Of walls, traffic jams, and parental leave

Hello Everyone

A great writer (Frederik Pohl) once said good science fiction predicts not the car, but the traffic jam. It's easy to dream up different technologies, but imagining the implications of how people will use them is much harder.

When asked to name great inventions, physical technologies are most often brought up. The printing press, the digital computer, etc. It's much more rare to see social innovations like double entry bookkeeping or the UN mentioned, but their impact is just as, and often much more, significant. Like the idea of cars versus traffic it is the impact of how they are used rather than their existence that is notable.

The UN is a personal favourite, mostly because I studied international relations, but also because I think it represents a different approach to problem solving. One of the few immutable laws of IR is that security is a zero sum system. Any action by a state to increase its security, such as building a wall, necessarily lowers every other state's security.

Rather than try to counter this fact, the UN gets around it, and creates a safer world.

One of immutable laws of biology is that males can neither give birth nor breastfeed (formula and bottles notwithstanding). It has meant that women bear the social and economic cost of childrearing and men are largely left out. Parental leave, particularly paternal leave, gets around this fact by creating space where fathers (and second parents who are not fathers) can share the costs and benefits of childrearing more equally. It's necessarily imperfect, but the changes it creates are profound.

I think parental leave is a huge innovation. It's like the UN, it's imperfect but provides a solution to an otherwise intractable problem. It will also have a profound impact in the next decades. Fathers having the ability to stay home and look after their families will create the social norm that they do so. In turn, that will influence a lot of social dynamics we now often don't even recognize as changeable.

It's especially true because parental leave is awesome. Your kids are only babies for a short time, so it was amazing to spend that time together. I loved it.

Wes

Photos

If the Big Lebowski got fit.

Arthur looking to raid my suet ball bird feeder.