Half Changed World

Some things I’m giving thanks for today:

• The health of myself and my family.
• My husband, who believes in me more than I do in myself.
• My boys, who let me share their delight in the world.
• My parents, for braving the Thanksgiving traffic so we wouldn’t have to.
• Our freedom from material need.
• Our dishwasher, running its third load of the day.
• The easy recovery of the kitty from her surgery.
• The people who volunteered in the wind and rain this morning putting on the Turkey Trot race I ran this morning.
• The people I work with, for making it a pleasure to go to work most days, even when the policies we have to support make me want to bang my head against the wall.
• The internet, for bringing to my life so many people who I never would have met otherwise.
• All the people who are far from their loved ones today because they volunteered to serve our country, or to try to improve the lives of strangers.
• That I live in a country where I can write my opinions without fear that the government will break down my door as a result.

Yesterday, I wrote about Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice.  In looking for further discussion of this book on the internet, I found a PSB Newshour interview with Schwartz from last year, in which discusses some of the political implications of his argument.

The interviewer explains "Now, politically Barry Schwartz is a liberal who finds himself running against what seems to be the tide these days, more choice for every citizen: The private Social Security accounts that President George W. Bush has pushed, for example, where we would decide how to invest our own money."  In fact, the Bush Administration supports increased consumer choice as the solution to everything from health insurance to primary education, to social security, to job training (they’ve proposed giving unemployed workers vouchers that could be used for job training — or taken as cash if they get jobs quickly).

And then Schwartz says:

"People don’t have the resources, the intellectual resources, the time to learn enough in all of these different areas of life to make wise decisions. The point of public policy, seems to me, is to improve welfare.

"But who decides what’s in someone’s best interest? And the answer that we have collectively embraced, driven, I think, largely by economists is maximizing choice is the way to promote public welfare."

I have very mixed reactions to this statement.  When I think about health insurance, and social security, I tend to agree with Schwartz.  I think about how much trouble I have figuring out what is the best health insurance option for my family — as a person with access to all sorts of information, and the time to sort it out, and a graduate degree in public policy — and I find it hard to believe that there are a lot of people who are going to find it much easier, while I’m quite sure that there are people who will find it much harder. 

But I’m also vehemently pro-choice.  And, as my father asked (rhetorically, of course) this evening, how come Democrats are only pro-choice when it comes to abortion and not when it comes to anything else?  And he’s right, there’s something fundamentally inconsistent about saying that we trust women — all women — to make the best decisions for themselves and their families regarding abortion, but not regarding where to send their kids to school.  Or how to save for their retirement.

(Note that rejecting Schwartz’ argument doesn’t mean that you have to support these proposals; there’s a separate problem that most of these proposals deliberately eliminate the risk pooling that is inherent in the current systems.)

Today’s book is The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz.  As my loyal readers may remember, this book was the source for the Post article that I discussed last month in How to Be Happy.  The article intrigued me enough that I requested the book from the library, and I’m very glad I did.  It provides a theoretical framework for all sorts of common experiences; as I read it, I kept on saying to myself "oh, of course!  That makes sense!"

Schwartz’ basic question is, at a time when we have more choices than ever before in areas from the trivial (what cut of jeans to wear) to the profound (whether to have children, what sort of careers to pursue), why aren’t people happier?  At its heart, the book is a psychologist’s response to the economists’ claim that more choices are always better than fewer.

An economist will say that if you have options A and B, and you prefer A, adding option C might make you happier — if you prefer it to A — and can’t make you worse off.  And the same applies for options D, E, F and so on.  Schwartz argues that more choices can make people unhappier for several reasons:

• Figuring out all the choices takes time and effort.  This time and energy may be more valuable to the consumer than the improvement offered by an additional choice.  Schwartz argues that in a situation where one is faced by a large number of similar choices (e.g. the cookie aisle in your typical American grocery store), happiness is best achieved by accepting the first option that meets your minimum standards, rather than doing an exhaustive search to determine the absolute best possible choice.  Some economic models recognize this issue; Schwartz notes that an economist, Herbert Simon, coined the word "satisficing" to describe this phenomenon.
• When you compare a bunch of options, it is likely that each will have some strengths and some weaknesses.  Schwartz argues that extensive comparisons make you more aware of the ways in which your choice falls short of an imagined ideal, combining the best features of all of the options, and thus reduces the pleasure that you take in it.  This is especially true when you continue to examine the alternatives after you have made your decision.
• When faced with too many options, even if many of them are desirable, some people are unwilling to commit to any (and give up on the other possibilities).  Schwartz describes a study suggesting that the more options a company offers for investing in its 401(k), the fewer people will sign up at all, because they get paralyzed by the prospect of choosing.
• Even choices that are real improvements only make people happier for a short period of time, because expectations catch up to reality so fast.  Thinking that a new and improved detergent, television, or even relationship will fundamentally change your life is almost always a mistake. 
• Schwartz argues that people are more upset by negative consequences of choices they have made than by equally negative events that seem to come out of the blue and couldn’t have been avoided.  More opportunities to choose lead to more chances for regret.

I found this book deeply liberating in some ways, because I’ve often felt guilty that I don’t spend more time researching the options before I make choices.  (See my entry on picking a health care plan, for example.)  I’ve felt like I was being lazy, letting "good enough" distract me from a search for the best.  Schwartz passionately argues in favor of "good enough" as a way to escape the madness of endless comparison shopping. At a deeper level, Schwartz argues that always being on the lookout for a better option in the big parts of our lives — relationships, career choices — is a prescription for unhappiness.

I’m not sure what my reaction to this book would have been if my natural inclination was more to "maximize" — to seek out the best possible choice — rather than to "satisfice."  I’m not sure how much this is within one’s voluntary control.  I was reminded of Jennifer Boylan and her description of her inability to accept her "second best life" as a man, no matter how hard she tried. 

Schwartz recommends the practice of keeping a gratitude list, so you don’t take the good things in your life for granted.  What are you grateful for this Thanksgiving week?

Most of the attention being paid to the huge omnibus spending bill that Congress is trying to pass this week has been focused on two provisions added at the last minute, one allowing health care providers and insurers to refuse to provide or pay for abortions and one that would grant Congress access to tax returns.

The outrage about these provisions is perfectly justified, but I’m bothered by the fact that the actual spending provisions of this huge appropriations bill are sliding by essentially unnoticed.

Take, for example, the first sentence in the conference report under the Department of Education (page 172): "The conference agreement includes $14,963,683,000 for Education for the Disadvantaged, instead of $15,515,735,000 as proposed by the House and $15,500,684,000 as proposed by the Senate."  Usually, conference committees split the difference between what the House and the Senate propose, but this is half a billion dollars less than what either of them had recommended for Title I, the main federal education program that provides funding for low-income students.  And this is before the proportional across-the-board cuts that will affect all programs.  The pattern is true across dozens of programs.

And no one seems to be noticing.  The newspapers aren’t covering it.  The NEA doesn’t have anything about it on its website.  I only know it because I was reading the article on Congressional Quarterly (expensive subscription required) for work.  The Committee report is available on Thomas if you’re up for reading several thousand pages of dense appropriations language.  But don’t feel bad if you’re not; the Senators and Representatives voting on it won’t have.

And this isn’t because Congress ran out of time.  The Senate didn’t even hold hearings on half of the appropriations bills that are wrapped up in this.  This is a deliberate strategy to make budget decisions quickly, out of the public eye, and with Senators and Representatives only given the chance to vote up or down on the entire package.  And if anyone protests, the projects for their districts are cut.

It’s a lousy way to run a government.

This week, I was part of a small group that got together at the National Partnership for Women and Families to talk about their work to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act and to extend paid sick and family leave to more workers.  It was a good conversation, and it reminded me that I want to look into California’s paid family leave program (which is funded through an employee tax, not by employers) in more detail. 

Someone asked the question, what fraction of families don’t have a stay-at-home parent.  I thought I had addressed this question in my discussion of the trends in women’s labor force participation (see Who’s "opting out"?)  but when I checked, I discovered I hadn’t.

The latest figure i could find was for 2001, when 68 percent of children had both parents or the only resident parent in the labor force, up from 59 percent in 1985.  Interestingly, in 1985 this was true for 51 percent of children under 6, and 63 percent of children 6-17.  By 2001, the gap had narrowed significantly, to 66 percent of children under 6 and 70 percent of older children.  (These figures come from Table ES.3.1.A in Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children & Youth: 2003, a handy reference book put out by the fine folks for whom I work.)

The Work-Family program at the New America Foundation likes to refer to these families as "juggler families," which is a nice catchy phrase.  Their talk of how such families have "replaced the traditional family of the breadwinner and the homemaker" is a little misleading, however.  It conveys the impression that all of the working parents in those juggler families are fully committed to the labor force.  But the statistics include a significant number of parents who consider themselves primarily caregivers, but also have some paid work.  I’ve never seen a comparable figure broken out by hours of work — if any of my readers has, please let me know.

The National Partnership does a good job of pointing out that paid leave doesn’t only benefit families without an at-home parent; in fact, families with only one earner are more vulnerable if illness causes that earner to miss work and lose pay.  Unlike increased funding for child care, many social conservatives support paid family leave; however, the business lobby bitterly opposes it.

In reading one of the profiles in the new issue of Working Mother, I was interested to see Erica Carrasco’s description of her husband, Stephen.  She works during the day as a technical writer; since their daughter was a year old, "he’s been Mr. Mom, tending the home fires and working nights as a cashier."  Because she earns more than he does, they’ve decided to focus on her career, although they’re hoping that she’ll have more flexible hours when she starts her own business, allowing him to go to college.

I was particularly struck by the comment that her husband has been depressed since before their daughter was born.  She also says that being at home is "good for our finances but hard on Stephen’s ego."  I haven’t seen any formal research on it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that depression is at least as common among stay-at-home dads as it is among stay-at-home moms (who are more likely to be depressed than working moms). Men don’t have post-partum hormones complicating things, but they have less societal support for their role.

It’s also likely that depressed individuals are less successful in the world of employment, and so they may be more likely to choose to stay home for financial reasons.  Unfortunately, there’s some evidence that depressed parents are less responsive to their kids, leading to worse emotional and cognitive outcomes.

I can’t believe how fast the holidays are coming up.  Is it really possible that Thanksgiving is coming up next week?  For the first time in my life, I’m going to be cooking the Thanksgiving meal.  I’m actually looking forward to it; I like to cook, but don’t do it much these days because of time constraints. I just wish we didn’t have quite so much cleaning to do before the house was in a condition to receive guests.  But cooking and cleaning both are preferable to facing the NJ Turnpike Thanksgiving week.

Hanukah comes really early this year.  (The Jewish holidays operate on a lunar calendar, which means that they move back and forth in the solar calendar — next year Hanukah won’t start until December 25, and there’s one year coming up when it doesn’t fall until January.)  This means I have to get my act together soon, but also that the rest of December will be relatively low-stress.  I bought a ticket today from one of my coworkers for an opportunity to do after-hours shopping at a local mall this weekend.  It supports NOVAM, which is a good cause, and if I can get all my shopping wrapped up, I’ll be thrilled.  Plus, I’d like to get myself some clothes before my annual "no setting foot in a mall between Thanksgiving and New Years" resolution takes effect.

The early Hanukah also spreads the orgy of gift-giving out a bit, as my in-laws will still give us Christmas presents.  It’s lots of fun to shop for my older son, as he’s at the age when he’s absolutely thrilled by anything you wrap up, whether it’s a t-shirt, a book, or a toy.  I have no idea what to get for the baby, who doesn’t need anything, but his brother will be horrified if he doesn’t have something to unwrap too.

I started reading Spin Sisters, by Myrna Blyth, last week, thinking it would be one of my Tuesday book reviews.  It’s not going to be, because I feel a moral compulsion to actually read all the books I review; it’s sufficiently poorly written and repetitive that I’m not willing to slog all the way through it.  The funny thing is that, in spite of the gratuitous slaps at liberalism, I agree with Blyth’s thesis that the main goal of most "women’s magazines" is to make their advertisers happy.  She’s got some zingers about the concept of stress — especially the kind of stress that isn’t caused by major external events like illness or job loss, but just by overextension to too many activities and/or feeling like you need to live up to an unattainable standard (think Martha Stewart).  She does raise an interesting question about cause and effect — do people feel more stressed about the holidays now that it’s the conventional wisdom that they’re stressful?

My favorite anti-holiday stress book is Unplug the Christmas Machine, by Jo Robinson (and no, you don’t have to celebrate Christmas to find it useful).  It’s not terribly complicated, but it talks you step by step through the process of figuring out what parts of the holiday experience are really important to you, and making those the priorities, while letting everything else slide. It’s out of print, but there seem to be plenty of used copies floating around.

The cat is back from the vet, with big bald patches on her backside, her side, and one of her front legs, and a patch that is slowly dispensing painkiller.  She’s eating, and sat on my lap to be petted for about half an hour, but is definitely moving slowly.  We need to find a store that sells unflavored metamucil, because she’s not at all pleased to find her cat food suddenly flavored orange.

We had her anal glands removed yesterday, because they kept on getting impacted and infected.  Fingers crossed that she will resume using the litter box now.  We’re also really hoping that this is the underlying cause of the unexplained weight loss she’s had — the vet was sure it was her thyroid, but all of the blood work came back perfectly normal. 

The surgery was expensive, and I’m still not entirely sure that we did the right thing.  It seems wrong that a cat should have this sort of medical care in a world where kids go without basic things like immunizations.  But we’ve taken on the responsibility for this cat, in a way that we haven’t for the rest of the world.  It didn’t seem right to either let her suffer, or to put her to sleep.  If caring for the cat would mean that we didn’t have food to eat, I wouldn’t have done it, but it doesn’t.

The really pathetic thing is that I’m not all that fond of the cat, not the way I was about our other cat, who died about four years ago.  That one had been mine since I was a teenager, and she used to sleep under the covers with me when it got cold at night.  This one was my husband’s originally, and has never been that cuddly with either of us.

But she’s remarkably gentle with the boys, and has never scratched either of them, in spite of being provoked at times.  It’s surprising, because she’s not always gentle with adults — she’s one of those cats that will demand attention and then suddenly decide she’s had enough and claw you without warning. 

Heal fast, little one.

I am totally fascinated by the question of how couples make joint decisions about money, especially when one earns more than the other. 

Today somone pointed me to the website of Equality in Marriage.  It’s got a lot of nice links and advice on how to talk about money, before, during and after marriage.  This organization was founded by Lorna Wendt, who became famous for fighting for half of the assets from her marriage with former GE CEO Gary Wendt even though just the 10 percent he offered her would have made her a very wealthy woman.  She argued that they were equal partners in the economic unit that was their marriage, and that he couldn’t have become the success he was without her support. 

(I remember reading about her in The Price of Motherhood, and asking my husband if he wanted a post-nuptual agreement before he quit his job to be an at-home parent.)

When my husband and I were both working for pay, we had three sets of bank accounts — his, hers, and ours.  We figured out how much we needed to cover our regular bills and save a bit, and divided that amount roughly in proportion to our after-tax incomes.  The remainder was ours to spend as we pleased.  Like our decision to both hyphenate our last names, it was complicated, but equitable.

We haven’t changed our formal system, but all the money going into the "ours" account comes out of my paycheck, and the amounts of money left in the "his" and "hers" accounts are smaller and smaller.   I don’t feel like I get more of a vote on how we spend our money because it’s my name on the paycheck, but I do have slightly more money that’s mine.  I pay more attention to how we’re doing at staying within our budget, so am more likely to be the one to say "whoa," but that was true even when my husband earned more than I did.  (Neither of us considers shopping a leisure activity, so it’s almost never a big issue.)

The conventional wisdom is that only breadwinning is valued in our society, that caregiving is overlooked.  And yet, one of the recurring complaints from the mothers on the email list for working wives of SAHDs is how little credit we get for breadwinning.  At best, we are seen as good mothers in spite of our employment, not because of it.

On one of my lists recently, someone asked what was the parenting book that you couldn’t live without.  Lots of people suggested books with advice about getting your baby to sleep, or what to feed them, or how to talk to them.  My choice was Operating Instructions, by Anne Lamott.  It’s not an advice book, but just a memoir, in journal format of her first year of parenting following an unplanned pregnancy.

I picked this book because I truly think it kept me sane as a new parent.  Because it reassured me that it was perfectly normal to feel tired, overwhelmed, frustrated, and inadequate, and that none of these things made me a bad mother. And it did so without being whiny and made me laugh out loud more times than I could could count, as well as cry.

Lamott also manages to talk about all this without ever losing sight of the wonder and magic of parenting.  Many books that attempt to show the "dark side" of parenting — Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions come to mind — make you wonder why anyone would ever willingly choose to have children.  The joys of parenting shine through Operating Instructions.  I actually gave it to my husband to read when we were discussing whether to have children — I figured it would be a good sign if it didn’t scare him off.

One of my recurring themes on this blog is the question: "Where are the fathers?"  Sam’s father is totally absent from Operating Instructions. Lamott writes "The baby’s father was dramatically less excited than I was to find out I was pregnant, so much so that I have not seen or heard from him in months and don’t expect to ever again" but she is never dismissive of the role of fathers.  In a haunting passage, she imagines Sam talking with the child of friends of hers, who was born without a left arm, and comparing the holes in each of their lives.  A few years ago, Lamott wrote on Salon about how Sam’s father is now part of his life, which is lovely to hear.

Operating Instructions isn’t an advice book — the joke in the title is, of course, that babies don’t come with manuals — but it does have some good advice.  The most important advice she gives is that it’s ok, even good, to ask for help.  Married or single, young or old, parenting is just too big a job to do without help.  And that help might take the form of someone cooking you a meal, or it might just mean that someone takes a walk with you and the baby and gets you out of the messy house for 15 minutes.