 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Steve Horowitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and Department Chair at St. Lawrence University and author of the new book, High X Modern Family, Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Steve. Hi, guys. My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So you're an economist and you've written a book about family. So did you just get bored with economics, apparently, and decided you wanted to write about child rearing or something like that? It's a great question. It's an interesting answer to how I came into this. It actually came out of my teaching. One of the great things about teaching at a liberal arts college is you get the opportunity to do interdisciplinary stuff and work with colleagues. And as part of our first year seminar program a number of years ago, 20 years ago now, I ended up teaching at the time with a couple of colleagues who were interested in family issues. And so I thought, yeah, I'm an economist. Gary Becker talked about family. We can do this. And I taught with one of those folks for a couple of years. And then she left. And then since then I've taught now that course six times with a colleague in the Psychology Department who turned out to be a wonderful co-teacher, teaching partner and friend. And she introduced me to a lot of the sort of family stuff that's in here and the legal stuff, too. She also has a law degree. And so our work together got me thinking about the family as a social institution and trying to teach that to first year students and why sort of libertarians haven't talked about it, right? I mean, you think, you know, why haven't libertarians said very much at all about the family? And what could they say about the family? And in particular, what could someone who sort of was trained in economics and in Austrian economics and Mises and Hayek, what insights could they bring to that conversation? This seems, you know, initially kind of an odd project, especially coming from an Austrian or Hayekian direction because the thing that we all know about, the main thing we know about Hayek and the Austrian school is the knowledge problem and the price system solving the socialist calculation debate. And these seem to be things that are very different from the way that we think about families. And families seem structured almost entirely opposite to the way we think about a market economy and that you do have distribution along central planning lines and whatnot. So is this, is it as an odd of fit as it initially seems? I don't think so. I think one of the things that you find really in Hayek, but it's in Mises too actually, but I'll focus on sort of Hayek's version of it, is the idea that, you know, markets aren't the appropriate solution to every human social problem. It's funny, just I just want to say that there's so many people who don't even know that they think that Hayek thinks that the markets solution to every social problem. So in fact, yeah, right. And, you know, if you've read the introduction, right, I have one of those in the introduction more or less, right, where I have to combat that right off the bat. But yeah, I think that's really important. Hayek's very clear, right? You know, we, for the smaller tasks that we do intentional kind of cooperative, we call them communities or whatever, right, can be very effective. And we have a lot to those firms, right? The firm has elements of that sort of, you know, they're in that. I'm going to use the word carefully, but they're socialist or altruistic or whatever, you know, collective, whatever word you want to use. And the reason we need the market is that once we get beyond a relatively small number of people and we get beyond the ability to sort of engage with each other face to face and to sort of know what each other wants. In essence, when we're dealing with anonymous human beings, we need the market to coordinate our activities. We need prices and all the things that we were just talking about to do the job, because now we're outside the bounds of the world of the intimate or known and into the world of the unknown and anonymous. And so markets enable us to coordinate in that world. One way to think about it is what markets do is coordinate between and are among families and firms and all these other little sort of islands of cooperation and collaboration. That's what markets are. So to even say, even when people say, well, Hayek's all about the market, what the market is is a collection of little, you know, I'm exaggerating a bit, but little versions of socialist collectives, right, scattered all over the place. So in a more, I guess sort of abstract sense or specific, because you kind of touched on it, but what is the Hayekian view of social institutions in general and how they're created and what they're supposed to do? Yeah, they're problem solvers, right? I mean, I think the best way to think about social institutions is that is think in terms of their function, right? What do they do? And what they do is they solve some problem that human beings have. And most, not all, but most social institutions came about through some social evolutionary spontaneous order, as Hayekians would call it, processes where nobody invented them sort of whole cloth, but rather human beings who had problems that needed to be solved. If we think about the family, right? We have to raise these helpless infants into reasonably functioning adults, among other things that families do, but that's certainly an important one. So the way in which social institutions come about and organize themselves will be responses to the particular problems that any particular situation at any particular time, you know, throw up and that social institutions will solve. An important part about that too, right? The social institutions aren't static. They evolve and change, and that's part of that spontaneous or order story too. One of the, I think, things that I try to get out on the table early in the book is this sort of relationship between function and form and recognizing that the form that social institutions, the structure that social institutions have is tightly linked to the particular functions they perform. What are they, what they look like will depend not solely, but largely on what they do. And that's important because you say that very early on that if you talk to conservatives and they say, the family is dying or something like this, they're seeming to not clarify the difference between the form of the family, whether it's Liva to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, and the function about what a family is supposed to do. Right, and I think that also comes in a lot with the phrase and, you know, with students over the years, this is the one that comes up a lot, is, what do we mean by a normal family, right? I mean, normal can have this understanding in terms of the form, the type of family, right? What's the most typical family? Is it a two-parent family? Is it not, right? I mean, so descriptively or the form families take is one notion of normal or typical, but then we have this other notion of normal, which is more like functional or dysfunctional, right? A family can look a particular way, but whether it's normal or not might depend upon does it actually do the things we think families should do? And, you know, single, for example, you know, single-parent families, most of them do raise kids successfully to adulthood. So their form is different, but they function okay. And so I think understanding that difference between what families look like and what they do and how well they do it often gets confused. Conservatives frequently do that. I think others do too, but certainly conservatives do when we decline of the family and what's a normal family and all these kinds of things. So it sounds like you'd be someone who'd say that, because conservatives always say family is the bedrock institution of society and all these things, but someone might be listening to you and thinking that you're disagreeing with that. Are families bedrock institutions of society? They are, you know, and I think one way I've always thought about this book project and my research on the family is that what I want to do is construct a non-conservative defense of the family as a social institution. So if we tie this to the form and function thing, right? I mean, what I would argue is that the functions that families perform are irreplaceable. You need the family as a social institution. But that doesn't mean the family needs to be the identical form of the family throughout history. It hasn't been. And just because we see one form at one time doesn't mean it's universal. So I think for me, it's recognizing that multiple family forms are capable of performing the functions that we expect families to perform. I guess how strict is the definition of family here? So is anything that fulfills the functions that we've outlined for a family a family? Yeah. Well, it's tricky, right? Because obviously if you start defining family in terms of blood relationships, right, you've got a couple problems right away. Because number one, the obvious one is we have adoption and things like that. But more importantly, the very foundational relationship that creates families is not a blood relationship. You don't marry people you're blood related to, right? So the family from what forms families in most cases, if we think marriage, right, is not a blood relationship. But then once you say it's not about blood relations, right, where do you draw, what stops something, how do we know what a family is or is not, where's that line? I'm not sure there is a kind of bright line that we can say this is and this isn't. Maybe like pornography, we know it when we see it. But we certainly know that families are institutions in which people care for each other, in which children are raised, in which people engage in the household production activities, in which people engage in sexual activities, right? These are all part of what we think of as being a family. And certainly legal definitions, we can, people who aren't legally married but who raise children together, I think we have no problem calling them families in a sort of sociological or social scientific sense. So maybe I'm dancing around your question. But I think the best way to understand, I think the best way to understand what families are is generally by what does this, what is this group of people doing, right, and is what they're doing looking like the things we expect families to do. Because we know, I mean, we know we'd even marriage, right? I mean, we talk about single-parent families all the time and there we're thinking about kids. Are we, what about a couple who never had kids but who has their elderly parents living in with them, is that, what, yeah, that's a family, right? So I mean, how do we categorize all these things is an interesting question. So let's get into the history of the family because as we sort of scoped out here, a lot of people who think that the family is, I mean, they said the Bedrock institution of society, they're often think that they're talking about the same thing. And sometimes it seems like, especially conservatives, seem like they're talking about a nuclear family or a leave-it-to-beaver type family that was around in ancient Jerusalem and was also around in the 50s and should be around today because it's crucial. What's wrong with that view? You give the history of the family in sort of a few chapters and you start with the family under poverty. Yeah, so I think that the problem with it is that it's just, well, it's not true, right? I mean, the family has evolved and changed in a whole bunch of different ways. And certainly for most of human history, the primary challenge facing human beings and therefore facing families was grinding poverty, right? Producing food and surviving and ensuring that your children survived was the overwhelming task for human beings. And that was done within the family as a social institution, was the primary way we did that. One way to think about that is that the family historically for most of human history has been the unit of production, right? And farming agriculture is the most obvious example. We think about married couples running a farm and again, perhaps having a lot of kids and other relatives pitching in to help do this. And this mattered for marriage, right? Who did you marry? Who you married for most of human history was someone you could work effectively with. The notion of marrying for love is a relatively recent phenomenon. We can come back to that in a little bit. But for most of human history, right, it was in economist terms, you wanted complementary human capital combinations, right? But that were about production. It wasn't, you know, look how beautiful it is. Look at those shoulders. She can plow, right? That's, you know, when we think about what... That's poetry right there. Yeah, I'm telling you. Eighth century romantic poetry. Well, right. And which note? No, by the way, right? All the romance that we think of back even, you know, say five, 600 years ago, romance normally wasn't husband to wife. It was mistress, right? Appalart and Hallowe's or Romeo and Juliet, yeah. Right. So you're who you married, again, unless you were the very rich, right? Who you married was very much a narrow sort of economic and very calculated in some sense decision. And both, you know, wives and kids were in some sense the analogous to employees. And the household was a firm. And you were producing enough to survive. And the result of that, again, was marriage for love was a luxury people couldn't afford. It was sort of limitations on women's rights that we think about all the time. Family size was big, right? You wanted to have a lot of kids to help work the farm. And kids were an economic asset, including when you got old. You know, it was certainly much cheaper and more fun to make your own labor than it is to hire it. So what, you know, large families were part of this too. And childhood wasn't what we think of today either, right? I mean, kids were viewed as, you know, we're off to work early on and education was fairly rare. Again, you had to have the wealth to do it. So in that sort of chapter on the family in poverty, and I really emphasize, and again, this is all pretty common knowledge among historians, right? There's nothing new here. But what what begins to happen over time is that we see that the transition take place with the advent of capitalism and markets and industrialization in the late 18th and 19th century. So, so there, right? I mean, the key, the two key developments there are people are able to work outside the home in a major consistent way for really the first time in human history, right? I mean, with always some of that, but now more people are able to work in factories or make their living trading. This is sort of a Diadromoklowski type story here too, right? And so once work goes out of the household and people can earn a living outside the household, the sort of space that economics filled up in the household is now available to other kinds of banks. At the same time, that same industrial revolution and capitalist revolution was making people wealthier. And the early on, we know, you know, mom, dad, and the kids all had to work in the factories, didn't take long for the kids to come home and mom to come home and dad to be able to support them all, you know, on his own income. And it's at that point that we begin to see the transition to what we think of as the modern family, where now people can afford to marry for love. You don't have to worry so much about, you know, what those are. And this, of course, creates a much more equal relationship between men and women. It's not coincidental. We see middle late 19th century, the first women's rights movement in the end of coverture, the end of, you know, the limits on what married women can do with their property. All of these things begin to liberate women in these ways. And we begin to see marriage itself become more equal. Domestic violence for the first time takes on a negative tinge in a way it hadn't before. At the same time, family size begins to shrink. Parents start to regulate their fertility a little bit, you know, more carefully. And then the kids get invested in more. And we begin to see by the end of the 19th century, the sentimentalization of childhood and what's sometimes called the sheltered childhood, a kind of precursor of some of the trends we're seeing today in the extreme. And by the time we get into the 20th century, among the middle class anyway, we have what more or less looks like the modern family. We don't quite have that 50s family yet. We still have, you know, people still took borders in and elderly parents and family size hadn't come down all the way. And women, you know, women's roles were shifting too. But by the 20th century it looks more or less like what we have now. That was pretty good. You gave pretty much an overview of most of the book. That was good. Good job. You can tell I've done this. So there's a rather strikingly common fable that we hear. It shows up, Hollywood movies often are based around this narrative or the fairy tales that I read to my kids. It seems to come up a lot, which is basically the opposite of the story you just told. So the story you just told is that wealth and the growth of wealth enriched the family in meaningful ways that a lot of the things that we consider to be the most important parts of family life were themselves a result of having access to more wealth and some more freedom. But there's this really common story of the real family exists among the poor, where the rich guy has to learn how to appreciate family and can only do it by becoming poor or spending time among the poor. So this is Annie or there was that Nicholas Cage movie a while back. The one where he trades places with the poor people. But it shows up in fairy tales all the time too like the rich son wanders across the poor family and learns the meaning of relationships. And so why is that if the story of wealth is so clear and there's wealth that enhanced these important family connections, why do so many of us either believe this counter narrative or at least just feel kind of drawn to it? So really, I've never thought about that questionnaire and it's really interesting one off the top of my head. I think part of the answer is within wealthy societies, right, that fairy tale has more resonance in the sense that poor families within relatively wealthy societies you know might probably spend more time together because they have a few other things to do. They don't have money to spend on other things, right? And so if it's about those cultivating those relationships and oftentimes let's be honest those cultivating of those relationships are a consequence of poverty, right? You know that the reason you have to cultivate those family relationships and you have to be close and especially with extended family is you're in relative poverty. But still that's perhaps within the midst of plenty. But if you go back, I mean I spent when I started doing the sort of research on this book I was started when I spent 10 weeks on a like visiting gig at Bowling Green State when they had those social philosophy center there. And I spent like a week reading these histories of the family from the you know that were histories of the 16, 17, 18 hundreds. It's worse than any horror movies you can, I mean it was horrific. It was the most depressing week of my life, right? Just sort of when people would you know they couldn't care for their own kids because they had to care for the farm so they would you know give out their children to wet nurses to care for their infants. The wet nurses are overburdened. They would swaddle them up and leave them in their own filth, right? Sometimes they'd hang them on hooks, okay? Just because they had nowhere else, literally nowhere else to put them. Or the other story that was quite common is they'd leave them to stay warm by the fire. You can imagine what happens next, right? A couple of good sparks and you've got a big problem. I mean this is, we can't even imagine this world at least in the West today, right? So when we hear that kind of fairy tale story of well the nobility of the poor family, right? Again it's kind of possible the same way we can imagine we sort of romanticize farm families within the larger society today, right? I have a line in an old column of mine about how we're rich enough to play at being poor, right? And it's the same kind of thing. Like turning butter for fun. Slow food, right? Yeah. All these sort of things, right? But the reality of that poverty when you're not in the midst of plenty is a whole different thing. And I just would want to say people should read Edward Shorter's book or a couple of other references in my book and just spend a couple of hours with those families and see whether you think there's much to romanticize. Well I think Eric's question is interesting because it also goes back to some of the things you were talking about a few minutes ago about the Hayekian point about the great society which is anonymous and wealthy. I mean, or tins to wealth because the trading possibilities are higher. And then the little institutions within the society that are communities and tribes and families and other things that are how we evolved in those systems. And this is a point that Hayek makes that you cannot take the morality and interaction of the tribe and extrapolate it to the entire society. Right. And it's interesting because that's a lot that you could say that the right one's the, you know, state to be our mommy and daddy and the left one's it to be a village. And it can't be either of those. So they're both extrapolating from the family and then we complain about the anonymity of modern times and how soulless it is and all these kind of things like that where it's like the person-to- person interaction is what we can get from this capitalist system that made the family a richer and better place. Right. Right. And one way to think about this is that the very outsourcing, to use that word, the outsourcing of the economic functions of the family to the marketplace that capitalism and industrialization brought opened up the scope for the family to be this site of emotion, emotional and psychological and, you know, sort of affection and all these other kinds of things that we think is so important about the family today. Right. I mean, that's the interesting part. We created loving families. You know, the story on the left sometimes is well, capitalism turned the family into this sort of calculating rational, you know, no, it's just the opposite. Right. The family to use McCloskey's sort of virtues language. Right. What capitalism and industrialization did was to kick prudence out of the family and open up the space for love. Right. And that, you know, love is there in ways it never was before. Yeah. The question of marrying someone by prudence, which of course is going to involve a lot of different economic situations. I wanted to get more into, so we're still at the family at poverty. There's another element of the family of poverty, which is related to this sort of great society concept is the political aspect of the family, which is somewhat at a rich level, kind of game of thrones, kind of marriage system. But it's also the sense of expanding your trading possibilities beyond in a world where you only have status and you don't have contract, even in that poverty world, being able to trade with more people is a good thing and marrying in that way is a good thing too. Right. And I think that you can look at the political thing and right, as you say, in two levels, even for poor families, one of the great things about marriage is that in creating families is that it brings this whole other group of people into your world with a shared interest in grandchildren, right? So now you have this whole other network of family who is a resource that you can draw on. So marriage, even among the poor, marriage expands kind of the political community and the trading community, sure, but even the political community sort of defense and things like that in a way that is desirable. And among the rich, right, I mean, you know, we have Shakespeare plays and all kinds of things that remind us of the politics of marriage among the wealthy and powerful. And it was a way to form alliances. He said very much Game of Thrones. I have, I don't know if you guys noticed it, but one of my favorite footnotes in the book is the one about the Monty Python and the Holy Grail one, right? Which is, if you recall, the wedding scene in that movie is in fact a great example of the sort of upperclass marriage, right? I don't recall it, actually. Yeah. So, you know, it's the king of swamp castle is trying to marry off his somewhat doddering son in order to Princess Luki, right? And the idea is that the reason he wants to marry her is because her father, you know, his son's father and a lot of B has these great tracts of land, right? They're going to marry. And it's clearly all about the economics at one point the character, the king character refers to, instead of the marriage, refers to the merger of our children, right? So, and then even later on when Sir Lancelot, I think it is, comes in and carves up all the wedding guests and there's blood and dead people everywhere, right? The father insists, you know, we can't stop the wedding, right? The wedding has to go on, right? What's a little blood? And again, the idea that this was so important politically in that sort of the emotional aspect of it and the fact that the son didn't even want to marry this person, right? Didn't matter. And so the sort of politics and again, as you say, in a world where status or power is much more important than contract, marriage has a political element and family have a huge political element too. I should have mentioned earlier, you know, one of the ways we know about the economic function of families and marriage back then, of course, is last names, right? We have all these last names that describe the work people did, Baker, Brewer, Fletcher, Miller, right? Miller, right? Cooper was a barrel maker, right? All these kind of things, all the Smiths, right? So, you know, that's how we know that family and occupation was once, that's a farmer, right? So, well, you know, all these kind of things. So, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a feminist Marxist professor, which I've known many of them and so is Aaron. Actually, and Aaron once had a professor who said that serfdom was better than capitalism. Was that what she said? Yes, because the lines of responsibility were clear and people knew who you were supposed to be taking care of and they had obligations to take care of people based on status. So, when you died at 35, at least you knew who was responsible. Yes. But we get to the 19th century and I could see a feminist being, oh, this is interesting. I've never really heard of maybe, you know, capitalism or at least a very bare bones type of it. Again, the 18th century capitalism, the emergence of some amount of markets and trading helped women get out of just, you know, picking things in the field and then never leaving and just being sort of subjected to their husband constantly. But it seems that in the 19th century you could argue that the industrialization of the world pulled men out of the home and put them into a place where they were in positions of power because the marketplace was assumed to be a place of status and power and left women in the home and not given the opportunity to be in the marketplace which exacerbated or maybe returned the subjugation of women at a new level starting in the sort of Victorian era in early 19th century. Yeah. And there's truth to that. Right? I mean, one thing I'll note is that the story that I'm telling and certainly that I've told so far is not inconsistent with the Marxian story, right? If you read Marx's stuff on the family, it's a similar kind of story. I think we diverge more in the 20th century. But this is an interesting question, right? Because, I mean, what it's true that now men had power in the marketplace more often perhaps than they did before and did that. So before capitalism men had power in the home, right? I mean, it was still, right? Even in the world of poverty and sort of the Magin agricultural family got the husband still has all the power. Now what's happened is he's earning that income outside the home and bringing it back to the home and coming in, sort of, you know, coming in with that power. But at the same time the shift towards marriage for love created a weird kind of pressure, right? To the degree that now men and women were married because they loved each other, it became harder to justify tyranny within the home. Again, it happened. I'm not denying that it happened. But it's kind of, it was on rockier ground. Right? And there was a sense in which there was being, the fact that they loved each other opened up a door to a claim of equality that did not exist before. Right? We're, yeah, go ahead. And there's also the, and these are sort of, I think, mutually feedbacking effects but you talk about the separate spheres. But the other thing you kind of get out of this is, because love is a product of wealth in this interpretation. But there are other things that come from wealth like, oh, say separate bedrooms for children and parents. And so then you start getting almost a private sphere also coming out of the 90th century, which, again, some feminists would say it would be a bad thing. But maybe you could actually be looked at as a good thing. And right. And again, all of those things that made marriage into this, you know, more sacred, more emotion-based institution at least created pressure toward equality. And the separate spheres point is important because the way this sort of played out was women basically began to say, OK, you guys have the public space of the market. We'll take the private space of the home. And all that Victorian domesticity that we think of, right, and often in nostalgic ways, was women laying a claim to the private sphere as their sphere. And this also extended into sort of civil society to some extent, with charitable work among wealthier women and so on. But the argument, I mean, and then grew up this whole sort of rhetorical, ideological justification that argued, well, you know, it's not unequal. Men and women just have different things they're good at and their own, their separate but equal to use a phrase that would get mattered in other dimensions. But essentially, that was the argument, right? Different but equal might be a better way to put it, right? And it was an argument about men and sort of saying sometimes we see it in different forms today, but the distinct feminine and masculine qualities and that women and men for the public space and that was a fair, in some sense, a fair deal, right? But don't we have historical evidence of that sort of divide going way, way back? I mean, that's how like the ancient Greeks operated along those lines with the women were basically in charge of managing the home. Well, the husband, although the husbands did the shopping, but that means it seems to predate. Yeah, to some degree, but it was never, at least as I understand the history, that was never a way of, never an ideological cover that made it seem equal, right? Historically, I mean, the sexual division of labor is universal, right? It's not always the same people doing the same things, but the idea that men and women have generally different tasks is pretty universal, right? But this, the separate spheres in the Victorian era was papered, that was papered over by this language of equality, right? That said, we have separate spheres, but they're both important, right? And was that really true? No, but it became a way sort of a kind of first step on the road to equality. And you can see, right, how the end of coverture and the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement and all these things, we're gonna bust out from there, right? We're just gonna say, well, wait a second, if we're talking about, we really aren't equal. Well, this is just nonsense to sort of claim that the separate spheres are equal. We don't have to vote. We don't have full property, right? You know, we're not educated in the same way that men are. It's funny. I just finished reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which was written in the late 1800s in its late 18th century. And it's making, you know, it's, she was, she saw all this kind of coming and saw it at the time, too, this sort of, you know, treating women as different. But later it became the difference turned into an argument for equality. And I think that's the difference you see at the turn of the 20th century. And there's a lot of interesting things you point out to be very perceptive and kind of filling in gaps. So you talk about in the 19th century as we start to get wealth that allows for private spheres, for bedrooms, for homes, for children's rooms like we started associated there like children's toys that we have, we think of children's toys in Victorian era. And we also think about, start thinking about holiday celebrations as things that you do in your house with your family. So you think about traditional Christmas imagery of the Victorian era starts coming out there as opposed to a thing what we all go to the square and do together. We start doing it in our home. These are all kind of interesting developments. And that's part of the kind of, I guess you could say invention of childhood in the 19th century. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. What you begin to see is childhood as a distinct phase of life and then adolescence as a distinct phase of life. Because you know before that kids would go out to work and boys at least anyway. And so that became that was the end of childhood as we think of it today. But once you have the wealth once you have the sort of keeping kids in school and educating them and then you have the development the sort of privacy of the home and the the nuclearization of the family. The sort of pairing the family down to parents and kids and sort of love and affection and all these kind of things have room to be there now. And so that's the end of childhood and you get the kind of gauzy Victorian romantic version of the family which was not untrue right in in some important ways. Is this like a specialization regime I mean basically if it may be the case that in say 1450 I think one of the answered Aaron's question about the Greeks is that I mean maybe not 1450 but it like 850 say in England I mean I think and that's also not exactly continuous socially with England but I mean in 850 if we're thinking about the nature of it takes a village it did and they could do that because and they were poor and they're all very interrelated. It could take a village they could have community laws that were strong enough to treat the community like a family it took a village but it's also inexorably related to the fact that it was really poor. Yeah and any decision any decision that a family may let me generalize any decision that a family makes in a really poor society is likely to have spillover effects to the rest of the community. So who you married mattered if you didn't marry someone who could help you produce it wasn't just you who were potentially at risk it was your ability to provide for the community to turn towards home right is certainly related to wealth it just seems like interesting because you're almost inventing privacy yeah and one of the interesting yes certainly the idea the man's home is his castle right which has a nefarious version but if we just think in terms of the idea of the privacy of the home right that is certainly made possible by the economic changes of the 18th and 19th sorry I just occurred to me this may be a completely wrong way of thinking about it but does this invention of childhood and invention of adolescence is it possible to look at that as like a declining comparative advantage of children that like as you get wealthier children just don't have any comparative advantages anymore and so we just let them have an adolescence where they don't really try to use chores than to fight with my kids about it well now you're talking about your family the question about is your kids can move along because you should be working here the way I'd put it is kids right we are wealthy enough I often say this to my students when I do talks at schools we're wealthy enough that you guys meaning college students right can sit around for your first 22 years of your life and not produce anything right and that investment in their human capital is what prolongs childhood and adolescence in these ways so we were able to invent this distinct thing because we did it's not so much that kids didn't have things they could do we didn't need them to do it right and that's a point I've made a lot and you cite our colleague Brink Lindsey's Age of Abundance book which is a spectacular book it is you don't have I mean you don't have rock and roll without adolescence I mean we first invented childhood and let's say that's until 10 and then we invented teenagerhood let's just say 11 or 13 to 18 and then we gave them disposable income and maybe a garage for a garage band and a cheap relatively cheap guitar and now they can produce culturally relevant artifacts and then we can all sit around and be nostalgic about how everything was awesome we were 18 and they don't make as good our 30s I mean I think Aaron always wants to ban millennials I mean it's his favorite hashtag I do and I think that's it's the same story too and the psychologists talk about now late adolescence or post adolescence to describe that period of life so here's the really tricky part today I think right we've extended the you know the thing people say about millennials is they don't reach the mark the traditional markers of adulthood until they're whatever and we've extended childhood right we've extended childhood and adolescence socially but biologically the age of first menses has never been less right girls are starting their periods at 11 and 12 right so now we have this long period of time where girls are capable of are biologically capable of reproducing but sort of are emotionally and developmentally and financially not necessarily prepared to be mothers and if you think about I don't know if you Aaron I can't remember if you have little girls or not but I have both he has two and a little boy two girls and a boy heads up right yeah yeah no this is the thing right and so if you think back a couple hundred years we threw kids into adulthood before they were biologically adults and now we've done the reverse right they're biologically adults long before we throw them into adulthood at least again all western developed kind of other relevant topics because I said this gets very very big and it has many fingers and many elements of social thought but after we get to privacy and we get modern family and we start really ending the subjugation of women or start really on the path of that with women to vote and increasing their ability to earn outside of the outside of the home and increase their human capital this leads to even things you argue like the normalization and then legalization of same sex marriage to some extent yeah and I think you know we what we've seen happen is that the to the degree that marriage becomes put it this way to the degree that we be among heterosexuals began to separate marriage sex and and and child and you know pregnancy right raising children that those all became separate things at one time right those were all thought to happen together now you can be married and have sex but not have kids you can have sex and not be married right I mean there's all the combinations there and once we busted that up and once marriage became about clearly about love for almost all of the population of the wealthier countries it's it's inevitable that the same sex marriage thing would come before us right one reason is is that in and of itself was a product of the same sort of social forces capitalism made it created the wealth and the work opportunities in the cities for gay for gay men and lesbian women to survive outside the typical heterosexual family and so we saw the rise of you know New York and San Francisco and so on as sort of homes to gay population you could be anonymous you didn't need to have family and over time right that sort of that turned into the ability to live one's life and to identify as gay or lesbian as in the way that we think about race and ethnicity and so on and so once you kind of have that and once you have marriages about love and it's not about kids you can see why same sex couples were saying well wait a second why are we any different we're just like you we love each other our relationship is about affection it's about romance it's about sex it doesn't have to be about kids look at all these childless right so why are we any different and you know Stephanie Coons the historian of the family who I drawn quite a bit and some of this stuff her line is I think the best one which is the the real revolution was not same sex marriage the real revolution was marriage for love and once you had marriage for love you know the toothpaste was out of the tube and it wasn't going back and so here we are today and one of the ironies of writing the book was I got the page proofs to correct on the book the day the Oberstfeld decision was rendered and that was and that was some beautiful cosmic harmony right now it meant I had to fix some things right because I and you know because I had said some things about the case that were all sort of in the future tense and I quickly was able to fix a couple paragraphs in that one chapter to get it back but yeah I mean and plus the idea of a same sex family right the notion that gays and lesbians have families not just sort of children but some Cath Weston's words families we choose right now things have changed a lot I mean they will and you write about how much things are going to change in the future but with in the latter part of the 20th century into the 21st century we have a bunch of factors divorce is an issue which is related to the economic possibilities of women the what you call market oriented human capital versus household oriented human capital now we have big conversation about dual income families what kind of important conversations should we be having now about the nature of what should we be realizing about what's happening to the family now well a couple of things I think that we're going to have to deal with you know as we move on off top of my head a few one good thing I think there are good things happening one good thing is more and more people able to work out of their homes and that changes a lot of this to the degree that men can tell a commute as we used to call it working on your home now suddenly child care looks different and the division of labor between men and women and who does what and if both parents can work out of the home sometimes suddenly a lot of these issues and especially issues about the gender division of labor within the household begin to look really different and we're weirdly kind of back to the world we were with people working in the home but they're working in the home but being paid for what amounts and so it's not as if the home it's not that the home is the firm it's just the physical site where you're working for someone else and so it's a weird mixture of the past and I think that's the more of that that we see that's going to change how millennials and others think about marriage and family and who has what responsibility and I think if the more it happens I think that will continue to narrow the gender wage gap because it takes it enables it makes more easy the vision of labor within the household and it gives both genders more flexibility in ways that I think are valuable so that's one thing I think the other thing that we're going to have to deal with is what does it what does extended life expectancy mean for marriage and here's the blunt version of the question are we biologically capable of being married to the same person for 75 or 100 years that seems I mean my parents are pushing 50 I mean add another 25 years that's going to be crazy that's a long time that's a long time for no matter how much you love someone that's a long time and I mean the biological part I mean our pair bonding has a biological basis and I don't know if it can sustain that so I don't like making prediction but here's a prediction that I think we will see happen is I think we'll see more people as life except life expectancies extend engaging in kind of serial marriages you can imagine someone saying I want to be married to one person when I'm young perhaps when we can travel and do stuff maybe I want to have but maybe that's not the person I want to have kids with and then I have kids and maybe when I'm older I want to be with someone else and one other thing to consider too is that marriage I think has now become at least relatively it's still important if you have kids but relatively more important at the end of life right you want someone there to care for you at the end young people don't need it right that's why marriage rates are down they just don't need it right but they're going to want it when they're older it wouldn't surprise me to see a lot of people who are single for a long time then suddenly getting married right later in life because they think I need someone to take care of me and I need companionship when I'm not working anymore so I think there's some interesting things that could happen there with respect well it seems that we're going to have I mean the economic status of women continues to increase and it continues to increase relative in western countries for example we're going to college and all these things and they can also have kids outside of wedlock and all this stuff it seems that increasingly I mean it's you know my grandma she literally used to say why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free to like my you know female cousins and now casual sex is okay so the milk for free all these things are socially acceptable so what reason is there to get married I mean are we almost eliminating marriage having existed historically and so now we might have to talk about then as we said the form and the function of the family could we could the family kind of disappear I don't think so I think so so there's a couple things here right the social scientific and I will give my conservative friends this you know who are listening particular they're absolutely right about one empirical fact the social scientific evidence is clear that all other things are better in two parent families than in single parent family now they do you know if it's single parent by widowhood or death of a parent they look more like two parent families it's divorce right that clearly does make on average right kids worse off and so we can talk about that and questions about that but it's it's true and I think it's it is better for kids again all other things equal to be raised in a sort of loving two parent and I would note it works better than one so in that sense that's if you're thinking about having kids having marriage or some kind of marriage like institution makes a lot of sense and I think we do run into trouble the ways in which the welfare system subsidizes single parenthood and or penalizes marriage depending on your income level and especially the way it does so among poor folks the tax and welfare system is set up to penalize marriage among poor people in that sense you know the disappearance of marriage which I'm not so sure it's really disappearing I think it's just changing but to the degree it's being driven by policy and I don't talk a lot about this in the book because other people have done the work on this fairly well I mean I mention it but I do think we could make some policy changes that would help this a lot so in that sense I don't think it's going away and weirdly the other way in which marriage is not in family or wealthier is what are we going to do with you know polyamory right and what is the demand for more than two going to come at us and I think it will and that raises some other interesting questions too so it seems like people want to live with other people right what's true is economically it's not as necessary particularly for women if you think about marriage as being kind of specialization and exchange the way it has been for much of human history that's gone and wealthier economies for men and women are gone why marry now it becomes companionship right you know you're not marrying for the big broad shoulders but you're marrying because you both like to ski or you like to see the same movies or read the same books that's kind of the foundation of a lot of marriage or eat the same food that's sort of where it is and I think that's probably a good thing but it does mean that people are pickier and we see people marrying later too if we want another concern is are we you know reproducing ourselves right we've seen this happen in western Europe and in Asia you know so many one-child families or people who don't have kids and the demographics of that and who is having kids and who isn't and what that means is a whole interesting set of questions too so one of the concerns that you hear that I'm curious how these trends play into and what we do about it if it seems to be we don't want to limit the growth of wealth right but and we don't want to stop markets from functioning and we don't want to stop a lot of these positive trend lines but there are scenarios some of which you just outlined where things could turn bad because of it and one that seems to be relatively common today is this the rising status of women added to the fact that women tend not to want to marry down men will marry down in social class or whatever else whereas women won't and so as more and more women gain wealth and more and more women go to college and we're now majority women for 60% for colleges most colleges you end up with large portions of men who can't find a mate because they're lower status than the women and then large portions of women who can't find a mate so many of the available men are lower status and that you know I mean there's all sorts of problems associated with unattached men violence and poverty and bad stuff and so how do we how do we address these kinds of problems without you know killing the golden goose without saying well let's limit the wealth or in other ways bring in government in pernicious functions and it's not even clear what government could do about this I mean short of limiting the wealth which I'm not which would not even sure it would work anyway but you know what you know I'm trying to imagine what it would be sort of you know forced forced you know get all those men into a program where we teach them you know manners the pickup artist stuff or desensitize them to video games or something I'm not sure what we do about that to be honest with you I think you know part of me wants to say women who you know why isn't it the case that women who gain in wealth won't be as willing as men who have wealth to quote unquote Mary down right you know why what's driving women to see this differently is it I mean it could be you know I'm not here for my children but in a world where you know the ability to work after having a kid for women is so much easier than it used to be is that all that important and what you know if you're a high status high income woman what do you really want out of your husband you know if you want to have kids what do you want out of your husband presumably someone you know kind of reliable and whatever but it's not necessarily the case you need resources you might need their time right if they're willing I don't know I'm not sure what the answers are I just I think though you're right the one thing we don't want to do is you know is kill the goose it's laying the golden egg and I'm not sure what else we can do about it certainly you know one of the things I would like to see happen is I wonder how many you know sort of lower income men were oversold on college and then never found themselves trapped between not getting the job they wanted and not having skills to do kind of you know high paying manual labor if we had more particularly young men perhaps but even young women too who realized right away they didn't need college to make a good living right and be a good person you know I wonder whether that wouldn't help this too again I'm speculating there if we're talking about the way the concerns we have with how the family I mean this should be a normative question we're dealing with here which is interesting within the framework you've discussed because if we look at the family as an involving institution then there's a completely positive way of looking at where we just we look at the environment it evolves within and we analyze different constraints upon it and say here's why women were this way in poor times and then the 19th century and this is why the family all this stuff that we've discussed but what how do we be normative about this and be concerned if they're being dysfunctional if they're being undercut aren't they always just going to be reacting to the environment that they're within the policies they're within I yeah to some degree but I think you know I think we can ask this is kind of the question I ask in the chapter on the parenting stuff right which is what what's the and this is the Hayekian question too what's the family's role as a social institution in contributing to the survival and thriving of a liberal society right and so you know we I do we need families we need make sure the kids are raised well for example right so there's a normative kind of issue we might take up and if we and if we believe that kids are raised best in an environment of two parents who are happily married to each other okay then how do we you know how do we get out of the way of that happening how do we help ensure that it does happen questions you know what we're seeing with parenting right now right are too many kids and I'm not sure it's as widespread as the worst people you know the sort of worst version is but too many kids kind of coming to coming to adult responsibilities without adult skills to deal with them okay and you ask anyone who teaches or staff and colleges today about being without their parents that's a scary you know that's a scary thing for a free society or society that aspires to be free right and to the degree to which childhood is either extremely risk averse we don't let kids take any chances we pad them up and we give them playgrounds with 10 feet of cushion on it right and sort of the the Norse-Canadian type stuff or the reverse where kids take all kinds of things both of those seem really bad for a world in which we want entrepreneurship and reasonable risk taking and people to bear responsibility for their actions right so we can I think we can talk about families normatively too and you know explanation isn't justification so even if we can explain why families I mean I have an explanation in that chapter I think about why we've come to this sort of hyper-parenting stuff that doesn't mean it's right and it doesn't it's not a nirvana fallacy sort of thing right where everything that is is ideal so I think we can push back and again policy's part of that right but also our beliefs about parenting matter here too for what we you know how families play in a liberal society thanks for listening if you enjoy free thoughts please take a moment to rate us on iTunes free thoughts is produced by Martin McDaniel and Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org