KenF: My children didn’t ask to be born into this world, it is a burden I placed on them…

You placed on them the burden of living in one of the richest countries in the world in hands-down the richest era of the world. I doubt they’re going to grow up to hate you for that. On the other hand, they’ll probably resent you for handing down your negative attitude toward existence.

KenF, again: I believe, rightly or wrongly, that paying a lot buys me that, especially since it helps them gain entrance into elementary schools that offer a similar promise.

First off, one of the points here is to figure out whether that belief is right or wrong; if it’s wrong, you can save a bunch of money to use on other things. Second, I’ve done the whole competitive-schools thing (highly-regarded 7-12-grade school, Ivy League university—which was harder to get into than if I’d gone to a worse high school), but at the elementary school level? That doesn’t sound the slightest bit insane to you?

JH: Is there a bigger “I care about my kids” signal than a stay-at-home mom?

In the case of my family, it’s a signal that child care in a city for two children costs more than their mom made. And she had a meaningful job with very family-friendly policies: she brought our second son to work with her for a while when he was a baby.

Tomasz: If the long-run effects of somewhat better or somewhat worse child care are unclear, that’s an argument for reducing investment in child care and directing it toward something whose benefits are clear. (It’s not a binary choice between having kids tutored by Nobel laureates on the one hand and sitting in a dark, damp cage for six hours a day on the other.)

Finally, the article in question is a literature survey, not a single study; this gives it significantly more weight. Even so, you should always keep in mind that tossing five heads in a row gets you past the p > 0.05 barrier for publishing in a social science journal.

Tomasz and Jonathon’s points seem valid to me too. Many of your posts come off as being dogmatic in your support of signaling explanations. Of course I don’t deny that signaling is very important, but I’m skeptical that it is as important as you seem to make it out to be (especially in areas where people are greatly incentivized by other factors, such as health care and child-rearing).

By drawing conclusions from a single study, you are implicitly rejecting any contradictory theories suggested by other studies. This comes off as being against rigor.

With all due respect you completely miss Tomasz’s point. His critique has little to do with issuing disclaimers, but more with being rigorous in your research.

While the evidence and studies you present — and the questions you pose in relation to them — are almost always thought-provoking, your conclusions often dogmatically toe the signaling party-line based on relatively little evidence.

You ask in your post why it takes so long for people to accept the truth (or at least, to be made aware of the latest research). Perhaps the reason is because the truth, especially when discovered via empiricism, appears not overnight, but over time through replicated, falsifiable research.

It strikes me as perfectly rational for people to discount even the most rigorous studies before results are verified repeatedly. It’s odd that someone who often strives to stake out compromise solutions (e.g. your global warming post), is also so willing to deviate from his priors dramatically in response to minimal evidence.

While I’m not as skeptical as Tomasz regarding the influence of signaling in many situations (in fact, I pretty much always buy your explanations, at least in part), I wish you more openly embraced these calls for more evidence. Backing into the signaling explanation, and largely dismissing calls for more rigor, only weakens the persuasiveness of your arguments and inhibits you from achieving the broader impact that us regular readers wish you would.

Hmm, but these same people who want to signal their care for kids through expensive child care don’t attempt to signal this through mom (or dad) staying home. Is there a bigger “I care about my kids” signal than a stay-at-home mom?

I would guess that the stay-at-home mom signal is actually negative for most women. The high status people are upper and upper middle class families where both parents work professional or managerial jobs and childcare is outsourced to nannies, private schools, and mandarin classes (or karate, or clarinet) for kids.

The notion of stay-at-home parenting as high status is now almost exclusive to evangelical Christians, agrarians, and other members of the counterculture.