Is Megan McArdle a freeloader? (spoiler alert: no)

Last updated on: March 9, 2015 at 9:10 am by Jane the Actuary

Is Megan McArdle a freeloader? (spoiler alert: no) 2015-03-09T09:10:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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You all know Megan McArdle, right? Blogger extraordinaire at Bloomberg View, author of “The Up Side of Down,” home cook, etc.

She’s also childless.

No, she’s not one of those proud “childfree” people, and she doesn’t go around calling parents “breeders.” In her book (sorry, Megan, I checked it out from the library, rather than buying it!), she talks about failure, and not being afraid to fail, and tells the story — also retold in a recent Valentine’s Day post — of a relationship that occupied many of her, well, fertile years, a relationship that she had invested so much in that she wasn’t able to recognize that it wasn’t going anywhere and she needed to cut her losses. For that reason, and, well, because that’s how life works sometimes, she didn’t meet her future husband, or, as she calls him, her Official Blog Spouse, until she was in her later 30s. (And, yes, because she’s told the story publicly, and anyone who I may know personally hasn’t, she ends up the strawman here.)

Now, she’s been married five years or so. It seems to me that she’s a year or two younger than I am. No babies on the way. (Well, a couple of us, her readers, wondered, though not very seriously, whether there was some news, when she mentioned, in a comment on her blog post today, that she had read about a particular treatment for nausea on a pregnancy discussion board.) Did she and the OBS make the decision not to have children, because children are icky and they have better things to do with their time? Did they try to get pregnant, but the odds, not in their favor due to declining fertility, just didn’t cooperate? Did they feel they’d missed their chance, even if biology would have cooperated, because they felt they were too old to be the sort of parents they’d want to be?

No one knows. That is, none of her blog readers know, as she’s never written anything about it one way or another (neither “gaaah! I hate babies” or “let me tell you about the finances of fertility treatments from personal experience”) and it is, of course, certainly none of our business in any case.

But my point is this: just as the self-identified “childfree” like to speak of having children as a hobby that some people engage in, but it shouldn’t receive any more government support than knitting or cosplay, so too, it’s pretty easy, for those of us with kids, to turn discussions about the long-term impact of an increase in the proportion of people who never have children, into accusations that the childless are freeloaders because they don’t raise children of their own but expect that the offspring of the rest of us will be the ones keeping the economy going, and, more specifically, working as home health aides, or watching out for the childless aunt or neighbor. (Sorry, I tend to end up with overly-long sentences.)

Some of those childless people are infertile. Others are infertile-by-age, because, for whatever reason, they didn’t find a spouse in a timely fashion, or even simply never did. Others are, in fact, selfish, and don’t want to be tied down by a baby, and reject (via contraception, and abortion as back-up birth control) parenthood completely.

And there is a substantial diversity in family size: in addition to the childless, there are also those with one child, who are also now pushing back against those criticizing their choice, those who insist that two is the right number, and families like those around here, traditional Catholics with four or more. And that’s not to mention the more controversial issue of poor large families.

But in a way this is a specialization of family types that fits in with the overall specialization of a modern economy.

We all need medical care. Most of us aren’t doctors, but depend on others to provide this care. Are we freeloaders?

We need food. But we depend on farmers to grow the food for us. Are we freeloaders?

This is not exactly analogous because we do pay doctors and we pay farmers, but we don’t pay parents, who choose to have children because they enjoy them, or because of a belief that it’s part of responsible adulthood, or because they believe that abortion is morally wrong. But the reason that we pay doctors and farmers is not because it’s somehow the morally right thing to do, but, well, because it’s the nature of supply and demand.

Now, having written this, I’m thinking that I ought to unearth these articles complaining about the freeloader childless, so as to not be constructing a strawman to argue against — but I’ve promised my son that, since he’s done practicing the piano, we’d do a project together.

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