A Family-Based Social Contract

On November 13, 2008, the New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract Initiative and Workforce and Family Program hosted a discussion around the release of, “A Family-Based Social Contract,”  written by David Gray and Phillip Longman.  In their paper, Gray, the Director of New America’s Workforce and Family Program, and Longman, Schwartz Senior Fellow and Research Director of the Next Social Contract Initiative, argue that policymakers should focus on supporting parents and children early in life.  Gray and Longman were joined in the discussion by Reihan Salam, a New America Foundation Fellow and co-author of Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

In his introduction, Gray suggested that supporting families as citizens and individuals, not as employees, is integral to the next social contract.  He believes the current economic anxiety may provide the political will for a reframing of the social contract.  If so, according to Gray, it must prioritize families, the most basic and essential social grouping, which are often taken for granted under existing social policy.

Gray explained that families used to fulfill most important social contract roles, but major social changes since the mid-20^th century have altered the traditional roles of families and shifted economic value to employment.  The benefits of children are now diffuse, while the costs remain localized.  Gray expressed concern about the value of paid work versus unpaid work, and dismay about the excessive opportunity cost of raising children.  These conditions have profound social implications, including an emerging global “baby bust.”

Gray argued that the next social contract should allow parents to retain more of the value of having children.  Current public spending on children and those who help them develop is insufficient.  Moreover, new social policy should address work-life balance issues, which will be exacerbated by recession.  In summation, Gray said that children are now crucial to economic and national security, and that he was both optimistic and pessimistic about progress in this area going forward.  He then introduced Phil Longman, co-author of the paper.

Longman opened his talk with a provocative discussion of whether we could rightly refer to our children as “pets.”  100 years ago, he explained, the average woman had four children in order to satisfy labor shortages, raise armies, and ensure that fertility did not fall.  Today, conversely, we think that the world is overcrowded, and regard each additional child as just another carbon footprint.  The decision whether or not to have children is personal, and parents acquire kids because they provide companionship and love--just like a pet.

Longman suggested that these attitudes towards children and families have a long provenance: from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau onward, all social contract thinkers have treated the family as a vestigial institution beyond the scope of the social contract.  Another tradition, the Malthusian and Darwinian, viewed it as axiomatic that humans would breed up to the limits of their resources.  None anticipated today’s plummeting global birth rates, particularly in the developed world.  The U.S. today is propped up by the high fertility of recent Hispanic immigrants, but even Mexico’s birthrates are declining dramatically.

Longman warned that the U.S. is on the threshold of unprecedented demographic transformation, in which the number of children is surpassed by the number of seniors.  How would Malthus and Darwin respond to this inversion of the population pyramid?  Darwin might claim that seemingly “successful” couples without children are in fact maladapted to society, and that the future therefore belongs to religious fundamentalists (the only group worldwide that is resisting these demographic trends). 

Longman believes, nevertheless, that there is a huge, pent-up demand for children in our society, as the excess supply of potential adopters confirms.  But our institutions effectively “tax away” most of the value of children to parents.  We live in an aging society that “subsidizes and nationalizes” the economic security of the elderly, yet depends on children and parents to shoulder the costs of maintaining the system.  The public benefits hugely from parents’ investments in their children, yet our institutions do virtually nothing to benefit parents.  The terms of the contemporary social contract get it “completely wrong,” according to Longman: we “tax” responsible parents to support business and government.  We must instead think about the family as the primary engine for human capital formation.

So, “What to do?” Longman asked.  Some policy prescriptions are fairly straightforward: publicly-funded preschool and after-school care, for example, or subsidies for unpaid domestic caregivers (i.e. parents and extended family).  Unfortunately, however, we simply cannot pay people enough to incentivize parenthood.  Longman instead argues for a more fundamental approach that reduces the opportunity costs of parenthood and eases the trade-offs between starting a family and pursuing an education and a career.  New social policy should allow parents to keep more of the value of their children.  He offered the hypothetical possibility of reforming Social Security so that payroll taxes decline as the number of children in a family increases as an example.

Longman concluded that, thanks to a “huge array of factors,” we are long past the era when we could take families for granted.  The next social contract must recognize the changing nature of families, and the dependency we place on parents to maintain our public institutions. 

Reihan Salam opened by noting that Longman’s work on “pro-natalism” has profoundly influenced his own thinking.  Reorienting the discussion towards political issues, Salam suggested that both parties have “inchoate impulses” informed by their constituencies: Republicans want to address their declining demographic base as the “party of intact families,” while Democrats want to support families at both the top and bottom of the economic spectrum. 

Salam surveyed the consumption picture over the last 15 years, and wondered why a climate of rising inequality had not produced a greater anti-market backlash.  He concluded that, thanks especially to Chinese imports, the inflation of consumption of the bottom 10% has been restrained, and a plausible case for rising living standards could be made.  However, inflation has been much steeper for consumption among more affluent families.  This “inflation gap” means that incomes alone do not tell us very much.  Nevertheless, due to the recent spike in energy and food prices, the inflation picture may now be converging.  This convergence means increasingly shared anxiety among both parties’ coalitions.

Salam recommended a shift towards a “life-course” theory of tax burden, with rates set by one’s stage in life (or, more controversially, gender).  He believes that family issues will be addressed by new, ad hoc coalitions, noting that the Family Medical Leave Act has been championed by both progressives and social conservatives.

Gray moderated the question and answer session that followed.  Questions touched upon Barack Obama’s “Blueprint for Change” and its directive to “Make Work Pay,” the high cost of raising families in Asian societies, potential demographic arrogance in the developed world, debilitating social norms about the role of men, and a pop culture that tracks celebrity pregnancies obsessively and glamorizes super-sized families. 

See map: Google Maps

Participants

Featured Speakers
Phillip Longman
Schwartz Senior Fellow and Research Director, Next Social Contract Initiative
New America Foundation

Reihan Salam
Fellow, New America Foundation
Co-author, Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream

Moderator
David Gray
Director, Workforce and Family Program
New America Foundation