Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?

But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something.

After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . .

. . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.

Caplan’s main argument is:

1. We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful.

2. But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or inscrutable random seeds plus noise.

3. So you can relax. Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.

4. If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup. But people who understand and internalize the points above will have a better time than average. So for them, kids are probably a great bet.

I buy the behavioral genetics. I buy the ambiguous happiness results. But how long do parents really spend on childcare, and how easily can those numbers be cut?

How Long Do Parents Really Spend On Childcare?

Caplan’s most striking statistic is that fathers now spend more time with their kids than mothers did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.

I can’t reach Caplan’s specific source (Bianchi et al, Changing Rhythms Of American Family Life), but his claims broadly match the data in Dotti Sani & Treas (2016):

All these numbers are kind of low, aren’t they? Do both parents, combined, really only spend three hours a day with their children?! My wife and I combined spend approximately four thousand hours per day with our kids! Is that what we’re doing wrong - the dragon that we must slay before we enter Caplan’s easy-parenting paradise?

My wife eventually found Wilkie and Cullen (2023), an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.

But where DS&T seem too low, these seem too high. When a child is one year old, mothers spend 7.5 hours a day, and fathers 5 hours? Don’t some of these mothers and fathers have to work? Don’t some people put their kids in daycare? Even at age nine, W&C say both parents are spending a combined 9 hours per day, every day! Why are these two sources so different?

Zick & Bryant point out that a large portion of childcare time is “secondary childcare” while doing something else. This could be anything from “you’re sneaking a peek at your phone in the middle of babysitting” to “you’re napping, but your teenager is downstairs and can wake you if he needs you”.

Maybe C&W count secondary childcare, and DS&T don’t? Z&B’s own surveys find that this category only takes up an hour or so a day - not enough to close our gap. But this Bureau of Labor Statistics report is more promising:

Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.3 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)

Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare - that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 13 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (1.9 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).

This matches both sources pretty well, so we can consider the discrepancy solved. BLS goes on to separate its findings into ever-finer categories:

The weekend numbers add up to 19 hours of childcare a day, which is longer than most children are awake. Probably this is because both parents provide some secondary childcare together. I don’t know if these numbers count “childcare” “provided” when the children are sleeping, eg you’re watching a movie at 9 PM after putting your kid to bed.

I put more effort into finding these numbers than can be justified by curiosity alone. I wanted to know if my wife and I were doing something wrong or crazy - spending way more time with our kids than everyone else does. Now, with all the data in front of me, I find them impossible to interpret.

What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t? Or maybe I falsely think that mine aren’t, and that’s why I’m having so much trouble? Or maybe one-year-olds without twin siblings can do it, but twins have to - KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!

The Wisdom Of The Ancients

The first chart finds that 1960s mothers - including many stay-at-home-moms - spent only half as long on primary childcare as modern parents. How could this be?

Caplan treats this question in the genre of life advice - why not relax and spend less time parenting, like your grandparents did? But to me it feels more like ancient occult wisdom. If you heard that the people of 10,000 BC built vast crystal pyramids that channeled the music of the spheres into infinite free electricity, you wouldn’t think “Oh, nice, guess that gives me permission to relax and stop fretting so much about energy policy”. You would wonder how they accomplished this seemingly impossible feat!

Here’s Caplan’s explanation:

When he was a boy, my dad rode his bike all over downtown Los Angeles.. My friends and I had more supervision, but our moms still got us out of their hair by ordering us to play outside until dinner. My mom kindly let me read in my room, but the philosophy was the same: Entertaining myself was my job, not hers. Today, I almost never see kids playing outside without a watchful parent.

This seems basically right. I lived just close enough to the tail end of this period to recognize the phrase “Remember to be home by dinner!”

G.K. Chesterton wrote about the phrase “you can’t turn back the clock”:

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore.

So - could you, today, kick your child out the door at 9 AM on a Saturday and tell them to be back by dinner?

Bryan worries that most parents refuse to do this because they think the world is less safe than in their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. He says that’s wrong. Modern death rates for children are a quarter what they were in the golden age of outside kids. Most of the improvement comes from less disease, which is only slightly relevant to this question. But deaths from accidents (including car accidents) are down even more (5x!). Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn’t matter given how rare homicides were to begin with (and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members).

You could think of this improvement in two ways - either as proof that coddling kids works really well, or that coddling kids is unnecessary. Caplan chooses the latter, at great length - although when I read the several pages he devoted to this question I cannot figure out his exact argument disproving the former.

One potential argument is that the child trends mostly mirror adult trends. Adult accident death rates have also gone way down (and adult murder rates stayed about the same) since the 1960s. The simplest explanation is that child trends simply mirror adults. And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. So maybe the kids aren’t either.

What about kidnapping? Plenty of people are kidnapped, but it’s usually something like a relative stealing them away in defiance of a divorce custody agreement. The “traditional kidnapping” where a creep in a white van plucks a child off the streets is much rarer - only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?) that’s still only 1/70,000 children per year. On the other hand, over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds) that’s a 1/7,000 chance. And surely if you’re the only person still letting your kid play outside, your chances are worse than average. But if you’re an upper-class person in a good neighborhood, your chances get better than average again. Let’s estimate a 10x penalty for playing outside and a 2x bonus for not being a poor person in a ghetto. Now it seems like your total chance of child abduction per child-lifetime is 1/1,400.

But it seems like most abductions are navigated successfully:

Across the country, only 181 Amber Alerts were broadcast in 2022, including one in New York, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In those cases, 180 children were recovered and only one was still missing as of March. Four of the children were killed.

If 4/180 abducted children are killed (I don’t know if number of Amber Alerts is the right denominator), that’s a 1/63,000 chance of child death via abduction per child-lifetime. Seems not great but not like a deal-breaker.

So maybe the more relevant question is - if you decide you want to do this, is it even possible?

I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.

The police officer was legally in the wrong. This California child abuse lawyer says that there are no laws against letting your kid play (or walk) outside unsupervised. There is a generic law saying children generally need “adequate” supervision, but he doesn’t think the courts would interpret this as banning the sort of thing my friends did.

Still, being technically correct is cold comfort when the police disagree. Even if you can eventually win a court case, that takes a lot of resources - and who’s to say a different cop won’t nab you next time? To solve the problem, seven states (not including California) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which make it clear to policemen and everyone else that unsupervised play is okay. There is a whole “free range kids” movement (its founder, Lenore Skenazy, gets profiled in SRTHMK) trying to win this legal and cultural battle.

The Free Range Kids website has some tools and tips, but they don’t go about it the exact way that I would (yes, I’ve thought about this a lot). When Kai and Lyra are older, I fantasize about organizing the local rationalists - we have five families with kids on the same block. They’ll all wear bright orange t-shirts and hats with “FREE RANGE KIDS” on them, and they’ll all have a flyer - which they’re encouraged to show any adult or officer who complains - saying something like:

Thank you for your concern about our child. We are part of the free-range kids movement; you can read more about it at letgrow.org. We’ve given our children permission to roam between XXth street and YYth street. This decision is protected under California law based on the arguments we list at whyfreerangekidsarelegal.com. This has been endorsed by such-and-such a lawyer, and we also talked it over with our local city council member, so-and-so, who agreed. If you see our kid doing a specific dangerous thing, or inconveniencing anyone else, please call us at XXX-XXXX and we’ll come over immediately. Otherwise, please let them be!

Thank you,
Your Neighbors

PS: We are rich and extremely litigious.

Eventually the kids in the bright orange shirts will become a local fixture among neighbors and cops alike, and people will stop bothering us. I have no idea if this will work, but it works in my head.

Still, age one is too early to try this; my kids would still run into the street if we weren’t there to stop them. Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.

The “Wisdom” Of The Moderns

Let’s be real - if you dial back your parenting efforts while making no other changes, your kids won’t spend all day playing in the woods, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style. They’ll use screens.

Caplan seems to mostly accept this fate:

[These] suspicions are almost certainly correct. If you give mature adults extra free time, many relax in front of the TV or computer. It would be amazing if childish children didn’t do the same. But what’s wrong with that? Electronic babysitters are a vital component of cultural literacy. I hope my kids grow up to know both The Simpsons and Shakespeare. In any case, electronic babysitters are undeniably a lot of fun for kids, and - as a cheap, dependable substitute for a human babysitter - a blessing for parents, too. So why the hostility? It’s as if parents think that anything that feels good for every member of the family must be bad.

I’m not advising people to put their kids in front of the television and forget about them. My wife and I don’t let ours watch more than an hour or two a day, because we don’t want them to miss out on the other joys of childhood. I’m merely suggesting pragmatic adjustments in the way that families spend their time. If parents feel exhausted by their kids’ busy schedule, they should trim a few hours of activity from their week - even if their kids spend most of their extra hours on TV and video games. The parents will be happier, and the kids will probably be happier too.

Wise words - in 2011, when SRTHMK was written. What about the age of TikTok and Instagram?

We all know what argument comes next: “You think a newfangled thing is bad. But the ancients thought their newfangled thing was bad, and now that we’ve had time to get used to it, we realize it’s fine. Therefore, no new thing is ever bad.” People in 2000 were afraid video games were destroying society, people in 1960 were afraid TV was destroying society, people in 1600 thought the novel was destroying society, and people in 500 BC thought writing was destroying society.

Therefore, nothing can ever destroy society? Sorry, this is too Outside View, even for me (1, 2, 3). Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse. I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD and then they were right all at once - or whether each generation was right that they were slightly more decadent and less stable than the last, until finally the decline became unsustainable. But the guys in 475 saying “har har, we’ve read Livy, he thought his generation was decadent and about to collapse too” would have been in for a nasty surprise. So let’s at least consider taking this at face value.

There are two lines of evidence that phones are genuinely rotting people’s brains in a way past technologies haven’t. First, standardized test scores are down. Second, teachers are freaking out.

The Financial Times presents the argument from standardized testing: Have humans passed peak brain power? Student and adult test performance peaked in 2012, and has gone down ever since.

Cremieux thinks this might be fake. He says part of the effect is demographic shift. Blacks, Hispanics, and some Middle Eastern populations tend to underperform whites on most scholastic tests; if they are recent immigrants, they may not even speak the language fluently. As these groups increase in proportion of the test-taking population, test scores go down (there’s also a more arcane issue called measurement invariance; click the link for the explanation). Cremieux finds that when you adjust for these things, some of the problem goes away:

But these are American scores only. The pre-COVID decline in American scores was marginal at best. And the Financial Times’ cited scores across all OECD nations.

The best way I could think of to test this was to look at PISA scores filtered by the question “Does one of your parents have an immigrant background”? I hoped that this would filter out most of the ethnically diverse test-takers in non-US countries, allowing an apples-to-apples comparison:

Here ALL is all test-takers, and NAT is those with two native-born parents. 5/6 of the 2012-2018 score decline remains in the latter group. I’m not showing the 2018 - 2022 score decline, because most of that is COVID learning loss, but I analyzed it separately and found similar results.

This doesn’t really look demographic shift related. I can’t prove it, because it could be demographic shift among third-generation-plus immigrants. But most PISA countries don’t have enough third-generation-plus immigrants to shift trendlines on their own. These findings don’t 100% prove that something bad is going on, but they’re consistent with it.

I am more convinced by the widespread negative reports from teachers. People dismiss these by claiming there is some generic bias to think “the youth” used to be better in “the good old days”. But I hear stories like these from teachers who have been in the field for 30, 40 years, never said anything like this between 1980 and 2010, but now suddenly think there’s a crisis (one of them is my mother, who taught high school until her retirement in the late 2010s). This recent essay by blogger “Hilarius Bookbinder” is representative of the (voluminous) genre:

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know […]

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either […]

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection […[ it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

If I’d known I was going to write this post, I would have saved the dozens of similar claims I’ve come across recently - as it is, I’ll just have to hope that you’ve seen them too.

Hilarius lists seven causes, which separate into three groups.

The first root cause group is COVID. Faculty lowered standards when things were genuinely tough. Then students pushed back when they tried to raise standards again, so the new low standards got locked in.

The second is general technology. Teachers started giving lectures on PowerPoint; they sent out the slides afterwards to help people study; students figured they could skip the lectures and read the slides instead. There are plenty of ways to use technology to get learning experiences which are easier than the real thing and 80% as good. But when you get too reliant on them, you learn 20% less.

But the third is screens. Bookbinder writes:

[Students are] pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.

Maybe this is a subspecies of the previous category: bringing a laptop to class makes lectures far more tolerable at the cost of learning 20% less material. But also:

It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

Suppose that screens genuinely harm many students. Does that mean that parents should keep screens away from toddlers? It depends on the mechanism of harm. If phones harm kids by gradually damaging their brains somehow (chronic dopamine poisoning? I’m pretty sure this isn’t a real thing, but I’m sure some self-help guru has an infomercial that disagrees), and this damage is worst during childhood, then sure, keep your kids away. But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?

Or does giving kids phones at age three (when they have no hope of resisting) deny them the right to exercise their free will at age eighteen (when they might have some slight hope)? Do Caplan’s exhortations to remember the behavioral genetics literature apply here? Will those with phone addiction genes get addicted no matter how we raise them? Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?

I feel about 75% sure there’s a trend towards recent intellectual decline which needs to be explained, I think phones are about 60% of the explanation, and I think it’s about 25% likely that early childhood phone use causes some damage beyond what would happen if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18 but then let him use them normally afterwards. When I multiply those all out, that’s an 11% chance that letting my kid use a phone will rot his brain. I can already hear Bryan Caplan saying that’s not so high - that living with a stressed-out parent who constantly resents the demandingness of childcare has a much more than 11% chance of being bad.

But it’s not just addiction. What if they wander into the wrong part of the Internet and become incels, or SJWs with seven genders, or sedevacantists? Lots of people get one or another mind virus; why should my kids be immune? Because I’ll give them a happy childhood? I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals (5.93 vs. 6.70 on a ten-point scale), the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level (46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal). Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu? And what about our daughter? What percent of women from intellectually-inclined non-practicing-Jewish families avoid becoming insane woke people? 20%? 10%? Sure, we’ll try to inculcate her into our reasonable liberal culture. But what do you think all those woke teenagers are rebelling against?

Can a 2011 book say anything about these dangers? Caplan still blogs; some of his more recent output addresses them more directly. But maybe his greater contribution is the way SRTHMK teaches us to challenge our fears. Are the dangers of today really worse than those of yesterday? Is some real-but-small chance of harm from insufficient caution really worse than the certainty of making ourselves and our kids miserable through excessive discipline? Can we really win a fight against the spirit of the age and our children’s genetic proclivities?

When I try to apply SRTHMK’s lessons, I can’t deny that I’m being exactly the kind of hypocrite who says that my generation was okay but the next generation is destroying society. I chafed against all of my parents’ stupid computer use restrictions as a teenager - why couldn’t they understand that I was only playing classy games, like Civilization, and hanging out on decent sites, like LiveJournal? Now it’s twenty years later and…

…actually, I guess I became an anti-woke influencer (surely every good liberal mother’s worst nightmare). And I did sort of join a doomsday cult (comparatively tame but still unfortunate). Is that bad enough that my parents were right? If my kids end up as weird compared to me as I am compared to my parents, will I tolerate them as graciously as my parents still somehow tolerate me?

At this age, none of this affects me as much as my visceral reaction when I see a phone-addicted toddler. I shudder to see a three-year-old in the grocery store screaming “PHONE? PHONE?” until her parents relent and let her watch algorithmically-recommended YouTube videos of dancing monsters. And I know my kids would fall for it. I got them a toy keyboard-like-object once, the kind where you press a button and it plays terrible nursery rhymes. Sometimes I would not want to hear terrible nursery rhymes and would turn it off. Big mistake. My son would scream at me until I changed my mind; eventually I stopped even trying. The moment he gets a phone, his life is over.

And this is part of a more general argument against superstimuli. I used to let my kids stand on top of the table, under supervision. They loved it. Every time they saw me, they would grab me and point to the table. But sometimes I didn’t want to supervise them that closely, or there were breakable objects on the table, and then they (okay, mostly my son) would throw tantrums. Eventually my wife made a no-tables rule so they would lose the expectation that pestering us might work. This has expanded into a broader principle: don’t let toddlers know a superstimulus exists if you’re not prepared to fight them about whether they get to have it all the time.

So I’m not giving in yet. If nothing else, I want to be able to spend quality time with my kids without it turning into an argument over whether they get the phone or not.

Selfish Reasons To Do Less Childcare

None of this addresses my primary interest in this book: am I wrong to feel overwhelmed by childcare?

I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.

I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.

When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.

(Daycare would also work, except that my wife and nanny both have terrible immune systems and get knocked out of commission if they catch anything from the kids. Any solution which exposes them to more germs probably saves me negative childcare hours.)

I’d been resisting this. Partly it was out of stinginess - something something tariffs, something something impending recession. But partly it was pride. We’re a two parent family with a stay-at-home mom, a work-from-home dad, and a part-time nanny. Millions have it far worse.

I read SRTHMK hoping it would have some loophole, One Weird Trick that would let me stop feeling overwhelmed and join the ranks of those pronatalist influencers who blog about how childcare is great and you should go ahead and have kids right now, even if you’re only twenty-five, even if you don’t have your career totally figured out, even if you lost all your limbs in a tragic boating accident and are incapable of independent movement. It doesn’t, at least not for one-year-olds.

Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!

This whole time I was reading Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, when I should have been waiting for Pro-Market And Pro-Business (released last month, now available on Amazon). There really is a Bryan Caplan book for everything!

Ask Redditors what’s the worst subreddit, and a few names always come up. /r/atheism and /r/childfree are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent.

The one that really floors me is /r/petfree.

The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are:

• Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying.

• Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying.

• Sometimes pets attack people.

• Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can’t take care of and offload some of the burden onto you.

• Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an “AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY” way.

• Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead.

These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far:

These people are crazy. So let’s return to our usual question - what kind of crazy? Which DSM-recognized disorder do they have?

One easy answer would be cynophobia, the pathological fear of dogs. I don’t think this is true. The people on /r/petfree mostly don’t seem afraid, unless they’re sublimating it in some really weird way. And I know people with actual disorder-grade dog phobia, and they’re not angry about it. Many of them are apologetic, or agree dogs are cute, or at least don’t spend all their time fuming about the existence of dogs. You would really have to stretch the definition of phobia here. You can do it - witness “homophobia” for people with normal political or religious objections to homosexuality - but it would feel wrong.

The condition this reminds me of, more than any other, is misophonia.

Misophonics - and I say this as one of them - are angry. As I discuss in the link above, the anger seems more characteristic of the condition than the sensory sensitivity. If they go deaf, they’ll still be angry that people are making the noises they hate, even though they can’t hear them. Confronted with the noises they hate in a context where they don’t know it’s the noise they hate, it won’t bother them. I think of misophonia (again, explained at the link - the rest of this post won’t make sense without it) as a superstructure of anger/trauma/phobia/rumination built on top of a foundation of otherwise-non-disabling noise sensitivity. This isn’t to belittle misophonics’ problems - they genuinely hate the noise exactly as much as they say they do, and there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”. But the condition only enters full bloom when you take it from the neurological context of noise to the social context of people making noise.

Freud called intellectualization a defense mechanism. But at least for me, it functions as more of an overflow. When I’m at my worst - low on sleep, off all meds, forgot all earplugs - I go from hating whatever noise I’m hearing, to hating the fabric of civilization. I ruminate on crazy theories of how everything about modern urban life has been designed by crooks and liars to annoy me personally, and who we have to tax/ban/imprison to make it stop.

I look at some of those /r/petfree posts. There’s the one where someone said his friend posted a meme about how much she loved her dog, and now he “can’t ever go over to her house”. There’s the one where somebody asked a reasonable question about dog grooming on a hygiene sub, and the poster said that THEY HAVE TO INFEST EVERYTHING 😩😥🤢. I look at stuff like that and think - yeah, if there was a subreddit like this about noise, I’d post on it.

Someone - I think it was Philosophy Bear - once asked why a certain type of conservative treats it as axiomatic that order and low crime are the fundamental public goods. If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual? This was great food for thought - I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer.

Since then I’ve been noticing how much of politics seems driven by different people having rumination clouds / purity instict violations about different kinds of omnipresent aspects of public life. For me it’s noise. For the /r/petfree people it’s dogs. For the /r/fuckcars people, it’s cars. For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not). I’m not asserting that none of these are real problems or that you can’t have rational objections to them. I’m just saying, one less-than-perfectly-mentally-well person to another, that I can see myself in you.

I think when you have something you get exposed to every day, plus starting variation in which things mildly annoy people, you have the opportunity to get the kind of cloud of mutually-self reinforcing triggers and automatic negative thoughts that sustain a misophonia-like condition. Then, depending on their levels of intellectualization and paranoia, some people will develop broader theories of why they’re right to hate these things and their all-consuming unhappiness accurately reflects an all-consuming evil in society. It’s a miracle that the /r/petfree people haven’t developed some word that cashes out to basically meaning “the petarchy”.

This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media - that the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse. But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.

In the 1970s, the discovery of the Tennessee snail darter in the Tellico River was used to halt completion of the Tellico Dam under the Endangered Species Act (a tale many law students learn in TVA v. Hill). The dam was only completed after Congress expressly exempted it from the ESA's dictates.

It has long been understood that the snail darter was the right species at the right time, as it gave dam opponents a powerful legal weapon. Now, the New York Times reports, it turns out the snail darter was not really the right species, as it is not a distinct species at all.

"There is, technically, no snail darter," said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.

Dr. Near contends that early researchers "squinted their eyes a bit" when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority's plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.

"I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the 'conservation species concept,' where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication," Dr. Near said.

What Dr. Near is hinting at is the incentive structure created by the ESA--an incentive structure that encourages the distortion and politicization of scientific findings.

Under the ESA, the listing of a species (or subspecies or distinct species population) triggers regulatory restrictions, such as those that halted the Tellico Dam. Section 7 of the Act, for example, bars federal agencies from undertaking actions that could jeopardize a species' survival or destroy any of its critical habitat.

As I explained in this paper, this means that if an interest group wants to influence regulatory decisions under the ESA, they need to influence the scientific findings that trigger regulatory constraints. What should be policy fights over whether the benefits of a project justify harms or risks to particular species instead become fights over whether something is a species or is at risk of extinction. Thus political and ideological concenrs infect what should be scientific disputes over how best to identify what constitutes a distinct species.

From the article:

Dr. Plater, who also argued successfully for the fish in the Supreme Court case, took issue with the Yale study. He said the approach favored by Dr. Near and colleagues makes them genetic "lumpers" instead of "splitters," meaning they reduce species instead of making more. He believes the findings also lean too heavily on genetics.

"Whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act," Dr. Plater said of Dr. Near.

Dr. Near said being described as a "lumper" was a pejorative in his world, and he added that most of the research he and colleagues had performed had resulted in speciation splits, including a 2022 study.

While the intent of the ESA is to provide greater protection of species, it is not clear the hard regulatory trigger actually maximizes the effectiveness of species conservation efforts. As I noted in this paper on the ESA's 50th anniversary, the Act has been far less successful at recovering species than one would like, and its unforgiving regulatory structure may be part of the reason.

The post "There Is, Technically, No Snail Darter," But the Snail Darter Still Delayed the Tellico Dam appeared first on Reason.com.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.

This week's newsletter closes out the year by looking at the latest homelessness census released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which found a staggering increase in the number of people living on the streets or in shelters.

Number of People Without a Roof Over Their Head Goes Through the Roof

This past Friday, HUD released the results of its Point-in-Time (PIT) count—an annual census of the homeless population conducted each January by local homeless service providers.

The 2024 numbers are not pretty. According to the HUD survey, 771,480 people were homeless in January 2024. Of those, 497,256 were "sheltered" homeless, meaning they were sleeping in an emergency shelter or transitional housing. Another 274,224 people were "unsheltered" homeless who slept outside, in vehicles, abandoned buildings, or other areas not fit for human habitation.

The top-line figure represents a remarkable 18 percent increase in the country's homeless population. That increase is even more shocking when one considers that the country's homeless population grew by 19 percent between 2007 and 2024. Near two decades' worth of growth in the homeless population occurred between 2023 and 2024.

A year-over-year comparison pic.twitter.com/eKA2YrkFlV

— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) December 30, 2024

That top-line figure obviously masks a lot of yearly ups and downs. Nevertheless, the numbers are moving decidedly in the wrong direction, and fast.

Breaking Down the Numbers

The huge rise in the homeless population is attributable to related increases in the sheltered homeless population and the number of homeless families.

Of the 118,376 additional homeless people counted in 2024, 100,762 (or 85 percent of the total) were sheltered. This represents a 25 percent annual increase.

The 2024 PIT found that the unsheltered population grew by 17,614, which represents a 7 percent increase. That significant, albeit less severe, increase is effectively a continuation of the steady pre-pandemic rise in the unsheltered homeless population.

Conversely, the sheltered homeless population boom is both a huge increase and a reversal of the trend line. The sheltered homeless population had been on a steady decline in the years before the pandemic. Shelter populations plummeted even more during COVID-19 as shelters slashed capacity as a social distancing measure. This fall was significant enough to push down the overall homeless population, even as the unsheltered homeless population was rising.

Similarly, the 2024 PIT count found a record 39 percent annual increase in homeless families with children. The population of homeless individuals grew by a more modest 9.6 percent. The veteran homeless population was the only group to see a decline, dropping by 7.6 percent.

Migrant Surge, Homeless Surge

The HUD report notes that 13 Continuum of Care (COC) organizations (the local federally funded groups that provide homeless services and perform the PIT) saw a large influx of migrants into their shelter system.

HUD attributes the massive increase in homelessness to a range of factors, including rising housing costs, the belated expiration of some pandemic aid programs and eviction moratoriums, the end of the child tax credit, and "systemic racism." One reason stands out above the rest: the recent influx of migrants to major northern U.S. cities.

"You combine the increase in family homelessness and the increase in sheltered homelessness, it looks like this is overwhelmingly driven by the migrant surge," says Judge Glock, director of research for the Manhattan Institute.

This is most obviously the case in New York City, which has a longstanding, robust "right-to-shelter" policy, and has seen its emergency shelter population grow from 55,677 in 2022 to 81,108 in 2023 to 132,892 in 2024—during which time the city received some 225,000 new migrants and asylum seekers.

New York City's COC attributes 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness to asylum seekers. And the increase in New York City's homeless population accounts for roughly 40 percent of the national increase in the homeless population.

Cities like Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., which all have robust right-to-shelter policies and which have been primary destination cities for new migrants, also reported some of the largest jumps in their homeless populations, Glock notes.

Chicago's COC reported that most of the increase in its homeless population was a result of newly arriving migrants and asylum seekers.

Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute notes that 75 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness over the past two years can be attributed to rising shelter populations in Massachusetts, metro Denver, New York City, and Chicago.

One-Off Increases, Chronic Problems

The number of migrants in big-city shelter systems is already falling, thanks partly to smaller influxes of new migrants and cities' own curtailment of shelter benefits.

There were 69,000 migrants in New York's shelter system in January 2024 when this year's PIT was performed, The New York Times reported. That's since fallen to 55,000.

A lingering question is whether this will merely shuffle currently sheltered homeless migrants into unsheltered street homelessness.

The Times reported earlier this summer on a rise in tent encampments in the city, populated by migrants who'd been evicted from the city's shelter system after staying the new maximum of 30 days.

Glock says right-to-shelter policies also pull people into the shelter system and into free temporary housing where they're counted as homeless. Places without right-to-shelter policies have lower overall rates of homelessness, suggesting migrants exiting shelters will find housing on their own.

HUD says that the January PIT likely captured sheltered homeless populations near their peak and that those numbers are declining. We'll have to wait until December 2025 to know for sure if that's true.

The huge, likely migrant-driven increase in the sheltered homeless population obscures the more depressing, humdrum reality from the 2024 HUD homeless report: the number of people sleeping on the streets is at record levels and continues to rise.

Homelessness continues to increase in almost every state in the country. That includes West Coast states that have not experienced a New York City–like migrant surge and already have among the country's worst rates of homelessness.

This steady rise in homelessness has occurred even as federal funding for homeless programs has steadily increased under the Biden administration.

It's no coincidence that homelessness continues to rise as housing continues to get more expensive in the country. Lower housing costs correlate with lower rates of homelessness.

In the places where homelessness is worst, housing costs continue to rise. We can expect homeless problems to continue to rise with them in the new year.

Quick Links

• Earlier this month, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the city of North Las Vegas, Nevada, rejected the nonprofit Tunnels to Towers plan to build a privately funded 112-unit housing complex for low-income veterans on a vacant five-acre lot across the street from a Veterans Affairs hospital. The city argued that the location was a poor fit and thus declined to rezone the commercial property to allow the proposed housing.
• Housing inventory (the total number of homes available for sale) is at the highest it has been since November 2020, reports listing company RedFin.
• Last week, a judge ruled that the City of Los Angeles illegally tried to prevent a housing developer from using the city's streamlined development process known as ED1 to build a 220-unit project in a single-family neighborhood. LAist has the details.
• Mobile home prices are on the rise, reports Fortune. 
• California massively undershoots Gov. Gavin Newsom's campaign trail goal of building 3.5 million new homes by 2025.

The post Unprecedented Rise in Homelessness appeared first on Reason.com.

On a Monday in August 2020, Camryn Kuehl and her family embarked on a snorkeling trip in Jupiter, Florida, on a boat operated by a company that specializes in shark encounters. During the trip, the boat's crew, John R. Moore Jr. and Tanner Mansell, spotted what they described to the Kuehls as an "illegal longline fishing line" attached to a buoy. With the Kuehls' help, Moore and Mansell hauled in the line and freed the 19 sharks caught on it—a rescue operation they encouraged the Kuehls to document with their cellphones. Moore called Florida Fish and Wildlife Officer Barry Partelow to report the incident.

As Partelow ultimately discovered, Moore and Mansell had made a mistake. The line had been set by Scott Taylor, a seafood distributor whom the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had authorized to catch sharks for research purposes. Although Moore and Mansell clearly thought they were doing good by releasing illegally ensnared sharks, they were nevertheless convicted of theft at sea, a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Prosecutors alleged that Moore and Mansell had stolen Taylor's fishing gear, which they left on the dock, where marina employees discarded it in a dumpster.

In addition to a year of probation, Moore and Mansell were saddled with felony convictions that trigger lifelong disabilities, including barriers to employment and loss of their Second Amendment rights. They challenged their convictions on the grounds that the jury instructions included a broad, counterintuitive definition of stealing that did not require an intent to use Taylor's gear for their own benefit. Last September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected that challenge. Moore and Mansell are now asking the full appeals court to reverse that decision and correct the flagrant injustice of treating them as federal felons based on an honest, well-intentioned error.

Moore and Mansell were convicted under 18 USC 661, which applies to someone who "takes and carries away, with intent to steal or purloin, any personal property of another" within "the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States." During their trial, they asked U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks to instruct the jury that stealing property means wrongfully taking it "with intent to deprive the owner of the use or benefit permanently or temporarily and to convert it to one's own use or the use of another." After the prosecution objected to including a conversion element, Middlebrooks omitted it, although he did tell the jury that the defendants maintained they had "removed property without the bad purpose to disobey or disregard the law and therefore did not act with the intent to steal or purloin."

The jurors, who sent the judge half a dozen notes while deliberating for two days (longer than it had taken to present the evidence against Moore and Mansell), struggled to reach a verdict. When they told Middlebrooks they had been unable to reach a unanimous decision, he gave them an Allen charge, encouraging them to continue deliberating and saying they should be open to changing their positions, provided they could do so "without violating your individual judgment and conscience." After sending one more note asking whether they should consider any other defense theories, the jurors found Moore and Mansell guilty of one charge each.

In an opinion by Judge Charles Wilson, the 11th Circuit panel ruled that Middlebrooks had been right to conclude, based on the relevant precedents, that Section 661's definition of stealing does not require evidence that the defendant "carrie[d] away" property for his "own use or the use of another." But in a concurring opinion, Judge Barbara Lagoa, joined by Judge Britt Grant, highlighted the perverse consequences of that reading and harshly criticized Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-FitzGerald for his "imprudent exercise of discretion" in choosing to prosecute the case.

Lagoa noted that Moore and Mansell had openly stated their motivation in freeing the sharks, had enlisted their customers to help and to take pictures while doing so, had reported the incident to the relevant law enforcement agency, and had "returned the gear to the marina dock as instructed." Kuehl, for her part, "thought [they] were doing a great thing," and she "shared pictures on social media reporting as much to her friends." Yet "for reasons that defy understanding," Lagoa said, Watts-FitzgGerald "learned of these facts and—taking a page out of Inspector Javert's playbook—brought the matter to a grand jury to secure an indictment for a charge that carried up to five years in prison."

Despite evidence that "plainly suggests a good-faith mistake on Moore and Mansell's part," Lagoa wrote, Watts-FitzGerald "determined that this case was worth the public expense of a criminal prosecution, and the lifelong yokes of felony convictions, rather than imposition of a civil fine." Explaining that decision during oral argument last August, the government's lawyer likened the case to car theft on federal property. "If someone steals a car on a military base," she said, "the proper response isn't, well, pay restitution for that. That's a crime." Grant called that "a silly example," adding, "There's no comparison."

In her concurring opinion, Lagoa proposed a different analogy. "Imagine that Bob, walking along a path in a federal park, sees a man rush up to an elderly woman from behind, pull a gun from his pocket, and yell 'Give me your purse or I'll shoot,'" she wrote. "Bob rushes the robber, yanks the gun from his hand, and ushers the old woman out of harm's way."

What if "what Bob witnessed was not a genuine robbery, but a scene being acted out by some students from the local community college"? In other words, Lagoa wrote, "the robber was not a robber at all, but the elderly woman's scene partner for drama class. Bob, of course, had no way of knowing that when he interrupted what he believed to be a violent crime."

Under "the government's theory in this case and applying § 661 as broadly as the government did here," Lagoa noted, "this genuine mistake would be of no moment, because all that matters is that Bob took the 'robber's' property with the intent to deprive him of it. Perhaps it would move the needle if Bob's lawyers requested an instruction on mistake of fact, aiming to undermine the mens rea needed to convict." But for Lagoa, the bottom line is that Bob, like Moore and Mansell, "should not be prosecuted in the first instance."

What happens when prosecutors nevertheless defy fairness and common sense by pursuing criminal charges in a situation like this? In a brief urging the 11th Circuit to reconsider Moore and Mansell's case, the Cato Institute emphasizes the vital role that juries can play in correcting such injustices.

"From a purely originalist standpoint, perhaps the single greatest protection against unjust convictions and punishments was the institution of jury independence,
which included—but was by no means limited to—the power to acquit against the
evidence," writes Clark Neily, Cato's senior vice president for legal studies. "At the Founding, criminal jurors were not relegated to the role of mere fact-finders, as they are today. Indeed, the conception of criminal juries as having no proper role in assessing the wisdom, fairness, or legitimacy of a given prosecution is a more recent invention that early American lawyers and jurists would rightly have condemned as antithetical to centuries of common-law understanding and practice."

Neily notes that "the jury in this case appeared reluctant to convict, and only did
so after sending out seven notes and receiving an Allen charge from the trial judge." If the jury instructions had "better embodied the Supreme Court's directive that 'ambiguity concerning the ambit of criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of lenity,'" he argues, "the verdict would likely have obviated this appeal by more accurately reflecting how ordinary people understand the word 'steal' in the context of potentially ruinous felony charges."

Although "the spectacle of an imperious national government prosecuting virtuous
citizens for activities within its 'special maritime jurisdiction' would have been entirely familiar to the Founders," Neily writes, "they would likely have been dismayed by the identity of that government and by the miscarriage of justice that occurred here. It is
highly doubtful that a Founding-era jury, fully cognizant of its historic powers and
duties, would have branded John Moore and Tanner Mansell lifelong felons for their
misguided attempt to fulfill what they perceived to be a civic duty. The Court can still avoid that result by granting the Petition and applying a suitably restrained interpretation of the relevant statute."

The post 2 Florida Men Who Thought They Were Freeing Illegally Caught Sharks Are Now Felons appeared first on Reason.com.

It started, like so many overwrought home optimization projects, during the pandemic.

My wife and I, like many people stuck inside, were ordering takeout more frequently. We wanted to support local restaurants, reduce the dish load, and live a little. It became clear early on that app-based delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats were not the best way to support local businesses. If a restaurant had its own ordering site or a preferred service, we wanted to use that—or even, heaven forfend, call the place.

The secondary issue was that we kept ordering from the same places, and we wanted to mix it up. Sometimes we'd want to pick something up nearby. Sometimes we wanted to avoid an entire category ("Too many carbs this week, no pasta") or try the newest places we knew about, or maybe a forgotten classic. Or just give me three places randomly, creative constraints, please—it's Friday.

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