers, and stable, predictable laws around property and wealth. Your culture embraces disruption and protects losers enough that your community has little resistance to new companies, technologies and industries and welcomes change. You have things like universal healthcare so that would-be entrepreneurs face less risk when they take on the risk of a new business. Your culture sees social invention and product invention the same way: you keep improving what you have and looking for new ways to reach old goals more effectively, whether that goal is to store fresh food for longer like a fridge now does (and like some other technology may do in the future) or create meaning and community like a church now does (and like some new social invention may do in the future). 

If you are successful at making it easy for every parent to raise a child, this again has many policy implications. People have easy access to birth control and abortion so that they can easily control when they become a parent. Maternity and paternity leave is generous without penalizing companies that employ young people who are more likely to be starting careers and families. Childcare is affordable. Jobs can be customized. (The Netherlands has brought birthrates back up by offering more flexible job options: many parents (mostly mothers) work part-time.) You have a vigorous defense of the environment, minimizing the probability that children will be exposed to threats that might not show up for decades.

Rather than penalize entrepreneurs who would create jobs and wealth by making them jump through hoops,or ignoring the fact that their educational needs are just as real as those who would pursue a vocation or white-collar job, the community should make it easier for them in a host of ways, from mentoring programs to bureaucratic aides to help them through necessary legal, financial and regulatory hoops. Rather than penalize young mothers who would raise up the next generation of workers and citizens, the community should make it easier for them in a host of ways, from mentoring programs to childcare along with logistical and emotional support to help them through the various challenges of parenting.

If your mothers are raising the children they aspire to raise, you'll have an emotionally whole and productive citizenry. If your entrepreneurs are creating the businesses they aspire to, you'll have steadily rising wealth and income and strong job markets that enable the community to finance personal things like fine meals and communal things like beautiful parks and good roads. If you focus on making life easier for single mothers and entrepreneurs you will automatically make it easier for two-parent families and no children families. If you focus on making it easier for entrepreneurs, you will automatically make it easier for employees and investors.


The policy implications of these two goals - the various programs and initiatives that would help further us towards these goals - could be continually enhanced by - among other things - running focus groups with real and aspiring entrepreneurs and real or aspiring single moms. Asking them what would make them more successful, what obstacles and frustrations the have, what their needs are and sorts of resources they need would help to inform policies that could make a difference. Tracking the efficacy of these policy initiatives to determine what makes the most difference for the least time and money could be used as further feedback about which policies to continue and which to let die. With these two goals, a community could continuously experiment to see how best to achieve them. It's hard to imagine how such policy experiments wouldn't make the community better for everyone.

Transcending Parenting

Of course the thing that no one admits is that the life of the child transcends our feeble attempts at parenting. Fortunately, the child is not any more limited by our parenting than is our brain by our understanding of it.

We have this conceit that we have to get parenting right or the child will turn out poorly. I don't intend to be glib about the danger of scarring a child, but I do know that the life of any person is more complex, more nuanced, more able than the parenting effort that went into it.

And whether you're a parent or a child, you can take comfort in this thought.

Your World - A Social Construct

My inspiration to begin blogging traces back to two things: my outrage at George Bush’s policies and wanting a forum in which I played with my 4th Economy ideas. It seems as though, of all the things that interest me, this 4th Economy idea – my one big idea – is the one that provokes the least interaction and interest when I write about it.

Going over ideas of Werner Erhard’s about how our own personal narratives are constructs, I wonder if one of the obstacles to my explaining the 4th Economy don’t trace back to this still elusive notion of social constructs. Foundational to the ideas is the notion that even terribly large constructs – like Renaissance thinking or the modern, dominant pragmatist way of thinking – are themselves social constructs.

If one were to doubt the claim that any culture’s dominant world view is a social construct, one would only have to look at the inordinate amount of time and attention we give to “civilizing” a baby to become a member of society. The gross effort it takes to recreate our society in each child should be testament to the fact that any culture is not a "natural" or spontaneous state; it is, instead a social construct that takes great effort - every time. Language and manners, what we question and what we accept, social roles … all of these end products represent the myriad tasks of parents and teachers and are essentially tasks that work to construct a world view and assert the place of the individual in it.

Instead of being seen that way, we more often see social constructs as “the way things are,” rather than a choice that is carefully and painstakingly chosen and supported. Mothers in particular have to be aware of how tenuous is this social construct. The curious child, the rebellious child, the stubborn child, the lazy child (and really, which of our children are not all of these things at various stages of the day / week / childhood / adulthood?) all question the social construct in ways that don’t readily suggest easy answers.

It might be too much to expect parents and schools to add to their list of admonitions and lessons the label: “Warning: contents of this society have been known to create feelings of anomie and alienation, provoke wars, homicides, and suicides, and pollute the habitat you need for survival. Most of what we tell you should be questioned and improved on. This is, really, just the best we’ve been able to do up until now and it could be that improvement will actually overturn much of what we now accept and advocate. Learn about your culture and your place in it, but don’t cling too tightly to it.”

It does seem like a stretch to expect communities to see their culture as a social construct when, as Werner Erhard and others have seemed to prove, even accepting the notion that our own life, our own life's story is a construct is elusive, a notion we tend to resist. As long as we continue to believe that even our own lives just represent "what is" rather than a construct that we might change, it'll be hard to build a consensus that it is time to break out of the consensus trance. And to give you some idea about my own level of optimism, I actually think that this is a task we can do.

To quote from the bumper sticker, just sign me, "another dopeless hope fiend."

In the Aftermath of Father's Day

My friend Glen sent me the transcript of his son's commencement speech. (His son is Jeff Lee, pointed to in the blogs listed on the side and found here, just graduated from UC Davis.) I found his speech unsurprisingly amusing and well done, but will just excerpt this:

It took me my first year of college to figure out that I wasn't going to pursue the line of study I originally thought I would. When I first announced that I would major in English, not life sciences, my disappointed and well-intentioned father sent me an e-mail which consisted solely of a link to a CNN article titled, "Most lucrative college degrees." It prominently featured a table of starting salaries according to major, and - as expected - "Liberal Arts majors" were listed dead last.

Understanding that my father, an Asian dentist, would want his son, not surprisingly also Asian, to receive a degree that would lead to a medical profession, I had no choice but to ignore my family's helpful input on my life decisions.

This is the catch-22 of parenting, what it means to be a father or mother. If parents do their job right, they'll give their child autonomy. And, of course, it would not be autonomy if the child could not - did not - choose to do things with his or her life that the parent would rather they did not.

Happy Father's Day Glen.

Policy for Two-Parent Families

"Parental involvement means not only a preparatory effort to help our parents get up to snuff, but also to make sure that we do everything we can to have two-parent families."
- Mitt Romney

Left to speculate about the policy implications of this kind of statement, I will do my best to fill in where Mitt left off.

Of course, it's a catch-22. If you want to have children, to take responsibility for launching a life into the world, you obviously lack the judgment needed to actually raise them. Yet there is no reason to single out child raising. Misinformed optimism is the catalyst for all projects.

Many candidates talk about the importance of a child having two parents. I agree. Not only do I think that children should have two parents, but I think that the rich do it right: children deserve nannies and a parade of private tutors to complement their parents' limited repertoire.

In order to ensure that children are raised properly, we could neuter each infant at birth. They could be neutered by a simple procedure that can be easily reversed once they have demonstrated financial and emotional stability and passed a series of courses on parenting. The license to reproduce should be harder to get than a license to drive or hunt pigeons. We could even make financial independence a prerequisite to reproduction, thus ensuring the above-mentioned childhood nirvana of nannies and support staff.

Obviously, this could create some issues. Birth rates may drop precipitously. One can easily imagine a future in which the few qualified to be born would be hounded by calls from worried pensioners, concerned about stimulating enough economic activity to generate deposits into social security in a world with 100 retirees for every 1 working stiff.

And of course, if reproduction were outlawed, only outlaws would reproduce, suggesting a society even stranger than this one.

But these are merely details and I’ve contacted the campaigns emphasizing two-parent families for clarification of how such issues would be addressed. You can be reassured that their emphasis on traditional families are not just empty words, designed to trigger head nodding. There must be policy implications – or why would they mention such issues? I'll keep you posted as I learn more. I can hardly wait.

The Odd Job of Parenting

Tomorrow my youngest turns 18 and next week my daughter is 20. Even though I'm only 46, I have 38 years of experience as a parent (you just add up the ages of your children to calculate years of experience, right?).

I've learned a few things about parenting. I've learned to kiss them on the head when I'm confused by them or frustrated by them or delighted with them. This seems to work on 18 month old children and 18 year old children alike. I've learned to call them "precious children," as a reminder to me and to them. And I've changed my mind about my job as a parent.

When these two little people came into the world, I actually thought it was my job to help turn them into certain kind of people. A couple of decades later, I'm come around to the opinion that my job is very different.

Anyone with children is amazed by what distinct personalities they are. They come into the world at a particular trajectory, seemingly destined to be a particular somebody, and it is not exactly clear that a parent can do much about it. Well, other than make them feel self-conscious or guilty about who they are.

So, how has this realization changed my notion of what it means to be a parent? Rather than try to change or shape who they are, I see my job as helping them to figure out how to succeed, how to navigate life, given that they are who they are. As we stand beside each other, trying to figure this out, I learn one more thing; they usually have a better idea than me about how to do that.

Parenting. It's an odd job and after 20 years I still don't know where I'm supposed to pick up my paycheck.

Mothers and Presidential Race 2008 Policy Proposal One

The civilized world rests on the fragile foundation of mothers. We digress about the influence of media, the quality of our schools, and the importance of good government. All those are important, but none is as influential on a child as his or her mother. Because we've forgotten this fundamental fact, we've ignored what mothers are going through. We all know that mothers are, in record numbers, raising children alone. Additionally, mothers are more likely to raise a child hundreds of miles away from a family network of their parents or siblings, resources that have historically been available for tasks as simple as baby sitting while she runs an errand or as profound as offering advice about how to deal with bad behavior or a child who wakes the household many times a night. Finally, jobs demand more and both mothers and fathers are forced to juggle parenting with excessive hours and stress from jobs they're required to work in order to pay the rent or mortgage. The traditional social supports of partner, extended family, or tolerant (or even unnecessary) employer have eroded. What we need is recognition of this fact. One little thing that we can begin doing to help - and it is just one little thing that will need so many other supporting tissues to work - is to offer education and support sessions for mothers. I'm proposing a series of pilot programs to introduce free sessions for mothers. Once these pilots have been revised to the point that they have proven successful, I would fund the rollout of a nationwide program. These sessions will meet at least three needs. One, mothers will be in classes with peers who have children roughly the same age, creating social networks that are helpful in ways that can scarcely be calculated. Two, these sessions will share the latest and best research on nutrition, learning, behavior, and child development. These courses will continue for years.

And three, these courses will do more than offer advice. They will be agents for problem solving, forming a central reference place for dealing with issues as varied as spousal or child abuse to homelessness or finding and funding a dentist. The leaders of these sessions will effectively be advocates for mothers, working with agencies as varied as urban housing and local schools to help these mothers to more effectively care for the children they love. There are a variety of questions and further issues raised by this proposal. For instance, I would propose as part of the legislation tax breaks for employers who allow mothers time off to attend these sessions. These and other kinds of supporting initiatives could be worked out at the various pilot program sites.

This initiative will help with education; it is time to stop admonishing teachers to do the job that we won't help mothers to do. Teachers can't be expected to raise children but we do need to do more to help mothers to do just that. Just as it is not enough to praise troops and then leave them to fight unarmed and unprotected, we have to do more than praise mothers and do more to ensure that they have what they need to do their jobs.
[I'm going to begin an intermittent series of proposals that I'd like to hear from a candidate - any candidate - for president in 2008. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm looking for a candidate who aligns with my values but just as importantly, I am looking for a candidate who shows signs of being a social inventor like FDR. Too many candidates can (and have) polled people to learn how to speak to their values; at this point I am less interested in a candidate who tells me that he'll sell me a Van Morrison record than a candidate who has invented an iPod that lets me listen to Van Morrison in a new way. This is the first in a series of sketches of policy innovations that I would support.]