michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, should college be free?

ross douthat

The American college system is considered by a lot of people to be better than the college systems in Western Europe. And one reason it’s better is that it induces parents to part with their money.

david leonhardt

Then, where have all the baby’s gone?

anna louie sussman

Women feel like men have not caught up. They have not been able to find men who have really kept pace and necessarily share their views of what a more egalitarian relationship would look like.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

I was just so rapt by this movie. And I was also sort of astonished that it got made at all. And I see that as an optimistic sign of where the culture is.

david leonhardt

The cost of college is a big burden for many people. And it’s become a hot political topic as well. The big question in progressive policy circles is whether public college should be free, paid for with taxes rather than tuition payments and loans from students and their families. Pete Buttigieg has sharpened the debate in recent weeks by running an ad criticizing the idea of free college, saying it’s too much of a handout to the wealthy.

archived recording (pete buttigieg) I believe we should move to make college affordable for everybody. There are some voices saying, well, that doesn’t count unless you go even further, unless it’s free even for the kids of millionaires. But I only want to make promises that we can keep.

david leonhardt

Buttigieg favors free college for lower and middle income families. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, prefers free public college for everyone. It’s a classic debate between universal and targeted social programs. And it’s fascinating both in its own right and as a symbol of the larger left versus center debate in the Democratic primary. Michelle, I’m mostly with Mayor Pete on this one. Free college for everyone just doesn’t seem to me like a good use of resources. And it also seems to bother a lot of swing voters. So I don’t think it’s worth the political cost. But I’m really interested in what you’ve thought about this whole debate.

michelle goldberg

Well, David, I mean, you don’t think that kind of millionaires and billionaires are going to start sending their kids to public college if it’s free, right? I mean, the argument itself is sort of — it might be politically astute. But it seems sort of disingenuous. And I think Democrats in general should have been pointing out a lot more that this idea of free college is not a new thing. The UC system was free until the ‘70s. The CUNY system which produced a lot of the leading conservative minds in the country was also free until the 1970s. And so this isn’t some sort of departure like “Medicare for all.” This is actually the way public education used to be. And bringing market mechanisms into public universities has been sort of a disaster. My fear about what happens if you have free college for, say, everybody under $100,000 is that it creates incentives which you already see in some of these state university systems to really focus on bringing in the families that can kind of subsidize everyone else. I’ve been to public colleges in Arizona where, because there’s less and less money from the state, there’s more and more of an emphasis on getting out-of-state students from California, which has created this sort of arms race of amenities, while basic educational functions are ignored. I’m not sure you’d have that exact problem if you just had free college for people whose families make under six figures. But I do think that the idea that it’s obviously going to function better is untested at best.

david leonhardt

Look, Buttigieg is obviously trying to score some rhetorical points here by talking about paying for college of millionaires and billionaires. But there is a larger point that’s true here, which is, Michelle, that the world you worry about creating is a world that I think we already have. So I don’t have a problem with getting to a world in which all college is free. But the idea that we would start now by making all college free, to me, has two really big problems. One, it really is regressive. It really is sending a lot of benefits to people like high-income professionals who don’t need the help relative to most Americans. And two, it’s not obviously a political winner. And so it might be a political loser. The polling’s sort of mixed on it. And so I guess I just prefer an approach that, one, is going to help more people that need help and, two, might actually be more popular and make it more likely that Donald Trump loses. And so that’s why I prefer the Buttigieg approach.

ross douthat

So I guess my question — and I’m more on David’s side, but I’ll play devil’s advocate a little bit — is that I think the strongest case for various socialistic proposals is that we’ve set up markets in health care and education in this country that just don’t work at all, because nobody knows what the prices are. I am an upper middle class professional trying to figure out what I need to save for college. And if I look at elite college tuition rates going forward, I have no idea how that interacts with these incredibly opaque financial aid systems that are there to milk just the right amount of money out of each group and so on. And that is both a deterrent for low-income people in applying to college at all, because they get sticker shock and look at these prices that aren’t real prices and don’t apply. And it’s a source of endless stress for parents and, to some extent kids. And Buttigieg’s proposal, it probably adds to some of that complexity and stress to some extent, even as it reduces it for lower-income people. There is an advantage in terms of how people interact with bureaucracy and how people interact with these systems to just say, yeah, these schools cost money. And these schools are free.

david leonhardt

And look, we love to denigrate American high schools today. But historically, they’re this unbelievable success story. America moved toward universal high school education before Europe. And our economy benefited enormously. And that’s basically the argument that, to some extent, you each are making. And I guess I would love to get to a world in which at least two years of college are free for everyone and maybe four. But a little bit as with “Medicare for all,” the idea of saying, this is what the Democrats are really going to double down on, decide it’s what they really want, free college for all, as opposed to a really ambitious climate bill or as opposed to a wealth tax, which I like. To me, it’s just not exactly worth it. And you get a huge portion of the benefit without the downsides by doing a more targeted approach. And by the way, I prefer Buttigieg’s to Biden’s approach. Biden’s approach is free community college for all, which I’ve written positive things about. But I also like the idea that we don’t tell poorer kids that the only way to get the benefits of this program are go to a community college and we say to them, you can also get it by going to a four-year college. But you’re right, the plan that I’m talking about is more complicated. It’s cheaper, but it’s more complicated than the idea of free college, period, for everybody.

michelle goldberg

I’m willing to concede that there might be a short-term political benefit when it comes to defeating Donald Trump. But I would also say that if a Democrat gets elected, they’re going to have a much better chance, I think, of starting from the position of what they really want and negotiating from there rather than starting with a halfway measure and maybe, if they’re lucky, getting to free community college.

ross douthat

Yeah, and I’m skeptical that this is — I think “Medicare for all” as proposed by Warren and Sanders is very unpopular. I think this would be much less unpopular and would not be an issue that would help reelect Trump per se. I’ll now switch sides and make the opposite argument. I think there is a case, on the one hand, that the four year college model is oversubscribed, actually, in America right now and what we need is more people going to community colleges, trade school, continuing education, more investment in that space. And that makes me more sympathetic to the Biden proposal, in that it sort of very specifically directs resources there rather than towards the college system as a whole. I also think there’s an argument that seems pretty plausible, which is that, David, you mentioned how the American high school system was the envy of the Western world. Well, right now, the American college system, as horrible as it is in six different ways, is considered by a lot of people to be better than the college systems in Western Europe. And one reason it’s better is that it is well-funded in lots of ways, in part because it induces parents to part with their money. And college becomes free, and then that becomes a justification for state governments to say, look, these kids at these state schools are getting a free education. They don’t need lavish amenities. They don’t need high-paid faculty. We’re going to cut the higher ed budget. And pretty quickly, it would actually end up starving a lot of middle and lower tier colleges of revenue, even as the rich private colleges, which are the ones whose revenue you should actually be cutting would be doing fine. I think that’s actually a pretty plausible description of how free college might actually end up undercutting the colleges.

michelle goldberg

But the argument against that is that that’s precisely what happens when it is only free for the sort of bottom tiers. When free college is something that, say, 80 percent of families can take advantage of, you have much more social buy-in, just as there’s much more protectiveness around Medicare than there is around Medicaid because of who gets it. It creates a constituency for this that is much harder for politicians to ignore.

david leonhardt

Clearly, Buttigieg is not just thinking about education here. He sees a lane to get these large number of Democrats who either are moderate or want a moderate who they consider to be electable. Michelle, how do you assess the state of the race right now? Kamala Harris has just dropped out. It feels like Biden and Buttigieg are competing for the moderate voters. And Warren and Bernie are competing for the progressive voters. Where do you see things?

michelle goldberg

I don’t think there’s any real clarity about where the race is right now. It seems extremely indeterminate. Buttigieg has gone from someone who I think a lot of people on the left found kind of interesting and thought he had a lot of compelling structural ideas. And he has now whipped up such intense ill will among the progressive part of the Democratic Party, in part because he’s doing this while accepting Republican framing of these issues in a way that I think that Democrats, or at least a good section of the party sees as really pernicious. And so it might end up helping him get the nomination. And I think it would also make it much harder to unify the party if he actually did.

david leonhardt

I’m a little more optimistic than that. I remember when Barack Obama was outraging progressives. Our colleague Paul Krugman really didn’t like the way Obama ran against Hillary in 2008, and talking about bringing everyone together, which a lot of progressives found naive. So I don’t know. I agree with you, Michelle, that’s what he’s trying to do here. But I do feel like it’s something that he could recover from in the unlikely but not impossible event that he’s the nominee. A quick note before we take a break. 2019 is quickly coming to an end. And here at “The Argument,” we’re thinking about the year ahead. So we want to hear from you. What are your New Year’s resolutions? We want to hear them, especially if they’re related to politics, culture, or something beyond your own life. Maybe you’re going to canvas for a political candidate for the first time. Or maybe you’re going to add a few different news sources to your reading list. Whatever it is, big or small, share your resolutions with us by leaving us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. Make sure you tell us your name and where you’re from so we can play your call on an upcoming episode. And with that, we will take a quick break. Americans aren’t having as many children as they used to. The fertility rate in the U.S. declined last year for the fourth year in a row and has fallen to a record low. It’s not just the United States either. Fertility rates in much of Europe and Japan are low enough to be causing population declines. And in China, the end of the “one child” policy has not led to the baby boom that some expected. What’s going on here? Anna Louie Sussman is a writer who tried to answer that question in a fascinating recent Times op-ed called “The End of Babies.” And she has joined us for the discussion. Anna, thank you, and welcome to “The Argument.”

anna louie sussman

Thank you for having me.

david leonhardt

So I was struck by your description of fertility rates being low in a really wide variety of countries, including some with really good parental benefits like Denmark and some with really terrible parental benefits like the United States. And I came away thinking that I guess the closest thing to a single explanation for this trend is a rise of what might be called individualism over communitarianism. You mentioned this notion of workism, of people focusing on their careers out of either necessity or choice. And you also talk about people being wary of bringing children into a world suffering from climate change and extreme inequality. So I was wondering whether you think it’s legitimate to think about falling fertility rates as being a reflection of the individual triumphing over the community.

anna louie sussman

I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. I think there’s a few different parts to the issue. One, I don’t see falling fertility rates in a macro perspective as necessarily a huge issue. I think there’s loads of people in the world. We’re not suffering from an actual shortage of people. What I was more interested in is what’s happening on an individual level, which is to say, a gap between the number of children people say they want and the number of children they wind up having. Demographers call this underachieving fertility. And it’s particularly acute amongst educated women. The other issue, I think, is individual versus a kind of way of thinking that takes into account interdependence. I use this term late capitalism in the essay. People have kind of quibbled with it a bit. But I meant particular aspects of the way that our economy is conducted right now. And in particular, I was thinking of extreme inequality. I was thinking of this growth mentality that requires more resources and more raw materials and more energy and more manufacturing and creates more waste. But it’s also gone way into our psyches. And it’s affected relationships between women and men in very disturbing ways and our own self-conceptions. And all of that has made it, for a variety of reasons, more difficult to contemplate or realize this idea of having children.

david leonhardt

Michelle, how do you think about the part of the essay in which Anna points out that fertility is really weak, even in countries that have the sort of structure that you and I think the U.S. should have? Which is, it’s really weak in Denmark, even though Denmark has really good parental leave. So it doesn’t seem like it’s just a story about the safety net.

michelle goldberg

Well, it’s not just a story about safety net. But it’s partly a story about the safety net, because the two countries that have higher fertility than America right now are Sweden and France, not that much higher and not replacement. And it might just be pregnancy and childbirth is an extraordinarily brutal experience that most women, given the choice, are not going to go through again and again and again. A society that’s kind of shrinking slowly, which you get at 1.8 or 1.9 births per woman versus 1.4, 1.5, those have really different social implications. And so the only way that we know of in which a modern society, women who have kind of the whole full plethora of economic options that modernism gives them, the only way we know in which you get fertility even sort of close to replacement is with really rich social safety net provisions and a sort of culture that enables women to combine work and family. The thing that we do know is that efforts to juice fertility by just imposing penalties on women, by trying to make gender roles more reactionary are an abject failure. So the thing that’s absolutely toxic for fertility rates is a combination of modernity and economic freedom for women but a total lack of feminism and a social safety net.

anna louie sussman

And I’ll add that I was just in Poland earlier this year doing some reporting. And it’s quite clear when I talk to single women who are pursuing fertility treatments to become parents on their own, the women feel like the men have not caught up. These are women who are independently — they support themselves. They’re ambitious. But they still have an interest in having a family, a partner, and children. But they have not been able to find men who have really kept pace and necessarily share their views of what a more egalitarian relationship would look like.

david leonhardt

And I think it’s probably not just individual men, although you might expect that I would come to the defense of individual men. But I do think it’s sort of the structures that we have in society that basically contribute to sexism, that we have all these structures that make it really hard for people to find meaningful part-time work and that basically lead to all kinds of inequities in child rearing, which in turn make much more of the burden fall on women and make me understand why people might be reluctant to have kids into that structure.

ross douthat

I guess I’d start by throwing out one other example of a country that’s rich and developed and has a higher fertility rate than the U.S. that I think goes to some of the questions about the kind of cultural and even metaphysical things going on here, which is Israel. It doesn’t have a fertility rate at replacement level. It has a fertility rate well above replacement level. And its fertility rate is higher in part because of immigration by Orthodox Jews over the last 20 or 30 years or 40, 50 years that’s made Israel a more religious society. But if you look at birth rates among secular Israelis, they are also basically comparably high and much higher than in any other wealthy country. And I think that’s a really interesting fact that, at the very least, it suggests something about sort of the nature of community and feelings of, on the one hand, threat and on the other hand, possibility. Israel is a country that is historically imperiled and exists in this strange equilibrium where it’s as rich and developed as a lot of countries in Europe but is in the Middle East and has military threats on its borders and so on. And I think it suggests that there is something about a culture’s perception of its own sense of purpose, its sense of the future.

michelle goldberg

Right, but Israel is also a very special case, because there is this sort of —

anna louie sussman

Ethnonationalist.

michelle goldberg

Well, it’s not even — but it’s not even ethnonationalist, because I feel like there’s a more innocent term for it. But basically, you have Israel is this country that was sort of born from the ashes of a Holocaust. And there’s this very strong cultural imperative to reconstitute the Jewish people. I’m not sure what other countries can kind of borrow from that. I don’t think that that’s an ethos that can be constructed.

ross douthat

No, I think it’s very clearly not an ethos that can just be transferred. But I think the power of that ethos to shape child rearing in a profound way tells us something about how much an ethos matters, in the sense that it’s not just the structures of the welfare state. It’s not just the condition of late capitalism. It’s not just the sexual revolution. Israel has late capitalism, the sexual revolution, a full-on welfare state, and much larger families. And I totally agree. That’s related to the nature and destiny of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. But it tells you something about how much cultural belief and purpose matter.

david leonhardt

It may not be fully replicable. And I certainly— Michelle, you know I agree with you about having the policies that make it possible that Israel has and Sweden has and we don’t. That is a little bit what I was trying to get at with the individual and community thing, that that exists. And I feel like not just in the west but also in China, in Japan, in much of the world today, this idea of individualism really has taken hold. You see it with climate change, Anna, which was a big part of your piece. You see it with inequality. And I do feel like there’s this notion of people thinking much more about the individual than the family or the community.

anna louie sussman

I mean, I will say that you can find community at different levels. But whether it’s the caliber of community that would make it possible to raise children in an absence of any government policy is a different question. So I have plants, and I have a dog. And my neighbors, when I’m away, alternatively look after my plants and my dog. But I could not do that with a child.

ross douthat

They’re actually surprisingly resilient. [LAUGHTER]

anna louie sussman

Right, you just drop some food in a bowl.

ross douthat

You get them at the hospital. And you’re sort of baffled by how you’re going to keep them alive. But then, five years later, there they are.

anna louie sussman

But I think it’s also a question of, what do you feel you can ask someone in an environment of so much scarcity. I was raised by a single mom. And some of the things that we relied on just aren’t there anymore. For example, in our neighborhood when I would come home from summer camp, from day camp, my mom would give me $3 and I’d buy a bowl of egg drop soup. And then I’d read for three hours until she got off work and could pick me up from the Chinese restaurant. There are no more restaurants in my neighborhood where you can get anything for $3. So those kind of community level supports aren’t always there anymore as a function of these larger macroeconomic forces of gentrification and housing prices.

michelle goldberg

And can I just add — also, I think the amount of supervision and cultivation that’s expected of parents has escalated dramatically.

ross douthat

To me, there’s also a sense in which I tend to think of it as less about scarcity and more about abundance, in the sense that this trend obviously correlates with countries getting very rich. I was joking about the ease of raising kids. But the reality is that there is an irreducible difficulty to having children that no amount of wealth can get rid of. And this comes up in your op-ed a bit, Anna. But the cost of childcare doesn’t go down in the way that the cost of a new stereo goes down, because you need a human being to watch your child if you’re not watching your own child. And in that sense, I don’t think it’s surprising that people in an age of general material abundance would find this lifelong task that the material abundance doesn’t make easier something they’re less inclined to do. And I wanted to ask you about something that we sort of went back and forth briefly about on Twitter, which is that your piece doesn’t really get into the question of marriage and marriage rates. But I wanted to ask you about that, just because one of the facts about the recent fertility decline in the U.S. is that it’s not happening among married couples. Married fertility in the last 10 or 15 years is pretty stable. And so it’s a function of rates of single parenthood dropping slightly and lower marriage rates overall. And I wonder how you fit the decline of marriage itself into the story you’re telling.

anna louie sussman

One thing that really stuck with me — it didn’t go in the piece. But when I was reporting in Denmark, I talked to this policymaker. She was concerned about the fertility issue. And my joke when I talk to policymakers, if you want to see your birth rates go up, you need to fix men. For example, you could have a law that if you don’t return a woman’s SMS within a week, you get fined $50, something like that. I find myself, for example — I’m not going out with anyone. And on any given evening, I could go out on a date, or I could you know finish a story I’m working on or write something that I’m doing for income. And you wind up getting into this very calculating mindset that I think makes it really hard to relax and go out and meet people. And that’s, I think, also what I was referring to in terms of a scarcity mentality.

ross douthat

What do you think is wrong with the men?

anna louie sussman

Well, I was going to offer an example from a Bumble profile that crossed my path recently. His profile reads, “Hedge fund manager that has generated top one percent returns globally three years in a row. Travel a ton for work. Like sports. Collegiate athlete. I have limited time, so don’t try to negotiate stupid crap with me. Let life happen. Let’s meet for a drink.”

ross douthat

That was actually in my Bumble profile before I was married.

michelle goldberg

Wait, can I say something here? Anna and I have been friends for a long time. And sometimes when we’re talking about how brutal it is out there, I’ve actually wanted Anna to talk to Ross, because the one thing that I think that you guys both hit on from different directions, that Ross has written a bunch of columns about men and women growing apart, just having less and less in common. And that’s, I feel like, sometimes what I hear from Anna about just that it’s almost like speaking a different language to try to communicate with these people.

anna louie sussman

I used to be more, why can’t they get it together. Why don’t they read more? Why don’t they diversify their interests? But it’s an environment where also men still believe in that they have to earn a family wage. And I think whether you’re a woman or a man, if you’re working 100 hours a week, you’re not going to have the time and opportunity to pursue whatever other interests you have. So what that means for me when I’m sitting across the table or sitting at a bar with someone, trying to get to know them, is that I don’t necessarily haven’t anything in common, because he’s been working a lot. And I’ve been doing the kind of interesting, fulfilling job that, as a woman, I’ve been told “pursue your passion.” I think men get such different messages. And it’s left us, especially in an era where you do need so much money to survive, in these very different positions.

ross douthat

I want to quickly just quickly defend the male desire to be the breadwinner, because I think one of the questions that hangs over this alienation between the sexes is a question of what are men for in a post-feminist egalitarian society where the example of the professional women who you’re talking about in Europe or America are basically saying, well, I can do everything a man can do now. But I still want a partner and so on. Men need a sense of purpose. And even in an egalitarian society, the obvious place to find purpose is, look, your partner, your female partner does this incredibly difficult but also incredibly awesome thing of gestating and bearing a child. And your role in that is a sort of protective, providing role. You want to be equipped to, if not being the sole breadwinner all the time, being the person who can carry the load while your wife is pregnant and while your kid is young and so on. And I think it’s very hard to imagine a healthy masculinity that produces the kind of guys who would be suitable spouses for you, Anna, without some element of that, without some element of, look, being a man, I’m never going to bear a child in my womb. But I can offer something to a future spouse while she does that that she can’t do for herself.

anna louie sussman

Here’s what I don’t understand. I went on a date a month or two ago someone who works at a hedge fund. And he said at first he didn’t tell women where he worked, because he didn’t want to be seen as a big checkbook. But then he said, you know what, it’s part of who I am. And I like numbers. And this is the job I chose. And I do want to be able to provide for a family and make that known. But I think what he was missing and what I find myself wondering about is, wouldn’t it be so much nicer to be wanted than needed. If you know that I don’t actually need you for your money, but I just picked you, because you’re the most fun person I’ve met to hang out with, wouldn’t that be a wonderful basis on which to form a relationship? And Ross, if you’re lucky, we’ll get married. Maybe we’ll even convert to Catholicism.

ross douthat

I don’t even — I’m blushing at the other end of the mic.

david leonhardt

And on that note, Anna Louie Sussman, thank you so much for joining us.

anna louie sussman

Thank you for having me.

michelle goldberg

Thanks, Anna.

ross douthat

Thanks, Anna.

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we suggest something meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, It is your turn this week. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

I’m going to recommend the movie “Queen and Slim” which I wrote about in my column this week. It’s this really remarkable film about this couple on a sort of very awkward and desultory first date who are on their way home. He’s on his way to drop her off. And they’re pulled over by the police. It’s the sort of encounter that we’ve seen a million times in which the cop becomes needlessly aggressive and ends up menacing black people and in some case killing them, except in this case, there’s a scuffle. The cop ends up being killed in self-defense. And this couple go on the run. It’s not a perfect film. But I was just so rapt by this movie. I was kind of ugly crying when it ended. And I was also sort of astonished that it got made at all. And I see that as a optimistic sign of where the culture is. It’s been compared to a lot of blaxploitation films. There’s also obvious comparisons to “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Thelma and Louise.” And I looked back at some of the criticism around those two movies. Those two movies were really, really hard to get made. And I assumed that this movie with a first-time director who’s a woman of color, a black woman script writer, a movie that’s steeped in the politics of Black Lives Matter— I would have thought it would have had a much harder road to the Hollywood screens than it did. But apparently, Universal basically gave the filmmakers the resources they need and turned them loose.

ross douthat

I’m really looking forward to seeing it, not least because I just saw— my last movie experience was Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” which I really wanted to like, because I’m, of course, on Scorsese’s side in the great battle over comic book movies. But “The Irishman” was, I thought, sort of ruined by having Robert De Niro play a role that he’s just too old to play and using digital effects that didn’t suffice to have him fill the part. So a more dynamic and youthful and interestingly political movie that isn’t a comic book movie sounds great to me right now.

david leonhardt

And it’s shorter.

ross douthat

And it’s an hour and 15 minutes shorter than “The Irishman” as well.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s the recommendation?

michelle goldberg

“Queen and Slim.”

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thanks so much for listening. And we would very much like to hear from you. Share your sociopolitical New Year’s resolution with us or your views on free college or declining fertility rates. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sarah Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat