Greetings from Montgomery, where daytime highs have finally dropped below 90 for the rest of the year (I hope). It seems like the fall semester just started a week or two ago, but we’re almost to midterms already.
New Content for All Subscribers
After several delays, I finally submitted my review of Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Makes Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, and the editor published it the very next day under the title “The War on Ordinary Families.” Here’s the opening:
In 2013, when my wife was pregnant with our sixth child, we decided it was time to retire the hand-me-down minivan we had been driving for almost a decade and get a more roadworthy family vehicle. So one sunny day I drove onto the lot of a major dealership near my campus and got out to browse. When the smiling salesman walked up and asked if he could help me find something, I told him I needed a vehicle that would seat eight. He paused, frowned, and confessed, “I don’t think we have anything on the lot that will seat eight.” Just like that, I became another casualty in America’s War on Large Families (WoLF). (We ultimately ended up with a 15-passenger van.)
The WoLF takes its toll on families like mine—God ultimately blessed us with seven children—in numerous ways. Occupancy restrictions, car seat regulations, and similar governmental measures function effectively as a tax on children. Even more pernicious are the anti-family norms promoted by media and the corporate world: “childfree” public spaces, handwringing about the alleged irresponsibility of having children in the midst of “the climate catastrophe,” and the readiness of “concerned citizens” to call the cops on the parents of children playing unsupervised.
Tim Carney, a Roman Catholic father of six, is familiar with all of this. But in Family Unfriendly, he has upped the ante by making the case that American culture is hostile to any ordinary family with children, not just large families—not just a WoLF, but a WoOF. Over 14 chapters spanning 368 pages, Carney poses a wide-ranging critique of American life, ranging from travel ball and walkable neighborhoods to transhumanism and radical feminism. By the time you reach the end of the book, you might conclude that it’s providential anyone at all is still having children in this country.
The review was fun to write, and you can tell it’s in a less formal style than my academic publications. You can read the whole thing (along with some of the unhinged comments it elicited) here.
What I’m Writing
I have three pieces due this month, although only one actually has to be written out in full. The first is a conference presentation on natural law and the American Restoration Movement at Faulkner’s Institute for Faith and the Academy conference in a couple of weeks. For that one, I expect I’ll only have time to make an outline and then speak from notes. The second is a webinar for the Russell Kirk Center (about which more later), and I’ll probably try to write out most of that in anticipation of its eventual publication somewhere. The third is a review of David Austin Walsh’s Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right for History: Reviews of New Books. I haven’t started the book yet, so I’ll need to make some serious progress on it this week in order to meet the deadline.
What I’m Reading
For some time, I have been slowly working my way through Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose. McCloskey is an economic historian who manages to give academic writing an informal vibe. The book makes recommendations that fly in the face of what you learned in junior high and high school, but there’s nothing too egregious. It was written primarily for scholars in the social sciences, who continually face the temptation to bog down their writing with scientific-sounding jargon.
Every now and then I read a book on personal finance, and last week I got the Kindle edition of Brian Preston’s Millionaire Mission: A 9-Step System to Level Up Your Finances and Build Wealth. Preston is the cohost of The Money Guy Show on YouTube and has become very popular over the past few years, although I don’t think he’s in Dave Ramsey territory yet. I rarely watch the show, but I was interested in some of the mechanics and guidelines Preston has developed, such as his “Financial Order of Operations.”
One of the sections of the book gives rules for purchasing a car. It stuck out to me because we just bought a car for my wife about a month ago, a couple of weeks before I read the book. I was interested to see that my own thinking about how to handle the purchase tracked pretty closely with Preston’s “20/3/8” rule:
Pay at least 20% down
Finance for no longer than 3 years
Make monthly payments of no more 8% of your income
Our situation was different because we used a life insurance policy to finance the car, but otherwise we fell pretty much within the guidelines. I might write a whole post at some point showing in detail how we worked it out. At any rate, Preston’s book is worth a look if you are interested in ideas on how to handle your finances.
Update
The last week or two have been pretty hectic. Most significantly, I was in the Washington, D.C. area for two different conferences in the Sept. 25-29 window. The first was the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism Summit, which I referenced last week in my post on Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict. In addition to meeting Ripley, I was able to meet Daryl Davis of the Prohuman Foundation. David is well known for befriending more than 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan and persuading them to renounce that ideology.
I also met Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, for the first time at the Mercatus conference. I had known of Klein’s writings for many years and was glad to get a chance to talk with him. He consented to sit down for an interview on the second day of the conference. I’m still working on that transcription, but hope to share it here in a week or two.
I had to leave the pluralism summit, which was in Falls Church, VA, early on Friday to get over to the Philadelphia Society’s board meeting in Tysons Corner, about 15 minutes away. The board meeting was longish (2.5 hours) but productive, and then the fun started with the main meeting. One highlight for me was hearing Lord Daniel Hannan deliver the first keynote Friday evening. I had seen many of his speeches in the European Parliament back before Brexit took effect, and I’ve always considered him a tremendous speaker.
The rest of the meeting was like always: stimulating sessions with challenging ideas punctuated by conversations with friends old and new. Some of my current and former students asked me to go to dinner with them Saturday evening, and our party grew from four to thirty-one by the time we all got to the restaurant!
I do have a couple of trips scheduled for this month: a quick jaunt up to the Russell Kirk Center and a couple of nights in Atlanta for Hillsdale’s Free Market Forum. I also will be representing Ivy Classical Academy at an event in Huntsville. Combine these with the writing deadlines I have, and it’s turning out to be a busy month.