Economics is a tool for understanding human behavior. That includes problems in running a household. For example … Solutions to a Public Good Problem Emptying and refilling ice cube trays requires about ten minutes that could be spent doing something more entertaining such as reading a good book or arguing with people online. If I do it the benefit is shared with my son and daughter, if one of them does it the benefit is shared with me (my wife doesn’t have a taste for iced drinks). There is a temptation for each of us to refrain from emptying the trays into the bin until we absolutely have to in the hope that one of the others will do it instead.
Enjoyed this post on several levels. I'm of a similar age bracket to you and my parents, having grown up in the Depression were averse to anything resembling wastefulness, particularly when it came to food. So any resistance my brothers and I put up over certain foods was not well tolerated. In my case, I ate almost anything but my next brother despised peas and broccoli, spending long periods of time staring at the offending vegetables until he "cleaned his plate." But he ate nearly everything else without complaining and, to my parents' credit, eventually gave him a pass on those two foods. Harmony at the dinner table was returned to normal and nobody starved to death.
When I was a child we had a rule that has persisted now to my great-grandchildren. Children have new, or different, or unusual foods on their plates (in about a tablespoonful in total), and they must eat two bites (Mom decides the size of the bites), but after that they are free to ignore it until the next time it appears on the plate. After three tries they no longer have to eat that food until they "grow up" and they may choose to try it again. We just served them all plenty of home made cooking and very little sugary snacks. So far it works well.
My children both love spinach, raw or cooked despite their mother (a vegetarian) not liking it at all. Each of them eats a wide variety of foods (my daughter is now a "mostly vegetarian" who, oddly eats very spicy chili with hamburger in it occasionally). My son eats pretty much anything put in front of him. Their grown children are also pretty much "eat anything" types.
I think the trick is allowing some decision-making by children when they're quite young.
As an aside, as a baby my son would not eat any green baby food. Not green beans, not peas, not spinach. I would try to trick him by giving him a spoonful of half apricots, which he loved, and half green stuff. At 8 months he'd wallow the food around with his tongue, then spit out the green stuff every time. I still have no idea of why, or of how, exactly, he knew. Today he likes all of those green veggies.
1. You are better at preserving familial customs than I am. Before finishing the post I emailed my older son, who has kids, to ask if they used the "number two" custom, and he responded that they didn't. My two younger kids are adults but unmarried so don't have their own households — hopefully they will pass on the custom when they do.
2. We ended up with kids who had odd tastes. Favorites include medieval Islamic dishes with what a modern would consider odd spicing but our daughter hates both peanut butter and melted cheese and our son won't eat cooked bell peppers and prefers spaghetti sauce out of a jar to his mother's delicious home made spaghetti sauce.
Peanut butter is an odd case because both our daughter and the son of my first marriage hate it, I love it, and I am the parent they have in common.
While quite dispersed, my family is still pretty tight-knit. Growing up rural and pretty hillbilly probably has a lot to do with that. Generally, even the ones who move far (CA, Canada, NE, MI, TX, AZ, CO, FL, some other states, manage to find their way 'home' periodically to the small town (now 250 population) that my (and my sibs) grandparents grew up in and that my generation did, or nearby. My sister and her husband live in the home we moved into in 1957, before she was born, and that serves as central clearing. She keeps us all up-to-date with "family doings."
I also think this is one of those few things that that the web has helped, at least in our case. We have a family FB page with about 50 members, and we communicate regularly. Also, lots of texting and such.
As for food, my mother used to say I'd eat anything that didn't bite me first, and some things that did,
We have wide-ranging tastes. I make great soups, and breads, in general, and I've been told by a Vietnamese colleague that my pho is nearly as good as his grandmother's. High praise indeed. But I come from a family whose matriarch on the farm had a stockpot on simmer every single day for decades. We know about that sort of thing. She used a wood burner right up until she passed.
I make some decent Chinese and Thai dishes and a Dutch-Indonesian friend is helping me with that cuisine. We all love Mexican and Tex-Mex. Most of us love real Italian, but also Southern Fried foods, various kinds of barbecue, and of course the solid Midwestern fare we grew up with. A few years ago we had a family reunion over the 4th of July weekend, and everyone brought a couple of dishes to share, or cooked them on one of the 4 platforms available. The variety was wild. We also took the opportunity to turn 300# of cabbage into sauerkraut, which most of us love. We had around 90 family, shirt-tail relatives, adoptees that we had taken in at one time or another, in-laws, outlaws, ne'er-do-wells, black sheep, neighbors, and, I swear, a couple of carnies.
We're a weird, loving, extended family. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Have the same rule in my house though only started around age eight or so and continues unto today even though my kids are almost grown now, I find even teenagers need to get prodded to try, or retry when it's simply a base ingredient prepared differently, something new.
Prior that, and it's where I disagree with David here, it IS about submission once your kid chooses to not eat. If you are reading this comment David I'm curious on your thoughts around "libertarian child-rearing" as that is one area I haven't really seen much discussion of. Generally in my libertarian view it only applies to "moral", and previously moral, beings, i.e. infants don't have rights and I need not concern myself about the non-aggression principle when it comes to the rights of my five year old on choosing their bedtime or getting a flu shot (terrified of needles).
PS. I like that second dishwasher idea actually, never thought about it. I have a pathological hatred of putting dishes away (and folding laundry) to the point I pay someone to come in and do both weeky, not the washing but the finishing. Might have to look into the cost of a second hookup now lol.
Regarding the issue of who cooks, who washes up: You have to take comparative advantage into account. My boyfriend is better at washing up, so he always does it and I dry. I'm so appreciative of his washing up, and he's equally appreciative of my cooking skills. If I'm at his house, and he prepares the meal, he still does the washing up and I dry. He's a good cook too, but nothing trumps his washing up skills and his willingness to do it.
On dishwashing: I knew a faculty couple who had adopted a rule that one person washes all the dishes until (a) a night has elapsed, and (b) the sink is empty, at which point it becomes the other person’s turn. When I, as a grad student, moved into their basement for a month, they added me to the rotation, and were upset when I followed the obvious strategy of getting up early and washing all the dishes before they had gotten out of bed. (Upset in part because their bedroom was adjacent to the kitchen… and neither of them was a “morning person”….)
I presume that any good scholar who addressed a point made by Aristotle, either to embellish or refute his account, would mention Aristotle if they knew that Aristotle had addressed the question. And we should be able to replace Aristotle with any other scholar, though Aristotle's ideas are unusually widely known. Assuming that economists generally are not poor scholars, I would conclude that there is not much overlap between Aristotle and economics. Perhaps I have misperceived Aristotle, and he did opine on economics, but has been refuted so soundly that that it would be redundant to mention him when discussing economic questions.
But perhaps there indeed is a distinction hinted at here. Philosophers generally like to include a comparison between the accounts they present and others that have given different responses. Perhaps for economists, just presenting a coherent story is sufficient, even if it ignores the rival accounts?
My point was that there has been enough progress in economics over the past two thousand plus years that what was written in classical antiquity is no longer relevant. The same does not seem to be true of philosophy.
That could be taken to mean either that there has been no progress in philosophy, or that progress has consisted primarily of addressing new problems, and the ones addressed in antiquity were addressed pretty well and remain relevant, or at least that the answers considered in antiquity are still worth considering. Mathematics provides an example of a discipline where many results derived by the ancients are still worthy of study and recognition, while loads of new stuff count as progress.
Those are both possible, but my impression is that the former is more nearly what happened. When I read a book on evolutionary psychology (real example) I actually learn interesting new ideas that might be correct. When I read philosophy I don't.
Probably a second reason for my view of (modern) philosophy is that Rawls' difference principle is taken seriously, when the argument is pure hand waving designed to avoid the obvious implication of the initial position argument, pointed out by Harsanyi twenty years earlier. Because Rawls doesn't like it.
Yes, lots of philosophy is bad, and some of it has become popular among philosophers. I guess this could never happen to economists. (*cough cough Keynes cough cough*) ;)
Keynes's derivation of the multiplier (in the original General Theory, which does not distinguish G from I) involves setting up an equation for calculating Investment from Income, by way of the marginal propensity to consume, and then solving it for Income and saying that if you increase Investment Income must rise commensurately. But this gets things backward; the proper interpretation is not "this is how much Income WILL rise if you raise Investment" but "this is how much Income NEEDS TO rise if you want to raise investment." Income remains the cause and Investment the effect. Of course Investment often secondarily produces an increase in future Income, but there's no reason to assume that that's governed by the same relation. Being able to run an equation in either direction like that is valid under conditions of static equilibrium, where by definition future Income is necessarily the same as present Income; but it doesn't work under dynamic conditions. That just jumped out at me as an obvious fallacy when I struggled through the clotted prose of the General Theory.
Under dynamic conditions, you must distinguish what is cause and what is effect; you can change the effect by changing the cause, but not conversely. And the market economy is characteristically dynamic, as Schumpeter (for example) pointed out in Keynes's own time with his concept of creative destruction, and as we have seen in our own time with the massive changes caused by the Internet. As a Cantabrigian Keynes thought of static equilibrium as the natural state of the market—and not merely as a hypothetical future state toward which it tended without necessarily ever getting there—but that was just wrong, and obviously wrong.
I would also note that Keynes's rejection of Say's Law was based on a statement of that law, as "supply creates its own demand," that was not merely oversimplified but entirely different from what Say actually said. That was either an incredible stupid reading or a deliberate falsification for propaganda purposes.
One of my Political Philosophy frequently said that all the best questions in philosophy had been asked by the time of Christ's birth, but lots of them still did not have really good answers. (And he was a strong conservative Catholic, who taught Augustine and Aquinas, among others.)
I would hardly expect an economist to quote Aristotle, or discuss any of his ideas, since none of Aristotle's writing is about anything that economics now addresses. On the other hand, I have seen you quote Adam Smith in discussing economics; it does not seem that you think his having written a quarter millennium ago makes him unable to shed light on current concerns.
I would have to disagree with the cook having to clean the pans-approach. While it is true that the cook has limited incentive (but not none - after all, the cook cares for his family) to reduce the use of pots and pans if he does not have to clean them, this ignores the differences in personal preference and cooking skills among the family members. For myself, I detest hoovering and cleaning oven trays, whereas I do not mind ironing shirts or cooking. My wife, on the other hand, dislikes hoovering and cleaning oven trays less than I do. Also, she concedes that my cooking is generally better. Therefore, in order to get better food and to make me happy, she agrees to do the hoovering and clean the oven trays. Even if there may be a few more trays to clean than if I had to clean them myself. In economist terms, it seems the added benefit to my wife of agreeing to clean the trays and do the hoovering more than outweighs the added cost of having to clean more trays than strictly necessary.
Great post! Here's another solution to the child/veggie problem. Joel Furhman, M.D. describes in one of his Eat to Live podcasts (Growing up Nutritarian, https://www.drfuhrman.com/podcasts), how he trained his boy when the child was very young. He pretended that kale was such a super food, he wanted it all for himself. When the child began to crave it, he pretended that the child was getting so strong that Dr. Furhman was now at risk of being a push-over. When the child tapped him on the shoulder as requested, he fell over, apparently dumbfounded by the child's strength. P.S. Blueberries are a great source of phytonutrients but can't compete with green veggies. Berries are important to have every day, as are beans, onions, mushrooms, seeds and nuts, but take a look at this ranking of foods: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/238/knowing-a-foods-nutrient-density-is-key-to-making-good-choices
I think he was only 2 or 3. He really did believe, or so I assume. From what I've gathered from "Two Lucky People," your parents' memoir, you probably wouldn't have!
Nice post but I'm wondering how many ice cube trays do you have that it takes 10 min to empty and refill. And on the dishes. Both sides would have to agree on what is a clean kitchen. I'm more obsessed than my gf so she does a half-a#* job knowing that I will clean after her.
Enjoyed this post on several levels. I'm of a similar age bracket to you and my parents, having grown up in the Depression were averse to anything resembling wastefulness, particularly when it came to food. So any resistance my brothers and I put up over certain foods was not well tolerated. In my case, I ate almost anything but my next brother despised peas and broccoli, spending long periods of time staring at the offending vegetables until he "cleaned his plate." But he ate nearly everything else without complaining and, to my parents' credit, eventually gave him a pass on those two foods. Harmony at the dinner table was returned to normal and nobody starved to death.
When I was a child we had a rule that has persisted now to my great-grandchildren. Children have new, or different, or unusual foods on their plates (in about a tablespoonful in total), and they must eat two bites (Mom decides the size of the bites), but after that they are free to ignore it until the next time it appears on the plate. After three tries they no longer have to eat that food until they "grow up" and they may choose to try it again. We just served them all plenty of home made cooking and very little sugary snacks. So far it works well.
My children both love spinach, raw or cooked despite their mother (a vegetarian) not liking it at all. Each of them eats a wide variety of foods (my daughter is now a "mostly vegetarian" who, oddly eats very spicy chili with hamburger in it occasionally). My son eats pretty much anything put in front of him. Their grown children are also pretty much "eat anything" types.
I think the trick is allowing some decision-making by children when they're quite young.
As an aside, as a baby my son would not eat any green baby food. Not green beans, not peas, not spinach. I would try to trick him by giving him a spoonful of half apricots, which he loved, and half green stuff. At 8 months he'd wallow the food around with his tongue, then spit out the green stuff every time. I still have no idea of why, or of how, exactly, he knew. Today he likes all of those green veggies.
1. You are better at preserving familial customs than I am. Before finishing the post I emailed my older son, who has kids, to ask if they used the "number two" custom, and he responded that they didn't. My two younger kids are adults but unmarried so don't have their own households — hopefully they will pass on the custom when they do.
2. We ended up with kids who had odd tastes. Favorites include medieval Islamic dishes with what a modern would consider odd spicing but our daughter hates both peanut butter and melted cheese and our son won't eat cooked bell peppers and prefers spaghetti sauce out of a jar to his mother's delicious home made spaghetti sauce.
Peanut butter is an odd case because both our daughter and the son of my first marriage hate it, I love it, and I am the parent they have in common.
While quite dispersed, my family is still pretty tight-knit. Growing up rural and pretty hillbilly probably has a lot to do with that. Generally, even the ones who move far (CA, Canada, NE, MI, TX, AZ, CO, FL, some other states, manage to find their way 'home' periodically to the small town (now 250 population) that my (and my sibs) grandparents grew up in and that my generation did, or nearby. My sister and her husband live in the home we moved into in 1957, before she was born, and that serves as central clearing. She keeps us all up-to-date with "family doings."
I also think this is one of those few things that that the web has helped, at least in our case. We have a family FB page with about 50 members, and we communicate regularly. Also, lots of texting and such.
As for food, my mother used to say I'd eat anything that didn't bite me first, and some things that did,
We have wide-ranging tastes. I make great soups, and breads, in general, and I've been told by a Vietnamese colleague that my pho is nearly as good as his grandmother's. High praise indeed. But I come from a family whose matriarch on the farm had a stockpot on simmer every single day for decades. We know about that sort of thing. She used a wood burner right up until she passed.
I make some decent Chinese and Thai dishes and a Dutch-Indonesian friend is helping me with that cuisine. We all love Mexican and Tex-Mex. Most of us love real Italian, but also Southern Fried foods, various kinds of barbecue, and of course the solid Midwestern fare we grew up with. A few years ago we had a family reunion over the 4th of July weekend, and everyone brought a couple of dishes to share, or cooked them on one of the 4 platforms available. The variety was wild. We also took the opportunity to turn 300# of cabbage into sauerkraut, which most of us love. We had around 90 family, shirt-tail relatives, adoptees that we had taken in at one time or another, in-laws, outlaws, ne'er-do-wells, black sheep, neighbors, and, I swear, a couple of carnies.
We're a weird, loving, extended family. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
My maternal grandmother cooked on a wood burning stove — possibly coal, it was a long time ago.
Have the same rule in my house though only started around age eight or so and continues unto today even though my kids are almost grown now, I find even teenagers need to get prodded to try, or retry when it's simply a base ingredient prepared differently, something new.
Prior that, and it's where I disagree with David here, it IS about submission once your kid chooses to not eat. If you are reading this comment David I'm curious on your thoughts around "libertarian child-rearing" as that is one area I haven't really seen much discussion of. Generally in my libertarian view it only applies to "moral", and previously moral, beings, i.e. infants don't have rights and I need not concern myself about the non-aggression principle when it comes to the rights of my five year old on choosing their bedtime or getting a flu shot (terrified of needles).
PS. I like that second dishwasher idea actually, never thought about it. I have a pathological hatred of putting dishes away (and folding laundry) to the point I pay someone to come in and do both weeky, not the washing but the finishing. Might have to look into the cost of a second hookup now lol.
Regarding the issue of who cooks, who washes up: You have to take comparative advantage into account. My boyfriend is better at washing up, so he always does it and I dry. I'm so appreciative of his washing up, and he's equally appreciative of my cooking skills. If I'm at his house, and he prepares the meal, he still does the washing up and I dry. He's a good cook too, but nothing trumps his washing up skills and his willingness to do it.
On dishwashing: I knew a faculty couple who had adopted a rule that one person washes all the dishes until (a) a night has elapsed, and (b) the sink is empty, at which point it becomes the other person’s turn. When I, as a grad student, moved into their basement for a month, they added me to the rotation, and were upset when I followed the obvious strategy of getting up early and washing all the dishes before they had gotten out of bed. (Upset in part because their bedroom was adjacent to the kitchen… and neither of them was a “morning person”….)
I presume that any good scholar who addressed a point made by Aristotle, either to embellish or refute his account, would mention Aristotle if they knew that Aristotle had addressed the question. And we should be able to replace Aristotle with any other scholar, though Aristotle's ideas are unusually widely known. Assuming that economists generally are not poor scholars, I would conclude that there is not much overlap between Aristotle and economics. Perhaps I have misperceived Aristotle, and he did opine on economics, but has been refuted so soundly that that it would be redundant to mention him when discussing economic questions.
But perhaps there indeed is a distinction hinted at here. Philosophers generally like to include a comparison between the accounts they present and others that have given different responses. Perhaps for economists, just presenting a coherent story is sufficient, even if it ignores the rival accounts?
My point was that there has been enough progress in economics over the past two thousand plus years that what was written in classical antiquity is no longer relevant. The same does not seem to be true of philosophy.
That could be taken to mean either that there has been no progress in philosophy, or that progress has consisted primarily of addressing new problems, and the ones addressed in antiquity were addressed pretty well and remain relevant, or at least that the answers considered in antiquity are still worth considering. Mathematics provides an example of a discipline where many results derived by the ancients are still worthy of study and recognition, while loads of new stuff count as progress.
Those are both possible, but my impression is that the former is more nearly what happened. When I read a book on evolutionary psychology (real example) I actually learn interesting new ideas that might be correct. When I read philosophy I don't.
Probably a second reason for my view of (modern) philosophy is that Rawls' difference principle is taken seriously, when the argument is pure hand waving designed to avoid the obvious implication of the initial position argument, pointed out by Harsanyi twenty years earlier. Because Rawls doesn't like it.
I discussed some of that in an old post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ddf-vs-bhl
Yes, lots of philosophy is bad, and some of it has become popular among philosophers. I guess this could never happen to economists. (*cough cough Keynes cough cough*) ;)
I don't think Keynes' work was obviously wrong. Rawls' derivation of the difference principle is.
Keynes's derivation of the multiplier (in the original General Theory, which does not distinguish G from I) involves setting up an equation for calculating Investment from Income, by way of the marginal propensity to consume, and then solving it for Income and saying that if you increase Investment Income must rise commensurately. But this gets things backward; the proper interpretation is not "this is how much Income WILL rise if you raise Investment" but "this is how much Income NEEDS TO rise if you want to raise investment." Income remains the cause and Investment the effect. Of course Investment often secondarily produces an increase in future Income, but there's no reason to assume that that's governed by the same relation. Being able to run an equation in either direction like that is valid under conditions of static equilibrium, where by definition future Income is necessarily the same as present Income; but it doesn't work under dynamic conditions. That just jumped out at me as an obvious fallacy when I struggled through the clotted prose of the General Theory.
Under dynamic conditions, you must distinguish what is cause and what is effect; you can change the effect by changing the cause, but not conversely. And the market economy is characteristically dynamic, as Schumpeter (for example) pointed out in Keynes's own time with his concept of creative destruction, and as we have seen in our own time with the massive changes caused by the Internet. As a Cantabrigian Keynes thought of static equilibrium as the natural state of the market—and not merely as a hypothetical future state toward which it tended without necessarily ever getting there—but that was just wrong, and obviously wrong.
I would also note that Keynes's rejection of Say's Law was based on a statement of that law, as "supply creates its own demand," that was not merely oversimplified but entirely different from what Say actually said. That was either an incredible stupid reading or a deliberate falsification for propaganda purposes.
One of my Political Philosophy frequently said that all the best questions in philosophy had been asked by the time of Christ's birth, but lots of them still did not have really good answers. (And he was a strong conservative Catholic, who taught Augustine and Aquinas, among others.)
I would hardly expect an economist to quote Aristotle, or discuss any of his ideas, since none of Aristotle's writing is about anything that economics now addresses. On the other hand, I have seen you quote Adam Smith in discussing economics; it does not seem that you think his having written a quarter millennium ago makes him unable to shed light on current concerns.
I would have to disagree with the cook having to clean the pans-approach. While it is true that the cook has limited incentive (but not none - after all, the cook cares for his family) to reduce the use of pots and pans if he does not have to clean them, this ignores the differences in personal preference and cooking skills among the family members. For myself, I detest hoovering and cleaning oven trays, whereas I do not mind ironing shirts or cooking. My wife, on the other hand, dislikes hoovering and cleaning oven trays less than I do. Also, she concedes that my cooking is generally better. Therefore, in order to get better food and to make me happy, she agrees to do the hoovering and clean the oven trays. Even if there may be a few more trays to clean than if I had to clean them myself. In economist terms, it seems the added benefit to my wife of agreeing to clean the trays and do the hoovering more than outweighs the added cost of having to clean more trays than strictly necessary.
Which is why I wrote:
" Assume away any differences between their circumstances that might be relevant to who washes the dishes when. "
Missed that - sorry.
Great post! Here's another solution to the child/veggie problem. Joel Furhman, M.D. describes in one of his Eat to Live podcasts (Growing up Nutritarian, https://www.drfuhrman.com/podcasts), how he trained his boy when the child was very young. He pretended that kale was such a super food, he wanted it all for himself. When the child began to crave it, he pretended that the child was getting so strong that Dr. Furhman was now at risk of being a push-over. When the child tapped him on the shoulder as requested, he fell over, apparently dumbfounded by the child's strength. P.S. Blueberries are a great source of phytonutrients but can't compete with green veggies. Berries are important to have every day, as are beans, onions, mushrooms, seeds and nuts, but take a look at this ranking of foods: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/238/knowing-a-foods-nutrient-density-is-key-to-making-good-choices
Dr. Fuhrman's child must have been very good at pretending to believe his father.
I think he was only 2 or 3. He really did believe, or so I assume. From what I've gathered from "Two Lucky People," your parents' memoir, you probably wouldn't have!
Nice post but I'm wondering how many ice cube trays do you have that it takes 10 min to empty and refill. And on the dishes. Both sides would have to agree on what is a clean kitchen. I'm more obsessed than my gf so she does a half-a#* job knowing that I will clean after her.
Great title! And I really enjoyed the post. Number two already has another meaning in my house, but I love the idea of code words
Number two has another meaning in many houses but apparently not in my parents' when they got married, so not in ours.