Modern careers expanded women’s freedom while competing with the same years in which families form most easily. This section follows that timing problem into remedies the rest of the book has been too well-behaved to entertain, including the ones that would take women out of the labor market.
Drafting notes (not yet prose)
Have the conversation. Do not replace it with a milder cousin and call that courage. Follow extreme versions to their ends; include milder redesigns as adjacent cases, not as the only respectable remainder. Cite chapter 3’s LFP and child-penalty numbers; do not rebuild the tables.
Direct mechanism
- Years of education and continuous paid work during ages ~18–35 compete with meeting a spouse, marrying, and having several children.
- Distinguish the “incarceration effect” of being in school (delay) from preference change after graduation (smaller desired families, higher opportunity cost, later marriage-market entry).
- What education is for: formation of a person versus training to sit in a cubicle through peak fertility.
The unfashionable solutions, stated plainly
- Devon Eriksen: “Stop. Hiring. Women.” The 15-year window; education for cubicles; men no longer able to offer support; “you’re not ready.”
- Follow it: labor supply and male wages; the marriage market when women earn as much as men; legality (sex-discrimination law); what “support” requires; what women were promised; what average men can no longer offer.
- dmoonlives: female higher education as wasted resources because many later seek a providing husband and children.
- TradAdvocate: sending an 18-year-old daughter to a secular university as the statistical default of delay, debt, binge, and a worldview that does not include young motherhood.
- NerdAthleticz / robbyparisi: women out of the workforce; fathers as heads of families.
Neighboring experiments, not replacements
- A one-earner (or one-and-a-half-earner) household that can actually pay the rent, via wages, housing, and tax treatment of household production.
- Two models of support: help a mother stay in work or help a mother stay home. Current policy quietly prefers the first.
- Raise the relative cost of third-party childcare so staying home is not the stupid economic choice (author note in
feedback.md). - Career paths with seasons, for fathers too.
- Shorten credential theater; residential party-and-debt university as a fertility technology without a ban on women learning.
- Chesterton: the confusion between a wage and a life.
Constraints on the prose
- First person, low temperature. Let the extremity of the proposal do the work.
- Do not sneer at educated women.
- Do not pretend “flexibility” language solves the timing problem.
- Inclusion is not endorsement.