The XX Factor: What women really think.

Quiverfull Feminism

"The threat of population decline," writes Michelle Goldberg at the American Prospect, "is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies.... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones!"

I wrote a Reason feature on this issue for anyone who is interested in sociological and economic analysis of natalist policy. But for now I'll just say: Liberals ought to be very, very cautious about engaging natalist rhetoric in the promotion of social welfare policies. The claim that Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction might help sell universal daycare or any other policy that can be cast as an incentive to motherhood, but population alarmism lends credence to a number of wildly illiberal arguments. Once you've bought into the idea that a nation-state must defend its existence through native population growth, you've come uncomfortably close to arguing that a particular subset of women has a patriotic responsibility to reproduce. You've also legitimized some legislator's attempt to bribe women into using their bodies in a particular way. There is a reason that the producers of Demographic Winter are traditionalist Christians.

Gradual population decline of the kind we are seeing in Germany and Japan is, I think, manageable. But even if we insist on addressing population decline as some kind of crisis, it's not at all clear that liberal policies like paid family leave are going to turn the tide. The most obvious difference we see between developed countries with relatively high birth rates and developed countries with relatively low birthrates is cultural. Swedes and Americans are relatively more likely than, say, Singaporeans or Koreans, to believe that work and motherhood are compatible. The countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are countries in which childless women are integrated into the workforce but women with children are expected to stay home.

Such attitudes are distinct from redistributional social welfare policies. It may be that Sweden's welfare state is responsible for its near-replacement birth rate, but the evidence for this is not terribly compelling. In order to frame the story this way one needs to cast the high-fertility United States as an anomalous outlier rather than part of the general, culture-driven trend.

I am sympathetic to Goldberg in that population alarmism might be a useful way to argue for policies I happen to support; more open borders, for example. But there are better arguments for a humane immigration policy, and there are better arguments for an expansive welfare state.

They Don't Call it a Majority for Nothin'

“Rule by Republican Hissy Fit”?

I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.

I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”

Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.

Keeping Track of Our Time

Quick, before we're all caught up in the reading of campaign entrails, I'd like to mention an item on the agenda of the Department of Labor's first budget hearing later this week: the American Time Use Survey, which will be eliminated if the Bush administration gets its way. Don't yawn: This is one of the most fascinating, and useful, data-collection endeavors around. And though there isn't a music video (yet) touting the cause of keeping it funded, there is a group of economists who are using their time to rally support for it. Check out this Web site if you're in need of a worthy cause to get behind when the primary season cools down.

Begun in 2003, the ATUS is a household survey that aims to track how Americans use their time when they aren't working. It's a look into the nonmarket nooks and crannies of life that isn't replicated by any other measurements. As such, it's a source of some of the most revealing information we have about how family life is changing—not to mention a resource for assessing all kinds of policies: Who's doing how much on the home front, with the kids, or with the elderly, for example? And what might that suggest about the role of the government or business? Without any data, we won't have answers. Without the ATUS, it will be easier to forget that those are important questions that need asking in the first place: That's the even larger danger of defunding the ATUS. Katharine G. Abraham, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who is now at the University of Maryland and is a driving force behind the SAVEATUS mission, put it this way to me: "It seems to me that this is a more general phenomenon—that social statistics generally tend to get short shrift relative to economic statistics.  And I also think it's self-reinforcing—if we don't have information on the non-market effects of our policy choices, for example, we tend to ignore them or at least give them less weight than they should get." Time spent figuring out where our time goes is time well spent-and it isn't even very expensive: $4.3 million a year.