Your Boss Is a Contraceptive

Your Autonomy Is an Aphrodisiac

Handmade Felted Wraps by Alanna Graboyes—working autonomously in her artisanal, pre-industrial studio. These and more artworks are available for purchase at ASGraboyesArt.com.

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In late 2022,

Virginia Postrel

posted a contest at

Virginia's Newsletter

for wannabe futurists like me. She asked readers to submit optimistic visions of what the world would look like around the year 2040. I wrote a longish short story, but ultimately decided to split it into a series of shorter pieces. The story, ostensibly written in the early 2040s, looks back at the period 2025-2040. In those years, social upheaval and repeal of certain labor laws has led to an economy-wide shift from employer-employee arrangements to independent contractor arrangements—similar to the shift from cab drivers employed by taxi companies to self-employed Uber drivers.

The employer-employee relationship, the story argued, was an early 19th century Faustian bargain—necessary for the Industrial Revolution (“modernity”), but increasingly obsolete in a 21st century world of artificial intelligence, shorter learning curves, and fewer economies of scale. I’ll elaborate on my logic in future essays, but for a brief inkling, my 2016 essay, “Gigs, Jobs, and Smart Machines” described the early days of the Industrial Revolution:

[H]umankind’s sudden wealth came at a terrible price—perpetual tension between employers and employees. A steady paycheck demands permanent subservience. Karl Marx boiled up from this tension, along with two centuries of conflict, revolution, war, and slaughter. The boss who offers a job has a dozen tethers controlling the most intimate aspects of your life.

My short story speculated on what happens when, to some extent, we return to pre-Industrial work arrangements. Here’s one brief passage, lightly edited to avoid references to earlier passages:

Social interactions changed drastically between 2025 and 2040. Perhaps most importantly, fertility rates shot up. Modernity’s bosses, it turned out, had comprised history’s greatest contraceptive, while worker autonomy, in turn, proved to be history’s greatest aphrodisiac. During the years 2025-2040, millions of younger couples left urban centers for more bucolic surroundings. More worked in or near the home. Commute times plunged. Work schedules interfered less with family life (and vice versa). As for housing, more square footage and extra rooms were cheaper in smaller places. And the social environment in smaller places was simply more welcoming for families with children. Thus, couples opted to begin families earlier and to have more children. And it had long been known that the presence of children is a major motivating factor for greater output.

Summing up—working for other people causes you to have fewer children, and having fewer children actually makes you less productive—not more productive. Autonomy does the reverse. One of my friends was skeptical of this conjecture, but I argued that this logic is critical to understanding many of the contemporary pathologies of American life. Atavistic labor laws, I will argue in future essays, lock Americans into suboptimal employer-employee relationships and impede the transition to a more atomistic economy.

With that in mind, this morning, I was delighted to read a piece by

Nellie Bowles

at

The Free Press

,

Bari Weiss

’s Substack:

Work from home makes people have more babies: In a bit of good news on the fertility front, it seems that working from home is behind the slight uptick in birth rates, according to new research from the Economic Innovation Group. Commute time becomes clean-up-the-kitchen time, which means clean-up-the-kitchen time can become . . . you get it. 

There’s also a dignity in the flexibility, as a remote-working mom. I don’t have to cower in a company break room trying to pump while people pop in for their sandwiches, and today I took our daughter to the pediatrician and you, my reader, didn’t even know it.

Also an interesting finding in the research: unmarried remote workers are more likely to marry in the next year than those who go to an office. So, it’s true that remote work dissolves part of company culture (the office!)—but does it then reinvigorate families and neighborhoods? I’d love to read the commenters’ takes on this. 

The research that Bowles refers to is “Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation,” by Lyman Stone and Adam Ozinek. Their key findings are worth a gander:

— In [the] absence of time-consuming commutes, remote workers—particularly those living with children—are spending more time on childcare and housework. This increased flexibility and time helped boost birth rates over the pandemic, specifically for wealthier or more educated women.

— Unmarried remote workers are significantly more likely to marry in the next year than their non-remote counterparts, potentially driven by higher migration rates.

— Though remote work only has a mild positive effect on the likelihood of near-term pregnancy, its effects on fertility intentions are particularly pronounced for women over age 35 (and especially over age 39).

— For women whose household finances have significantly improved in the past year, the likelihood to report being pregnant or trying to be so if they are remote is more than 10 percentage points higher than that of non-remote workers. 

— Remote work has the biggest effects on fertility for women who already have several children, and no effect on the fertility intentions of women who have no or one child.

Potentially, these findings have profound significance for the future of American society. Thanks to the mathematical law of continuous compounding, a modest increase in population growth can have an enormous impact on the size of America’s future population and on the age distribution within that population. Virginia Postrel recently authored an essay titled, “Japan's Old Age Crisis and Ours to Come: What happens when people live to be very old and don't have a passel of kids to take care of them?” In it, she wrote:

In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of the sustainability and inclusiveness of our nation’s economy and society, we place child-rearing support as our most important policy,” he said.

Further, Postrel writes:

Thanks to the baby boom, today’s very old Americans tend to have multiple children to take care of them. … … The alternative is what Japan is experiencing: a rapidly growing population of very old people without much family support. … … At the extreme are “lonely deaths,” or kodokushi, when people die alone and go unnoticed for days. (In some cases, the deceased elderly person was not alone but living with a person with dementia.)

Postrel concludes with:

As a childless baby boomer, I’m afraid I don’t have a good solution. But we’ve been warned.

Perhaps COVID, Zoom, remote work, and independent contracting are pointing us toward one good solution.

Lagniappe

A Facebook friend just posted a magnificent example kirigami (切り紙)—Japanese paper-cutting. Afterward, I found the following one-minute video on the making of the piece. Astounding!

Science Daily @ScienceFactsFun

Artist Masayo Fukuda creating a Kirie art masterpiece, The Octopus, using a single sheet of paper Kirie is a Japanese artform where the artist cuts out the negative spaces from a single sheet of paper to bring the shapes to life. It is incredibly intricate!

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.