"Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of 'Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,' a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous..."

"... that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News.... HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5. The statute enshrining childhood independence is part of a bigger children's services bill ensuring Texans that the state will not intervene and remove kids from their homes unless the danger is so great and so likely that it outweighs the trauma of entering the foster care system.... In other words, it prevents poverty from being mistaken for neglect.... 'If the mom misses that bus, she gets to work late and loses her job. How does that help the child, if now she can't pay her rent? So she leaves her child home alone for 15 minutes.' .... [T]he bill also helps folks who choose not to helicopter parent, like Austin mom Kari Anne Roy, whose case made headlines in 2014. Roy was at home while her six-year-old played within view of the house for about ten minutes. A passerby marched him home and called the cops...."

From "Texas Becomes Third State To Pass Free-Range Kids Law/'You had the most right-wing members of the legislature signed on with most left-wing members'" (Reason).

ADDED:  I haven't written much on the topic of "free-range" children, but let me quote something I wrote last year:

When I walk (or drive) around my neighborhood and beyond, I often think or say out loud, "Where are the children?" Are they inside looking at big and small screens? Are they chauffeured to adult-run activities? It's so sad! Even in the 80s when my sons were little, the neighborhood had kids outdoors, playing randomly with each other. But back in the 1950s, when I was little, the neighborhood was a constant festival of kid-dom. So much active, inventive play. It was endless. Nobody wanted our parents to scoop us up and take us anywhere. The place was completely alive and completely kid-scale, and none of it had anything to do — as far as we could tell — with preparing for a prestigious and remunerative career. I can't imagine any parents barging in and trying to leverage things for the advancement of their offspring. We were, to ourselves, on our own.

Ah, I see — I was reacting to an article questioning whether "expensive activities" for kids were a rip-off. 

Today's article, about the Texas law, is about the economics of childcare too, but it focuses on relieving low-income families of the burden of accusations of child neglect. The older article was about whether high-income families should be seeking to buy extra advantages for their children. The "free-range" idea works from both ends of the economic divide to equalize the life of children. 

If children are left alone to be self-reliant and to invent their own modes of playing, then rich and poor kids might have very similar lives. More or less. 

Could we all — from both ends of the political divide — agree on that? 

Of course not! We must disagree. We cannot have political peace. How would we live in political peace? The adults don't know how to play well together, even those of us who grew up in free-range American utopia.

The only thing to freak out about is freaking out itself.

I'm reading From "Opinion: Don’t freak out about inflation yet" by Catherine Rampell (WaPo). Key point:

If everyone interprets recent price spikes as temporary shocks that will disappear as the economy reopens and production ramps up, then inflation and overheating concerns should fade. But if people start to freak out about inflation, then inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Businesses start preemptively raising prices and wages, because they expect everyone else to do so, too.

So if there's inflation, it will be our fault. Calm down, settle back. It's only going to be a problem if you make it a problem. 

ADDED: It's all in the mind, so....

"We are closed" is trending on Twitter.

Every restaurant posting a “we are closed” sign like this blaming lazy workers for refusing to take risky public-facing jobs for abysmal pay with no benefits will lose my business. Not just now, forever. pic.twitter.com/MXZpnGLfIF

— cassandracarolina (@cassandra17lina) May 13, 2021

*CEO makes 9 figure salary*
we are closed due to lazy ppl who prefer govt money :( pic.twitter.com/JjiTb8aytg

— FULLER GO EASY ON THE PEPSI (@takemegarth) May 10, 2021

“We are closed :( bc our employees figured out we are exploiting them and quit to find better jobs but we’re spinning the narrative that they’re lazy & just want unemployment even tho you can’t receive unemployment when you quit” pic.twitter.com/mswxirTjkI

— azula playing volleyball (@ilovecheerwine) May 13, 2021

“WE ARE CLOSED”

Potential employers offering minimal coins demand to talk to the Manager of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/bHxhYCmFaO

— ƒєммє ρнємємє ✿ ✿ ✿ ꕤ ꕤ 🏴‍☠️ (@femme_phememe) May 13, 2021

WE ARE CLOSED

NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE

THERE DOESN'T SEEM TO BE ANYONE AROUND

I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW

THE BEATING OF OUR HEARTS IS THE ONLY SOUND pic.twitter.com/jau0VYlTHk

— Logan🌻🌊 Bishop 🤙🏽🏳️‍🌈 (@slothdragon90) May 13, 2021

The puzzling intensity of bile.

It was a beautiful piece. Honest and non-judgmental toward any other choice. Why the intensity of this bile? https://t.co/mB22zDYLoH

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 9, 2021

Let's take a closer look at that bile. Is there bile at all?

I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest "gross, pass" I've ever uttered in my life.

Bile is anger. "Gross, pass" is disgust.  One might perhaps base an entire career on examining the anger/disgust distinction, but I think the key distinction is the direction of the negative emotion. Anger urges you to take aggression at the source of your outrage. Disgust sends you away. You shun. It's the difference between wanting to attack what you hate and wanting to make sure you don't get any of that on you. Marcotte experiences disgust — "gross" — and immediately shuns — "pass." Her measure of the intensity of disgust is the shortness of the space between the emotion and the reaction. She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought. It's a feeling and a decision all at once — "gross, pass."

Having decided not to expose herself to the text of the article, Marcotte is free to enjoy herself: "The funniest part" — funniest part of the headline — "is framing 25 like it's some daringly young age. The average age of first childbirth is 26." Is that really funny? I haven't read the op-ed yet myself. I saw it, did a quick skim, and decided it wasn't bloggable, but I didn't think — like Marcotte — that my rejection of it was bloggable (i.e., tweetable). I'm going to read it in a minute, but I want to say that Marcotte comes off as privileged. I'm guessing that if the average age is 26, that includes a lot of very young women who are not spending their late teens and early 20s acquiring higher education and beginning career, that is, are not the sort of women who are reading NYT op-eds about timing their reproductive life. 

The Marcotte tweet cannot be clicked to get to the op-ed, so let me give you the link: "I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait" by Elizabeth Bruenig. Starting to read it, I see what made me reject it before. It's written at privileged NYT readers who care about the upper-middle class setting of child rearing. The writer finds herself, at age 27, "among a cordial flock of Tory Burch bedecked mothers in their late 30s and early 40s." Sorry, I don't know the brand, but I understand the nudge. "Tory Burch" is telling me these people are upper-middle class. The average age of pregnancy among "Tory Burch bedecked" women is not — I'm quite sure — 26.

When my husband and I compared notes after the [birthday party], he recounted a sly line of questioning spun by a curious partygoer that he thought was aimed at determining how, given our ages, we could afford the ritzy preschool that our daughter attended with theirs. 

Speaking of sly... you've let us know your kid goes to a ritzy preschool. Okay. Well, women who plan their reproduction think about the economics. There's going to need to be some info about how you can have your children young and still give them the benefits of an upper-middle class lifestyle. In Bruenig's case, this preschool was free to those living inside Washington, D.C. 

Bruenig is clearly talking about highly educated women — women who aspire to affluence:

A 2012 Pew survey found that while 62 percent of women with a high school diploma had given birth by the age of 25, only 18 percent of women with master’s degrees or higher had done the same. In fact, a solid 20 percent of master’s degree holders celebrated their first babies at 35 or older. Unsurprisingly, these numbers track with household income. As of 2018, more than half of women living on less than $25,000 per year between the ages of 40 and 45 report having given birth by the age of 25; among women banking $100,000 or more, the share was a touch over 30 percent....

Highly educated professionals living in major urban centers — in other words, people like me, a lily-white full-time writer with a master’s degree living within rail distance of New York City — tend to postpone childbirth until their late 20s and early 30s....

Yes, she called herself "lily-white." She's talking to white women. But you're not supposed to worry that she's afraid of the so-called "replacement" because she's made it clear — in material I've elided — that she loathes right-wingers.

While my husband and I were never in abject poverty, we understood what it meant to be precariously employed and at the start of our careers.... Reasonable concern about having children before establishing oneself could theoretically be remedied with a generous policy approach....

But what of having children — or getting married, for that matter — before establishing oneself?... When I got pregnant, my husband was a fledgling lawyer and I was a greenhorn journalist....

Once you're pregnant and decided to go through with it, all these economic matters will dissolve into a kaleidoscope of love:

When you have a baby, you do turn toward your child — that “relieved and joyful desertion” may eventually affect your friends, but it first affects yourself. What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief.... My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull.

For this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation....

You catch glimpses of yourself in time, when life shines through your inner world like a prism, illuminating all the sundry colors you contain. It isn’t possible to disentangle the light from the color, the discovery of change from the change itself....  But she peered up at me from the shadow of my shoulder, and I could see the umber of my own eyes taking shape in hers. There I am, I thought, there I am.

Ha ha. Too bad Marcotte didn't read through to all that. I'll bet she'd find the "sundry colors" and "umber of my own eyes" even funnier than the notion that 26 is a daringly young age to have your first baby. 

All these women who are thinking so hard about where on the timeline of life to place their unleashing of reproductive power? Don't think, let it happen, behold your miracle, and exult in your liberation from "the claustrophobic confines of my own skull." 

Ironically, that reminds me of Marcotte. As I said above: She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought.

"Maybe paying people more to be unemployed than to work has consequences? I've been out to eat with 2 waiters working an entire establishment."

"No one wants to work now. Same thing with Lyft and gig work. Bring back proof of looking for employment and curtail unemployment benefits when we have this many job openings. Helicopter money is temporary, not permanent."

That's a high-rated comment at "The Jobs Report: The Boom That Wasn’t/April’s anemic job creation was so out of line with what other indicators have suggested that it will take some time to unravel the mystery" (NYT). 

From the article: 

Employers added only 266,000 jobs last month, the government reported Friday morning, not the million or so that forecasters expected. The unemployment rate actually edged up, to 6.1 percent.... These numbers are consistent with the story many business leaders are telling, of severe labor shortages — that demand has surged back but employers cannot find enough workers to fulfill it, at least at the wages they are accustomed to paying....

Back in 2010, the Obama administration introduced one of the more unfortunate economic messaging concepts of recent decades, announcing that a “Recovery Summer” was underway. It became a punchline, because while the economy was expanding, Americans were still far worse off than they’d been before the 2008 recession, and improvement was coming very slowly. That’s one outcome the Biden administration desperately wants to avoid.

"Early on, some likened the public health crisis to a blizzard, imagining that people would stay home, cozy up with their romantic partners and make babies."

"These playful visions have given way to a more sobering reality: The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause 'missing births' — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come.... Millions of parents are dealing with the stress of combining their work responsibilities with the need to supervise and teach their children who no longer attend school five days a week. This raises the 'cost' of rearing children and can be expected to lead to fewer siblings being conceived this year. Moreover, restrictions on social activities also mean some relationships that would have started in 2020 (and might have led to babies someday) never took root. We have no precedent to estimate changes in birthrates from these disruptions, but they will undoubtedly also contribute to a large reduction in overall births.... Some women and couples will have fewer children than they hoped, and some kids will grow up without the younger sibling they would have had otherwise. This could contribute to what some have referred to as America’s loneliness epidemic.... But the real societal challenge of a Covid baby bust will be a smaller work force.... In the absence of effective policies to meaningfully increase births, the most reliable and immediate way to shore up the U.S. population is through immigration, which brings its own political and social challenges...."

From "We Expect 300,000 Fewer Births Than Usual This Year/Signs are pointing to a sizable pandemic baby bust in the United States, with implications that will be with us for years to come" by economics professors Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine (NYT).

"We are deeply disappointed in this decision. We are not going to give up the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 to help millions of struggling American workers..."

"... and their families. The American people deserve it, and we are committed to making it a reality." 

Said Chuck Schumer, quoted in "Biden’s minimum wage increase runs afoul of budget rules/The Senate parliamentarian has issued a ruling that could jeopardize the rest of the president’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package" (Politico).

Speaking of reality, do you think he's really disappointed? I imagine he's relieved. He and his party have the benefit of looking as though they tried and the benefit of not having the potentially deleterious policy actually imposed on us.

"A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter..."

"... and equated its members with 'flat earthers' over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.... Mr. Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators.... 'Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter,' Mr. Uhlig wrote. 'Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.'... Mr. Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past writings on his blog.... Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, 'Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?' Mr. Uhlig also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture industry at the Academy Awards. 'This whole "diversity = more American blacks in Hollywood movies" thing?' he wrote. 'So so strange. Really.' Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said in an email on Wednesday that 'the tweets and blog posts by Harald Uhlig are extremely troubling' and that 'it would be appropriate for the University of Chicago, which is the publisher of the Journal of Political Economy, to review Uhlig’s performance and suitability to continue as editor.'"

From "Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter/The editor of a top academic journal faces calls to resign after criticizing protesters as 'flat earthers' for wanting to defund the police" (NYT).

ADDED: "Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?" That's a perfectly phrased Socratic question, so let's raise a glass for Professor Uhlig.

"So we have created a scenario which has mercifully slowed the virus’s spread, but, as we are now discovering, at the cost..."

"... of a potentially greater depression than in the 1930s, with no assurance of any progress yet visible. If we keep this up for six months, we could well keep the deaths relatively low and stable, but the economy would all but disintegrate. Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind. All of this is why, [on] some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify.... Damon Linker put it beautifully this week: 'A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.'... We keep postponing herd immunity, if such a thing is even possible with this virus. A massive testing, tracing, and quarantining regime seems beyond the capacity of our federal government in the foreseeable future... [S]ometimes the only way past something is through it."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer" (New York Magazine).

ADDED: Damon Linker may "put it beautifully," but to write  "Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder" is to be on the wrong side of the flounder/founder distinction.

"Flounder" is a fish, and the verb means to struggle, and that takes some "momentum and purpose." To "founder" is to collapse, to fall helplessly to the ground... without momentum.

"I don't think I've ever heard Althouse use the word 'destroys' in reference to a debate."

Said The Vault Dweller in last night's debate conversation, after I said "Biden is doing well. I thought he destroyed Bernie on the issue of saving the banks."

Here's the part of the transcript I was talking about. The moderator, Ilia Calderon asked Sanders about his vote against bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. Sanders stood by his vote based on the "illegal behavior" the banks engaged in and because of his concern about "massive income and wealth inequality." The "working person" should not "suffer" for something they did not control.

Then:

BIDEN: Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. All those little folks, we would have gone out of business. They would find themselves in position where they would lose everything they had in that bank, whether it was $10 or $300 or a savings account. This was about saving an economy. And it did save the economy. And the banks paid back. And they paid back with interest....

I'm skipping some squabbling, and then:

BIDEN: Look, the fact of the matter is that if, in fact, the banks had all been -- gone under, we would be in a great depression. We would have not -- how do you get out of that? Now Bernie is saying that I guess he's going to do a wealth tax or something, that the top 1 percent could pay for everything. And they should pay for everything that occurred. We were talking about tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. That's what this was about. And the fact was that it saved the economy from going into a depression. After we passed the Recovery Act, which I was the one that went out and got the three votes to get it changed, that had $900 billion in it and was the thing that kept us from going into a great depression. 

"I’ve been arguing that philosophers don’t need to believe in their arguments in order to make them. But what they do need to believe in is..."

"... the project of philosophical inquiry itself. A philosopher might offer up her argument in the absence of conviction but in the hopes of furthering the philosophical discussion around it. This is very different from someone who offers up a controversial claim in order to stir the pot of internet discourse, or enrage his opponents. While belief in one’s position can be laudable, it’s not the only laudable motive for doing philosophy. One can aim at truth even while reserving judgment on whether one has hit it this time."

Writes philosophy professor Alexandra Plakias in "Let People Change Their Minds" (OUPblog).

This got me thinking about an essay in The Atlantic that I was just reading: "Cool It, Krugman/The self-sabotaging rage of the New York Times columnist" by Sebastian Mallaby:

In [a 1993 essay], Krugman reflects on his approach to academic research and emphasizes his facility with simple mathematical models that necessarily incorporated “obviously unrealistic assumptions.” For example, his work on trade theory, which helped win him the Nobel Prize, assumed countries of precisely equal economic size. “Why, people will ask, should they be interested in a model with such silly assumptions?” Krugman writes. The answer, as he tells us, is that minimalism yielded insight. His contribution to economics, in his own estimation, was “ridiculous simplicity.”

That same contribution distinguishes his journalism.... But Krugman should surely be the first to admit that his journalism, like his research, is founded on radical simplification. Like those economic models that assume people are perfectly rational, he presumes that his adversaries are perfectly corruptible. ...

In the end, one’s judgment about Krugman the columnist depends on the test that he applies to economic models: Their assumptions are allowed to be reductive, but they must yield a persuasive story. If you accept that almost all conservatives are impervious to reason, you will celebrate Krugman’s writings for laying bare reality. But... [m]ost people [have motives that] are mixed, confused, and mutable..... Krugman’s “ridiculous simplicity” produces writing that is fluent, compelling, and yet profoundly wrong in its understanding of human nature. And the mistake is consequential. For the sake of our democracy, a supremely gifted commentator should at least try to unite citizens around common understandings....

Are Mallaby and Plakias taking different positions? Would Plakias support what Mallaby says Krugman is doing?