 We're incredibly thrilled to have, as I've already put it, superstar economists and the it couple of the world of economics. I don't know how much competition there is, but even if there were a lot of competition, I'm sure that you all would still win. So we have Justin Wolfers and Betsy Stevenson here. They've flown in from Michigan. They're both now economists and professors of public policy at the University of Michigan. They have all kinds of other affiliations with the Brookings Institution, with University of Pennsylvania, with Princeton, and the National Bureau of Economic Research and have done incredible work on marriage, on happiness within marriage, on the way in which marriage influences the economy and also the way in which the economy and public policy influence behavior within marriage. We talked today about specialization in marriage when one spouse stays at home or is a secondary earner and one is the primary earner and they've done all kinds of great work on economic forces and so how we're responding is families to changes in the economy and to policy and how we're being shaped by those policies as well. So just to continue the conversation from the last panel, so let's talk about marriage as an economic unit. Marriage as an economic deal, say, between a man and a woman. I mean, that's what Simone de Beauvoir characterized marriage as this deal in which the man was the provider and the woman would bring all sorts of other resources, childbearing services, housekeeping services, sexual services, and that was the fundamental deal of marriage and it's primarily an economic unit. And so is that true? You know, Gary Becker won Noble Prize in Economics for bringing economics outside of standard questions and into things like family behavior and he started off by characterizing marriage as having enormous amounts of value because of the fact that people were more productive when they were in a marriage than when they were apart. So really giving the example, just like Adam Smith talked about the pin factory being more productive but through specialization, he explained that families were more productive because they could engage in specialization. So if a man and a woman were separate and they were trying to provide all the things for themselves separately, they would have less than if they did it together. And this was the big justification for marriage. And what we've seen over time is that benefit of marriage has been eroded, eroded enormously. And in fact, if that was really the only benefit of marriage or if that was really where we still saw marriage today, I think we would have seen much bigger declines in marriage than we've actually seen. And so what we've argued instead is that marriage has really transformed from being about, you know, producing more together to something that's fundamentally different which is enjoying life more together. So we call that consumption complementarities but it's about two people being together getting more out of life because they're together, not necessarily producing more because they're together. I mean, to say that a little bit in English, what Betsy's suggesting is the radical idea that marriage has moved from fundamentally being about producing more stuff together. This new idea, she called consumption complementarities, sometimes called hedonic marriage, it's actually just the idea that maybe it's about love and it's about enjoying doing stuff together. The economic toolkit, which often thinks about the production side of things, how we can do more together than we could do apart, we have to reshape that toolkit for thinking about what marriage is today. Another way of reframing everything Betsy just said, I think we agree on everything, is to suggest, and this is like a super economist way of looking at things but it's not crazy when you think about it, whenever we can achieve stuff through markets, we tend to do that. So I just bought my lunch, I bought it from a restaurant, I flew on a plane this morning, I bought that plane flight from US Airways. And a lot of what marriage historically was doing was filling in for missing markets, stuff you couldn't buy. If you couldn't buy it, you had to produce it at home in the family factory. And so the stuff that the family factory used to produce would be stuff like you'd sew your children's clothes, you'd make dinner, Liza used the delicate term sexual services, child care was also produced in the home. And what's changed is that the reach of the market has gone a lot deeper. So it used to be that my grandmother would sew clothes for my mother. And so clothes were something you'd produce in the family firm. And the natural seamstress, the person you'd hire would be the wife, well, dad went off, my grandfather went off to work. Today my family firm, Betsy and I employ a seamstress but it's actually someone in China rather than being done within the family firm. And so what's happened is a lot of these markets, the reach of the market has substantially increased to the point that we buy our clothes, now it's much cheaper to buy them from China. Fresh food, it's much easier to just drop off at Trader Joe's than to have a family chef, which previously would have been the wife's role. We've also seen another important role of families was actually there wasn't a lot of social protection if you lost your job. For instance, one of the functions of families was that if I lost my job, hopefully my inlaws would help us out. Of course with the rise of the welfare state, that's another role that was historically played by families that now is increasingly that this isn't the reach of the market, now it's the reach of the welfare state, which has sort of crowded out some of the historic roles that families played. Let me interject with just a little bit of I think what the changes were because you started by saying missing markets and then you gave some examples that I think to a lot of people wouldn't think the market was missing. Your grandmother could have bought clothes if she wanted to. So why is it that women thought it was a good deal to stay home and sew 50 years ago and now sewing is a luxury thing to do because it's very expensive to sew your own clothes compared to going to the store and buy them. The change in trade has really had an enormous impact on families because it means that you can find somebody who can make clothes much, much more efficiently than a stay at home spouse can. That's one of the reasons why we're trading with people all over the world and finding people who are focusing on what they can do most efficiently and that increase in trade has really eroded a lot of the benefits of having a household specialist but it's not just the change in trade, it's also been enormous technological changes. We take for granted when we go to the grocery store now that we might say, somebody says, you know, I'm going to make a cake, you know, the last time you made a cake, how many of you started with flour, eggs, butter, you know, what most people do now is they go to the store and they buy a cake mix. So even when you're making a cake, you're starting with something that's been pre-done in the factory. If you go back to, there was a grocery store that went in when these pre-made cakes were first introduced and asked women how many of them had ever made a, you know, a cake out of a box and, you know, they found like 5% had and now they went back in as part of some big anniversary in the last couple of years and asked women in the grocery store how many of them had made a cake from scratch and they got about 5% of them had ever made a cake from scratch, right? So there's been this just enormous change in how we cook and those changes, those technological changes have also reduced the value of specialists because lots of people, even myself who never learned how to cook, can follow the, you know, the directions on the back of a Trader Joe's box of box to Indian food to heat it up. I can follow the directions on a cake mix and usually not have it go flat. So you don't need as much of a specialist. I don't need to be making cake every week in order to turn out a reasonable cake once a year for my kid's birthday and the same thing is true with laundry. It actually used to be incredibly difficult to do laundry. And now it's really easy to do laundry. You can even put it all in together and put these color sheets in, right? So reds and whites can go together now. And so the need of having somebody who has the skills of a homemaker has really diminished over time. Yeah. So the other way of saying what Betsy just said is housework became so simple that even a man could do it. Well, although, although what we see, I mean, now that more and more men are getting involved in kitchens and getting involved in cooking is that kitchens are becoming incredible showcases for all sorts of tools. Then you need your flamethrower for the crème brûlée. And so it's some people would argue that just as men started becoming more involved in domestic spaces, these domestic spaces became really nice. Well, let me get some data on that just because now what we've seen what's really interesting is that, you know, over the last about 40 years, women's production inside the home has fallen by nearly 13 hours a week and men's has risen by nearly five. So that's a huge closing of the gap and it's coming both from women doing less and men doing more. Right. Right. But what's interesting to me about specialization and it's interesting also how inflammatory a topic specialization is that there, for example, I wrote in this Atlantic piece about same sex relationship that a surprising percentage of same sex couples with children will specialize in that one person will be a non-earner and the other person will earn and immediately you start getting like blog posts saying that's not true. That's not true. That's not people don't specialize. It sort of has a bad name. I think at least sort of liberal progressive ideas about how families should work. But why do you think it is that in a kind of surprising percentage of same sex couples specialization does actually happen when children come into the equation? Well, let me say I think every single household engages in specialization. Specialization doesn't have to mean one person stays home and one person works. The whole point we're saying is there's so much less to do in the household today that you don't need that kind of extreme specialization. In our household, we specialize. I do all the bills and all the taxes and manage all the money. And I have no idea how much money I have. And Justin deals with all the technology. I can barely turn that go. Every time I get on the treadmill, I'm like, how does this TV turn on again? So we do specialize. I think every household does. It becomes much more complicated when you have we have a three-year-old and an eight-month-old. So then now you need a lot more household production. And some people, many people are going to find that one person should be specializing in the three-year-old and the eight-month-old. And that's why you see people taking time out of the market. And it comes with a lot of baggage, I think, for women. And maybe one of the things you see in same sex couples is it doesn't come with quite as much baggage. But the other thing is that I think people realize that it can be incredibly efficient to take that time out when you have small kids like I have if you're only looking at today. But if you actually look at what happens to your wages over the next 40 years, it's an incredibly costly thing to do. And a lot of people don't do that. I'm sorry, what's costly to stay? To take time out of the labor force. You never get those wages back. You will never be at the same place at age 50 that you would have been if you hadn't come out of the labor force. Not only do you lose your wages those years, but you lose the gains. You come back in at a lower wage. And you're never going to reach the peak that you would have reached before, sort of no matter how hard you work. So the losses of staying home are not just the wages you give up today, but they're the promotions that you don't get in the future. And that's interesting because when I interviewed you for the first time for my book, Betsy was in town. She was getting ready to start as chief economist for the Department of Labor and you had one young child at that point. And I know you were at Penn and you were taking care of the child. And Betsy had taken the train down and she had an interview that day. And you were looking for your housing. So you were interviewing with me at the same time that you were looking at your housing and getting used to your neighborhood and you had to be on the train to get back and you were incredibly multi-tasking. But one of the things that we talked about was, and this I think plays into the work-family conversation that's going on so widely now, is that when you were talking about a friend who felt like she wasn't making enough to justify the childcare that she was going to have to pay in order to continue working. And so she was thinking, maybe I should just stop working. Maybe I just, and I think women have this calculation much more than men do. Maybe because it's my salary and so if I'm not making enough. And your argument, which rings so true to me, and both Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg have made it, is that if you keep your foot in the door, even if it feels like you're not making enough to make it worthwhile, it will be worthwhile later if you think of your careers in investment. I think for a lot of women that's true. And for a lot of women they are working for negative pay when they have those small kids, right? If they stepped out of the labor force, particularly married women, they stepped out of the labor force, they didn't pay the taxes, they didn't pay the cost associated of working, including childcare. When they've got those small kids, you know, they would actually see their family income go up. But they've got to take that dynamic approach to figure out whether it's a good choice or a bad choice. I think there's actually three components to that. So one is every year that you're in the workforce, you become a slightly better worker. So that's maybe worth a couple of percent. We economists call that returns to experience. Every year you stay with your employer, you become better adept at navigating internal bureaucracies and you become more effective within that firm. We call that returns to tenure. And so if you're not at work, you're not accumulating any of those. And that's worth maybe five percent of your salary, but it's worth that for the rest of your life. And then particularly for very highly educated white collar jobs, this is third issue, which I think is a signaling issue. There's no woman on partner track at a leading law firm or a woman on tenure track at a leading university who'll feel comfortable getting pregnant before they've reached partner or tenure. And the problem is, those who vote on these decisions see the choice to step out of the workforce as being a signal about your future commitment to the career. If you're the type of woman who take time off, then you're also the type of woman who's not going to work too hard once we make you partner. And as a result, women fear, I think rightly, that it's not a great decision before stepping out of the workforce is not a great decision before others are going to make these sort of very large career decisions on your behalf. So it sounds like you all are arguing that specialization is still a pretty fraught choice to make if you're going to be the at-home person. So I think the way to think about this is that our life expectancy has increased so much that people have decades in the labor force. And so when you step out, you're thinking about, you've got to think about what are going to be the effects of stepping out today for all your remaining time in the labor force. When women used to think about this, the vast majority of married couples had small children in their home. In 1880, 75% of married couples had children in the house. It's less than half today. In fact, I think it's about 40% of married couples have children in their home. So the majority of married couples don't have children. And that's not because we aren't having kids. It's because there's this period from becoming an adult at 20 to potentially working until you're 70, 75, that's 50, 55 years. Look, ideally, it would be great to spend more time with your kids when they're 0 to 8. By 8, it seems like they don't like you much anymore. They're not as interested in hanging out with you. The great thing about 3 is they really want to hang out with you. So that's when you want to be around. But our whole labor force is not very conducive to people who say, I'm going to take five years out. It's funny that when you say that, when you talk about how long our careers are and how long life is, you think, well, why not then take three years out or five years out? And I've heard, actually, again with the same sex reporting that I did, I was interviewing a lesbian couple. And lesbian couples are less able to specialize because women's wages are lower. And so they're less able to afford just having one person work and the other person stay home. But one of the women I was talking to said, if I could afford it, I would definitely stay home with my kids because what's three years? What's four years? But you're saying that actually it's. The problem is when those three and four years are, you know, I will tell you that I do sometimes think it with glee. I hope that my daughter has children when I'm about 65 and I will happily retire and be her nanny. Because, you know, you do. There is something joyful about staying home with kids, but it's really when you're doing it at the peak of your career, it can be very costly. I mean, the cost is it's just the cost is great because you're going to knock off your future wages for a heck of a lot longer than you once did. That's sort of the cost benefit. And to put it in just in terms, it's a time where you're actually rapidly gaining experience. Right. When you're rapidly gaining those returns to tenure. And we also know that most wage gains come from actually changing jobs, getting an offer in a new firm. And those are, you know, new employer. Those offers tend to come most when you're at that age where people might want to take some time out. But these ideas are not crazy, by the way, which is from an income perspective, the right thing to do is stay home, but stay home with your grandchildren. Because you're harming the future career you're not going to have because you're going to retire anyway. Actually, you see a lot of that in the African-American community. And in the Latino community as well. A lot of the women I interviewed. And so there's an open question as to whether we're going to see that become a more mainstream trend. Grandparents as the... I'm going to stay home. I'm just going to stay home in 30 years time. Right, right, right. That's interesting, yeah. And so let's talk about, the Pew Research Center had this really fascinating report a couple of weeks ago about that 40% of mothers are the primary breadwinners in their households, which is incredibly significant. But Betsy, you and I have also talked about, regardless of whether or not women are breadwinners, they're contributing more than ever before in terms of family wages. I mean, contributing much more to the family coffers than they ever have. And that that changes dynamics within marriage. And can you all talk about how that changes in dynamics within marriage? Well, let's first talk about this sort of... What's been going on with marriages? And one of the reasons we're ending up with so many women who are out earning. And really, when we were talking about why marriage is changing and one of the implications of how marriage is changing is that it's become much more appealing for highly educated women and it's become much less appealing for less educated women. So college educated women used to be the least likely to marry. If you look at women born in 1900 by age 50, 76% of the college educated women had married compared to 90% of the high school graduates. That is now flipped on its head with the college graduate women who are more likely to marry. But it's not, you know, you hear these people say this is somehow because of the erosion of morals, perhaps, among high school graduates. That's not what's going on at all. If you look, you see that it used to be the case that women who had a college degree were the majority of whom did not agree with the statement married people are happier. The majority of women, college graduate women did not agree with that. There was a huge gap. Most high school graduate women thought you'd be happy if you were married. Most college graduate women thought you wouldn't be. And now that's also flipped. Today, most college graduate women think you will be happy if you're married and less, around a third, only around a third of high school graduate women agree with that statement that marriage makes people happy. So it's real change in how people perceive marriage and what marriage is doing for them has led to different types of people marrying. So let's just explore the logic of that. So if you're a college graduate woman 80 years ago, either you were useless or you thought marriage was useless because the standard role for a woman in marriage was to stay home, wash, look after the kids, all the rest of this stuff. So you had no particular skills in that domain so you weren't particularly marriageable from the husband's side. And from your own side, you had the ability to go out and earn your own income just fine. And so what he was offering in that deal wasn't that attractive either. So that was sort of the old specialization-based model of marriage. What we think is happening is this movement towards what Betsy called hedonic marriage. I called love. And this is when you enjoy spending time and money together. Well, who has time and money? Actually, it's those who are financially better off. And so this is part of the logic for why marriage has become a much more attractive forum for particularly well-educated women and working class women instead of finding that they may not have the time and money to enjoy the partnership. And in fact, what they really don't want is yet another mouth to feed. And so marriage then becomes somewhat less attractive to them. When I first started studying economics, there's this classic parable they talk about about husband and wife have to decide what to do on a Saturday night. The husband likes to go to the fight. The woman likes to go to the opera and then they forget to plan so they have to figure out where to go. And it's this little parable you learn. And what is funny about that parable is it describes the 1950s marriage. When men and women specialized, they also had very different interests. So just in choosing this word love, love has a lot of different definitions in the world. But what I really specifically mean is people who like to do the same stuff together. So a guy who likes to go to the fight is not marrying a woman today who likes to go to the opera. That is just not a good match because a lot of the benefits from marriage are coming from doing stuff together that you enjoy doing. So two people who like the opera marry and this comes back to the same, why same sex marriages are also flourishing because marriage today is a place where the benefits come from finding somebody who is similar to you and enjoying the joint pursuits in life together, not somebody who's opposite to you, who's going to compliment you on your weaknesses by being more productive together. And this has led, as we said, to more college educated women marrying. Now we've got to combine this with the other trend that's happening, which is college men used to outnumber women like two and a half to one. And now women outnumber college men like 1.4 to one. So we're having a real sea change in who the college graduates are in our society. And with women getting all those skills, they're going to get the wages and that's going to change the dynamics. I just want to add, if anyone's interested in a great research topic, I mean, what's going to happen to the generation of college educated women, which in recent years, college educated women marry college educated men. There aren't that many college educated men left. So either standards are going to change or an alternatively phrased marriage is going to change. What are these people's understanding of marriage? Or we're going to see a very sharp decline in marriage among the highly educated. I don't have a clue what it is. I just think it's one of the more important social trends out there and there aren't enough people thinking about it. This is a really big deal. The unemployment rate in May, just this past month, for college graduates was 3.8%. 3.8%, right? For high school graduates, it was 7.4. College graduates have jobs and they earn twice as much as high school graduates. So you've got them earning more, earning more when they're working and twice as likely to not be unemployed. So it's more likely to be at work. It's leading to very different types of families and I agree with Justin. I think what's going to happen to the college graduate women who don't find college graduate husbands and how are those marriages going to work? Are we going to see men willing to, maybe we'll see resurgence of specialization with men doing more of the household tasks or are we going to see a group of women who have very unstable marriages? Or don't marry. Or don't marry, right? Yeah, right. I have to just read this. You all, since you're in Michigan, you might not have seen it, but over the weekend, the Washington Post Outlook section ran this incredible letter. The Washington Post long time restaurant reviewer, Phyllis Richmond, who's retired now and was looking through her, she was looking through some stuff in her basement and she found this letter in 1961 when she was a graduate of Brandeis and she was married and she applied to the graduate program in urban planning at Harvard. And she got a letter from a professor and he addressed her as Mrs. Alvin Richmond. And he said, to speak directly, our experience even with brilliant students has been that married women find it difficult to carry out worthwhile careers in planning and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professional education. This of course is true of almost all graduate professional studies. I never knew if he meant that all women who go into all studies feel a waste or that every graduate student feels like there's waste. But he said, therefore for your own benefit and to aid us in coming to a final decision could you kindly write up as a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life and city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family. And she never replied to that letter because she was so intimidated by being asked to justify how as a wife she could possibly make use of her graduate training. So, but she ended up writing this incredible letter now 50 some years later that said, well actually here's how I did it. And I had to follow my husband around and I wasn't able to go into urban planning but I found that journalism and restaurant viewing was something I could do at night and I found college students who would watch my kids and they would live in the basement or the attic and so I could get some time and I just somehow made it work but I was so intimidated by your letter that I never went into that career path and she sent it to him and he's still at Harvard and he wrote her back a letter and it basically, it didn't say I'm sorry, it didn't say I made a mistake, it said well you know back then it actually was really hard for married women to have a career. And I was just struck by what on so many levels what a liability for a woman being married was in the 1960s, I mean she was college educated woman but just in terms of having, it was just such a reminder of where the discouragement came from and now it's just extraordinary how the relationship between marriage and sort of your economic prospects has changed. Yeah, I mean we're still having a conversation though that I think the social change is still occurring because when I talk to people about work family you hear people who will recognize and who will talk about this is the only way we can really make fundamental changes is if this is a parent issue and not a women's issue but too many times I hear people talk about it as a women's issue and it's not a women's issue, it's a parent issue and I feel like we just have not, we're not all the way from that letter that we need to go if we're going to have women play an equal role in the labor force and I think when we look at the training that our women are getting when we look at their completing college degrees at greater rates, they're getting better grades, they're coming out of college, I told you the unemployment rate of college graduates, that's the total unemployment rate for all college graduates. If you look at recent college graduates, the unemployment rate's much higher but I'll tell you something that's really shocking. For recent college graduates the unemployment rate was 16.1% for men and 11.2% for women. So those women are graduating college and they're diligently looking for their jobs. Women are really pursuing things, these young women, they're pursuing it in high school, they're pursuing it in college and apparently they're pursuing those jobs as soon as they graduate. We can't afford to ostracize them from our labor market. We're investing too much in them and in order to make sure that our labor market is productive, as it can be, we're gonna have to make sure that we have a plan in place to keep them active and I think one of those plans is gonna have to be recognizing that work family is parent issue, not a women's issue. I think if you look at the, how women are doing in college, you know, grades, college completion, right? Betsy just talked about employment as well. I can imagine Betsy writing the equivalent letter today. Dear sir, it's come to our attention that you're a man. There is a big puzzle, what's going on with young men? Right, you know, we far into that male college student. Don't use their effort. Drink a lot, drop out, and don't work. Right, right, so could you justify your interest in pursuing graduate studies with us, yes? I think, mildly more seriously, you talked about that letter, the marker there was that that woman was married. I think the marker today is probably children. So I'm gonna take the field I know best, which is academic economics, and if you asked me that leading 20 female economists in the world, I would guess half to two thirds of childless. And again, somehow this is a marker of something, I'm not quite sure why. But certainly, I think there are still pretty big issues about how parenthood, but motherhood, motherhood, I mean motherhood here, how motherhood is perceived in the like market. Is perceived, right, I will, you know, I do think we've come out of a time where, you know, women still did try to pretend there were no differences. And, you know, I went to a conference and gave a talk when my now son was. He's gonna be a son a long time. No, no, no, my son was like maybe eight weeks, maybe 12 weeks, really early on. And so he was really on the breast. And I was giving a talk for Claudia Golden, who was like one of the most amazing scholars of women's labor force participation. Claudia knows that I'm coming with this, that I'm gonna give this talk at her big event and that I've got this new baby. And she emails me and she says, bring your baby, you should bring your baby. And so I did, I brought my baby and I breastfed in the back of the conference room. And now a woman who's about a decade older than me was horrified that I would actually, I was like, I've got a little apron thing, you can't see anything, but you know, I gotta walk out, I can't listen to the conference if I've got a breast feeder every two hours, I'm gonna be in and out, in and out, up to my hotel room. And I think the, I am a very aggressively out breast feeder. And I think that that's a real change. I think, you know, but I think that that's part of what we have to do because I think there's too many women who didn't want to acknowledge the, I don't know if you'll call it burdens, but the realities of having a newborn. And I think we, you know, we need to, we need to have public policy that accommodates them. And you know, it's one of, I think the greatest things in the Obama healthcare law was the paid, or not paid, sorry, shouldn't say paid, it's not paid, but the break, the required break for nursing moms where they have to be provided a room, it cannot be a bathroom, and they must be provided the breaks to express milk. And that's revolutionary in our country. So let me ask for questions now. I think we've got about 10 minutes. So we'd love to have some questions. Yeah, the first one that went up was in the beige shirt halfway back. Do you mean like going part-time? Or yeah. So I haven't done any of this work, but it's actually really hard to look at what are the causal effects. So we can look at on average what happens to women. But what we, you know, that really mixes up what types of people are willing to go part-time, what types of people are willing to step out, what types of people go full steam ahead. There was a really nice paper that I saw where what they did was actually looked at how long it took people to get pregnant, and was looking at sort of how much career experience had they had before. They had a baby based on this phenomenon, which is still the fact that we can't perfectly plan our pregnancies, and really saw that just the act of being able, just having your pregnancy delayed led to big gains in your wages, looking 20 or 30 years later. And that effect would put it all together. That would put us together, the people stepping out as well as the people going part-time. Meaning that the older you were when you had your child, the better you did wage was? Yeah, the better, because basically when you have your kid, the higher you are on sort of that wage curve as you're getting these gains in your wage from more and more experience, the higher you are on that when you have your first kid, the higher you're likely to rise. So I just want to add something which is surely it varies a lot across occupations. So you're only talking about rather than stepping out, powering down for a little bit. And the way we organize different occupations, I'm told you can't be a law partner unless you work in 100 hours a week. And surgery, knife before wife, you can't be a surgeon unless you're always on call. But somehow vets can do it and somehow obstetricians can do it. And I'm not quite sure I understand what it is that flips these occupations, but if you look at how obstetrics is organized, it shows that a lot of occupations where we'd previously thought you had to be 100% on 100% of the time, just turns out that's just not true. And we can reorganize work in a way that allows people to be part-time or work family-friendly hours, things like that. Yeah, I should say I would think about that. This work by Claudia Golden and Mary Amber Trond, and they look at occupations and it does women do tend to gravitate towards occupations where the hit from either taking time out or just reducing your hours is much lower on your wages. So I think for a lot of people used to think that veterinary medicine has become almost 100% women because animals are cute and fuzzy and it's no longer about cows, it's about cats, but actually it's because you can work at 80% and you get 80% of the wages, whereas in lots of occupations you go to 80% and you are lucky to get 30% of the wages. And because emergency facilities are now standalone, so if you're gonna be doing vet work in the middle of the night, it's gonna be a different facility and you're not necessarily... More questions? Yes, right there on the aisle in the blue plaid shirt. Doesn't actually seem to be working. Can you hear me now? All right, what those types of trends have for the overall I guess egalitarian nature of society and globally like a lot of these things are now being made in China and like a Foxconn factory in a Bangladeshi factory that just collapsed a couple days ago. So it's like here in America and in our interpersonal relationships, we may be benefiting from this more egalitarian spirit of interpersonal connections, but what are the broader social egalitarian like implications of the rise of, or change in dynamics of interpersonal relationships? Yeah, so the difference between my grandmother's household and mine is my grandmother would sew clothes and then my mother would wear them. In ours, we go to the store and we buy them made in China. What that's done is it's freed up Betsy to live an enormously more interesting professional life than my grandmother had. And it means that a family in China now isn't hungry. I understand this as a controversial claim, but economic development in China has reduced the number of people living under $2 a day from 80% to below 10%. So I think this is one of the most egalitarian things that I can do. So economists often have strong views on trade. The alternative is I can leave someone unemployed. I'm not forcing anyone to work in a factory. I'm offering them the opportunity to move off their family farm where they face the possibility of hunger to move into the city and working in the factory. And I'm offering them the choice and the person who thinks that exploitation won't offer them that choice. And I think it's on their conscience if those people end up unhealthy, if their children end up dying in the fields. I think that we economists tend to really wanna pursue efficiency gains. And these increases in trade have definitely increased world output. Everybody has gotten more, but we should think about how then if the pie got bigger for the whole world, how's the pie being divvied up? Those can be very separate questions. And I think Justin's strongly saying, don't advocate for things that would make the pie shrink. We need to keep the pie big, but I think we can ask the separate questions, which is are there better ways to divide it? But I don't think that keeping women in the home is the way to help get those slices more evenly divided. Yeah, so I think we'll also just, if both of you, starting with the gentleman in the tie and then the woman in the gray sweater, just state your comments or your questions. And then if we have time, we'll field them. Yeah, thank you so much. So I heard the story about two economists, and I'm not entirely sure if it's true, that were walking through the Swiss Alps and they were looking at some family farms where there were some potatoes being grown. And one economist turns to the other and says, this is a very inefficient way to grow potatoes. You can do it a lot better than this. And the other economist looks back at him and says, you're right, but this is a very efficient way to grow people. And in other words, that there's sort of non pecuniary benefits to certain kind of family structures. And you've talked about how there's been sort of changes in the goods that are provided by marriage, so that no longer is marriage providing the sewing and these sorts of things. And it's just sort of reduced now to doing things that you like to do together. Are there also non pecuniary costs to that? And has there been some study on that that you'd be willing to comment on? Okay, so we'll take the next question and then hopefully we can have a chance to respond. I think the portrait you've portrayed of marriages, especially middle class marriages is a little, it's somewhat inaccurate. That is a lot of middle class families don't just divide, it's not just one person works and one person stays home. What in fact happens is to achieve work-family balance, they hire someone else and this goes back to the question that this other person raised. A lot of the people that they're hiring because America has a almost near complete lack of socialized things like childcare and elder care and after school care, we hire foreign people. In other words, it's not just foreign labor doing labor in their home countries, it's foreign labor coming here, women especially migrating, leaving their own children behind with dubious arrangements so that they can pour love into our children. And this is a global imbalance that I think really needs to be addressed. Maybe some of it is gonna be addressed in the immigration bill if it ever passes and some of these women are able to migrate legally which will undoubtedly improve their situations. But I think it's really important, I mean most of the families you've talked about are middle class families and I think it's really important to think about the position of working class families in terms of care work. That's really one of the things that can be marketized but when it is, it's really complicated and often very unequal. So the children respond. Yeah, I wanna dispel one myth because people have this fantasy of sort of like the 1960s, 1950s marriages where the women stayed home and took care of the kids that the kids got all this time with their parents. Parents spend more time with their kids today than they did back then. Both moms and dads and it's more true the gains in time with kids has been even greater among highly educated women who are even more firmly entrenched in their careers. And what we see is parents are spending more time with their kids. So there's more actual family time where that's mom, plus dad, plus kid. So I don't think that we've necessarily sacrificed some idealic vision of parents spending time with their kids. I'll take a quick bite at the other question which is about non-pecuniary costs of changing marriage which is simply to say I think you're asking exactly the right question. When economists think about this stuff we aren't just thinking about dollars and cents. We are trying to think about the full range of things and what we've described is the ways in which marriage is adapted to the changing economy. I think the rest of the whole vibrant debate that exists around marriage is very much about what are these non-pecuniary costs and benefits. The only note, and this would be things like how well are we doing raising our children. And the only thing I'd note is I am struck by how little we still know despite the fact that it's a vitally important and interesting question. Well, thank you so much. This has been fabulous. You've been just a great audience. Thank you. Thank you for saying all afternoon and spending your afternoon with us. We really enjoyed it. Thank you.