The Business of Love and the Cost of Parenting

- A week after America's Super Bowl, it's another showdown of sorts. Valentine's Day, a time for romance, and for many a lesson in the high price of romantic gestures. As you're about to hear from a Hoover institution, economists surviving. Valentine's Day is the easy part. It's what comes after the romance, a lifetime commitment and raising rugrats that grows ever more complicated. We'll find out why in this heartfelt installment a matters of policy and politics. It's Wednesday, February the 11th, 2026, and you're listening to matters of Policy and Politics. A podcast devoted to the discussion of Hoover Institution, policy, research, and issues of local, national, and geopolitical concern. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institution's, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. I'm not the only fellow who's joined podcasts these days. You should go to our website and check it out yourself. That is hoover.org/podcast. You'll find just a whole gamut of topics we cover. It also includes the audio version of The Good Fellow broadcast, and I have the great honor of moderating. This podcast is being released on Friday the 13th. A curious date in that it's a number. Many of you either love or loathe depending on whether you worship the altar of Taylor Swift, whose lucky number is 13, or you suffer from a bad case of tka phobia, which is of course the fear of the number 13. It's also one day before February the 14th, which of course is Valentine's Day. You're gonna talk a little bit about the economics of Valentine's Day and a lot more about love and family where romance ultimately takes us. It's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast Valerie Remi. Valerie Remi is the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sol Senior Fellow, a research associated at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a professor of emeritus at uc, San Diego. She co-leads the Hoover Institution's economic Policy working group and participates in Hoover's long run Prosperity Working Group. She's the author of an essay you want to check out. It's on Hoover's Substack page. It's called Do Stimulus Packages Work. Asked Her Collin's podcast because she's written extensively on the raising of the children of modern times, and that's our connection of Valentine's Day. Assuming love blossoms in a commitment, commitment leads to parenthood, what comes after that? Valerie, great to see you. I'm gonna warn you, I am not a Valentine's Day person. Are you a Valentine's person?

- Okay, well, thanks for inviting me on the show. Valentine's Day is fine, but I find that ritual a little redundant since we kind of cover those bases on our anniversary. My husband and me. Okay. But I am wearing my pink jacket in honor of Valentine's Day.

- Very good. You mentioned your husband, your husband. Tell us how you and your husband met, because you both are academics, you're both a canvas, right?

- Yes. So my husband Gary, and I met when on the debate circuit, I just graduated from high school and was teaching at a debate institute for the summer. And then he was the guest lecturer on tertiary oil recovery since the topic that year was energy. Okay. So with that romantic start, we, I lured him to my university. We're at different ones then. And then we became economists together, went to grad graduate school together at Stanford, and then had careers at UCSD. He, he retired, but I came up here and so I commute back and forth.

- So what do economists do on Valentine's Day if they go out on a date? Valerie, do they talk economics? Do they look at the price of everything? Do they, they talk about Milton Freeman and Arthur Laffer. How exactly would you celebrate it?

- Well, so we might talk about economics, but we're also interested in, in politics and history and literature. So, so we're going to celebrate this Valentine's Weekend. First of all, we both love the theater. We both love Ibsen, and the head of Gobbler is playing with Katie Holmes in it at the Old Globe in San Diego. So that is our Valentine's Weekend fun. Plus we're gonna have a nice French dinner.

- So it sounds like your advice for couples on Valentine's Day is do something you both enjoy, kind of find your sweet spot and lead into it.

- Absolutely. And, and often chocolate is accompanying this because that's also our sweet spot.

- Boy, speaking of chocolate, Valerie, I was in the grocery store yesterday getting my provisions, and I happen to walk by, you know, one of the many stands that are strategically located in the grocery store, trying to get you to buy chocolate either for the love of your life or just to get you through the day. If you don't have such love, you would not believe the price of Hershey's Kisses right now. Like 20 bucks a bag.

- Wow. Wow. So, so we actually have chocolate that we received for Christmas present. So we did have that. I think prices were lower then.

- Yeah. So Valerie, I have in my office here a very tongue in cheek column that I framed. It's called Why I Hate Christmas, and I'm not a Christmas fan myself. And so I just love this column. It was written about 35 years ago and appeared the New Republic written by an economist named James Henry. And it's satirical. It just kind of, he points out that he grew up in a big Midwestern family, but as he's grown older, he's realized that Pete, in his idea of Christmas is what he calls a, a failed socioeconomic institution. In fact, here's a, here's a quote, let me read it to you, quote, modern Christmas is like primitive keynesianism, a short run oriented economic dispar that has been tried and found wanting Boy Baba. But could you say the same about Valentine's Day?

- No, I don't think so. I mean, Valentine's Day is, is a smaller holiday. It's a nice ritual. I mean, so, so cognitive neuroscientists and, and anthropologists actually have research rituals and turns out rituals are really important for mental health and social connections. So I think what, back when I was more of an academic Abba Humbug kind of person, I thought sort of not as bad as that person. I always liked Christmas, but, but then I, I actually realize as I've grown old, older, the importance of rituals. And often when you're young you wonder why you have to go through them. But it's a good thing. You know, re remembering why you love your spouse, you know, is a good thing.

- So, a little economics about Valentine's Day, Valerie, this is courtesy of the National Retail Federation. It estimates that Valentine's Day consumers spending will reach about 29.1 billion with a B billion dollars. This year will be a record that would surpass 27 and a half billion in 2025. It guesses at shoppers are gonna be targeting about $200 per gift. Interesting price range, if you will. This is obviously very good news for florist. I think something like 250 million roses are sold on Valentine's Day. Also, Saturday is the busiest day for florist in general restaurants. Valerie National Restaurant Association reports that nearly 40% of Americans will celebrate Valentine's Day after the fact getting a better deal. Now this fascinates me as somebody who goes out on dates, because I don't think dating somebody's a positive sign early in a relationship to say, I really enjoy your company, but, you know, let's go out two days after Valentine's Day. 'cause we'll get 20% less on the entree. That tells me a lot of married couples are doing this.

- Yes, yes. So once you're married, you can do what, what economists call intertemporal substitution to do something when the price is lower. So say you would, you know, naturally go out to dinner at certain times. So if you're on the romantic part, the trick is to go out and Valentine's Day because then you have this ritual also associated with it. But then once you're married, you can, you can say, ah, let's do it a few days in advance or a few days afterwards. And then you still can do your own little ritual, but you don't have to pay such a high price.

- And for the record, you've been married, what, 38, 39, 40

- Years? Oh, no, 40. I think it's gonna be 45 years this summer.

- 45. So you note of what you speak.

- Yes, I I know what I'm talking about.

- When you were growing up earlier, did you give those little tiny sweetheart candies on Valentine's Day? There was a message

- On them. Yes. I just loved those. And then, you know how we had to give Valentine's to our entire class? 'cause you never wanted to leave somebody out. You know, we all read peanuts and Charlie Brown didn't get Valentine's, so we all made sure to give everybody Valentine's. 'cause we wanted know Charlie Brown left out.

- Yeah, my sister has four little grandsons between the ages of 10 and seven. So I've been watching how they approach Valentine's Day and they have no interest in girls right now. Girls are the enemy right now. That'll change soon, I imagine. But two things I've noticed in their class. One is Valentine's Day is very, very inclusive. Everybody has to get a card for what you just mentioned. Nobody wants to be Charlie Brown. But secondly, Valerie, they're taking away all pretenses of gender and just identity. And so, in other words, I can't give you a football card because, you know, boys play football and girls don't necessarily, in other words, they just want to take the whole boy girl thing away from it.

- I I don't think that's a good thing. No.

- And also this is, I mentioned this because also we go back to our friends who make the Sweethearts candies, those messages used to be things like Marry Me and Be My Valentine and stuff, the newest batch, it's come out Belly. Let me read a few slogans to you. One reads Love in This Economy. You can appreciate that I no one read split rent. Another one reads share login. Another one reads carpool, another one reads Buy in Bulk. And no one reads Cook for two.

- So maybe one can see why marriage rates are going down.

- Well, it's, it's not romantic, is it?

- No, it isn't. It isn't. You know.

- Okay. I wanna turn to your, your knowledge of stimulus economics, Valerie, and ask you a rather naive question. I think this is not a holiday Valentine's Day, it's a day on the calendar, but it's a day that kind of is, you know, engages in social engineering because it drives people into doing economic activities. I have to go out and buy chocolates or roses, or I have to take somebody out to the theater or restaurant and things like that. In other words, you could say it's good for the economy, it's a stimulus. So my question Vale is why don't we have one of these every week to get people out and spending money? I mean, you could, so you could, you could have Valentine's Day, you could have, you know, national divorce a day, one day. You could have, you know, first Child Day, just, you could go on each week and find some reason for people to depart with their money.

- Well, it wouldn't work. So let me tell you that, because typically what it does is it leads people to bunch things they are likely to already do. So, for example, for Christmas, you know, we tend to save up the sort of luxury fun things to put on our Christmas list for our relatives to give us. 'cause it's just fun for everybody to be opening presents. But if we didn't have Christmas, we would probably buy them for ourselves earlier. So the total amount of spending isn't as high as you see just by the big peak in spending at Christmas. It's just that we've, we've intertemporal substituted, you know, substituted away from other times to a time when it's fun to do it. And it's the same thing with Valentine's Day. Chances are that the monthly or whatever dinner out at a restaurant just gets moved to Valentine's Day because then it's more festive. It, it's actually fun to celebrate things when other people are doing it. Of course, as long as it doesn't get too crowded. 'cause sometimes that can take away the fun. But the other thing is, I, I think this is not economics, but just basic psychology. There is a fatigue effect with these sorts of things. And if you had too many of them, then you just start ignoring them all. It's, it's sort of like those signs in California that's saying that, that this is known to cause can, this chemical is known to cause cancer. What's the last time that you paid attention to that sign? Again, it's the fatigue effect

- That crossed my mind when I was buying cigars in the Caribbean, recently went on vacation. You buy the little box of cigars in, there's, in huge letters, this will cause cancer. Okay. Duly noted.

- Right? - I think you read about the fatigue thing. You know, one thing in this country, there is a national day every day for something. And at some point, the cynic in you, the crusty person in you says, do we really have a national day for this? Are we running outta things to have a national day?

- Yes. No, absolutely.

- Okay. Apparently, explain to me this thing called the khap economy.

- Yeah. So, so this is the idea that people in a higher socioeconomic category are really making good progress. Their incomes are going up, their prosperity is going up, whereas there are other groups of people typically less educated or, you know, less healthy whose incomes are stagnating or going down. So that's the, the, the spreading apart that people talk about the K economy.

- Okay. Is Valentine's Day a khap event?

- Well, I, so, so, so Kha is talking about overtime. So I would say on average, I suspect that higher income people spend more on Valentine's Day. The question is, is that diverging? I'm not sure. But one thing that's diverging is getting into the, what happens after Valentine's Day is marriage rates. So for example, for 45-year-old women, those who are college educated, 71% of them are married. But for non-college educated women, only 52% are married by that age. So, so there's, and, and, and that is spreading apart over time. So, so there is a k shape in marriage rates.

- Can you expand a little bit on the marriage question, because this is very complicated. This obviously ties into the fact that, you know, women in particular have career options they didn't have 20, 30 years ago. This ties into obviously, that people are looking to marry later in life, that you can be 35 or 40 years old and not be maybe as much a stigma. Remember the Mary Tyler Moore show came on in the early 1970s, and this is hugely controversial because oh my gosh, Mary is single, she's a, she's a spinster. What's wrong with her? But you would not bat an eyelash at this day. And it's also that, you know, especially here in the California Bay area, I can't tell you how many friends I have. They're single moms and they're single moms by choice. They didn't find somebody by the age of 35 or 40, and they just decided to, to go on it own. And society, unlike say what Dan Quail did years ago with Murphy Brown society today is not, you know, cast scorned upon them.

- Yes. So one of the interesting things is what we call sort of mating, which is college educated women are more likely to marry college educated men and vice versa and less educated women. So that, so if you look at household income, that's something else that's leading to a spreading out because you have two high wage earners in one household and lower two lower wage earners in another household. But then the other thing is that you have a, a much higher incidence of single mothers raising children for less educated women. So in fact, it, an interesting fact is that for the more educated people, they look much more traditional, they're much more likely to get married, they're much more likely to raise kids with the two, what, what Melissa Carney calls the two parent privilege, where they have both their father, the child has both his father and his mother there raising, raising them. So, so there's a big difference there. And, and that's leading to some of these issues of, you know, income mobility. The kid who's raised by two parents, all of the statistics say they have a big advantage. And then college educated parents have more resources to give to those kids. And then that's leading to increased inequality among the children.

- There's one other consequence of all this, Valerie perhaps, and that is fertility. So back in 1960, Valerie America's fertility rate, this is average number of children a woman expected to have was about 3.6. In 2022, it fell to 1.6. So what happened?

- So that's a really good question. And there are many economists and demographers studying this right now. So, so the replacement rate needs, you need to have a fertility rate of 2.1 just to replace the current population, alright? Right. We are at 1.6. All right. What that means is with no changes, the US population would start shrinking. And in fact, the congressional budget office projections, I just looked at their latest projections. They project that the native born population of the US will start shrinking after 2030. That's four years from now. Because births are too low relative to deaths. The only thing that will keep population above water level or growing is actually net immigration. So, so if immigration is cut off, we're going to see the US population declining. Japan has already led the way on this Japan, but by the end of this century, I think there'll be half as many Japanese as there were at the beginning. Korea's population is shrinking, China's population is shrinking, but not just there. Latin America, Columbia's fertility rate collapsed in most places outside of Muslim countries. The fertility rate is, is declining dramatically.

- But if you talk about America going from say, 330 million people, Valerie to 310 million people, what's the real difference?

- Yeah, well the difference is that first of all, there, there's what we call the compounding problem. So, so just to give you an idea, suppose that the fertility rate drops to 1%, which is what it is in China. So Chad Jonas has looked at this that me, I'm trying to remember the numbers. That means that a hundred years from now, we would have millions of people on the earth rather than billions of people. Okay? So, so we're talking about big numbers or down into, yeah. Hundreds of millions, right? We're not at 1% yet. But, but the other thing is the, the age structure, the the peer age pyramid. Alright? If you are not having children, let, let's, let's do this in a complete blunt economic sense, you are not producing the workers of tomorrow. Now the government can promise you all the social security you want, but if there aren't any workers to produce the goods and services, that money is nothing. It would just lead to inflation. Prices would keep going up because there would be all of these checks chasing very few goods. The other thing is that older people need services a lot, particularly medical services and caregiving services, right? So we, you know, we're gonna to talk about childcare, but adult elderly care is be gonna become more and more important and that can be very, very expensive. There recent paper came out in the NBR working paper series that looked at areas that had higher net migration in the US and they found that the health of elderly people was better in those areas after you got a surge in, in migrants because you had people that drove, drove down the wages of caregivers, but enough so that people could afford them at the nursing homes in the home and all of those sorts of things. So, so the issue is fine, don't have children, but if you don't plan to work until you're 75 or 80, because there aren't gonna be any other workers there, right? You cannot retire, you know, at 60 that the way it was traditionally for people who had lots of children and therefore ensured that there were workers for the future.

- You know, Valerie years ago, the comedian Conan O'Brien gave this just brilliant commencement address at Dartmouth and he was making jokes about several things. And one joke he made about was about aging boomers who refused to leave their jobs. And what he was making tongue in cheek reference to is the fact that Jade Leno would not leave the Tonight Show when it had been promised to Coan O'Brien. But he had a point also that aging boomers, and keep in mind, tread lightly here you're talking to an aging boomer, aging boomers are hanging around longer than they used to. So isn't this already kind of a problem in the US workforce where if it's not too top heavy in, in the elderly, the elderly are not necessarily stepping aside to the younger generation.

- So more workers is always a good thing.

- Oh, okay.

- The, the capital increases. So, so this, in the short run you might say, oh, there's a little crowding out, but, but not overall the, the, you know, it's healthy to have a good inflow of young workers, but also to have senior workers there that have a lifetime of on the job experience. So, so this moving aside, is it, it's, it's kind of like people who say, oh we shouldn't, we shouldn't have adopted the tractor in farming because so many farm workers, you know, lost their jobs. I mean, we're much better off because of the tractors in farming because then now workers can work elsewhere. The thing is that we have, and the US is pretty good at this, at reallocating workers to, to good better productivity. If there's a higher labor supply, then you tend to get more job creation. And in fact that's what's could be happening with the labor market recently, all the big surge in immigration over the last, you know, over the previous years led to more job creation and more hires. And now with, you know, a lot of the, the expulsions and, and just people not coming in, that could be why job creation is lower.

- Alright, so the end game here, Valerie, is to get this rate from 1.6 where it is right now. Back up to, I think you said 2.1 is the numbers. So yeah, how do we do this?

- You know, so again, all of these academic conferences are looking at, they're so far, they figured out what doesn't work,

- Right?

- Subsidizing doesn't work. Even subsidizing childcare doesn't seem to work much. You know, various places have Russia did this, I remember way back trying to pay people to have children just doesn't seem to work. I mean part of it is the culture, part of it is so, so one big question that we need to an answer, and people are trying to do some more research on this, to what extent is the decline in fertility people who wanted to delay childbearing because of career reasons,

- Right?

- And then beliefs, some false promises about how modern technology can help you have children later in life. The various methods are not nearly as effective as people think. And so quite a few people said, geez, I wish somebody had told me this, that this, this wasn't a panacea that they can often fail and now it's too late and now I don't have children. So, so part of it could just be learning and a part of it can be culture. It's really fun to have children if all your friends have children, but if your friends aren't having children, then you kind of get into a social life where children aren't included. And so then you could, so you could have what economists call multiple equilibrium. So certainly, you know, during the baby boom era, everybody had kids, the streets were running with kids, social activities were organized around kids. And now it's more, you know, adults only kinds of things. So if you could have a change in culture, you might have an increase in fertility.

- It could, but the timeline is curious. Now getting back to the, the little grand boys, I remember grandsons, I mentioned their mothers, my sister's two daughters, they both got married in their thirties, or actually, excuse me, one got married in late twenties, but she didn't have a child until I think about six years later. So she was in her mid thirties, the other one who is made to have children, she's a teacher. She just, she's a, she loves people, she's a nurturer by, by nature. She didn't get married until she was 32 and she had a child two years later. So they both have had two boys. So they're just, they're just shy of the 2.1 mark. I don't know how you one 10th the baby, they're two of, let's see, they're, they're doing their bit. But the point is it didn't happen for them until they mid thirties. But in part because what you just mentioned, Valerie, by the time they're getting to the mid thirties, they've found that all their college buddies, all their sorority sisters, all the people they tailgated with and gone on all kinds of debauching trips with, they all were stumbling down with kids.

- Yes.

- Yeah. So I guess the question is then how do you speed that timeline up? Maybe five years and maybe also try to encourage people to have a third child. But again, now we get an economics because in the case of these two girls, they're very middle class. Having a third child becomes much more complicated, especially when it comes to the cost of college.

- Yes. So when I talked to Milton one time at a lunch here at the, at a conference, he had a great idea and, and I'm hearing that some of that idea is sort of catching on among some groups. He said that the research at that time figured out, you know, people that the, the creative productivity people said, oh, it declines with age, but that research actually said it was relative to when you got your degree, not your chronological age.

- Oh. - So he suggested the following strategy for women. 'cause you know, let's be clear, women are the ones who do the childbearing and even with very helpful fathers, it's it, right? You know, it's harder on women. So he suggested that women go to college because that's very important for the marriage market, right? You want to, you know, marry your college sweetheart, say it like I did. And then you, then you start having children, you know, the husband would go out and work and, and the woman would then start having children. And then once the children are old enough, say high school, then she would go back and get her advanced degree, PhD medical degree, whatever. Because life expectancies are so long now then she can have many, many decades of a good career. And I think that's a very interesting idea. So,

- But life gets in the way of getting that degree, doesn't it?

- Later on? Well, not necessarily. I mean, people could, you know, it, one of the things, so I know several who went back later

- And

- It's be, and part of it was because they were married to people in that profession. So they kind of, you know, opted out for a while, but then it was easier for them to get back in because they were keeping up with it through their spouse.

- Alright, so let me throw one more curve ball at you, doctor Remy. What happens to college professors, people like you, where are the PhDs gonna be? Are are universities gonna be, you know, short of teachers if we do this strategy?

- Oh, it's a big thing. You know, if you, now until recently there was great demand from foreign students, so, right. But of course, you know, even though China's population is decreasing, there are still 1.3 billion people over there. So demand from foreign students can be great, but given the geopolitical factors, it's not clear what demand will be in the future. But, but that's gonna be a big thing. In fact, this is what happened in the early 1990s. The ba there was a baby bust in the early seventies and the result was, that was much easier to get into even Yale and Stanford in the early nineties because there weren't as many high school graduates. In fact, in this, in the study that my husband Gary and I did on the Rugrat race, this was one of our prime explanations for, for certain patterns is that that was low. And then, then there was a recovery from that. More kids were, there were more high school graduates in the US and then on top of that there was an increased propensity to go to college. That led to what we cohort crowding, which is you have more people trying to get into colleges now some colleges expanded, new colleges came up. But what the research showed is that the more prestigious the college, the less likely they were to add slots. So the Ivys plus hardly increased the number of slots at all, even while there was this big increase in the demand for slots at college, both domestically and then of course with the, the foreign students coming over. So you started getting what we call this rugrat race to get your kid into college. Whereas before, if you were well to do, you had a pretty good chance of getting your kid maybe if not in the Ivys plus one of the very nice liberal arts colleges if you had the money for it or one of the flagship colleges, like such as we have in uni at, you know, in the University of California.

- One last question about Milton Freedom, before we get into Rugrat race, how old were you, Valerie, when you taught your first college course?

- Oh goodness. So, so I was a teaching what I was a teaching assistant here at Stanford in the 1980s. And then I started as a professor in 1987 at UCSD. So,

- Alright, you were, you were young.

- I was young

- Under the Freedman plan. Would not universities be lacking for young female professors if women are waiting until later in life to get their PhDs?

- That could be yes. But, but not every, you know, this is what, what I'm saying here. I'm not saying a wholesale shift, you know, kind of thing. And, and I actually, you know, I, I went and got my PhD and then I had our first child in the summer after my second year as an assistant professor. So, so at age 29, so I was kind of young by today's standards. Okay.

- And

- Then my second one in my thirties,

- And you have, I know you have at least one kid who went to Stanford, right?

- Yes, yes. And then our, our son went to Stanford, our daughter went to Berkeley. So, so two of the

- Great, so you, you've run the rug, you've run the Rugrat race twice. I try saying rugrat race three times, you've run the race twice. And I would say you succeeded very well by getting the, but do you have, do you have a house divided flag, by the way?

- No. Fortunately our daughter isn't into football, so, so it's okay. Okay. That's otherwise,

- Right. Well let's talk about the rugrat race here. So this is something that you and your husband got into. Was it simple, Valerie is you and your hubby had moved to San Diego and you saw this phenomenon of children being raised and the race to college. Is that what triggered this?

- That's what triggered it. So, so that paper we wrote was semi autobiographical. The, yeah, our first neighborhood. 'cause you know, trying to afford a house, even in San Diego at that time, in our first neighborhood, it was mostly an immigrant neighborhood. There were a lot of non-college educated parents and, and we moved into their 1988. So, so that was the time when this mania hadn't come about. Plus we were in a less educated neighborhood,

- Right?

- Then in 1998 we moved to our current neighborhood where we still live, which was much more educated. Plus things had changed over time and we couldn't believe this preparing the child's college, college resume with afterschool activities thing. We thought, oh well if you get good grades and do well on your standardized test, you know, you should, it should be fine. We're professors, we know this. And people said, oh no, no. And we heard all of these sorts of things. So I'm, I'm much more sensitive to social signals than, than my husband is. And so then I said, okay, we've got to, you know, they've gotta have this, they've gotta have that. And some of them they like, like our daughter loved horseback riding, but, but then I'd say, oh, maybe we should do this camp. I hear Johnny's in that camp and then my, my son and my husband finally pushed back and said, my son says I don't wanna be over camped in the summer. I wanna have fun doing things in the summer. 'cause he's very, very creative. He did Legos and, and, and he'd like to read a lot and had liked to play with friends. And so they pushed back and I said, okay, you know, and, and as somebody else said, foot dangling time is really important and you know, where you just have time to yourself to do whatever you want. And, and I think that's where you can be the most creative. And I thought about this when I was growing up, you know, we were all free range kids. And then I grew up in the Panama Canal zone and the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Network, the TV didn't come on until 4:00 PM there were no cartoons on weekends. And so we all went out and played and that was a good thing. So, so then I, you know, I was convinced and it wasn't too hard to convince me and it turned out really great, like our son who was just always loved building things. So he did all of these projects in the garage with his friends and made trebuchets. He was very into medieval battles and, and in fact for his, and then he did leadership at our church, which was a block away. He knew we hated driving our kids to too many things. And so they, they accommodated us on that and he just did really well. And his acceptance letter from Stanford, they said, you won't have to use your parents' garage anymore to, to do your projects. You can use our labs. And I thought that was just a lovely thing.

- That's wonderful. Now Valerie, blessed of those who don't have to worry about the situation. The big news here at Stanford yesterday, for example, was that Charlie Woods is not coming to Stanford. Charlie Woods is Tiger Wood's son.

- Oh,

- He's apparently quite a golfer himself. Tiger Woods of course played golf at Stanford for two years. But Charlie is going to Florida State because they have a good golf program and he is more of kind of a southeastern kid than a California kid. So there you are. But the point is, I think Tiger has a daughter who already goes to Stanford and I got a sneaky suspicion if Charlie Woods wanted to come here, Valerie, unless he was just the, just the least intelligent man on the planet, which I doubt he is, I got a sneaky suspicion he would get in here and be allowed to at least trout for the golf team. So college, not a problem for the Woods family, but for a lot of people is concerned. But here's what I'm curious about Valerie. So I'm a child of the seventies ultimately, and I think to the extent that I first looked at college and my parents looked at college, I think it was about a 10th grade issue because they were thinking about, okay, 10th grade, now you better get your act together. 'cause that's when they're gonna look at grades. And so think about extracurriculars and all that. The point is, my parents were not thinking when I was in sixth grade what I needed to be doing in terms of embellishing my resume for college or even earlier than that. So I know there's no magical date when society kind of changed this way. But your estimation though, when did we really start turning the curve though? When we started thinking about college, not just a couple years out for kids, but even, you know, a decade or 15 years out?

- Yeah, it was again during the 1990s. So, so one of the things that we pulled together a bunch of evidence to try to explain why particularly college educated parents were dramatically increasing the time they spent on childcare, even though overall they were having smaller families. And the fact that because college educated parents were earning high wage premium for their college education,

- Right?

- That what we call the opportunity cost of their time was great, right? You could do some extra consulting or you could stand there on the soccer field watching your kid play soccer. So, so we went through a whole bunch of the standard explanations and just rule them out like the crime rate had actually dropped it, it, it was high in the early nineties, it was dropping over time. There's do income, higher income levels. We found once you controlled for college income, didn't matter a variety of those things. But what we felt again, autobiographically was that it was this pressure, it was chauffeuring kids was a big part of this increase in time spent on childcare. And that not the only part, but, but something that we certainly noticed and that this was happening because of this panic to get into good colleges. And so, so then we pulled together a bunch of evidence. So first of all, you know, this trough and then this increase in the number of kids trying to get into college, and then the college is not responding at least the top ones by increasing their supply. And so our argument was the following before, before the late nineties, basically if you were a college educated parent, as long as you made sure your kids did their homework and did a few extracurricular activities, it's always good to know some music to do some sports, you know, it, it just enriches you. Then as long as you did that, then your kid would get into a good college and that's all that mattered.

- Okay,

- Then you got into, okay, so one, one thing Caroline Hoby, my, my colleague here at Hoover 30 years ago documented that the market for higher education evolved from a mostly local communities market. You just went to the college in your town to a national market and it became very hierarchical. There was so much status and perceived benefit from going to the very best colleges there. So then that led to this increasing thing so that even the college educated parents said, I don't have any guarantee I could get my kid into a good college. And so then they felt like they had to put out much more effort and that's what led us to this rug rat race. It's a tournament. If you only have say fix slots just for simplicity in college, then there's a tournament. You've gotta beat the others to get your kid into those few slots at places like Stanford and Harvard.

- So how much of the rugrat race is real Valerie versus imagined in this regard? There are a lot of great colleges in California, there a lot of great colleges in America, but you also have a lot of people in this country who view college for their children as a statusy thing thing as a bragging right for themselves as parents. Remember Operation Varsity Blues a few years ago?

- Yes, yes.

- Yeah. So what was that all about? That was about very wealthy families in California paying a lot of money to get colleges bribed and their children, a lot of their children were really not terribly sharp. This is more about the parents and their egos. They wanted to brag that their kids went to Stanford or Georgetown or U US SC, right? So that's my question here of how much of this is real versus how much is kind of in the parents' heads.

- Yeah, I mean certainly a lot of it is in the parents' heads and there are studies going back and forth saying, how much extra do you get? So, so, so kids who get into Stanford end up doing very well, but how much of that is Stanford's really good at identifying very talented children who will do well no matter what? And some of the studies suggest that that's what most of it is, and others say, well no, they get, you know, they do get extra benefits. So I can, I can compare Stanford to UCSD and you know, you just have a much higher faculty to student ratio at Stanford, right? And they do get much more individualized attention than at UCSD. But I think at UCSD, we did a great job and, and, and particularly with, you know, kids who get in there who don't come from families with college backgrounds. I mean, I think UCSD's value added was probably higher than Stanford's, but Stanford still has value added. So particularly people who can afford it, you know, one can say that that's worth it. But both of our children got great educations, our son at the private Stanford and our daughter at Berkeley. And in fact, when I was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we brought the whole family and then my daughter was so delighted how more Berkeley people got in than Stanford people. And so then she finally felt on par with her brother, you know, because before she'd always been a little bit, oh, I went to Berkeley, I didn't go to Stanford. So I,

- Yeah, I, I just, I find this line interesting because we live in what I would call a very performative age, Valerie. We post everything on social media to an excess. You really don't need to see what I had for dinner last night on social media, but yet, but I don't put it on there. But some people do, and parents love to put college decals on their cars or walk around saying, I'm wearing a Stanford mom ball cap or something like that. So again, I just wonder how much of this is Rio versus how much the parents are putting pressure on themselves to ultimately feel better about themselves because I got little Johnny or little Susie into Stanford or into Berkeley.

- Absolutely. And, but, but they, they need to think about the cost of the Rugrat race. So, so back when we first published our paper in 2010, I was on several, you know, public radio broadcasts and, and I remember in one case it, it was a family therapist there that was talking about real harms to the crazy lifestyle that parents had because they were, had their kids in all of these activities way more than was probably good for anybody. But they felt this because of this red rat race to get into college.

- So in Europe, in your study this earlier you wrote quote, the amount of time college educated women spent on childcare went up from 13 hours to 22 hours per week since the 1990s. What data do you have, if any, on dads?

- Oh, I have quite a bit on dads and I even looked at the most UpToDate. So

- I'm curious about this early because we had water parenting this phenomenon where, again, I'm going back to my primitive childhood in the 1960s and seventies where dads did dad things. Dad and I would play catch, dad would take me to little league and mom did mom things with my sister piano, things like that, ballet and so forth. But you know, I have this phenomenon where moms will be little league moms and dads will be, you know, girl dads and, and so it just, it seems we've become much more creative in our parenting.

- Yeah. Yes, we have. And, and, and that's a good thing. So, so right now I looked at the latest last few years. So on average, a college educated mother ha spends 21 hours a week on childcare. That's actually declined by one hour since the early two thousands. So I looked at that, that that's college educated, non-college educated, they're still doing a lot. 18 hours fathers college educated fathers are spending 13 hours, and that's much more than there used to be. That's gone up two hours, even from 2003, 2000 to 2005 for non-college fa the fathers. Now to be clear, these are fathers in the house. So, so this is not counting the others. So these are fathers who are there, it's 10 hours for non-college and they're, there's been a two hour increase per week for them. So we are seeing fathers getting more involved over time and, and that's good.

- Okay. One

- Thing I noticed, and it's great, you know, the fathers playing with kids, just, you know, that's one of the most enjoyable activities, but I think it's also a really important activity. So this is a high value activity both for, for the parent and, and the child. But one thing I've noticed, and I just talking to other female economists, you know, and we, our husbands just do a lot for our kids. They do the sports and all that, but more, much more often than not, the mother tends to be the household manager, right? It's the mother who has to remember today is a field trip day. So they have to, you have to send a snack lunch bag, right? And oh, today is pajama day at school, so you have to send your kid in pajamas and just, you know, all of those sorts of things. It's usually the mother that's remembering that. I mean, I complain, but just that, that's how it work. Whereas the, the more optional kinds of things not being driven by what the school's telling you to do, the fathers take over some of that.

- Yeah. The best test is Valerie, is get a dog for your family. Purely anecdotal, but anyone I know, every family I know that has gotten a dog, it becomes the mother's project ultimately. Why? Because the dog becomes kind of the extra child she didn't have, but the mom just kind of ends up having to clean up after the dog and, you know, train the dog to get off the sofa and kind of be, you know, the responsible one in terms the dad started to have fun with the dog and play with the dog and walk the dog and rough house the dog. But the mom kind of takes it upon herself to really kind of raise the dog.

- Well, you don't, this is the inter actually in, when I was growing up, my father was the dog person. He loved animals. And in our household, when our son went away to college and left us his cat, my husband did the cat box. And then also now we have a chihuahua we've had for 10 years and my husband does more for the chihuahua than I I love the chihuahua too, but, but actually that's not the case there. So, but, but, but I could imagine that the average is what you say.

- So here's a question for you, Valerie. We have this problem where we're not having enough kids in society. The good news though, is what kids we're having in society, parents are devoting more time to them, but if you have more kids, doesn't that mean you have to thin out your time among the kids?

- Yes, there is, but but there are what economists call economies of scale, right? You know, if everybody's there doing homework, you have the kids all at the dining room table doing their homework that you're managing. If you go out, if you take them out on activities, you, you take all of them out, say to the zoo. So, so I don't think it's so much plus. So I, I'm an only child of two only children, but I always hung out with my friends who were from baby boomer families with, you know, four to six people. And there's just a lot that's conveyed by having siblings. I think so, so I think, I think kids who are raised in families with siblings, even if they get a little bit less parental attention, they're, they're getting plenty of benefits from having siblings. They learn from them, they enjoy them.

- I think that's a great point too. Especially ideally siblings who may be, so again, I have friends who've done this many different way. Society, by the way, here in the Bay area is fascinating, Valerie. So I, I always like to tell this story back when I had a chocolate lab in days where my house would be cleaned, I'd take the lab over to the nearby Nordstrom and sit in the courtyard and have a cup of coffee with the dog. Always amazed how many people gravitate toward the dog. They really are magnets, if you will. But I noticed phenomenon that right before the doors would open, women in their forties would show up and they were pushing a stroller, Valerie and the stroller had twins in it, which suggested me what IVF that

- Right?

- You know, you're doing that age so different ways, but I think in terms of the kids here, and granted I don't have kids of my own, so maybe I'm just talking out of school here, you want to have kids relatively close in age, not necess maybe, maybe not a year apart, maybe not four years apart, but somewhere around there. So they're kind of close together in terms of experiences, but not necessarily, you know, caught up in, in the older one shadow.

- Yeah, I, I've definitely noticed this among all the families that, that, that the siblings that are closer in age are more likely to, to be closer, lifelong friends. You, you know, so our kids are, what is it, four and a half years apart, you know, so a little bit too long, but you, you know, we, we needed to get, as I said, we had our first one two years after we, I became an assistant professor, and then we both wanted to kind of lock in our tenure portfolio before we had the second one. So that's why we took a little bit of a gap there.

- Yeah. And I think especially if they're the same gender, it's an issue when you get to college, if I'm two years behind you as your sister in college or high school, excuse me, I am really, you know, people know you and so I'm being judged by you in large part. It's hard to develop your identity as a second child, is what I'm saying.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but it's also, it's true. They expect things, but, but I, I was always envious of my best friend who had two older brothers, and if anybody was trying to bully then, then they'd suddenly realize, oh, we know you, you're from the Barnes family. And, and, and then they kind of leave her alone. I thought, oh, I need a, I need a surrogate bigger brother.

- Okay, so let's wrap this up, Valerie. So we've talked about a birth rate, which has gone down to, in the ones it should be in the twos, is it time to sound the alarm? Have we already sounded the alarm, but when do we get to really kind of crunch time and crisis time here?

- Yeah, well, one can always turn these things around, right? Right. The, the, the only real, the real harms come if it continues, because then you have that compounding effect where, where the whole population just starts exponentially declining. And we have what one book called an Empty Planet. So I think that culture is important. So I think that this coming into the culture, and certainly even people in the administration have been talking about this, you might get an increase in, in childbearing and I, and I think if people felt more confident about the economy, that would also help. So, okay. A good economy is probably good for fertility.

- Okay. Final question. What are the younger rabies doing? We know what the older rabies doing for Valentine's Day. What are the younger rabies doing?

- Yeah, so, so our son is married. He, he met his wife here at Stanford. Okay. When they were freshman. They're, they're doing some kind of romantic, so our kid and our daughter's married to a fellow academic. So she, they're both academics and the, they always do romantic things. I'm not quite sure what they are. We haven't asked yet,

- So, okay. But they're helping the economy.

- They're helping the economy. Oh, oh, in terms of what they're doing. I thought you meant for Valentine's Day. No. Oh yeah. Our son is an engineer. Our daughter-in-law is a dentist. They're up in the Seattle area, and our daughter and her husband are assistant professors of cognitive neuroscience at University of Arkansas. They were able to get a joint, you know, joint location is, is hard. That, that's one of the things I think that affects marriage. But they were able to get a positions in the same university.

- Okay. Well, Valerie, again, I congratulate you and her husband on winning the Rugrat race, and I hope your children likewise are victorious come the time when they turn their attention to this fun conversation. Valerie, thanks for doing

- All right. Thanks, bill.

- You've been listening to matters of Policy and Politics, a podcast devoted to the discussion of policy research from the Hoover Institution, as well as issues of local, national and geopolitical concern. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, spread the word, tell your friends about us. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and X fades. Rx handle is at Hoover ins, that's spelled h double O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. I encourage you to go back to the Hoover website, which is hoover.org, and sign up for the Hoover daily report, which keeps you updated on what Valerie Ramey and her Hoover colleagues are up to, and that's delivered to your inbox weekdays. We'll be back next week at the new episode of Matters Policy and Politics, Hoover, senior fellow, Leo Haney and I talking about the latest political developments here in California. That's it for this podcast. Before I go, I'd like to thank my research assistant Jack Patrick magazine for taking a data dive into Valentine's Day and population demographics. Thanks, JP. For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen. Till next time, take care. Thanks for listening.

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