There’s actually a good reason work is so family unfriendly

Narcissism gets a bad rap. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair.

First of all, any personality trait can become a disorder if you take it far enough. I’ve even heard this is true of being too nice. (I’ve never been accused of this myself.)

Also, narcissism is why we have entertainers.

It’s also why we have politicians, a good number of serial killers, and (worst of all) writers.

It’s a mixed bag.

Narcissism is also why I started Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be by my old… guy who I’d like to be friends who I argue with a lot but who I will very happily settle for being mutuals with on Twitter, Tim Carney.

I absolutely loved, and am constantly talking about, the first Tim Carney book I read, Alienated America. In this newsletter alone I’ve mentioned it here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I didn’t know he’d published Family Unfriendly until an actual friend shared a screenshot on Facebook. She wrote that it was the first time she’d stumbled across one of her IRL friends quoted in a book.

I’ve actually been cited in a few books, if we’re bragging. But this was a first for me me. Usually, the Google Alert I have on my name or the book’s author tells me.

A book must do more than mention me before I’ll crack it open. I’m not that easy. I’ve yet to read most the aforementioned books.

Besides the mention and having loved his previous book, I also downloaded this one because I’m slightly obsessed, especially recently, with marriage and fertility. These topics coincide with three of my long-term special interests – gender, economics, and politics. (Check out The asshole theory of fertility and this collection of fertility facts.)

I’ll probably write a full review when I’m done. I’ve written six pages of notes based on the first two-thirds alone.

But today, I want to address Carney’s fertility-boosting advice to US employers.

Work culture is, as Carney points out, pretty hostile to fertility. Part of the problem, as Carney as points out, is the fact that we consider this to be a female issue rather than a human issue. Most of us aren’t socialized to question a man’s fitness as a parent solely because he works long hours.

Carney’s solution is for employers to become friendlier to families. Let me explain why I think that Carney much more accurately understands many of the barriers to fertility he describes than the actual tradeoffs involved in some of his proposed solutions.

The book contains a few tells that Carney is writing for a more conservative audience. He does work for that bastion of populism and working-class solidarity that is the American Enterprise Institute. One tell is the pains he took to justify the very idea that employers would have any ethical obligations outside maximizing value for shareholders and investors.

I am genuinely torn on “corporate responsibility.”

On the one hand, evil cannot happen without helpers.

On the other hand, evil tends to find its helpers somewhere (*cough* Harvard, Yale, McKinsey, Deloitte *cough*). Is anyone necessarily better off if every person with a facsimile of a conscience “does the right thing” so hard that their more evil competitors put them out of business, weakening the US economy and thus eroding our military advantage, and then the evil people evil even harder with even less competition while Russia and China use their economic advantage to build a drone army capable of bullying every other state into compliance and then we all end up speaking a new kind of Chinese/Russian/English patois?

I have nothing against Tim Carney suggesting businesses buy $1,300 miracle bassinets to loan to new parents, per se. I was also more than happy to take on extra work so my colleague could spend time with their new baby, even though I will never take any time off for that purpose and the company paid me the same. I’d happily do it again if my jobs weren’t writing this newsletter and making porn.

My issue with Carney is that he claims that pro-natal corporate policies are also profitable. Or, at least he claims that “Pro-family employers find that being pro-family helps the institution.”

I went into the book pretty skeptical that being pro-family makes most employers more profitable. The fact that Tim neither asks nor explains why employers aren’t already maxing out on family friendliness did not alleviate my skepticism.

It’s not like no employer has ever thought of doing things that exclusively benefit working parents.

The $1,300 bassinet idea is innovative. But I doubt the lack of investment is due to a lack of imagination.

The biggest, most profitable companies seem to have experimented a lot with various “family friendly” policies and benefits. My guess is they’ve probably mostly figured out which investments yield the highest net profits and where more spending offers diminishing returns.

That Carney highlights Brigham-Young University-Idaho as a family-friendly employer is very telling, for a few reasons.

First, he doesn’t even try to claim that family friendliness profits BYU-ID.

Then again, maybe profit isn’t the right metric. It is a religious institution and a university. But that just highlights how non-representative Brigham-Young University-Idaho is as an employer.

Carney doesn’t claim its policies benefit BYU-ID in some other way, either. He only states that Madison County, Idaho has the most births per capita. That’s probably more to do with its unusually fertile demography than anything the school is doing.

BYU-ID is in Madison County, Idaho. There, 68% of the population reports membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons are an unusually fertile demographic who tend to put a premium on family friendliness.

Employers compete for workers. One problem with Carney’s idea is that the highest value workers tend to care the least about family friendliness. That’s why SV startups offer free beer, ping pong tables, and gym memberships rather than paid time off for each kid’s birthday.

Another reason I’m skeptical that family friendliness leads to profits has to do with the nature of work in the 21st century.

For different reasons, neither low-wage nor high-wage employers have much financial incentive to pay people to spend less time working.

Low-wage employees who aren’t at work aren’t making their companies any money whatsoever. There’s a reason union members literally fought and died for the eight-hour work day and five-day work week.

Weirdly, the incentive to squeeze long hours out of their workers is even bigger for employers who pay the most.

That’s why high-earners work longer hours than low-wage workers, on average. The average worker who earns 50% or more of their area median income actually spends more hours per week at work than someone who earns 50% or less.

Briefly, one potential reason for this is that it doesn’t really matter how many people a company has to hire to get the job done if a person can learn to do the job with the same proficiency as an experienced worker in one afternoon.

Five low-wage McDonald’s employees working 20% longer per week so the company can employ one fewer person won’t save McDonald’s much money or bring in much more revenue.

The longer it takes a company to find a new worker and get them to the same level of output as an existing worker, the bigger the incentive to squeeze more hours out of the people you already have. That’s why startups and law firms strongly prefer their existing software engineers and lawyers work longer hours.

This gives high-wage employers an even bigger incentive than low-wage employers to avoid any policy that involves workers spending more time not working.

Obviously profits aren’t everything. I’m not heels-in opposed to asking employers to help fix wider social problems. I’m just skeptical about whether and to what extent employers are the right people to do whatever one is trying to accomplish, whether it’s getting people to have more kids or solving sexism and racism.

I’m pretty sure that it’s better for everyone in the long-run if US companies invest in automating existing tasks and inventing new shit rather than spending money just to fail at other goals.

I agree with Carney that work, especially the more highly skilled and highly paid work, is fundamentally pretty family unfriendly. But it’s that way because, not despite, the fact that it’s profitable.

Our work culture and norms are built around a status quo that no longer exists. For a 25-year stretch, middle-class white men could work long hours because they had stay-at-home wives. Everyone else throughout space and time has worked long hours inside and outside the home while their kids ran around every day for hours at a time with minimal supervision by extended family and neighbors.

He’s right that for fertility to stop dropping, something has to change. But his idea that employers can boost profits while boosting fertility if they just experiment with a few new “family friendly” policy ideas is disconnected from reality. I’m pretty confident that if it were possible for a company to profit from boosting fertility, at least one of them would be doing it. Say what you will about US companies, but they do tend to figure out how to do the stuff that makes them money.

I care a lot more about economic growth than fertility. Most of the time, I don’t think it’s really an either/or situation. But if companies choose to try to boost fertility with family friendly policies, based on all the evidence with which I’m familiar, it will mean lower profits and slower economic growth.

Even that, however, isn’t my main objection. My main objection to that advice is that I think it’s most likely — as has been the case with regard to DEI, environmentalism, and most other corporate efforts to do anything other than maximize returns to shareholders — to accomplish neither.