Should the rich avoid discussing their wealth with their kids?

I've never understood that idea, and this New York Times piece convinced me there's no good reason for it:

Parents would be remiss if they did not talk to their children about drinking and driving, using drugs and, of course, sex. . . . So why do a significant number of parents still not talk to their children about wealth and inheritance?

Two-thirds of Americans who have at least $3 million in investable assets have not talked to their children about their wealth or never will, according to a Merrill Private Wealth Management study of 650 families.

Some in the survey said they did not bother because they assumed their children had already figured it out. But 67 percent had quietly made gifts in a trust or set aside money in their children’s name. . . . Ten percent steadfastly refused to talk at all with their children about money, saying it was no one’s business. . . .

In a world of oversharing on social media, why does this restraint persist? It’s complicated. . . .

The most common reason cited for not talking about money is that parents do not want inheritance to rob children of motivation. So if a parent does not say anything, a child will never figure out the family’s wealth. Impossible.

Children are well able to use computers and mobile devices to determine just how much their house, car and vacation cost, along with their school fees and the salaries of any household help. Information about prominent parents and families is flowing to their children’s friends as well.

“A second-grade kid, because they go to all of these house parties, will be able to rank the wealth of all the people in his or her class pretty accurately,” said Dennis Jaffe, a psychologist who works with wealthy families. “It’s not positive or negative, and they’re not jealous yet. But these are teaching moments about values.”

This challenges the notion that waiting until children are older is better. By then, they will have formed their own views on wealth by watching their parents.

“Values are set by everyday behaviors when you’re growing up, and kids are watching you,” Mr. Jaffe said. “Entitlement education begins in nursery school, not when they’re 25 and come to you and say, ‘I need some money.’”

The strategy of ignorance exposes a disconnect between a parent’s stated reason and real reason for saying nothing, said Matthew Wesley, a director at Merrill’s Center for Family Wealth and a co-author of the study with Ms. Allred.

“The stated reason is, ‘We don’t want money to screw up our kids, and if we disclose our wealth to them, we’ll derail their career paths,’” Mr. Wesley said. “The deeper reason is about fear and control — the fear to relinquish that control and the deeper psychological issues around money.”

Disengagement creates more problems, though, because it can create a perception that a family is more, or less, wealthy than it really is. Leaving children to guess can also create feelings of insecurity.

Some parents shy away from talking about wealth because they have decided to give away most of the money.

“That’s great, but if you’re not telling your kids, that’s weird,” Mr. Jaffe said. “If that’s what you believe in, why wouldn’t you tell your kids that ‘we’re a very wealthy family, but our values say we’re going to put most of it into a philanthropy, and we’re all going to work and do something on our own’?”

Toddler disables iPad until 2067

Try again in 25 million minutes . . .

Happy belated 85th birthday to Thomas Sowell

The economist Thomas Sowell reflects on his 85 years. An excerpt:

After my 85th birthday last week, I looked back over my life and was surprised to discover in how many different ways I had been lucky, in addition to some other ways in which I was unlucky.

Among the things I did not know at the time was that I was adopted as an infant into a family with four adults, in which I was the only child.

All sorts of research since then has shown how the amount of attention and interactions with adults a child gets has a lot to do with the way the child develops. But of course I knew nothing about such things back then.

It was decades later, when I had a son of my own, that I asked one of the surviving members of the family how old I was when I first started to walk. She said, “Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you.” . . .

Although I was raised by people with very little education, they were people who wanted me to get an education. They praised my every little accomplishment when I was very young, and I was taught to read by the time I was four years old, taught by someone with only a few years of schooling herself.

Years later, when I was promoted to the seventh grade, I was surprised by what a commotion it caused. Then I was told: “You have now gone further than any of us.” You don’t need a Ph.D. to help your child get an education. . . .

Not everything was wonderful in my family or in the world where I grew up in Harlem. But, as I learned from later research, the homicide rate in New York when I was growing up was lower than it had been in the years before, and much lower than it would be in the years afterward.

I cannot recall ever hearing a gunshot, or even having to think about gunshots when I slept out on the fire escape on hot summer nights.

The New York City schools were among the best in the country in those days, better than they had been for the European immigrants before me and much better than they would be for the mass influx of blacks from the South after me.

As for bad luck, there were years of that, too. But I learned a lot from that bad luck, so I am not sure that it was all bad luck in the long run. And 85 years is a very long run.

What are we doing when we teach fiction to kids?

I want to make an observation I’ve never heard anyone make before. I’d be interested to know if anyone has expressed the same thing. If not, I’d be shocked, since this is something that’s right under our noses. Here it is:

When we teach children fiction — reading it, writing it, understanding it, loving it — as important as those teachings are, I think they also have a negative side effect. By teaching fiction so often and beginning at such an early age, we condition children to expect the “just right” results to flow inexorably from the writing of those who are good and bright.

Before kids learn about economics or law, politics or psychology, they learn that we’re supposed to treasure writing not primarily based on how well it corresponds to reality, but primarily based on whether it makes us feel good. And I intend the double meaning of “good” as in both “contented” and “moral.”

This could explain why well-educated, intelligent people, all across the political spectrum, so often make the unspoken assumption that good intentions and well-crafted words are sufficient for making good public policy. Now, when I put it like that, you might think that’s obviously false, and you might question how many people really believe this. But that's the assumption being made whenever anyone argues in favor of a law by referring to the righteous aspirations underlying it, without contemplating whether the process initiated by the text of the law could lead to results that are at odds with those aspirations. And people do that all the time.

This is not a lament that not enough people understand the concept of unintended consequences. In fact, I think most liberals and conservatives and libertarians understand the concept pretty well. The problem is that even with this fundamental understanding, they have an easy time selectively ignoring unintended consequences to suit their politics. For instance, I think many on the right too readily overlook the unintended consequences of going to war and criminalizing drugs. And I think many on the left overlook the unintended consequences of welfare, the minimum wage, affirmative action, and gun laws. My point here isn’t to say that anyone’s position on any particular issue is right or wrong. For instance, some would retort that conservatives overlook the unintended consequences of making the minimum wage too low. And others would say the anti-war folks overlook the negatives of so-called peace and the unintended consequences of refraining from going to war when it’s justified. Fair enough — but those are just more examples to support the broader point that there’s a lot of blindness to unintended consequences all along the political spectrum.

The approach I'd like to see more of, the pragmatic approach — scrutinizing policies with an eye for unintended consequences — is easily eclipsed by a belief in the power of brilliantly benevolent writing. From an early age, we awaken in children a shimmering, numinous sensibility that transcends empiricism and rationality.

By the way, you might notice that I haven’t proposed anything to be done about all this.

"Why don’t dads complain about parenthood like moms do?"

Samantha Rodman asks the question:

It seems like women are being publicly applauded for complaining about parenthood. And dads, well, aren’t...

One thing I have noticed as a clinical psychologist in private practice is that men are increasingly less able to voice negative feelings about parenting, even ones that are entirely understandable. Imagine being at a play date and hearing someone say, “God, I needed a drink all day today. The kids were behaving terribly, I couldn’t deal.” You’re picturing a mom, right?

However, what if the speaker is a dad? The question is moot because I have yet to hear a dad complain this openly and honestly about his kids, and this is not for lack of trying. Dads don’t even take the conversational bait. If asked to commiserate about parenting, the average mom breathes a sigh of relief and sits forward in her seat, but the average dad looks around like he’s on Candid Camera and gives a vague answer about having lots of fun sitting around watching dance class through a two way mirror for the 15th week in a row. . . .

My male clients in therapy, one of the few places where people are free to speak openly, often tell me how stressed they feel. They feel pressure to support their families (with or without the financial contribution of their wives), they have limited time for social or leisure activities outside work and family play dates, and they are expected to be verbally and emotionally open and engaged with their wives in a way that was never required of men in previous generations. They also often have less-than-fulfilling sex lives. (Sadly, research contemporaneous with the confessional mommy movement indicates that women in long term relationships lose interest in sex more easily than their male partners [NYT link]; this is another topic upon which many women today expound with abandon.)

As the icing on the cake for the fathers in today’s families, they are expected to do half the childcare, while being criticized for how they do it. Further, society appears to dictate that men should never complain about the same tedium and exhaustion that women experience for fear of being considered a throwback, Don Draper-like, uninvolved dad. Yet, he must support his wife in her public admissions of her yelling too much, not paying attention to the kids, playing on her phone while parenting, and even being a pothead.

Note: I am not judging any of these behaviors. I’m saying this: Tell me what the reaction would be if a dad talked about yelling too much and smoking pot in front of his kids.

Do Obama's anti-homemaker proposals make sense?

Ramesh Ponnuru says they don't:

He wants to triple the existing tax credit for child-care expenses, and create a new credit for second earners. Those proposals will help some parents and couples, but have nothing to offer families where one parent concentrates on home-based tasks. The second-earner credit is probably too small to affect couples’ decisions about work and child-care arrangements. So its main effect will be to lower the share of the tax burden paid by two-earner couples who were going to be working even without the credit.

Why do that?

There are two standard economic justifications for shifting the tax burden in this way, neither of them convincing.

One is that two-earner couples have higher costs than single-earner couples making the same income, so it's harder for them to pay the same taxes. But that seems like using the tax code to counteract the efficiency advantages of a particular way of dividing a family's labor, which doesn't make much sense. And it seems like an especially weak argument since, in the real world, single-earner couples have smaller incomes.

The second justification is that a progressive tax code, when applied to families rather than individuals, can penalize second earners. A second earner will often pay a higher tax rate than she would if she were single and making the same income, because she moves to a higher bracket when she marries a wage earner. The tax code thus discourages her from working. That's true, but it's just a special case of the way taxes discourage work, and not one that seems especially unjust or destructive. Marriage is (among other things) an economic partnership, and this feature of the tax code reflects that it involves pooling resources.

If the second-earner credit ignores that feature of marriage, Obama's other proposal ignores how little Americans like commercial child care. Surveys suggest that most parents prefer that small children be primarily cared for by a parent at home, and the Census Bureau reports that less than a quarter of them are in organized care facilities.

Given these preferences, it would make more sense to enlarge the child tax credit -- not the child-care credit -- and let parents use it as they see fit rather than requiring them to use the commercial day care most of them try to avoid. Some of them, it's true, might use the extra money to let one parent scale back from full-time to part-time work, or from part-time work to leaving the labor force.

The author of the Choose Your Own Adventure books has died

R.A. Montgomery died in his Vermont home at the age of 78, a few days ago.

This website collects the unhappy endings to your adventures.

A commenter on Metafilter says:

I remember as a child being aghast at a The Cave Of Time ending where you were enslaved for the rest of your life building The Great Wall. Certainly made a 9 year old me stop to think what things were like for others.

How to talk to children about tragic events in the news

By Fred Rogers.

David Brooks analyzes Mitt Romney's hidden-camera comments

Brooks writes an insightful column on Romney's infamous comments:

Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers. Forty-seven percent of the country, he said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor. . . .

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

I agree with most of that. But Brooks's line of reasoning about parents and children, though clever, is also potentially dangerous. Adults aren't children. And the government isn't — or, shouldn't be — our parents.

By the way, who are the 47% of people Romney referred to as not paying income taxes? Here are a few charts with the answer. As you can see from that link, Romney is about right if you're looking at federal income taxes paid in 2011: 46.4% of households didn't pay them. But most of those households (28.3%) paid payroll taxes instead. Among the remaining 18.1%, most of them (10.3% of the total) were elderly, and almost all of the younger ones (6.9%) made less than $20,000 a year. It's fine for Romney and others to make the case that more of them should pay higher taxes. But let's be clear about who we're talking about.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of children's books including Where the Wild Things Are (which will be 50 years old next year), has died at 83.

From the New York Times obituary:

As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.” . . .

Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite gregarious. He was a man of ardent enthusiasms — for music, art, literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them.

In an interview last year, Sendak said:

"I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

Cat soothes crying baby

How bad is it to cherry-pick scientific studies that support your position?

Very bad, explains Ben Goldacre. He calls out Aric Sigman, a popular science writer who admitted to cherry-picking only the studies that supported his pre-existing views about day care (that it's harmful to young children).

At the end of his post, which is worth reading in its entirety, Goldacre concludes:

A deliberately incomplete view of the literature, as I hope I’ve explained, isn’t a neutral or marginal failure. It is exactly as bad as a deliberately flawed experiment, and to present it to readers without warning is bizarre.

I have a feeling that last sentence was carefully edited, and that he originally wrote a different word than "bizarre."

Talking to little girls without talking about looks

Some good advice and thoughts. "Not once did we discuss clothes or hair or bodies or who was pretty. It's surprising how hard it is to stay away from those topics with little girls, but I'm stubborn."

What are we banning kids from doing?

1. Bringing lunch from home to school. (via)

2. Playing outside. (via)

Are men declining? If so, why, and what's the solution?

Among men, median wages have "declined by 28 percent, or almost $13,000 (in constant dollars)" since 1969. (And no, 1969 was not cherry-picked as their peak; they peaked in 1973.)

That's from a post called "The Struggles of Men" on the New York Times' Economix blog.

If you go to that post and look at the chart, you can see how much difference it makes whether we include all men, or just men who are working full time. Not surprisingly, the latter measure (represented by the red line on the chart) paints a rosier picture.

The blue line includes men who have dropped out of the labor force. If you go by that measure, men's wages seem to be taking a firm nosedive.

An Economix commenter says:

After about 1970 there was a big expansion of the labor force, for three reasons. The first was the Hart-Cellar act of 1965, which produced a big increase in immigration. The second was a surge of women into the labor force after 1970. The third was the entry of the baby boom kids in the late '70s.

It really shouldn't be a surprise that an expansion of the labor supply leads to stagnant or falling prices (wages).

(That commenter has expanded on those points in a blog post, which seems to be totally anonymous.)

Glenn Reynolds posted the blog post to Facebook, and Brittany Gardner had this take (she gave me permission to quote from our discussion using her name):

As female strengths (empathy, social networks, collaboration) become increasingly marketable in a workforce, we will have to be sure that male strengths (competition, experimentation, systems thinking) can find a new niche and balance to match. With many traditionally "male-dominated" fields being automated or outsourced, I think that one logical entry field will be one women have dominated for a while.... child-rearing. Early education needs a complete overhaul to meet the needs of the next generation, and who better to design and implement new systems and experiment bravely and rationally, than men?

Men may also find they are uniquely equipped to get kids off the couches, net, and video games for a bit, and into the physical world, working on hands-on projects, games, experiments, and exploration.

I responded:

I agree about child-rearing, but the norms against men taking a lead role in raising children seem to be a lot more entrenched than the norms against women in the workforce. It's no longer socially acceptable to question whether women can do any job they want, but boys will still be teased if they pretend to be daddies; we'd feel more comfortable to see them pretending to be mass murderers. Many people might accept the idea of a stay-at-home dad in theory, but how many men would truly feel comfortable in that role in practice? Alas, men aren't seen as one of the kinds of people we're supposed to be concerned with, so anyone trying to draw attention to these issues will be fighting an uphill battle.

Glenn Reynolds said:

I think John's right, especially as any man who actually does want to work with children is immediately suspect as a child abuser.

(See "Eek! A Male!")

Here's Brittany Gardner's response to my comment:

There is a growing number of stay-at-home dads at the park and at playgroups I've attended. I was impressed at how much "better" they seemed to be at effortlessly managing behavior and teaching/interacting with their children . . . .

If it's true that unemployment is becoming a reality for more men, talking up roles with the next generation makes a lot of sense, and other projects can be worked on simultaneously. (All the stay-at-home fathers I know also work from home, or have productive hobbies they can work on simultaneously and involve their children in, to both parties' benefit and enrichment.)

The idea that steer-heading the next generation of humans is somehow emasculating, needs to be abandoned.

To paraphrase a quote I read recently: Sense of masculinity has always flowed from men's utility in society. Not the other way around.

And here's her response to Glenn Reynolds:

I think the suspicion directed at men who want to work with children mirrors the suspicion of motives we direct at women who take leadership positions . . . I think the more we normalize both, the better.

Kid's menus are "the death of civilization."

So says Nicola Marzovilla, who owns a resaurant in Manhattan's Gramercy Park called I Trulli. (Via.)

He expounds his view of restaurant's "kid's menus" in that New York Times piece:

"The table is very important," Mr. Marzovilla explained as we sat around one at his restaurant early Sunday evening with our five collective children. "It’s about nutrition, it’s about family; you go right down the line. And the children’s menu is about the opposite — it’s about making it quick, making it easy, and moving on." . . .

"You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend," Mr. Marzovilla noted. "I have a duty to mold and teach." . . .

"Some parents, it’s important to them that their kids do sports," Mr. Marzovilla said. "To me, it doesn’t mean a thing. To have this experience with their family is more important." . . .

"If you don’t ask your children to try things, how will they ever know what they’re capable of?" Mr. Marzovilla said. “And isn’t the same true of us?"

What do his children have to say about this? The Times interviewer asked about his success in "encouraging" them to try new foods, and his daughter took umbrage at the verb choice:

"Try 'forced,'" said Julia, the 14-year-old.

"There wasn’t a time we didn’t end up trying it,” said Domenico, the 17-year-old. "Sometimes it took longer than others."

RELATED: Why parents shouldn't hide vegetables in their kids' food.

Should children be medicated to deal with their psychological issues?

In this book review that's probably a more worthwhile read than the book, Alison Gopnik writes:

Within the past few years more and more children have been given powerful brain-altering drugs to deal with a wide range of problems. . . .

You can sympathize with the impulse of parents to do something, anything at all, to help their children. But that doesn't alter the fact that the scientific evidence just isn't clear about what to do. On balance, though, the evidence suggests that we should be conservative about prescribing drugs to children, and much more conservative than we actually are. Even the scientists who advocate some use of drugs acknowledge that they are overprescribed and badly managed. Brains are complex enough, children's developing brains are even more complex, and determining the long-term effects of drugs that alter those brains is especially difficult. Children are different from adults, often in radical ways, and many childhood problems resolve just as part of development.

On top of that, each generation of doctors discovers that the last generation was disastrously misguided in its medical interventions, from lobotomies to estrogen replacement, at the same time that they assure the patients that this time is different.

I'm also glad to see that the review highlights the importance of compatible "levels of description":

[Judith] Warner's book [We've Got Issues] also reflects a common confusion in popular writing about psychology. She writes as if there are just two kinds of explanations for human behavior. Either the everyday narratives are right—so that children are unhappy because their parents don't care about them, or they fail at school because they are lazy. Or else the right answer is that the children's problems are the result of "something in their brains." Warner's logic seems to be that since the parents do care about their kids, the problem must be in the children's brains and therefore drugs will fix it.

But everything about human beings, cultural or individual, innate or learned, is in our brains. Loss and humiliation change our serotonin levels, education transforms our brain connections, social support affects our cortisol. Neurological and psychological and social processes are inextricable. The work of psychological science is to identify causes at many levels of description—social, cultural, individual, and neurological.

There was a very insightful blog post (on Psychology Today's website) that makes a similar point about evolutionary psychology: "Is it evolutionary, or is it . . . ?" (That post speaks of "levels of causation," which is the same thing as the "levels of description" in the above block quote.) I've also blogged this concept before: "Can you give a neurological or evolutionary explanation of love without debunking the whole idea of love?"

By the way, that book review has several points that could be added to my list of ways blogs are better than books. The bias in favor of conclusions that come from riveting stories is huge.

Anti-vegetarian argument #2: Tradition

In a discussion about vegetarians and Thanksgiving, an AskMetafilter commenter said this:

Food isn't just fuel - it's a whole lot of what symbolizes who you are and where you come from. One of the problems with giving up meat, especially if it's not by your own choice, is that you're giving up pieces of culture, heritage, family traditions, ties to your childhood memories, ties to the way your great grandma cooked for her children...

For some reason that's an aspect of vegetarianism that isn't often addressed.

More recently, in a personal essay in the current New York Times magazine, Jonathan Safran Foer says:

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. ... We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients. ...

In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. ...

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. ... [M]y choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

That sounds like Foer basically agrees with the AskMetafilter commenter. But he has a second thought:

Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. ... [S]he would tell me about her escape from Europe [in World War II], the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn't. It was the story of her life -- "Listen to me," she would plead -- and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

Foer explains the lesson at the end of the essay.

It's actually not the kind of essay that most appeals to me. I prefer to read writing that gets straight to the point instead of taking extra time to build up characters who gradually embody that point.

I also find it unfortunate that Foer puts down the role of "reason" in decision-making, saying that "stories" are more important. Of course, this is a self-serving view for a professional storyteller. But he himself relies on reason when he says:

A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

But none of that gets to the heart of the "tradition" argument. I would argue that tradition simply isn't as important as numerous other factors -- but that's not likely to be satisfying to those who raise the tradition concern in the first place.

Perhaps it is better to use "stories" rather than "reason" to respond to that concern. That's what Foer does in this essay -- to chilling effect in the final section.

Is it morally wrong to care too much for your children?

This is a valiant attempt to try to ease the tension between utilitarianism and actual human behavior:



Joshua Greene seems to want to have his cake and eat it too: defend utilitarianism while accepting the fact that parents lavish money on their kids that could, from an objective utilitarian viewpoint, be better spent on less fortunate people in the world.

His clever move is to suggest that utilitarianism is an "ideal." We accept that people will never reach the ideal because their extreme concern for their children is so deeply rooted. But the ideal is nevertheless an important goal to aspire to.

If we accept that it's a matter of degree, not of strict compliance with binding rules, that raises the question how close it's reasonable to want people to get to the ideal. It's easy to accept one of his examples: parents who are considering buying an $800 stroller for their child should instead buy a perfectly adequate $200 stroller and donate the $600 they save to charity.

But that example dodges the more uncomfortable questions you raise once you start pursuing this line of argument. For instance (to loosely use another of Greene and Joshua Knobe's examples), instead of paying for your child to go to their top choice of college, you could send them to a cheaper, inferior college (or even no college at all), saving thousands of dollars, and donating the money to a charity that does lots of good for suffering people -- say, Doctors Without Borders. It's easy to imagine that an objective and purely utilitarian observer would prefer the inferior college and the massive donation to a humanitarian charity. But it's impossible to imagine significant numbers of real people actually making that kind of decision.

One particularly revealing thing about this exchange is that Greene himself admits that he would hardly follow a utilitarian regimen of being stingy with his children to allow for morally magnificent levels of philanthropy. Why isn't he convinced by his own "ideal"?

I admit that I share Greene's cognitive dissonance. I habitually analyze ethical questions as if utilitarianism were true. Yet if I were a parent, I would knowingly spend extraneous resources on my children that could have led to objectively better consequences if donated to strangers. (And aside from having children, I'd say the same thing of spending for myself.) I don't mean this to be a remotely surprising commentary on my own character; I'm sure the same thing is true of everyone I know.

Even if you make some sacrifices that are laudable on utilitarian grounds, you'll never even come close to doing all you could to maximize net utility. Is there any point to an ethical commandment that no one ever follows?

IN THE COMMENTS: "Jason (the commenter)" adds:

What is the utility of utilitarianism?

I think the speakers minimized the problems associated with individuals following utilitarianism by focusing so much on parents and their children. You'd also have to stop giving special treatment to your relatives, spouse, friends, et cetera.

I suspect if enough people behaved this way the fabric of society would collapse. Of course, they'd be so free of passion they'd probably cease to exist after a generation. Why would utilitarians have kids in the first place?

The liberal, conservative way to teach children morals

"Two views of moral education," set forth by Eric Schitzgebel in his blog about philosophy and psychology called The Splintered Mind:

(1.) The "liberal", inward-out model: Moral education should stress moral reflection, with rules and punishment playing a secondary role. ...

(2.) The "conservative", outward-in model: Moral education should stress rules and punishment, with moral reflection playing a secondary role. You can't understand and apply the rules, of course, without some sort of reflection on them, but reflection should be in the context of received norms....

Now, academically affiliated researchers on moral development almost universally prefer the first model to the second.... The common idea is that children (and the morally undeveloped in general) improve morally when they are encouraged to think for themselves and given space to discover their own reactions and values....

But he has an idea for how to blend the two together:

Suppose Sally hits Hank and a liberally-minded teacher comes up and asks her how it made her feel to hurt Hank. What child, realistically, would say, "Well, I know he didn't deserve it, but it just felt good pounding him to a pulp!"? The reality is that the child is being asked to reflect in a situation where she knows that the teacher will approve of one answer and condemn another. This isn't free reflection; and the answer the child gives may not reflect her real feelings and values. Instead, it seems, it is a kind of imposition -- and one perhaps all the more effective if the child mistakes the resulting judgment for one that is genuinely her own.

Therefore, maybe, a liberal-seeming style of moral education is effective not because we have in us all an inclination toward the good that only needs encouragement to flower, but rather because reflection in teacher-child, parent-child, and similar social contexts is really an insidious form of imposition -- and thus, perhaps, the conservative's best secret tool.

As an adult, it can be hard to put yourself back in the child's shoes, since your childhood was so long ago. But anyone who's been to a law school where they use the Socratic method has a more recent memory of what he's talking about.

NOTE: With this post, I've created a new tag, and also applied it to a few old posts: "observed morality."