Matt Yglesias: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think having more three-child families would set back feminism? I don’t think that it would. Well, look, feminism means different things to different people. There’s a version of feminism in the United States that is — well, I suppose other countries too — that is extremely focused on the super duper duper high-end elites. I think having larger families is probably bad for women’s equality in the top 0. 1 percent of achievement. If you look at the fact that there are many more male billionaires, that having any prospect of leveling that probably goes against family things. On the other hand, if you’re saying, “Okay, the mainstream ways in which feminism impacts most people — it’s women’s legal and social entitlements to have jobs, to be financially independent, to be able to get out of really bad marital situations.” That kind of thing. Get school. The general changes we’ve seen over the decades, where women are now, on average, better educated than men, where the income gap at the median level is starting to narrow — those kinds of things, I don’t think are meaningfully impacted in a negative way by somewhat larger families. My view is this — that for reasons that are probably intrinsic and biological, women, on average, care more about the kids than the fathers do. The fathers are more likely to say, “Ah, let them go out and play. It’ll probably be fine.” Women, on average, are more inclined to worry. That may be hard to change. So if there are more children in the life of the family, the preoccupations of women will shift more towards the children than will the preoccupations of the men. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, right? It’s certainly good for the kids to have three of them, but it could harm what many people would consider to be feminism.…

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