Episode 58: The Parent Trap

On episode 58—recorded from Lord Ravenscroft's desolate manor—Charles reviews objections to his approach to counting states, relates the most recent problems he's had with his golf cart, and talks to Tim Carney about his new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. Among the questions Charles and Tim discuss are why we should have "lower ambitions for our kids"; what modern parents are doing wrong—and why; what caused these mistakes; whether there is a political answer to them; why creative and independent play is so important; why parents think the world is more dangerous than it is; whether achieving the cultural changes that Tim proposes will be different given the obvious collective action problem; how cultural underconfidence factors in to the baby bust; and what Tim would do if he were a dictator.

The dial-up tone in the introduction was recorded by lintphishx and is used under a CC 3.0 License.