{"id":1483,"date":"2015-03-08T17:42:23","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T23:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1483"},"modified":"2015-03-09T09:10:59","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T15:10:59","slug":"is-megan-mcardle-a-freeloader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/03\/is-megan-mcardle-a-freeloader.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Megan McArdle a freeloader? (spoiler alert: no)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

You all know Megan McArdle, right? \u00a0Blogger extraordinaire at Bloomberg View<\/a>, author of \u201cThe Up Side of Down,\u201d home cook, etc.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also childless.<\/p>\n

No, she\u2019s not one of those proud \u201cchildfree\u201d people, and she doesn\u2019t go around calling parents \u201cbreeders.\u201d \u00a0In her book (sorry, Megan, I checked it out from the library, rather than buying it!), she talks about failure, and not being afraid to fail, and tells the story \u2014 also retold in a recent Valentine\u2019s Day post<\/a> \u2014 \u00a0of a relationship that occupied many of her, well, fertile years, a relationship that she had invested so much in that she wasn\u2019t able to recognize that it wasn\u2019t going anywhere and she needed to cut her losses. \u00a0For that reason, and, well, because that\u2019s how life works sometimes, she didn\u2019t meet her future husband, or, as she calls him, her Official Blog Spouse, until she was in her later 30s. \u00a0(And, yes, because she\u2019s told the story publicly, and anyone who I may know personally hasn\u2019t, she ends up the strawman here.)<\/p>\n

Now, she\u2019s been married five years or so. \u00a0It seems to me that she\u2019s a year or two younger than I am. \u00a0No babies on the way. \u00a0(Well, a couple of us, her readers, wondered, though not very seriously, whether there was some news, when she mentioned, in a comment on her blog post today<\/a>, that she had read about a particular treatment for nausea on a pregnancy discussion board.) \u00a0Did she and the OBS make the decision not to have children, because children are icky and they have better things to do with their time? \u00a0Did they try to get pregnant, but the odds, not in their favor due to declining fertility, just didn\u2019t cooperate? \u00a0Did they feel they\u2019d missed their chance, even if biology would have cooperated, because they felt they were too old to be the sort of parents they\u2019d want to be?<\/p>\n

No one knows. \u00a0That is, none of her blog readers know, as she\u2019s never written anything about it one way or another (neither \u201cgaaah! \u00a0I hate babies\u201d or \u201clet me tell you about the finances of fertility treatments from personal experience\u201d) and it is, of course, certainly none of our business in any case.<\/p>\n

But my point is this: \u00a0just as the self-identified \u201cchildfree\u201d like to speak of having children as a hobby that some people engage in, but it shouldn\u2019t receive any more government support than knitting or cosplay, so too, it\u2019s pretty easy, for those of us with kids, to turn discussions about the long-term impact of an increase in the proportion of people who never have children, into accusations that the childless are freeloaders because they don\u2019t raise children of their own but expect that the offspring of the rest of us will be the ones keeping the economy going, and, more specifically, working as home health aides, or watching out for the childless aunt or neighbor. \u00a0(Sorry, I tend to end up with overly-long sentences.)<\/p>\n

Some of those childless people are infertile. \u00a0Others are infertile-by-age, because, for whatever reason, they didn\u2019t find a spouse in a timely fashion, or even simply never did. \u00a0Others are, in fact, selfish, and don\u2019t want to be tied down by a baby, and reject (via contraception, and abortion as back-up birth control) parenthood completely.<\/p>\n

And there is a substantial diversity in family size: \u00a0in addition to the childless, there are also those with one child, who are also now pushing back against those criticizing their choice, those who insist that two is the right number, and families like those around here, traditional Catholics with four or more. \u00a0And that\u2019s not to mention the more controversial issue of poor large families.<\/p>\n

But in a way this is a specialization of family types that fits in with the overall specialization of a modern economy.<\/p>\n

We all need medical care. \u00a0Most of us aren\u2019t doctors, but depend on others to provide this care. \u00a0Are we freeloaders?<\/p>\n

We need food. \u00a0But we depend on farmers to grow the food for us. \u00a0Are we freeloaders?<\/p>\n

This is not exactly analogous because we do pay doctors and we pay farmers, but we don\u2019t pay parents, who choose to have children because they enjoy them, or because of a belief that it\u2019s part of responsible adulthood, or because they believe that abortion is morally wrong. \u00a0But the reason that we pay doctors and farmers is not because it\u2019s somehow the morally right thing to do, but, well, because it\u2019s the nature of supply and demand.<\/p>\n

Now, having written this, I\u2019m thinking that I ought to unearth these articles complaining about the freeloader childless, so as to not be constructing a strawman to argue against \u2014 but I\u2019ve promised my son that, since he\u2019s done practicing the piano, we\u2019d do a project together.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You all know Megan McArdle, right? \u00a0Blogger extraordinaire at Bloomberg View, author of \u201cThe Up Side of Down,\u201d home cook, etc. She\u2019s also childless. No, she\u2019s not one of those proud \u201cchildfree\u201d people, and she doesn\u2019t go around calling parents \u201cbreeders.\u201d \u00a0In her book (sorry, Megan, I checked it out from the library, rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Megan McArdle a freeloader? (spoiler alert: no)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"You all know Megan McArdle, right? \u00a0Blogger extraordinaire at Bloomberg View, author of "The Up Side of Down," home cook, etc. She's also childless. 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