I think there's a deep unity between the policy argument that society should have more than one status hierarchy and Dan's psychological argument that it's healthy to avoid tying your self-esteem too closely to your status in one hierarchy. The structure of society affects how easy it is to liberate your mind from one-dimensional status competition.
One of my friends said law school is miserable because everyone feels like they're competing for the same resume. In college, by contrast, there are so many career paths open to you that you don't feel the same kind of competition with your friends. You can be a lawyer; your friend can be a doctor; and your other friend can be the lead singer in an indie band.
You could imagine societies more like law school and more like college. Suppose income inequality got much worse than it is today, so much that almost every smart person felt like they had to become an AI researcher. I think that kind of society would be psychologically miserable and also socially undesirable. Instead, I want to live in a society where some people want to be the world heavyweight champion and others want to be the Wykeham Professor of Logic.
This point is also related to why I love New York. It's not a company town for any industry, like San Francisco is for tech. A diversified economy makes for more interesting house parties.
I love this. How do you think policy can try to nudge society in the direction of a plurality of status hierarchies? (I like the NY vs SF contrast, but have less of a sense of what policy levers there are to affect stuff like that.)
This was a joy to read, Dan. But I will never forget what could have been a masterful title for a Substack post (though perhaps not this one): “fewer yachts, more hemorrhoid cream”
The advice you mention about finding multiple axes to care about (like philosophy and jiujitsu) and noting one’s joint position on the rankings is how I overcame imposter syndrome in early grad school. When I was starting in the logic program at Berkeley, I started by noticing how much less math I knew than the math grad students and how much less philosophy I knew than the philosophy grad students, but it was a really useful reconceptualization when I realized that the opposite comparison was also relevant, and I could make a difference by leaning in to that combination.
It’s a lot like the economic literature on comparative advantage, and I’m also thinking these days that it’s relevant for dealing with student anxieties around AI - one AI might be better at writing sentences than you and another might be better at doing calculations, but you still have a comparative advantage at doing the things together (or at least you will if you practice both skills, rather than leaning on each AI when you are supposed to be practicing its skill).
The math and philosophy case has the advantage that being good (even if not best) at both gives you unique abilities to combine them, as is obvious to anybody familiar with your body of work.
Sadly, I have no philosophical insights into jiu jitsu that I'd be in a unique position to write about, nor does my knowledge of philosophy help in the least on the mats.
I’ve always thought that one compelling reason to be a well-rounded person was purely egoistical: if you’re good at multiple things, you’re much less likely to encounter someone who (even weakly, in the econ sense) dominates you across all of them. So you can suck at things you want to be good at, but you’re not an outright failure bc no one is better than you at everything you do. Come to think of it, that is indeed a handy POV in the crucible of grad school :)
Please do! It was an important reconceptualization that changed my attitude after a year of grad school and I try to get new grad students to have this realization as soon as possible!
Awesome!! (For me, a new morning mantra: “there are better Sinologists and better analytic philosophers out there, but not many people who can do both and bring them together”)
This is wonderful! Although I'd argue that some parents are very competitive with each other about parenting, and especially about how their children are turning out. However, unlike competition in other domains where friendly rivalry might spur us to improve, competitive parenting is usually bad for us and for our children.
Yep! I have a high school junior so college anxiety is way too salient for us. We've had to dial back on all college talk because it was stressing out our daughter too much.
Yes, the sense in which I say I think it's "worth it" at the end was meant to be a selfish one. When it comes to people like this guy, maybe I should hope he is consumed by a desire to win a Nobel prize, not for *his* sake--sounds stressful--but for the rest of ours:
Of course, there’s also the situation where you’re concerned with rankings and playing what looks like a zero-sum game, but mostly because you’re interested in the non-comparative goods or rewards that getting the right job would provide. I think that’s how many people in the rat race see themselves, but of course, I think they lose sight of the non-comparative goods and for that reason end up on the hedonic treadmill
This is great, very thought provoking. I quit academic philosophy a few years ago but discovered the Substack posts like this perfectly satisfy my itch for thoughtful, well written philosophy, and without having to deal with all the baggage and drama (and grading…).
A couple of questions.
First, could some aspects of romantic coupling (or just personal / social choices in general) be interpreted as an intrinsic externality? A cynical interpretation of at least some instances of coupling is a status game, where the As want to be with each other partly to show their superiority to everyone else, so then the Bs pair up to show their superiority to everyone beneath them, and so on down to the Zs, who are stuck with each other if they don’t want to end up alone.
If so, then maybe it’s harder to motivate state intervention in (all?) intrinsic externalities. (I think Nozick facetiously referred to this problem as facial justice.) E.g., would we want to tax make up and gym memberships and etc etc etc. Indeed, one of my favorite Futurama clips, ostensibly an argument against dating robots, suggests that the main motivation for every good, productive thing we do is mate selection.
Second, could some parenting be comparative without being too narrowly goal directed? Maybe you want your kid to do well in school so that they can have a fulfilling career, and this requires that they read well at an early age, etc. How well, how early? Well, if the (broad) goal is to have a fulfilling career (and the narrow goal of what specific career is still left open for the kid to choose—we’re trying to be gardeners instead of carpenters, to some extent), it doesn’t matter except that it should be at least as early as the other kids, if not earlier. So you expose your kid to reading early, and talk to them about math, and practice handwriting, etc.
Importantly, it doesn’t matter how well your kid reads in an absolute sense, as long as he reads at least as well as the other kids. More formally, if you had to choose between these two options:
A. Your kid reads at X level; all other kids read at X-1 level.
B. All kids, including yours, read at X+1 level.
You would choose A. It seems like a lot of parenting has this sort of structure, and is a source of a lot of stress for parents.
On coupling having this dimension, I take it that's where the idea of the "trophy wife" comes from.
As for state intervention, even just with regular externalities, in principle the scope for justifying Pigouvian taxes and subsidies is huge; *lots* of stuff we do has externalities (not just positional ones). In practice, I think a default of mostly not trying to price all those externalities is better than what we'd get if we did, but that's because we have actual politics instead of omniscient, benevolent philosopher kings making policy. So while I like *some* Pigouvian taxes and subsidies--I'd probably be happy to see a global carbon tax--I'd rather we stick to the most slam dunk examples of really large and significant externalities that can be priced reasonably objectively.
Also totally agree on parenting having this structure in realistic cases, rather than just the extreme Polgar-style cases. I mean, I hope/suspect that early reading in particular isn't a huge advantage--that is, if you take a given kid, and teach them to read at 3 versus 7, I vaguely remember that they don't look particularly different at 10. But just take stuff like college admissions, and the role parents play in that. I haven't dealt with that yet, but my sense is the process has strong elements of these sorts of dynamics. In a world where no high schoolers are founding non-profits, who would even think that makes sense as something for a high-schooler to do. But now that lots of them are doing it...
>> I think—hope?—most parents will recoil from the idea of treating children as projects. Psychologist Allison Gopnik offers a wonderful contrast between the parent as gardener and the parent as carpenter. The carpenter parent is trying to shape their children into a particular form, like a carpenter building furniture to an exact plan.
I agree with a lot here, but I can't understand the revulsion towards treating parenthood as a project (at least in part; I am sure those parents such as Laszlo Polgar who did approach parenthood through the project model also enjoyed the atelic aspects of parenthood you describe.)
Laszlo Polgar strikes me as an exemplary model whose parenting approach not only produced three happy and well adjusted daughters, but also seriously undermined various sexist theories about women's abilities in competitive chess as well as larger biologist beliefs about the nature of genius. That's a pretty amazing accomplishment. I am sure he did want to repeat it with three adopted children - why wouldn't he? - although I also understand his wife's reluctance. But imagine how badly hereditarian or race realist views would have been undermined had he succeeded with the adopted children. That would be a very worthy goal, and I can't understand why people disparage wanting to do that.
If Polgar had taken the purely atelic approach you describe, he would possibly have also produced three happy daughters, but they would have likely been no more remarkable than any other typical daughters of a gifted parent. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but surely making childrearing into a project can have massive beneficial effects with no apparent downsides (as long as such children are not abused or mistreated in the process, of course.)
The opposition to the "project view" of parenting strikes me as similar to the opposition to embryo selection via companies like Orchid. There's an implicit assumption that something is lost when parents take a directed and constructive approach to having children and make special efforts to maximize good outcomes while minimizing the risk of bad outcomes. But in both cases, I'm unsure what the actual downside could be.
My sense is that from everything the Polgar sisters say, they had a wonderful childhood. So it worked out great.
I guess I just worry that the approach he took is very risky. To strain the carpentry metaphor, if your father is trying to shape you into a table, while you want to be a chair, that seems likely to cause lots of tension. Even absent outright abuse, I'd worry that overly specific expectations concerning what children should grow up to do or be risk causing disappointment and resentment if they're felt as an imposition. To follow up on themes in the post, I take my kids to jiu jitsu. But if I get the sense that it feels like a grim obligation, I don't intend to force them to keep doing it (for now, they seem to mostly enjoy it, and certainly haven't asked to stop). I'd be horrified if my kids thought that I'd be disappointed in them if they didn't end up excelling at jiu jitsu, so if they wanted to stay in my good graces they'd have to do it regardless of how they felt about it.
And the fact that Polgar went looking for another parenting project after the sisters were grown suggests to me--perhaps totally unfair speculation--that had his girls not taken to chess as well as they did, they might have had much less pleasant childhoods.
I do suspect my attitude is likely to produce fewer chess prodigies, fewer music prodigies. My sense is that plenty of kids who grow up to love their instrument had to be forced to practice against their will as children, and end up being grateful for the kind of strict discipline that was initially instilled in them. Maybe I'm too much of a softie. But I still think it's a gamble. I don't know how you'd count--I certainly can't quantify this--but my guess is that for every orchestra violinist who's grateful they were forced to practice hours on end as a child, you have several adults whose relationships with their parents are more strained than they would otherwise be.
I appreciate this view, but I have a couple objections to it.
One, I disagree with the framing that suggests children have innate well-developed interests, such that a Polgar-like parent could rub up against them in a really negative way. I'm probably just much more of social constructivist, but my belief is that such interests are developed socially and culturally. So if parents pull back or take a more passive approach to childrearing, the larger culture will "fill in" for the parents and the children will develop their passions and interests from their interactions with the larger culture (social media, peers, teachers, etc.) as opposed to their interactions with their parents.
Laszlo Polgar obviously inculcated a love of chess in his daughters. Had he not done so, perhaps those girls would have developed a love of a more gender normative activity - say dancing. I wouldn't say the love of dancing would be somehow more authentic than their love for chess. It's just that the love of dancing would have emerged through the girls' more passive engagement with the larger culture, as opposed to the 1:1 interactions with their father. In other words, there are no real innate interests here - there are just interests that develop based on the particulars of a child's environment.
So with that in mind, I have fewer worries about the potential harms of a Polgar approach. Of course intensive parenting can be done wrong - see Michael Jackson's dad - but the Polgars show it can also be done in a healthy way.
My second worry is that the hands off parenting method also has its risks. To use a prominent example, the novelist Ayelet Waldman wrote a book called "Bad Mother" where she outlined her more relaxed, hands off approach to parenting (very similar to what many hereditarians on here suggest!) Unfortunately, twenty years after her book, her son was arrested for violent rape and may spend much of his life in prison. This is certainly a nightmare scenario, and I don't want to blame Waldman - perhaps her son would have done what he did no matter how she raised him. Still, if we are to blame "tiger parents" for the failures and issues that their children evince, perhaps we should also, to be consistent, note that "hands off" parenting has its own risks and demonstrates its own failures as well.
In my experience it's a lot easier to feel like you have a ton of control over your child when you have just one--including blaming yourself when things go poorly, and giving yourself credit when things go well. "I did such a good job teaching my child to read with Engelmann, anyone can do it!" (This was me.) As you start having more and seeing how different they are, even when you didn't intentionally raise them differently--in pur family Engelmann did not click with #2--it becomes a lot harder to think you have the control your picture is suggesting. I don't mean to be saying that whatever kids do like is innate in a purely genetic sense--while I do think genes probably play a big role, I'm certain a given genetic profile will manifest in different interests depending on the environment--just that it's not reliably under parental control in a way that means you can do the Polgar approach without risk.
I don't think Polgar's success shows what I think you're implying it does. In particular, I don't think it shows that he had a general method that would've produced similarly happy results no matter what kids he'd had, or which others could pick up and use at scale. It's just one family. It's very hard to get good social science on this kind of stuff because you can't randomly assign people to different parenting styles. Of course there are twin studies, and I can see the argument that the fact that "shared environment" generally doesn't have much predictive power in those studies could be seen as a reason to think parents don't have much control over the sorts of outcomes they measure. On the other hand, there aren't many families like Polgar's, and I bet he'd predict that a twin study in which half the kids were raised in the Polgar style would produce very different results from a typical one. I'd probably agree...
That's just a long-winded way of saying solid evidence here is scarce, and I certainly agree you can find what look like successes and horror stories on both sides.
All very reasonable, and it's so important to have humility as a parent.
Nevertheless, I'll conclude by saying I think people are way too dismissive of the possibility of using Polgar's techniques more widely. I read his book, and his parenting style isn't rocket science: he just spent around 4-5 hours a day systematically working through chess books and tutorials with his kids. The idea is that spending a few hours a day systematically focused on a subject with your kid will make your kid really, really good at that subject. It doesn't matter what the kid's sex or race or background is, provided they're generally mentally and physically healthy; nor does it matter what the subject is. You could do something similar with math or music or physics or whatever.
Granted, most people don't have 4-5 hours a day to work with their kids, and it's not as if the world desperately needs more chess prodigies anyways. But the general idea - that consistent, focused work with your kid on an academic subject will make them really good at that subject - is solid and really should be propagated more widely. This more or less aligns with the East Asian approach to parenting I grew up with as well, so I guess I just find it totally sensible and reasonable.
Bottom line, if Polgar is right and people are sincere when they say raising children is the most important human endeavor...then Polgar's techniques are one of the more important discoveries of the 20th century. I hope more people take him seriously in the future.
Upon further thought, I wonder if the “good in multiple dimensions” approach risks haecceitic complacency. If I keep adding more and more properties that I exemplify, looking for the combination point at which I best all comers, eventually I reach haecceity. Socrates is the world champion at possessing the (composite) property of Socretaity. He needs to do nothing further.
Yeah I think there's some kind of tradeoff here. You want something idiosyncratic enough that you can excel at it relative to most others, but not so idiosyncratic that excelling at it seems silly/worthless. Hacceities fall into the latter category.
Only after posting. That first sentence of the abstract is very much the picture I got from Paul Forrester; if we don't do something about it, wasteful status competition eats up most of the gains from growth.
Right, though the paper seems to recommend bottom-up market solutions rather than top-down public policy interventions (a la Frank). I haven’t read the paper, I like Frank’s work a lot, and I don’t know what I think.
An idea I'm sure I've heard somewhere is that the internet has facilitated the proliferation of dimensions of status, by allowing people with similar interests to connect with each other. Or at least, that was the sort of optimistic story you heard more in the early 2000s, before discussion of the impacts of the internet on society tended to focus on the baleful effects of social media.
That's pretty "bottom-up", though not sure how "market-driven" it is. I should read the paper.
A progressive consumption tax is likely one of the taxes on the rich that is most socially efficient. Starting with the median price of a yacht, or house, then the next 4 deciles, 60, 70, 80, 90. Would pay a consumption tax of 1%, 2, 3, or 4% on the amount above that year’s decile boundary.
Changes every year, becomes cumbersome clunky and which categories included?
Maybe a similar tax on stuff made that costs more than $1,000 or $10,000 with higher rates at every 0, and some median exemption for house & car.
Taxing the rich on their consumption status competition is less bad than taxing labor.
On your last paragraph, I think that’s insightful and that “tricking” oneself into joy, one might forego productive ambition. Yet in the long list of modern neuroses, the anxiety of failure to measure up can be enough to make a person not even try, a bit like the crippling anxiety the existentialists described when faced with one’s freedom. If I understand the detachment taught by Marcus Aurelius right, it is meant to make him take action despite what hardship others’ judgment may cause, and instead act by some eternal standard. My point is that the tricks you describe could reduce the anxiety of anticipatory failings, and if those anticipations are false, as they often are, the tricks may enhance one’s accomplishments. It would be dose dependent, since clearly the man content with the ascetic life would be unlikely to be the next great inventor.
Great post! Really enjoyed it. I find it hard to use the Dracula perspective: just as I can think "my life is extraordinary relative to the past" I often feel "my life is wimpy compared to the lives of the future".
Wow I really enjoy that and I think I will genuinely be happier if I keep the lessons in mind. That said, I'm gonna be the smartass who points out how height surgery might not be a pure positional good. Perhaps many or even most women prefer husbands who are taller than them. If Joe is married and gets height surgery, perhaps his wife, who prefers taller men, ceteris parabis, will be happier. If he's unmarried, he increases the average quality of men on the dating market, and women will benefit.
The contrast between the gardener and the carpenter also applies outside of parenting. I call the former "questing" and the latter "scheming." Schemes are detailed, complex, and pedantic -- they make note of every detail, try to figure out exactly what is going to happen, and plan for all possibilities... Quests, on the other hand, are radically and purely simple. For example, write one million words; drive from coast to coast; make $100,000.
The details can be filled in one day at a time, and don't need to be decided prior to the action. The carpenter needs to have an exact scheme prepared prior to making any cuts, but the gardener can just react to weeds and rain and bugs as they come, always keeping the final simple goal of fruit in mind.
I just encountered another context where someone--George R. R. Martin--drew a very similar distinction. It was between gardeners and architects, but in this case it was about writing fiction. Architects have it all planned out from the start (like your schemers), whereas gardeners have some characters, and some plot points they probably want to hit, but they need to start writing to see where the spirit takes them, and maybe the direction they initially imagined they'd go is not where they ultimately do.
As much as I favor gardening for parenting, I think I prefer fiction writers to be architects rather than gardeners! (For context, Martin has been stuck with a case of over-a-decade writers block, and I get the sense he wrote himself into a corner that he can't find a good way out of. I like the sense you get reading Tolkien, where you're just getting a glimpse of a fully worked-out world, where he's just decided to fill you in on some of the details.)
In terms of fiction writing, another way to consider this is through the lens of Deleuze, comparing the arborescent model (vertically integrated) with the rhizomatic (no central point of organization, stream of consciousness). I think the dramatic case is when you have a large superstructure, a kind of metaphysics, and then you riff off that and play around and experiment with the characters within it. The comedic case is when you have extremely narrowly defined characterizations and plot points, but no larger sense of meaning and purpose. When I think about the latter, I’m reminded of something like Rick and Morty, where the characters are familiar but each episode is deliberately arbitrary and non-sequitur.
Great post. One way of keeping your reference frame helpful is some kind of historical hobby. Even just reading a sacred text that features people from long ago, as many do, helps a good deal!
I think there's a deep unity between the policy argument that society should have more than one status hierarchy and Dan's psychological argument that it's healthy to avoid tying your self-esteem too closely to your status in one hierarchy. The structure of society affects how easy it is to liberate your mind from one-dimensional status competition.
One of my friends said law school is miserable because everyone feels like they're competing for the same resume. In college, by contrast, there are so many career paths open to you that you don't feel the same kind of competition with your friends. You can be a lawyer; your friend can be a doctor; and your other friend can be the lead singer in an indie band.
You could imagine societies more like law school and more like college. Suppose income inequality got much worse than it is today, so much that almost every smart person felt like they had to become an AI researcher. I think that kind of society would be psychologically miserable and also socially undesirable. Instead, I want to live in a society where some people want to be the world heavyweight champion and others want to be the Wykeham Professor of Logic.
This point is also related to why I love New York. It's not a company town for any industry, like San Francisco is for tech. A diversified economy makes for more interesting house parties.
I love this. How do you think policy can try to nudge society in the direction of a plurality of status hierarchies? (I like the NY vs SF contrast, but have less of a sense of what policy levers there are to affect stuff like that.)
This was a joy to read, Dan. But I will never forget what could have been a masterful title for a Substack post (though perhaps not this one): “fewer yachts, more hemorrhoid cream”
Shoulda coulda woulda...
Actually you have a great opportunity if you do a post on the progressive consumption tax 😁 On second thought…
The advice you mention about finding multiple axes to care about (like philosophy and jiujitsu) and noting one’s joint position on the rankings is how I overcame imposter syndrome in early grad school. When I was starting in the logic program at Berkeley, I started by noticing how much less math I knew than the math grad students and how much less philosophy I knew than the philosophy grad students, but it was a really useful reconceptualization when I realized that the opposite comparison was also relevant, and I could make a difference by leaning in to that combination.
It’s a lot like the economic literature on comparative advantage, and I’m also thinking these days that it’s relevant for dealing with student anxieties around AI - one AI might be better at writing sentences than you and another might be better at doing calculations, but you still have a comparative advantage at doing the things together (or at least you will if you practice both skills, rather than leaning on each AI when you are supposed to be practicing its skill).
The math and philosophy case has the advantage that being good (even if not best) at both gives you unique abilities to combine them, as is obvious to anybody familiar with your body of work.
Sadly, I have no philosophical insights into jiu jitsu that I'd be in a unique position to write about, nor does my knowledge of philosophy help in the least on the mats.
I’ve always thought that one compelling reason to be a well-rounded person was purely egoistical: if you’re good at multiple things, you’re much less likely to encounter someone who (even weakly, in the econ sense) dominates you across all of them. So you can suck at things you want to be good at, but you’re not an outright failure bc no one is better than you at everything you do. Come to think of it, that is indeed a handy POV in the crucible of grad school :)
100%
This is a genius way to overcome imposter syndrome and I'm gonna steal it for myself and suggest it to others as need arises
Please do! It was an important reconceptualization that changed my attitude after a year of grad school and I try to get new grad students to have this realization as soon as possible!
Awesome!! (For me, a new morning mantra: “there are better Sinologists and better analytic philosophers out there, but not many people who can do both and bring them together”)
This is wonderful! Although I'd argue that some parents are very competitive with each other about parenting, and especially about how their children are turning out. However, unlike competition in other domains where friendly rivalry might spur us to improve, competitive parenting is usually bad for us and for our children.
Yes! Our eldest is only 10 so we're pretty far from thinking about college, but my sense is that college anxiety fuels a lot of competitive parenting.
Yep! I have a high school junior so college anxiety is way too salient for us. We've had to dial back on all college talk because it was stressing out our daughter too much.
Wrt that tradeoff, some telic activities have huge positive externalities.
Yes, the sense in which I say I think it's "worth it" at the end was meant to be a selfish one. When it comes to people like this guy, maybe I should hope he is consumed by a desire to win a Nobel prize, not for *his* sake--sounds stressful--but for the rest of ours:
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/personalized-therapeutic-vaccine-steers-the-immune-system-to-fight-kidney-cancer/
Of course, there’s also the situation where you’re concerned with rankings and playing what looks like a zero-sum game, but mostly because you’re interested in the non-comparative goods or rewards that getting the right job would provide. I think that’s how many people in the rat race see themselves, but of course, I think they lose sight of the non-comparative goods and for that reason end up on the hedonic treadmill
This is great, very thought provoking. I quit academic philosophy a few years ago but discovered the Substack posts like this perfectly satisfy my itch for thoughtful, well written philosophy, and without having to deal with all the baggage and drama (and grading…).
A couple of questions.
First, could some aspects of romantic coupling (or just personal / social choices in general) be interpreted as an intrinsic externality? A cynical interpretation of at least some instances of coupling is a status game, where the As want to be with each other partly to show their superiority to everyone else, so then the Bs pair up to show their superiority to everyone beneath them, and so on down to the Zs, who are stuck with each other if they don’t want to end up alone.
If so, then maybe it’s harder to motivate state intervention in (all?) intrinsic externalities. (I think Nozick facetiously referred to this problem as facial justice.) E.g., would we want to tax make up and gym memberships and etc etc etc. Indeed, one of my favorite Futurama clips, ostensibly an argument against dating robots, suggests that the main motivation for every good, productive thing we do is mate selection.
Second, could some parenting be comparative without being too narrowly goal directed? Maybe you want your kid to do well in school so that they can have a fulfilling career, and this requires that they read well at an early age, etc. How well, how early? Well, if the (broad) goal is to have a fulfilling career (and the narrow goal of what specific career is still left open for the kid to choose—we’re trying to be gardeners instead of carpenters, to some extent), it doesn’t matter except that it should be at least as early as the other kids, if not earlier. So you expose your kid to reading early, and talk to them about math, and practice handwriting, etc.
Importantly, it doesn’t matter how well your kid reads in an absolute sense, as long as he reads at least as well as the other kids. More formally, if you had to choose between these two options:
A. Your kid reads at X level; all other kids read at X-1 level.
B. All kids, including yours, read at X+1 level.
You would choose A. It seems like a lot of parenting has this sort of structure, and is a source of a lot of stress for parents.
All that sounds right to me.
On coupling having this dimension, I take it that's where the idea of the "trophy wife" comes from.
As for state intervention, even just with regular externalities, in principle the scope for justifying Pigouvian taxes and subsidies is huge; *lots* of stuff we do has externalities (not just positional ones). In practice, I think a default of mostly not trying to price all those externalities is better than what we'd get if we did, but that's because we have actual politics instead of omniscient, benevolent philosopher kings making policy. So while I like *some* Pigouvian taxes and subsidies--I'd probably be happy to see a global carbon tax--I'd rather we stick to the most slam dunk examples of really large and significant externalities that can be priced reasonably objectively.
Also totally agree on parenting having this structure in realistic cases, rather than just the extreme Polgar-style cases. I mean, I hope/suspect that early reading in particular isn't a huge advantage--that is, if you take a given kid, and teach them to read at 3 versus 7, I vaguely remember that they don't look particularly different at 10. But just take stuff like college admissions, and the role parents play in that. I haven't dealt with that yet, but my sense is the process has strong elements of these sorts of dynamics. In a world where no high schoolers are founding non-profits, who would even think that makes sense as something for a high-schooler to do. But now that lots of them are doing it...
>> I think—hope?—most parents will recoil from the idea of treating children as projects. Psychologist Allison Gopnik offers a wonderful contrast between the parent as gardener and the parent as carpenter. The carpenter parent is trying to shape their children into a particular form, like a carpenter building furniture to an exact plan.
I agree with a lot here, but I can't understand the revulsion towards treating parenthood as a project (at least in part; I am sure those parents such as Laszlo Polgar who did approach parenthood through the project model also enjoyed the atelic aspects of parenthood you describe.)
Laszlo Polgar strikes me as an exemplary model whose parenting approach not only produced three happy and well adjusted daughters, but also seriously undermined various sexist theories about women's abilities in competitive chess as well as larger biologist beliefs about the nature of genius. That's a pretty amazing accomplishment. I am sure he did want to repeat it with three adopted children - why wouldn't he? - although I also understand his wife's reluctance. But imagine how badly hereditarian or race realist views would have been undermined had he succeeded with the adopted children. That would be a very worthy goal, and I can't understand why people disparage wanting to do that.
If Polgar had taken the purely atelic approach you describe, he would possibly have also produced three happy daughters, but they would have likely been no more remarkable than any other typical daughters of a gifted parent. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but surely making childrearing into a project can have massive beneficial effects with no apparent downsides (as long as such children are not abused or mistreated in the process, of course.)
The opposition to the "project view" of parenting strikes me as similar to the opposition to embryo selection via companies like Orchid. There's an implicit assumption that something is lost when parents take a directed and constructive approach to having children and make special efforts to maximize good outcomes while minimizing the risk of bad outcomes. But in both cases, I'm unsure what the actual downside could be.
My sense is that from everything the Polgar sisters say, they had a wonderful childhood. So it worked out great.
I guess I just worry that the approach he took is very risky. To strain the carpentry metaphor, if your father is trying to shape you into a table, while you want to be a chair, that seems likely to cause lots of tension. Even absent outright abuse, I'd worry that overly specific expectations concerning what children should grow up to do or be risk causing disappointment and resentment if they're felt as an imposition. To follow up on themes in the post, I take my kids to jiu jitsu. But if I get the sense that it feels like a grim obligation, I don't intend to force them to keep doing it (for now, they seem to mostly enjoy it, and certainly haven't asked to stop). I'd be horrified if my kids thought that I'd be disappointed in them if they didn't end up excelling at jiu jitsu, so if they wanted to stay in my good graces they'd have to do it regardless of how they felt about it.
And the fact that Polgar went looking for another parenting project after the sisters were grown suggests to me--perhaps totally unfair speculation--that had his girls not taken to chess as well as they did, they might have had much less pleasant childhoods.
I do suspect my attitude is likely to produce fewer chess prodigies, fewer music prodigies. My sense is that plenty of kids who grow up to love their instrument had to be forced to practice against their will as children, and end up being grateful for the kind of strict discipline that was initially instilled in them. Maybe I'm too much of a softie. But I still think it's a gamble. I don't know how you'd count--I certainly can't quantify this--but my guess is that for every orchestra violinist who's grateful they were forced to practice hours on end as a child, you have several adults whose relationships with their parents are more strained than they would otherwise be.
I appreciate this view, but I have a couple objections to it.
One, I disagree with the framing that suggests children have innate well-developed interests, such that a Polgar-like parent could rub up against them in a really negative way. I'm probably just much more of social constructivist, but my belief is that such interests are developed socially and culturally. So if parents pull back or take a more passive approach to childrearing, the larger culture will "fill in" for the parents and the children will develop their passions and interests from their interactions with the larger culture (social media, peers, teachers, etc.) as opposed to their interactions with their parents.
Laszlo Polgar obviously inculcated a love of chess in his daughters. Had he not done so, perhaps those girls would have developed a love of a more gender normative activity - say dancing. I wouldn't say the love of dancing would be somehow more authentic than their love for chess. It's just that the love of dancing would have emerged through the girls' more passive engagement with the larger culture, as opposed to the 1:1 interactions with their father. In other words, there are no real innate interests here - there are just interests that develop based on the particulars of a child's environment.
So with that in mind, I have fewer worries about the potential harms of a Polgar approach. Of course intensive parenting can be done wrong - see Michael Jackson's dad - but the Polgars show it can also be done in a healthy way.
My second worry is that the hands off parenting method also has its risks. To use a prominent example, the novelist Ayelet Waldman wrote a book called "Bad Mother" where she outlined her more relaxed, hands off approach to parenting (very similar to what many hereditarians on here suggest!) Unfortunately, twenty years after her book, her son was arrested for violent rape and may spend much of his life in prison. This is certainly a nightmare scenario, and I don't want to blame Waldman - perhaps her son would have done what he did no matter how she raised him. Still, if we are to blame "tiger parents" for the failures and issues that their children evince, perhaps we should also, to be consistent, note that "hands off" parenting has its own risks and demonstrates its own failures as well.
In my experience it's a lot easier to feel like you have a ton of control over your child when you have just one--including blaming yourself when things go poorly, and giving yourself credit when things go well. "I did such a good job teaching my child to read with Engelmann, anyone can do it!" (This was me.) As you start having more and seeing how different they are, even when you didn't intentionally raise them differently--in pur family Engelmann did not click with #2--it becomes a lot harder to think you have the control your picture is suggesting. I don't mean to be saying that whatever kids do like is innate in a purely genetic sense--while I do think genes probably play a big role, I'm certain a given genetic profile will manifest in different interests depending on the environment--just that it's not reliably under parental control in a way that means you can do the Polgar approach without risk.
I don't think Polgar's success shows what I think you're implying it does. In particular, I don't think it shows that he had a general method that would've produced similarly happy results no matter what kids he'd had, or which others could pick up and use at scale. It's just one family. It's very hard to get good social science on this kind of stuff because you can't randomly assign people to different parenting styles. Of course there are twin studies, and I can see the argument that the fact that "shared environment" generally doesn't have much predictive power in those studies could be seen as a reason to think parents don't have much control over the sorts of outcomes they measure. On the other hand, there aren't many families like Polgar's, and I bet he'd predict that a twin study in which half the kids were raised in the Polgar style would produce very different results from a typical one. I'd probably agree...
That's just a long-winded way of saying solid evidence here is scarce, and I certainly agree you can find what look like successes and horror stories on both sides.
All very reasonable, and it's so important to have humility as a parent.
Nevertheless, I'll conclude by saying I think people are way too dismissive of the possibility of using Polgar's techniques more widely. I read his book, and his parenting style isn't rocket science: he just spent around 4-5 hours a day systematically working through chess books and tutorials with his kids. The idea is that spending a few hours a day systematically focused on a subject with your kid will make your kid really, really good at that subject. It doesn't matter what the kid's sex or race or background is, provided they're generally mentally and physically healthy; nor does it matter what the subject is. You could do something similar with math or music or physics or whatever.
Granted, most people don't have 4-5 hours a day to work with their kids, and it's not as if the world desperately needs more chess prodigies anyways. But the general idea - that consistent, focused work with your kid on an academic subject will make them really good at that subject - is solid and really should be propagated more widely. This more or less aligns with the East Asian approach to parenting I grew up with as well, so I guess I just find it totally sensible and reasonable.
Bottom line, if Polgar is right and people are sincere when they say raising children is the most important human endeavor...then Polgar's techniques are one of the more important discoveries of the 20th century. I hope more people take him seriously in the future.
Upon further thought, I wonder if the “good in multiple dimensions” approach risks haecceitic complacency. If I keep adding more and more properties that I exemplify, looking for the combination point at which I best all comers, eventually I reach haecceity. Socrates is the world champion at possessing the (composite) property of Socretaity. He needs to do nothing further.
Yeah I think there's some kind of tradeoff here. You want something idiosyncratic enough that you can excel at it relative to most others, but not so idiosyncratic that excelling at it seems silly/worthless. Hacceities fall into the latter category.
Did you see this, just this morning: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/polycentric-status-contests.html
Only after posting. That first sentence of the abstract is very much the picture I got from Paul Forrester; if we don't do something about it, wasteful status competition eats up most of the gains from growth.
Right, though the paper seems to recommend bottom-up market solutions rather than top-down public policy interventions (a la Frank). I haven’t read the paper, I like Frank’s work a lot, and I don’t know what I think.
An idea I'm sure I've heard somewhere is that the internet has facilitated the proliferation of dimensions of status, by allowing people with similar interests to connect with each other. Or at least, that was the sort of optimistic story you heard more in the early 2000s, before discussion of the impacts of the internet on society tended to focus on the baleful effects of social media.
That's pretty "bottom-up", though not sure how "market-driven" it is. I should read the paper.
It definitely sounds polycentric.
A progressive consumption tax is likely one of the taxes on the rich that is most socially efficient. Starting with the median price of a yacht, or house, then the next 4 deciles, 60, 70, 80, 90. Would pay a consumption tax of 1%, 2, 3, or 4% on the amount above that year’s decile boundary.
Changes every year, becomes cumbersome clunky and which categories included?
Maybe a similar tax on stuff made that costs more than $1,000 or $10,000 with higher rates at every 0, and some median exemption for house & car.
Taxing the rich on their consumption status competition is less bad than taxing labor.
On your last paragraph, I think that’s insightful and that “tricking” oneself into joy, one might forego productive ambition. Yet in the long list of modern neuroses, the anxiety of failure to measure up can be enough to make a person not even try, a bit like the crippling anxiety the existentialists described when faced with one’s freedom. If I understand the detachment taught by Marcus Aurelius right, it is meant to make him take action despite what hardship others’ judgment may cause, and instead act by some eternal standard. My point is that the tricks you describe could reduce the anxiety of anticipatory failings, and if those anticipations are false, as they often are, the tricks may enhance one’s accomplishments. It would be dose dependent, since clearly the man content with the ascetic life would be unlikely to be the next great inventor.
Great post! Really enjoyed it. I find it hard to use the Dracula perspective: just as I can think "my life is extraordinary relative to the past" I often feel "my life is wimpy compared to the lives of the future".
Wow I really enjoy that and I think I will genuinely be happier if I keep the lessons in mind. That said, I'm gonna be the smartass who points out how height surgery might not be a pure positional good. Perhaps many or even most women prefer husbands who are taller than them. If Joe is married and gets height surgery, perhaps his wife, who prefers taller men, ceteris parabis, will be happier. If he's unmarried, he increases the average quality of men on the dating market, and women will benefit.
That's a good point.
The contrast between the gardener and the carpenter also applies outside of parenting. I call the former "questing" and the latter "scheming." Schemes are detailed, complex, and pedantic -- they make note of every detail, try to figure out exactly what is going to happen, and plan for all possibilities... Quests, on the other hand, are radically and purely simple. For example, write one million words; drive from coast to coast; make $100,000.
The details can be filled in one day at a time, and don't need to be decided prior to the action. The carpenter needs to have an exact scheme prepared prior to making any cuts, but the gardener can just react to weeds and rain and bugs as they come, always keeping the final simple goal of fruit in mind.
I just encountered another context where someone--George R. R. Martin--drew a very similar distinction. It was between gardeners and architects, but in this case it was about writing fiction. Architects have it all planned out from the start (like your schemers), whereas gardeners have some characters, and some plot points they probably want to hit, but they need to start writing to see where the spirit takes them, and maybe the direction they initially imagined they'd go is not where they ultimately do.
As much as I favor gardening for parenting, I think I prefer fiction writers to be architects rather than gardeners! (For context, Martin has been stuck with a case of over-a-decade writers block, and I get the sense he wrote himself into a corner that he can't find a good way out of. I like the sense you get reading Tolkien, where you're just getting a glimpse of a fully worked-out world, where he's just decided to fill you in on some of the details.)
In terms of fiction writing, another way to consider this is through the lens of Deleuze, comparing the arborescent model (vertically integrated) with the rhizomatic (no central point of organization, stream of consciousness). I think the dramatic case is when you have a large superstructure, a kind of metaphysics, and then you riff off that and play around and experiment with the characters within it. The comedic case is when you have extremely narrowly defined characterizations and plot points, but no larger sense of meaning and purpose. When I think about the latter, I’m reminded of something like Rick and Morty, where the characters are familiar but each episode is deliberately arbitrary and non-sequitur.
Great post. One way of keeping your reference frame helpful is some kind of historical hobby. Even just reading a sacred text that features people from long ago, as many do, helps a good deal!