The Treasury secretary’s comments to the Senate demonstrate progressives’ failure to understand that human beings are assets, not liabilities.
The Treasury secretary’s comments to the Senate demonstrate progressives’ failure to understand that human beings are assets, not liabilities.
S ecretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen made some comments about abortion during Senate testimony yesterday that deserve our attention. Here’s what she said to Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.):
What we’re talking about is whether or not women will have the ability to regulate their reproductive situation in ways that will enable them to plan lives that are fulfilling and satisfying for them, and one aspect of a satisfying life is being able to feel that you have the financial resources to raise a child, that the children you bring into the world are wanted and that you have the ability to take care of them. In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability, often, to continue their education to later participate in the workforce. So there, there is a spillover into labor force participation, but, and it means the children will grow up in poverty and do, do worse themselves. This is not harsh, this is the truth.
Senator Scott, of course, knows a thing or two about being black and being poor. “I’ll just simply say that as a guy raised by a black woman in abject poverty, I’m thankful to be here as a United States senator,” Scott told Yellen.
Scott’s objection to Yellen is that discussing abortion from an entirely economic point of view completely misses the point of the discussion. And he’s right. But Yellen wasn’t even considering the economic question in full.
It’s a hard sell to say that abortions, in general, have improved women’s economic prospects. The number of abortions in the U.S. has been declining for decades even as women have come to make up a greater and greater share of the labor force. There is probably no causal relationship in either direction here, but in any event, the idea that abortions make it easier for women to work doesn’t seem to be borne out by the data.
Yellen also fails to consider the other side of the ledger: women who got an abortion believing it would make their lives more “fulfilling and satisfying” and proceeded to focus on their careers, only to realize too late that they actually did want children. Much good has come from women’s participation in the workforce, but as Charles Krauthammer wrote in a 2000 column, “Like all great revolutions, feminism has its price and its victims.”
More fundamentally, Yellen’s view of human beings is incorrect: She views them as macroeconomic liabilities rather than macroeconomic assets. In her view, they take up space, consume resources, and impose burdens on those who care for them. And of course, they do those things. But they don’t just do those things. They also come up with new ideas, produce resources, and care for other people. On balance, they are assets, not liabilities.
This is a point that progressives have failed to understand for years. From the eugenics proponents of the early 20th century to the environmentalists of today, progressives have never believed that human beings are, as economist Julian Simon called them, the ultimate resource. They’re forever stuck in the zero-sum world of Malthus, where people are problematic mouths to feed, instead of the positive-sum world we actually live in, where people are a creative force to invest in.
People aren’t being irrational when they’re excited to have children or happy to be around and help care for other people’s children. There is a deep human desire for children to grow up, prosper, and have families of their own, and the adults in their lives are in many cases happy to sacrifice so that they might do so.
Sometimes those sacrifices entail forgoing higher education. Sometimes they entail leaving the labor force for a while. Those choices are common among people of every race, religion, and income bracket. They aren’t a problem to be solved — and even if they were, the solution would not be to prevent children from ever being born.
Children are not economic obstacles for adults to overcome, and Janet Yellen should not be talking about them as if they were in testimony before the U.S. Senate. They are macroeconomic assets, and we should want more of them.