Parentonomics | BTalk Australia

(13min 19) Economist Joshua Gans applies economic theory to the raising of children in his book “Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting“.

In today’s BTalk Australia he explains to Phil Dobbie why advertising of unhealthy food is a good thing, how sharing is part of childbirth, why bargaining is important to secure a good night’s sleep and how to outsource potty training.

Feel free to suggest how else economic theory can be related to parenthood in the Talkback section at the bottom of this this post.

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Too Much Power in the Power Industry | BTalk Australia

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• Today’s Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. We talk to the father of economics, well, of sorts. Well, it’s a big question: can an economist also be a good father? Let’s see. We’ve spoken to Joshua Gans before on BNET as an economist, but he’s also got three young children and he’s written a book about parenting. It’s called Parentonomics and it asks whether economic theory can be applied to bringing up children. Now Joshua, I’m a bit dubious about this because isn’t economics largely about order, which is exactly the opposite of having children?

Joshua Gans: Well, that might be true, that it’s the opposite of having children, but I believe that the common desire for a parent is to try to, out of the chaos of having children, bring as much order as possible. So it’s not impossible. It’s not impossible to conceive of both things somewhat coexisting.

Dobbie: Right, so a good bit of economic theory might help to create a bit of that order. You’ve got an interesting theory in your book. You say that advertising unhealthy goods can actually be a good thing. I think most people would find this abhorrent. What’s your theory behind this?

Gans: I was just thinking about it not from the perspective of advertising unhealthy foods to children, sort of falling on them and somehow they are able to use that newfound knowledge of sugar to manipulate their parents into purchasing more. But from the perspective of our day-to-day negotiation over eating, which is a tradeoff between getting our kids to eat healthy foods, most notably vegetables, and trying to work out how to do that — the most natural way to induce a child to eat vegetables is promise them something sugary later on. Somewhere down the track. And that’s to me a negotiation. Now in that situation, what I want to do is I want to maximise the amount of vegetables that I’m getting into the child per unit of sugar. You could restrict the supply of sugar. But you know you’re only going to be able to extract so much healthy eating with that strategy. But if you can get the child to think that the sugar is worth more, even though you’re not supplying any more sugar, that’s another matter. So if you offer a child a 60-gram chocolate in a plain wrapper versus a 30-gram chocolate in a Shrek wrapper, chances are the child would choose the Shrek wrapper.

Dobbie: Right.

Gans: And so in that regard if you can get the same amount of vegetables in them for either of those two choices, you are actually a winner.

Dobbie: I see.

Gans: With the Shrek wrapper, because you’ve actually minimised the amount of unhealthy food you’ve had to trade off.

Dobbie: So you’re talking up the treat in other words so that they want it more and they’re prepared to put up with more of the good food to get there.

Gans: Exactly. You’ve talked it up, you make that seem as exciting as possible relative to other options and basically you can economise. I mean, you know you could say “duped” your child into accepting a better deal. It’s the same reason.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Gans: In fact, that the Shrek wrapper actually has the smaller amount of content in it. The, the people supplying that are actually trying to save on their costs too.

Dobbie: It might be duping, but listen, whatever it takes, Joshua, whatever it takes. Now sharing the hurt is an economic principle, but difficult to apply in the delivery suite you say in your book and quite right too. My wife nearly strangulated me, I have to say. So she had a jolly good go at trying to share the hurt. What was your experience?

Gans: Well, I guess my experience was clearly a lot more pleasant than that. [Laughter] I guess there was the issue is that you want to be able to share the load. When you’re in childbirth, I guess is a case where that is pretty well impossible. And I recount in the book struggling to think about that. I guess my solutions were several fold. I did as much as possible to minimise discomfort and pain and provide distractions, and all those sorts of things. I guess I also contemplated outsourcing some services. Sure, I could provide a soothing massage, but actually this would probably be the time to get in a real expert. We didn’t end up doing that, but at least we thought about it.

Dobbie: That sounds like an excuse to me.

Gans: No, it’s not. You’ve got to have revelation of the customer. The question is would your wife prefer you or someone who’s an expert?

Dobbie: Yeah.

Gans: You know I don’t know. In every other situation I think she’d go for the expert. Why not then?

Dobbie: I guess you also experience the phenomenon of unemployment when you’re in that operating theater. Because there isn’t really a lot you can do in there. As you said, what you get asked to do is stuff that people are just giving — it’s almost tokenism isn’t it?

Gans: Yes. I sat there during the childbirth class and I saw the video and said now daddy can do something too. He can cut the cord and I must admit I thought, oh please, this was clearly just gratuitous. But it must have been I sat there watching that video and I thought actually catching the baby didn’t seem that hard. And so I came up with the crazy notion that I think I could do more. I think I can actually catch the child coming out and then really play a role in all this.

Dobbie: Right.

Gans: And I guess the children’s mother at the time thought, oh yeah, well if you can convince the obstetrician to, then that’s ok — then it’s just fine with me.

Dobbie: Thinking there’s no way in the world you’re going to convince the obstetrician.

Gans: No, I didn’t think there was a way in the world either. But I thought, well, at least it was going to amuse me during the next visit. So we turned up and I said I’ve got another question for you. Can I catch? And he said sure, no problem.

Dobbie: [Laughter] So you did in the end.

Gans: I did. I did it for, we’ve got three children. I did it for two out of the three. The third one came out a little too quick even for me.

Dobbie: Right well listen, I was kept well away from the business end. Bargaining is a part of the economy, of course. Now you believe you can apply that to sleep as well, which obviously is an important concern for parents, particularly their own sleep.

Gans: Yes, exactly. I guess this is just a standing back and looking at the situation of when you have a crying baby. It’s not like you can communicate. It’s not like you can express diplomatic terms to come to some sort of truce and agreement. And you also have this other problem: right at the beginning chances are the crying is legitimate. You know there’re all manner of reasons, good reasons to be crying and not be sleeping and having trouble getting to sleep. There’s just a lot going on. But at some point, you start to suspect the crying is more an attention grab. And some people think, well, you know, that’s ok — you should just give your child attention. And that’s fine. But, but not all parents think that way and we didn’t either. We had no sleep for some period of time — some period of many weeks and we really would have liked it. So we approached this as a negotiation. The cry of the child is an opening bid and basically you’ve got to see how far they’re willing to go. The only way you find that out is by letting them cry for a while. And we had other parents who had been through this to hold our hands, but it turned out much to our surprise that actually the crying didn’t last that long. After a little while our daughter worked out, you know, how to calm herself down or that it wasn’t worth it or something and we reached a happy compromise.

Dobbie: Right. Now for toilet training it looks like you took the easy road. You just outsourced the whole thing. How did you outsource toilet training your baby?

Gans: I wish we had outsourced it right from the beginning. We went through two children before we realised that that would be a better idea. I guess our children have always been going into child care, so you already get a different situation, maybe not a situation for everybody there. But what we realised by the time we got to the third child is that the people who are caring for our children outside of the home had more incentive than we did. [Laughter] To actually ensure that our daughter was toilet trained and in fact, not only that, unlike ourselves, we had two gos, you know of twice previous to that. They had hundreds.

Dobbie: Right.

Gans: I mean they knew what they were doing and they had the ability to use peer pressure and all sorts of things we didn’t have in the home.

Dobbie: They were the experts.

Gans: And we just became more relaxed about it and said, well, look — let’s see how she goes there and then we’ll deal with it at the home later on.

Dobbie: Things have changed a lot since we were kids, haven’t they? I mean there’s more government regulation. I guess that’s another economic concern: just how much does the government intervene in things? And here I’m thinking about things like car seats. I mean, we were rolling about on the back seat of our car when I was growing up. Is government regulation in this area, do you think, a good thing?

Gans: Standing back from it, you’ve got to wonder. I think you know there are all manner of rules there, there are the car seats rules and the standards associated with them. And Steve Levitt of Freakanomics Pain has done that — actually studies this to see whether it really is protecting the kids to put them in these car seats and for all these different ages. And it’s not clear it is. In some situations, there might be actual harm done. But at the very least there is cost involved in having car seats everywhere. And there are other situations as well.  We often see lots of toys “not suitable for kids under the age of 3″ or “could be a choking hazard”. Now that is no doubt true, but the problem is that what happens when you’ve got in the house a child who is over the age of 3 and a child who is under the age of 3? So we have this funny sort of regulation, but it’s not clear whether we should be complacent or not complacent. It’s not clear to me what sort of signal it’s sending. You know there are a lot more issues there. And so I’m not sure whether the government regulation is responsive or it has the ability to adjust itself to change in circumstances or whether it has too high a cost.

Dobbie: So you think you might actually create some false complacency in parents.

Gans: You never know. There’s a long-standing argument with regard to teaching your kids to swim early and things like that. So these are the areas. And what the difficulty is is that it’s hard to conceive. Even when you have that opportunity, it’s hard to use sort of evidence-based policy in this area. But we have to at least question ourselves as to whether we’re either being overprotective of kids, spending too much on car seats and things like that. I know people will be outraged at me even just suggesting that. But if it is obvious that this is a safe thing and it can be proved that way, then I’m all for it.

Dobbie: Right.

Gans: But the evidence has to be there. We’ve got to be skeptical of whether parental pressure or reluctance to move back from something is keeping it all as it is.

Dobbie: Now I don’t know whether your wife’s an economist as well. Has she appreciated your, your attempts to trying draw a parallel between the workings of the economy and parenthood? I suspect it might have been an unpopular move.

Gans: Well, no, no. You know you don’t do these things alone. She’s an engineer by training.

Dobbie: Right.

Gans: So you know that’s, that’s not too far distant from economics in a lot of respects. You know we still select our partners. So chances are if you’re an economic-minded person, you’ve already got somewhat of a similar like mind. And we’re fortunate you know. I might express things in a certain way that might lead to some eye-rolling, but fundamentally we agree on a lot of things.

Dobbie: Ok, you don’t need to be an economist to enjoy the book. It’s an excellent read. Particularly for Christmas, I think anyone who’s got kids, it’s going to certainly bring a smile to their face. The book is called Parentonomics, An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting by Joshua Gans. Thanks so much for your time today Joshua.

Gans: Thank you.