Why are people having fewer children than they say they want? In this episode of Ben Yeoh Chats, I speak to writer and policy thinker Phoebe Arslanagić-Little about one of the most consequential questions in modern Britain: why family life seems to have become harder to start, and harder to grow, even for people who want it.
Phoebe’s starting point is what she calls the “birth gap”: the gap between the number of children women say they would like to have and the number they actually end up having. That gap matters because it suggests this is not simply a story of changing tastes or shrinking ambitions. It points to something more complicated: a collision between personal hopes and the social, economic, and cultural realities of modern life.
“I don’t really subscribe to any of the theories that say, oh, it’s this one thing. I think it genuinely is like a confluence of factors.”
We discuss why this is not a one-variable problem. It is not just about money, though money matters. It is not just about housing, or childcare, or biology, or shifting values, though all of those matter too. As Phoebe argues, fertility is shaped by a confluence of factors: career timing, the costs of parenthood, the social contagion of what we see our peers doing, the changing meaning of adulthood, and the ever-rising standards many people feel they must meet before they are “ready” to have children.
“I think the state should very openly say there are people who want to have children. We think that’s great. We’d like to help them.”
That leads us into the policy debate. Phoebe makes the case for a more openly pro-parent state: one willing to say clearly that if people want to have children, society should try to make that easier rather than harder. We talk about the practical measures she thinks could make a real difference: better maternity pay, front-loading child benefit into the early years, improving maternity care and women’s experience of childbirth, more realistic thinking about paternity leave, and greater recognition of the role that grandparents and wider family networks can play.
We also talk about what governments signal, not just what they spend. Phoebe reflects on the long legacy of overpopulation thinking, from Paul Ehrlich to the anti-natalist policies of countries such as South Korea and China, and why state messages can shape behaviour long after official policy changes. We discuss universal versus targeted family benefits, the politics of fairness between parents and non-parents, and whether the state can ever really be “neutral” on something as foundational as family formation.
Along the way, the conversation opens out into some of Phoebe’s wider writing and interests. We discuss single-parent families, childcare ratios, dating apps, ultra-processed foods, shrimp welfare, astrology, lab-grown meat, pubs, Lime bikes, and the broader question of how modern societies make trade-offs between freedom, comfort, order, and community.
The episode also has a more personal side. Phoebe talks movingly about what surprised her most about becoming a mother: not only the practical challenge, but the strangeness of meeting your baby and realising that this tiny person, so important to you already, is also someone you do not yet know. It is one of the loveliest moments in the conversation, and one that captures something the policy debate often misses: family life is not only an economic or political issue, but a deeply human one.
This is a conversation about fertility and family policy, but it is also about modern adulthood, social expectations, cultural drift, and the kind of world we are building for the next generation.
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.
Contents
00:00 Fertility Crisis Defined
01:25 Overpopulation Narrative Origins
03:22 Is the Birth Gap Real
04:59 Why People Delay Kids
06:41 Culture and Readiness Standards
09:51 Policy Levers to Boost Births
13:06 Making Birth Less Traumatic
15:13 Paternity Leave and Social Engineering
22:05 State Neutrality and Universal Benefits
27:36 Grandparents and Informal Childcare
31:24 Single Parents and China Lessons
34:52 Best Family Policy Levers
36:33 Childcare Costs and Incentives
38:31 Childcare Ratios Debate
40:21 Safety Versus Deregulation
41:33 Underrated Overrated Round
42:20 Food Fears and Animal Welfare
45:12 Astrology and Lab Meat
47:41 Pubs Alcohol and E Bikes
52:18 Dating Apps and Social Mixing
58:49 Writing Process and Motherhood
01:01:49 Projects Advice and Wrap Up
Transcript (lightly edited, transcribed by LLM AI, so mistakes are very possible)
Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super, super excited to be speaking to Phoebe Arslanagić-Little. Phoebe is a brilliant writer and policy thinker. Phoebe, welcome.
Phoebe: Hi Ben. Nice to be here.
Ben: When you write about the fertility crisis, what do you mean by that and what do you think most people misunderstand about the debate?
Phoebe: So when I write about the fertility crisis in the uk, I suppose what I'm particularly interested in is what we call the birth gap.
So the gap between the number of children that women want to have, which is about 2.3, the number that they actually have, which is now probably around under two, shows that there is a predictive element to the TFR measurement. That means that it can go up and down, and is quite lumpy in terms of what people frequently misunderstand.
I think it's. Important for people in policy who are familiar with hearing about the birth rate challenge, familiar with hearing about the idea that birth rates are declining and that there are social and economic problems for us as a result of that. To remember that actually very many people still, fully believe that actually the main problem in terms of population of the world today and even in our own country, is that actually too many babies are being born.
This is a prob, this is unnecessary strain upon the earth and that this endangers our species in all sorts of ways. That's probably the number one misunderstanding I have when I talk to people outside the policy world about my work.
Ben: I guess, do we blame that on Malthus? 'cause he argued for it quite powerfully.
I don't know quite when that was, a couple of hundred years ago. Roughly. My history isn't so great. And that really caught the public's imagination. And it was more contested at the time, although it has been convincingly proved somewhat wrong.
Phoebe: I think we blame a more modern cohort of writers for the current worries around overpopulation.
Paul Erlich, the population boom, was published in the 1960s. I think that was an extremely influential book. It's still very well known, partly because it's got all these fun passages predicting things like the people of Britain starving to death by the year two thousand. People now quite like Tweeting about those.
His book was the start of a publishing boom of people worried about overpopulation with very evocative names, like reading ourselves to death. It was an extremely mainstream concern at the time. It was an area of focus for international philanthropy. Very much not a niche warrior.
It's something that the leaders of developing countries were extremely aware of. It really was like a major goal of international aid and philanthropy probably for at least 20 plus years. And that's had a really major effect I think both in terms of the sort of global international community and how they think about the problem, but also actually in terms of the developing countries that were influenced.
I wrote recently about South Korea and their very low birth rate. And South Korea is an example of a country that had decades of antenatal policies. Antenatal program sparked in part by and certainly promoted by like international actors who are really worried about overpopulation in that country and in many other countries.
Ben: I didn't realize how powerful that narrative was actually when the modern day thinks about it. Because it shows how when you do get something which has that as very salient, it can get really captured by lots of people, even if it's not fully evidenced by the data. And do you think maybe globally, but also in the uk, how robust do you feel this gap is between people who want kids but can't make it work?
I think you're saying this is around 2.3 versus Actually people generally no longer want as many kids, and that's falling particularly when you ask when you ask women. I guess probably that was maybe gone from three or four in the past to maybe that's this 2.3. So that has also been falling.
But your point is that there's still a gap between what's happening and where we would like to be.
Phoebe: Yeah, I think that there is still a gap. I think with. Child mortality being as low as it is now, we would expect people's desired number of children to decline anyway.
And that's something that people don't, it's always been uncommon in this country for quite a long time to really intend to have a family of let's say five or six children. There've always been people who want that. There are still people who want that. But really the norm is all always hobbled around more like two to four.
We haven't seen very big increases in a preference for single children in this country that we have to some extent. And that's especially been true in Scotland. The question of this is, this is a good challenge, yes. Okay. People say that they want this number of children, but they don't have them.
And is it possible that this is simply a revealed preference? I don't totally dismiss that. But I think that we've got to be really careful about deciding that is simply a driver of lower birth rate, particularly considering other factors that I think are probably pressing on couples and on individuals to cause 'em to delay their families or be unable to have as many children as they want.
Ben: And if you look at those factors, what do you think is the split between how big those drivers are? Let's say the UK but you might have a view when you zoom out and I guess you've got some big blobs like money, time, housing, culture, biology. Obviously they're also interrelated, but do you think one of those waits particularly more or two or three of those?
I think we, those are really big ones and some others are underrated or overrated.
Phoebe: I definitely don't have a sort of grand, it's this really big, it's this factor that really like clinches, its theory of a fertility. And I don't really, I don't really subscribe to any of the theories that say, oh, it's this one thing.
I think it genuinely is like a confluence of factors. And you can see this, when, when people think about it, we can all see this in our own lives. If you think about the reasons that you do or do not have children each of us could probably sit down and write 10 to 15 statements about why we do or do not have children, which are complete, all completely true.
But it's very difficult for us as individuals to understand which one of those is the most impactful. There may even be factors actually that are quite, working on us that we're not really even aware of and that we won't write down. So if we talk about, I mean you mentioned cost and things like that.
Certainly I think the sharpness of Career Parenthood is a trade off. It makes a very big difference when it is, especially when people decide to have children, and how big are the families that they consider having. Ultimately if you are an educated woman, the more time you spend in education, the more time you spend developing your career.
It means that the effect of having children, which definitely exists, and it's certainly possible to mitigate it, but I don't think it's possible to totally remove it. It does just carry a higher cost view. I think that social factors are under discussed. I'm extremely interested in them. We know that fertility is highly socially influenced, like very robust.
Finding the fertility outcomes of your siblings and your coworkers matters quite a lot. Even like what you're seeing on tv, the size of families that you're seeing. When you're seeing people around you begin to have children that I think works with material factors. It's. It's hard, I think, to disentangle those sorts of cultural material factors from one another because some of this is also about a perception of what being ready to be a parent looks like.
I think it's fair to say that over time we're moving away. We have moved away certainly in this country from a foundation stone model of family where you get married quite young. So we've never had particularly early marriage in this country except during the baby boom. And you build your family alongside, build your career and the capstone model where you know you have to, establish your career, then you get married, then you have your family, and that does just push you later because you need that time to establish your career first.
And some of that will also mean of course, that the standard of living you are providing for your children changes. You can see this, I think, with debates over whether or not it's acceptable to have your children sharing a bedroom, for example. I would say that's fine. I recently wrote an article about a charity that branded children sharing bedrooms, bedroom poverty which I think is ridiculous.
It's obviously a nice thing for children to have their own bedrooms, but obviously it's not a sign of poverty. I speak to lots of people who I think feel that they're waiting for a sort of feeling of stability and comfort before they feel ready to just, that they, before they feel that they can provide the right kind of life for their child.
And I think people will sometimes reach for, they'll mention specific things if you like, pull them out individually. Sounds frivolous and silly. Like people will say things like, I've had someone say, I had lots of sports lessons or whatever someone said to me growing up I, tennis lessons.
I don't think I could afford that for my child. Now. If I were to have one, and that makes me think that I should wait a bit. And of course it's, we can laugh at this person and think, obviously children don't need tennis lessons. But actually what they're saying is that they're like looking for a marker that they've reached a certain time in life and the tennis lessons are just standing in for that, and they just don't feel that they are there yet.
This is one reason why I'm very wary of ways in which we put pressure on parents. So you need to spend x amount of time with your child. You can't or should send your child to nursery. You have to make sure that they have their own bedroom, et cetera.
Ben: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's interesting how those relative values or relative thinking about wealth or time changed.
I can't remember when it was, but it was a few years ago where I only discovered that the two day weekend is a pretty modern invention. 1950s factories and things. And in fact, before that it was six days of work and your seventh day was generally church or religion related of which only half the day was yourself.
And there was some complaint about how we should move to a three day, and it was only recently that we had that. But given we've got all of these multifactorial and a big cultural social shift, if you were the benign dictator or the chancellor, I guess you could talk about this UK or again, you could be the benign dictator of the world.
What would you be doing then to make it generally easier for people to have the number of children that they want to do and, do those ideas extend globally? What could you actually do?
Phoebe: Certainly in the UK I would just focus on, like , fairly, you might even say dull like bread and butter policies that make being a parent, becoming a parent easier.
Things like more generous maternity pay. So currently in the UK if you go on maternity leave, you are eligible for statutory maternity pay. So that would mean that you would have to be, you have to have your job before getting pregnant. That's the basic eligibility test. Then you would get 90% of your average earnings for six weeks, and then you would get only 185 pounds a week for the rest of your maternity leave, which could be up to a year.
Obviously for most people, that's an extremely significant pay cut. That's all enough to cover your half of the mortgage, not enough to cover your half of the rent. So I think we could do things like, make maternity pay more along the lines of how we pay people during furlough, let's say two thirds of your salary.
I also think that we can look at benefits that we already give to parents, like child benefits, for example, and just shunt those like earlier in, in, in, in the sort of parenthood journey in children's lives. If you are getting child benefit for your your first child and you claim it all the way up to 18, which you're allowed to do if if they're in full-time education till 80, which most kids are now, which receive about 22,000 pounds from the government, which is a significant amount of money, and like just for that one child, like, why not give parents the option to compress that into the first three years of their child's life?
It's just weird. Like it's almost a bit like a baby bonus. I think giving parents lots of free and easy access to money when their children are young, which is time when they're demanding because they need loads of time. They need loads of help, but time when they're also more expensive because your own ability to work is being impaired.
I think that if you make parenting radically easier in these ways, you will also hopefully start to benefit from a social influence, social contagion effect, make things easier for a small group of people to start to have children. That means that people might start to have children, let's say six months to nine months earlier on average than they would've done, maybe even a year or a little bit earlier.
That affects what people see as the right age to have children. That affects what people see as the right age to become a parent. People know more young families themselves. It's very hard to quantify these effects. But I really do think that they mean that a policy that helps some people become parents can reverberate throughout society in the same way that the opposite can happen negatively.
If you are a 28-year-old in South Korea, you are unlikely to know very many young families. You are unlikely to have friends who are having kids. You don't really know what that looks like. You are struggling to imagine what your life would look like, how you'd manage with work. If you were to become a parent, there's no one who can tell you what their experience is.
You start to get the opposite, like essentially then not having children become socially contagious. Ah, and another thing I think we could do to make life easier for parents and if I, as I say, if I were dictated to the UK to help more people to have children, is to improve, I think the experience of giving birth.
We have very low take up of epidurals for a developed country in the uk. Epidurals are excellent. I'm not a total epidural. There are many people and I've met some people who prefer not to have one, and that's absolutely fine. But ultimately the takeup rate in the UK is about 22%. In France, it's 85%.
In the US it's 60%. That's many more people than need to go through a painful birth. I think we can easily make the experience of having a baby a lot better for very many people. And perhaps there are other things we could do around the experience in hospital just to make having a baby a bit more pleasant, better support after you have one.
And I think that could mean that people feel ready to have children as well after they've had one. And that can only be positive as well.
Ben: Excellent. That's a really large cluster of things, which has sparked a few thoughts. For me, in reverse order, I guess the maternity care issue is also conflated with the fact that maternity care in this country is below perhaps where you'd have it for rich Nations.
And I actually asked the LLMs about this the other day, and it looks like it is actually a fixable problem. And there are a few factors in it. And it's partly that the system doesn't seem to be there aren't quite enough midwives. They're not listened to as much, and actually mothers aren't listened to quite enough either, as well as some of the infrastructure issues that were according to the elements.
And the mothers not being listened to was a little bit like if you're having this debate between epidural or not it was decided for you rather than saying oh, actually I might want an epidural then then it's just sway that way. I dunno quite the truth a bit, but there was at least something about why maternity care, and this was only at l and m, so it might have just been reading the newspapers, but I thought that was interesting.
And then coming to a couple of other things regardless, that does seem to be something we can do, as making it easier on the births. I'd be interested if you focus on the maternity side, but you've also written about whether we should equalize per paternity pay and things.
I guess the Nordics have done both. Multifactorial do that. And then also on the cultural side. Because I've seen you write about it, but you didn't mention it in your response was the kind of grandparents or the wider society the wider society piece. I guess if we're only choosing one or two, you may be saying, fix the maternity pay side 'cause you're gonna give that money that way rather than the equality on, on the paternity.
The Nordics, I believe, went along the arguments of, and I guess they do both, but there is something in the career ladder where if you're just away for six to 12 months in a usual corporation. That time away is a little bit difficult on the promotion and just the skills that you lose. So if you send the man away for a certain same amount of time, you don't actually lose that relative promotion ladder.
Because actually when you look at it in corporates often in your twenties to early twenties, there's a, there's the kind of a quality you would be seeing in more entry level associate type positions across a number of corporates. And then it shifts. And so their thinking was around that.
Again, I'm not quite sure how true it was and I just picked it up for skimmed reading, but I'd be interested in that. So that's paternity.
Phoebe: Yeah.
Ben: Grandparents and the like.
Phoebe: Yeah, on, on fathers. So I do think that statutory paternity pay and statutory paternity leave are respectively too low and too short in the uk.
So my husband had statutory paternity leave and he had two weeks off. 'Cause he's a policeman. And statutory paternity pay is just 185 pounds a week. It's probably been operated by now, it's probably about 187 pounds, 50 a week now. I do think it should be longer. I don't think it's, if you are not someone who's living near your family, having a newborn baby and being at home by yourself is very difficult.
And having the father there for longer, let's say three months, does make a very big difference, I think, to families on compulsory longer paternity leave. I wish I could remember the specifics and I might try and find them after this and get them to you. I believe that there is a Nordic country that has brought in or has tried compulsory quite lengthy compulsory paternity leave.
I haven't found that it is possible that people don't really want to take it up. There's quite a lot of reluctance around it, possibly not actually all that good for births. I think that it's good to have a system that is flexible to fathers who want to take a longer time off, and families that want to have that.
But I also, I think. I'm not sure that a world in which, let's say women take six months and, the other six months, either the man uses it or the family loses it would be particularly well designed. Ultimately, most fathers don't want to take six months plus off work. I think that to some extent reflects fairly, normal, globally observed differences in how men and women parent. There are obviously men who do want to take longer off.
I think a system that allows 'em to take six months off or allows a woman to take one month off and go back and then the man take the rest of the year is great. And certainly men should be encouraged to take that up if they want. I think that trying to smuggle some kind of social engineering alongside policies to help people become parents actually doesn't always serve the goal of helping more people become parents.
This area I think is one that's quite prone to people trying to smuggle in. They're often extremely worthy and good social engineering goals alongside for example, I think we see this sometimes with people who are pri are to a great deal concerned with the decline of religious faith and kind of marriage in in the west and also in the uk and particularly in America where you see lots of this kind of commentary and perhaps design policies that are slightly too targeted at religious couples or at marriage couples.
And I think I forgot that actually a lot of births happen outside marriage. There are plenty of countries where most births happen outside marriage, including countries like France and the Western world. And actually, again, by trying to put in other goals, we might be actually moving ourselves away from the goal of helping more people actually to have children on the maternity point.
I think it's worth saying that a major issue, I think that's fairly distinct to the uk, I believe is a bit of an institutional emphasis on natural birth ideals, particularly among midwives, but not only among midwives in British maternity care. This was a reaction to problems in the sixties and seventies where women really weren't being listened to by doctors often having like very highly medicalized birth, often with lots of unnecessary interventions, not very pleasant stuff.
And there was a reaction to the moral sort of midwife centered model of care. Less medical women are allowed to deliver often without ever seeing a doctor because everything is going fine. I think we've overcorrected a bit now, and it's this natural birth ideology that has led to a suspicion of things like epidurals.
'cause if we're a natural born person. You will talk about things like the intervention cascades. So if you consent to one medical intervention, you open up the door to an escalating ladder of interventions that ends with the thing that they really want to avoid, which is a cesarean section. This fear around cesarean sections and the willingness and midwives to really try to avoid them has been implicated quite a lot in the UK in the past 20 years.
A number of maternity scandals, leading to the unnecessary deaths of women and babies. Though our cesarean levels are now rising as a country, I think that's good. I think they're probably artificially depressed before they should have been a bit higher. I'd like to see rates of epidurals rise as well.
A bit more medicalized birth can be quite good for us, I think.
Ben: Okay. Interesting. I hadn't seen that perhaps it was an over correction element. Yeah. I, in the Nordic country, I think there's one where essentially you have a year, 12 months, and you can split it also between parents so they can decide what the split is.
And I think roughly ends up at eight months, four months, so eight to the mother and forward to the man when they get to choose. So this is the whole point about. Empowering parents to have their own choice as opposed to the social engineering fair or even quote unquote, a sort of fairness where you would like let's just advocate for six.
Six. It's interesting when people have this reveal preference. It tends to be eight, four or 9 3 4, I guess a complicated set of reasons, which may be money or time or preference in that we'll come back to maybe the culture and the grandfather grandparents' point as well, but I'm interested if you think that the state should simply be neutral.
Between having kids and not having kids? Or is that kind of impossible because in some ways kids are the future taxpayers. And then I guess in the UK what's really interesting is on child benefits, which if I recall the data correctly, polls really quite well, particularly as a universal benefit.
Actually it was, there was a sense of fairness that, okay if we're gonna help people, we should just help all, even though you could make the argument that richer people don't need it. So you could have a progressive redistribution argument within it. And obviously a. For budget and other things, the UK went down the line of let's limit it and we'll, we will also mean test it as well.
And I get that sense of where fairness is. And I guess one way of thinking about that is for non-parent listeners, where's our argument for saying that as well and what do we get wrong? So still think about whether the state should be neutral. What do we do about the culture of grandparents? Do we just have to let that be a choice and should it be more of a universal benefit?
Or do we have to think about fairness even within something like this as a benefit?
Phoebe: Oh, should the state be neutral? I don't think the state should be neutral whether or not people have children. I think that has essentially been the position of many governments in this country who are for quite a long time now.
You said, children are the taxpayers of tomorrow. That's true. Every child is, every child is an important and worthwhile individual and ends in themself. And I think sometimes people who are concerned about low birth rates end up talking about children in quite a weird way.
Like puts, puts people off. When people look at their little baby, they don't see a future tax fair as much as they hope that they will indeed grow up to be a productive and contributive member of society.
Ben: This is the problem of the utilitarian cost benefit. Yeah. Thinking, which can get you into trouble if you don't the other way, but, yeah.
Phoebe: Yeah. I think what I like to remind people of is that there are lots of bits of our society in the uk, which, we do criticize and often we think could work better, aren't working very well at the moment. Like having easy access, like free healthcare or having a social safety net. That means that if you are disabled or ill for six months.
Or finding a new job. And also having benefits for pensions, right? Like having the state pension. These are basically good things. Yes, we might disagree with whether or not they're being managed properly and what should change, but these are, it's good that they are, we provide properly in our society for people who temporarily or for a longer period of time or because they have already contributed all their lives, can't become to themselves pretty now and need help.
That is, those systems are very dependent on having a large working age population. And they were put in place at a time when our population pyramid was very much more bottom than top heavy. And these are things that most of us would not like to risk. And every child is a contribution to a future where we can maintain these things and we can live in a way and take care of each other in a way that we ultimately want to.
So I think that's what I say on the state, on whether or not the HB Mutual point. And in fact, I think the state should be openly neutral. I think the state should very openly say there are people who want to have children. We think that's great. We'd like to help them. And this is not in any way a rebuke to non-parents.
There have always been and will always be people who don't want to be parents, who can't be parents. But the point is that when other people have children, that's a contribution to a future that benefits everybody. And that's a really key thing. On child benefit. So child benefit was universal. Up until show the dates probably 22 or 2011, now it begins to taper out between earning 60 and 80,000 pounds.
So it is still received by a large proportion of families. Though often many of those will cease to receive it as the parents age and they start to earn more. I do think that there is something. Importance of universal policies for parents and children. Looking back at policies that seem to have been effective in other countries or even in this country, helping people to have more children.
I think it's quite notable that they all seem to have been universal. It's quite interesting to compare the case of Spain and France. Spain and France, both low fertility in the early 20th century, both worried about it, both spent quite a lot of money on policies trying to reverse it. Spain's policies were very targeted and often are like quite conservative grounds towards male breadwinners in married families.
France's policy is much more broad based than that. France's policy succeeded. Spain didn't, that's obviously a simplified story, but possibly there is something about universal benefits that are uniquely good. Maybe because they send that message or state level. We care about you doing this.
We're here to support parents. We're committed to it for everyone. It could also be that states are just quite bad at targeting the marginal baby. Like we're just really bad at finding out who's the group who, if we give them X amount of money a year, actually going to have another child, for example. And maybe if we just got better at predicting that we'd be able to have policies that were much more focused and therefore also cheaper.
However, I don't think that we found any like that yet. Or grandparents. Grandparents. Grandparents are fantastic. Grandparents are an amazing pedagogical technology as well. My daughter is being featured in the book of famous child psychologists because her grandparents, when she was eight months, taught her the names of 27 different animals, and she could just pick them out.
On command from a box full of them. And that's the sort of thing I would never like, thought to do, ever. I would never have sat down and been like, I wonder if I can train my eight month old to differentiate between a Kudu and an Impala. Like I just never would've done it. I'm very lucky to benefit from childcare given by my grandparents, my daughter's grandparents.
She benefits a lot from her relationship with them. More adults in her life who love her and are talking to her and teaching her is excellent. I do wonder if there are ways in which we could help incentivize more grandparent care. The government does quite a lot to subsidize childcare.
I think the government spends about, which is a bit over this now, but it's about 8 billion a year on childcare subsidies. They're all for formal childcare essentially. So all for things like child minders, all for things like nurseries. I think it's possible to design a system where parents can use some of that entitlement on their own parents or on very close relatives, trusted adults like aunts, for example or cousins.
And I think that could help more fam, more extended families get involved in care and could be very helpful because sometimes their grandparents who are very keen to help their children with their children, but they actually work part-time and they quite need that money or their children live a train ride away.
And actually it's quite expensive. It's quite a lot for them. But I'm sure there are things we could do to alleviate those pressures a bit and just make it a bit easier for grandparents to step in.
Ben: And that's interesting. I also read a lot about a kind of single parent family. Penalty.
I think there was a book coming out of the US more, which looked at this. I was interested, where's your view on where that shows up and whether we should be doing anything more specifically around that? Again, it could either be supporting that or. All of the other stuff around the infrastructure that you just do better when you've got more support.
So this is the extended support about whether you are a two-parent family or more extended into grandparents. And that, or again, within fairness and everything that we need to do, are there just other things we need to concentrate on? And then just to comment on your Spain, France, which I thought was really interesting. I do suspect we'll never be able to prove that this is this second order signal that the state sends out.
But my line of evidence is the more extreme counterfactual because of what you've seen in China and because China for so long had this, and I think there is now a consensus very mistaken wherever you are on the political spectrum and even within China, a very mistaken one child policy. But that signal really lives on today.
And there's a load of people and even particularly women I guess, who are just like you gave us this signal for so long, we're just not going back. And they mock all of these posters which had come out during that time. And so there is, I think something around if you do give a universal benefit of the signaling of the signaling that you that you do.
And I just had also thought about conflating things as well. It was one of the problems with the, or challenges within the climate movement. A lot of them talk about climate, but put a lot of other social justice issues intertwined with that. And that puts people off if they don't want to combine those issues in that way.
Now, there might be really good reasons for a lot of these things like poverty, where I think there's a consensus that we could do more on poverty. But when you roll it together, it does get a little bit more murky. But in any event, I'm interested in the single parent family, and maybe any comment on the second order signals that states should be giving.
Phoebe: Yeah, on single parent families. I do get asked about the question of family breakdown. It's something I'm interested in. It's not something that I know a huge amount about. I'm interested in policy interventions that can help keep families together. I don't particularly know what those are.
I'll hear people talking about making it more difficult to get divorced. That doesn't strike me as the right answer, particularly. People make poor decisions about who they marry all the time. It's good for people to be able to get divorced and really, I don't think that a legal structure preventing your divorce is actually going to prevent unsuitable couples from separating from each other.
So that to me, feels like barking up the wrong tree. We do a lot in this country to support single parents, almost all single mothers. Through the benefit system, I saw the most generous benefit awards that's possible to happen when you stack being a single mother with other characteristics.
I, this is a good thing. The book that you are referencing, I think is the two parent privilege, right? From Melissa Kearney. It's obvious to me that having two parents at home is better for children than having one. I'm not a single mother, but I expect that most single mothers would acknowledge if they had an involved and helpful partner that would be better and easier for them in all sorts of ways.
And no doubt that would like red down positively onto their children. Partly it's a resource thing, but I think there'll probably be other factors in how stressed a parent is the kind of household they can have. It is just harder to do these things if there's just one of you. And certainly since becoming a mother myself, I have felt.
Genuine increased admiration for single mothers who managed to do it all by themselves. Because I realize that sounds quite trite, but it is absolutely true. On the signals that states send, I now often hear people cite the China example to me, as in China really wants people to have more children.
They're begging their population to have more children. They have all these posters up, asking people to have more children. It doesn't work. Therefore policies to help more people have children can't work in the uk. But I think it's a really mad example of people to cite. It was literally illegal to have more than one child until fairly recently, the last couple to be fined for having more than one child in China was like five years ago or something like that.
This was a concerted throughout society, extremely like the intensely resource backed program to make sure that people only had one child within some cases, like pretty terrible consequences for people who had. More than one, let alone simply like fines or social censure. I think even now China has a free child policy, so I think now it's not even about having as many as you like, there's still a kind of a stricture on how many children you can have.
Certainly what you can't do as a state, at least it's obvious to me, is spend more than two decades bullying your population to not having more than one and then turn around and say, please have more now and expect them all to comply by that stage. All sorts of things have happened to shape a society.
China is a very extreme example, I think. And in fact I don't really like to use the example when I'm talking about antenatal programs because the world child policy was so brutal and in some ways for me, it's more interesting to look at examples like Singapore or South Korea where there was a lot of propaganda, a lot of state time spent trying to convince people to have pure children.
But having more than one child didn't mean that you were fined or had your pregnancy terminated by force. So it is quite a different thing.
Ben: Yeah, I guess that makes sense as well. I think there's some comment about how things are going and I think, is it Hungary or somewhere that in terms of policies and stuff, but putting it all together then say if you had to choose, and I guess the message is here, you really don't want to choose because it's multifactorial, but are you, is it more generous maternity pay, stronger paternity leave, or cheaper childcare?
It did seem to be that maternity pay came as your first leave to push. Is that the highest leverage that you think we have and also I guess it's the highest potentially for the wellbeing of the family as well.
Phoebe: Maybe the highest leverage thing that I'd push is, would be something like no income tax for parents of young children.
Like maybe you shouldn't, if you have children. Or a scaling system of discounts or income tax. If you end up having one child under five, you get 50% off your basic rate going all the way up to zero if you have three, for example. I really like significant clear policies like that so we can really clearly communicate to parents like you are probably what you'll pay half the tax you do now, or actually none of the tax you do now if you're a basic rate taxpayer, if you have a child.
I think that those are probably some of the most impactful policies because they also, it's a very strong message from the state, right? To say you are contributing already. You are doing this thing, which is difficult and expensive. We're very glad that you want to do it. So we're going to take away this other pressure off you.
I think it would be very controversial. But I think you'll be able to give a clear justification for it. I think that justification would make sense to potential parents as well. In a slightly more realistic world, I think better maternity pay as well. The best things we can do. There's less evidence for childcare.
There's evidence of small effects for middle class women when we make childcare cheaper, but interestingly, not as significant as we might expect in terms of their prenatal effect. I do think that in this country, because there's quite a lot of conversation about childcare being very expensive and very complicated, that is probably in and of itself having an effect on whether or not people think they're ready to have children.
Certainly, if you're a higher earning couple, childcare is really very expensive for you. And it seems to me to be. A mistake to make it very difficult for women in who we've concentrated, like a lot of economic capital to make it difficult for them to have children. Certainly I know couples who are earning, people might say world's smallest violin but no couples where one of them is earning over a hundred K and they find managing the cost of a nursery place very crushing, particularly if they have two children.
And I've definitely met and spoken to couples who have decided to significantly delay having a third child for that reason. If you are earning less and you are fully caught within the system, then it is very generous and it works well, particularly if you could combine that with help from family. But if you are just outside the system, you are really crunched quite hard by the costs and there's no help for you at all.
Ben: No income tax for young parents. I, yeah, I think that would be a hard sell to the politicians, but probably worth taking. Maybe you sell that and they say, oh, the next best is maybe maternity pay. But I think the strict economists tend to prefer sales taxes over income taxes anyway. So you could sell it to them generally about we should just have lower income tax and Yeah, you put it on, you put it on sales tax, but you make it neutral for progressiveness.
Because you do that, and I hadn't, I wasn't aware of childcare. Part, either the, I've only glimpsed at that. The one thing which came obvious within the UK is actually our childcare was a little bit too regulated. The norms that we had for ratios between child minder to children were way lower than France and Sweden.
In fact, they, and they were stricter. I dunno where the balance or that was, but it did suggest that maybe it was too strict. I'm
Phoebe: happy to, I'm happy to say that I don't think the childcare ratio is the problem.
Ben: Interesting.
Phoebe: Don't imagine, and I should just take this, I take this moment. If you don't mind, I know women reading things from their phones is very boring, Ben, but I just want to actually say what they are: one adult for every three children under two.
It's one adult for every five, two year olds. And it's one adult for every eight children, ages over three and one adult for every. 13 children aged over three. If one, if that adult is a qualified teacher. I think that those ratios are or are, like they, they're fairly normal. You get some, you do get European countries that have slight differences.
It's not very significant. I would put it to most people who talk to me about this, like looking after five, two year olds is a lot of two year olds. And I think actually like three under two is also quite a lot of three under two. Certainly eight over three going up to 13 over three sounds like quite a lot to me.
We did actually also relax ratios a couple years ago. It hasn't particularly had an effect. Some nurseries have taken it up, some nurseries haven't, which I expect reflects the fact that some think that their parents will really care about whether or not they raise the ratios. Other things, parents don't really mind, makes a difference.
For us. Staff probably also have a. How many children a member of staff is willing to look after probably has an effect here. But I really don't think our ratios are all that strict. There are people who argue for no ratios at all. I'm not immediately very supportive of that. I do think that you might end up with institutions receiving government subsidies where children are genuinely not safe.
And people might say that, that's the parent's choice. They get to decide. But we actually do accept some level of public safety for children in all sorts of ways. I'm basically happy to accept it in childcare settings as well.
Ben: Great. Oh I'm gonna blame my friend Aria for that, who's trying to convince me of childcare.
I've spoken
Phoebe: to Aria about this already,
Ben: But I guess it goes, it comes actually from that principle pace view. I think that you mentioned that there was a cluster of thinking that essentially that everything needs to be deregulated because there's too much sludge and therefore that group of thinking.
All of it. But you could, as you rightly point out, that maybe the answer is that Sweden or whoever isn't as should be a little bit more strict. Although I do think it plays into the point of the grandparents and the wider community. Is it guidelines, is it legal?
And how much of that goes into the cultural shift? But regardless, I think you're making a point that actually the childcare piece is perhaps not the biggest, if you are thinking about that versus say the maternity pay. Maybe we can move on to a little bit of underrated, overrated, and then talk a little bit about creative processes and things and the like of leave.
So you can be underrated or rated, or you could be neutral or should we have more of it or less of it. And what you are, what you're thinking is on that. So underrated or overrated having a tattoo.
Phoebe: I've got several tattoos. I think they are extremely popular now which is good because all of our children will want to have them because we all have them.
They're probably a bit overrated now. I see a lot of bad tattoos. I have at least one bad tattoo, which is aged very poorly. Yeah. Uber rated
Ben: overrated currently, but could have been underrated. Previously. It swings.
Phoebe: Yeah, they'll probably be underrated in 40 years time.
Ben: Great. The ultra processed foods I'm gonna call it the ultra processed foods panic, but maybe ultra processed foods in general, or maybe specifically around children, but UPF underrated or overrated?
Phoebe: Overrated. I think the basic idea is quite an interesting one, and there are some, like some quite convincing studies that there's something specifically going on with some types of highly processed food, but the term has like. Ballooned out to, to encompass a huge variety of things. And I think it's, I think it's being abused if it had any scientific value at all in the first place.
Ben: Yes. I think when it first came out, there was quite a lot of backing, but to your point, a lot of things have been included and there's actually more nuance on the individual level, but you can look at very processed things like, white breads or things versus the equivalent.
But I was interested also in your piece where I think you alluded to it earlier there's things about if you give your children crisps every now and again or maybe even every day, but you're not, that it's maybe it's not the biggest thing in the world to worry about shrimp or prawn welfare.
Is this underrated or overrated?
Phoebe: I do think it's, I do think it's underrated in general. I worry about animal suffering. I was a vegan for 12 years until fairly recently. And I'm impressed with groups. I think they're called the Shrimp Welfare Project, but I'm not actually a hundred percent sure who spends their time convincing farmers to use killing methods for shrimp and like making changes to how they farm them.
That just means their lives are, our lives are better. Seems to me fairly well established now that lots of particularly marine life, which we haven't, historically associated with being. Particularly sentient actually clearly do feel pain and we should try and make their lives better if we can.
Ben: I definitely see it around octopus. It's interesting on the shrimp thing, my worry a little bit, there is this we referred to earlier where you take utilitarian thinking a little bit too far 'cause you can go, there are, I'm gonna slightly make up the number, but like 10 billion shrimp and they feel like minus point nor one.
But you aggregate that somehow and that's gonna become more of an issue than looking after your own children, which I don't, I think, instinctively say that. But on the other hand, I do think there are low costs and no costs that we can do. To show caring for all sentient things, whether that's vegan or animals.
So as that, so I can see both sides of it and this undiscovered things like we, it I read an essay around octopus, which really did seem to be that if we meet an alien species, which might well be sentient and have their own culture, it might be something like an octopus. And we simply just don't understand.
They're probably telling us jokes, but we just don't get it because it's an octopus joke.
Phoebe: Yes, it's troubling for us 'cause they have such short lives.
Ben: Yeah. And they do. They seem to have culture and community. They escape. They just all do all of these things, which we just can't comprehend. In any event modern astrology, is this an overrated or underrated thing?
Phoebe: Usually overrated and I think people should be much more disciplined with themselves and each other about looking at horoscopes, talking about it, going on apps. Everyone I know who's into it and claims that it's mainly fun, seems to take it too seriously. I think it's clearly complete nonsense.
I don't think we should. I don't think we should endorse it in other people as a quirky habit. It's strange, it's a strange misleading delusion, and I think it might have all sorts of other effects on how people think about themselves in the world. And I don't think any of them could be very good.
Ben: Yeah. I think there might be the slippery slope effects. I think I've only seen it in the US surveys, but if you look at the amount of people who believe in ghosts and supernatural phenomena and witches and all of this, it's a really high number. I think it's over 50% in quite a lot of those sets of questions, and I feel it is adjacent to this.
So you get a lot of that. So yeah, I don't know what to do, but because there is a bit on the other side, I can see it. Yeah. Overrated. Okay. I guess it's come back to shrimp welfare again, but lab grown meat do you think underrated or overrated?
Phoebe: Underrated. I think it's gonna be, I think it'll probably eventually, actually, I know that there are various technological barriers to it at the moment.
I believe it's extremely energy intensive and things like that. But I expect it will in the next a hundred years or so, replace a lot of the meat that we eat. It'd be a good thing, be very cheap and we'll be able to like designs like very healthy sources of protein. We could probably fortify our meat in all sorts of ways, which would be nice.
And eating animals that have actually lived a life and being farmed will become a niche and possibly both high status and very low status.
Ben: Yeah, I could definitely imagine it. I don't know, 200 years from now we will look back and look at eating meat as a really weird anachronistic thing as we do looking back a thousand years and looking at other things, particularly if we get it cheaper and better or cheaper and equal to current.
Phoebe: I hope that we have museum farms, like living museum farms or we can see animals being raised and what it would've been like I do think would be a loss to the countryside. I can see why people get romantic about it. It'd be nice so far great grandchildren know what it looked like.
Ben: Yeah. But I do think there is a little bit, we shape our countryside a lot over the last couple of thousand years, in every which way. So I do think we yeah, we have this somewhat fake nostalgia 'cause we really didn't know what it was like or how much we influenced things. But yeah, I think of iconic pubs as social infrastructure.
I guess this is a kind of very UK question 'cause I think the calculus is maybe different in America or even France and Germany. But pubs are overrated or underrated.
Phoebe: Overrated,
Ben: Right?
Phoebe: Like quite anti pub, slightly unique among my friends. I think that they are not often, not particularly nice environments to be, I don't really like standing up, for example.
Often they're a bit dirty, like floor sticky, table sticky smell of old beer. Not too family friendly. Increasingly you do get family friendly pubs, right? I'm probably more of a wine bar person. I do feel I can see that it is a matter of great sorrow to many of my friends that pubs are closing at the rate that they are.
I do fundamentally think that there are ways in which society has changed. Our habits have changed. It just means they just don't, they don't really cater for that very well anymore. And so actually it's just a, they're closing down 'cause they aren't as wanted as they once were.
And it's amazing to me to see like extremely free market friends become so sentimental about these businesses. However, I also think the wave designed alcohol taxes and so on, and like certain policy changes over the past 20 years have obviously particularly hit pubs. So I am open to them getting perhaps a little bit of a bit of help to save them.
But in general, I think they're gonna fade away 'cause we don't really want them anymore.
Ben: Yeah. So listen to the market. I do think over the years I've become more I guess I was mildly pro alcohol in my youth, and I'm now more neutral. Too negative. I got actually, as the science has changed as well, because initially we were like, there was a big science debate as to this J Cape, she and all that.
But now it's firmly that actually alcohol does have this negative population level. If you could really just take one glass or two a week, you are fine. But actually when you look at it, at the population, there's a lot more harm being done. What you need to do about it is a little bit questionable.
But I do think alcohol has now become firmly overrated for me. Sadly 'cause it does taste quite nice. But anyway, we've got these things: electric bikes or I guess this is more common in London. Overrated or underrated or you could talk about it as a net good for cities in general when you think it's an overrated or underrated thing.
Phoebe: I think they're a net good for cities in general. I also think there's been a lot of law breaking by cyclists in London, particularly since the pandemic. And I now quite often have arguments with cyclists on the street when they try to go through green men and that kind of thing. At war, me, particularly with e-bikes 'cause they're so fast and heavy people, I'm very pro e-bike.
I think I don't really understand when people have quite such negative reactions to them. One thing that they could do, I think, is they could make it even easier to report bikes that have been parked in stupid places. I really hate having to download like, millions of apps so I can have to report with these bikes.
They should all agree on one clear complaint mechanism so that I don't have to sign up to vo, which I had never heard of until two weeks ago. So I can report a bike.
Ben: I briefly looked into that. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the ones which get misplaced, I dunno what the percentages are, essentially the stolen ones or the broken ones where they get jailbroken to be stolen.
And that's why I think there was, at some point you had so many of these line bike beeping noises 'cause they'd been
Phoebe: Yeah.
Ben: That, I dunno whether they, I dunno whether they fixed that or not, but actually it has put me off cycling somewhat other cyclists because they expect you. So I'm a little, I'm a little bit road scared, so I always follow rules and I probably slightly too slow.
I don't drive, but I used to like cycling, but there's actually quite a lot of pressure from these go faster cyclists and they're like, why aren't you going, I guess you get this with cars as well. They go, why aren't you going? It's a red light. Why would I go? Oh,
Phoebe: Interesting.
Ben: And they argue with me and it's I'm not sure I wanna get into, I guess it's the equivalent of cycle rage. Of road rage. But it's just not. Yeah,
Phoebe: Definitely.
Ben: It's a red light and I know there's not, and maybe I was really influenced by being in Japan where they have the same on walking.
They can be a completely clear crossroad with nothing coming. And if there's a red man saying, don't walk, they will not walk and they will think you are a complete crazy person if you decide to walk. They were like, they'll tap you and go oh look. They just think you must just not have seen it.
Yeah. And had a crazed moment. Then this is the whole social cultural conditioning. Whereas in, in somewhere like Paris, they're like, if you wait for that, you'll never cross the road. The prisons are like, what you have to do is go into the road and you assume the car is going to stop. Yeah. When they see you in it.
Phoebe: Yes.
Ben: I think there's a really fascinating cultural difference in that one. Okay. Last one here. Dating apps, do you think that's underrated or overrated?
Phoebe: They're probably a bit underrated now. I think it's become very popular to criticize dating apps as the source of all dating woes. I feel that there's probably something that we're slightly missing here in that I just find it hard to believe that having access, I'd never used dating apps.
I met my husband when I was 17 but it's hard to see that having access to a significantly larger pool of people than you would've done without the dating app is by itself. What's making it harder to find someone? I wonder if there's something here about the way that we use apps, which is maybe not quite right.
I wonder if we can change our choices slightly around these tools. I think the tool itself is probably still pretty useful and probably going to actually like, stay with us permanently in some form. I think we probably have to evolve slightly different norms to dating apps than the ones that we have now.
For example, I've recently had lots of arguments with female friends who I believe have been judging men's profiles by very similar female standards. Oh, the men aren't being witty enough in their prompts. Oh, they're not being witty enough in their bios. Oh, they haven't said a cute, funny thing here. I think they aren't women, but they're not as good at presenting themselves online as women are who spend a lot of time or like group chats chatting with each other and get really good at a witty, like fun online repartee in a way that like a lot of men don't got to be careful, I think, not to impose all these unhelpful standards onto the profiles that we see.
Ben: Yeah, I don't know about dating apps. So I was lucky as well. I'm a bit older, so they hadn't really been invented, not an app form. When I was dating I think I would've struggled a little bit, but again, it's this weird pool thing 'cause I'm relatively short and there's a really big thing within that I'm about five foot four and I think my pool would've been significantly shrunk because women automatically go, oh, this whole tall man thing.
And as far as they know, heightened. Heightened men don't really correlate with an awful lot of the, many of the other things that you might want. And a long-term partner of course, I guess I would be saying that I'm being short. No, I agree. Short. So that's interesting about how you self cut off this dating pool, although some other friends have said that.
Actually that means it's a very good pond to fish in. Because of that, I do wonder whether there's an interesting second order effect because of the way that dating or dating apps try and match people. And how that works because in my early twenties when, there was a dating thing around, at least this is very London centric thing, you actually ended up going to a lot of house parties or even after work drinks because what happened is you had dated your first order pool of friends and even your second order pool of friends.
And that was like, basically it was either not suitable or something had happened. So that was out. And so the only way you are really gonna meet things is you have to rely on this kind of friend network. And so there's a little bit like, okay, we'll go to the work drinks, and everyone's oh, just come over.
So your primary thing is slightly work networking, but there was a definite second order. I might find someone there. But what happened is because it was just a work drink or a house party, you actually met people who were much more different from you, although, gosh, you are middle class London or whatever it is.
So in some ways not, and I think that allowed a certain less polarizing effect. So I see this within and maybe it's a social media discourse, but when you're in person. Leftists and righteous get along much better than you do when I see them online. And I don't think they meet one another as much as they did 20 years ago because they were meeting each other 20 years ago because they didn't have a choice if they were on the dating thing.
And now it will be quite obvious to the app that you generally don't do that. So I do wonder at the margin that has touched things, it's probably a completely made up theory by me. But I do see it a little bit. And now we have these meetups. In fact I do these meetups and I try to mix them up and they do seem to be really successful.
They're not really for dating, but I do think people miss that slightly. And we did have that more than 20 years ago when we didn't have dating apps because actually work meetups, their secondary purpose was potentially to find a partner. So anyway, that's my thought on dating apps. I dunno whether underrated or overrated, but it's a thing.
Phoebe: People are so homophilic, people like to date within their own groups, marry within their own groups, often to an extreme extent. Like it's ob we, it's observable, isn't it? That people prefer to go out, people who look like themselves which is a strange thing to contemplate. That's so absurd.
I'm not, yeah. Poss but yeah, way. I still think actually you'd expect a dating app to break open that pool a bit more just because of the sheer range of people and how geographically dispersed they are. Whereas like when a friend knows a friend, there's going to be a lot of shared background there though actually.
I often think that's helpful. Friends can't act as background checks. You know that someone's normal. It's more socially embarrassing for one person to be unkind to the other or stand them up because you all know each other. I do think something though that might be part of what you're driving at is that probably, but I'm theorizing here when people have a dating app on their phone.
They're less likely to even treat a work meetup, for example, as an opportunity to look for someone because they have a very distinct, like here's the, I have a place already where I look for people. This is like a professional environment. I don't need to combine these things where I once may have done so I'm not going to anymore.
Also, I think you see it increasing with people being sometimes a bit unwilling to date within their friend group. Something I hear, I'm not quite sure if it's true, but it's definitely like commentary that I've seen online a lot over the last few years. Once that would've been quite common, but now that's considered slightly impolite.
Like why would you threaten our bonds of friendship and possibly make it weird in this group of people when you could just go on your phone and find someone who we don't know.
Ben: Oh, I hadn't heard of that. That's interesting. The only other thing I picked up was, maybe this is more of a West coast rationalist thing, but these dating profiles where particularly actually if you've dated someone, you then shop around the dating profile of the person you dated saying, Hey, this person's really great.
Not for me, but you should. You should date them.
Phoebe: I think that's a great norm. I thought, that's great. People make fun of these, but I think they're fantastic. I strongly approve of date me docs and all that stuff, and they strike me as extremely cynical and I think. Cynicism is definitely overrated.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, they seem to have helped. So they do seem to work. So I don't know what the big pool of it is, but anyway, that's only EC data, so maybe it's wrong. I'm interested in your creative processes. So you write columns, you also do think tank policy pieces. Are you someone who writes better in the morning or at night?
Do you outline? Do you edit as you go? Do you have a particular process for developing your ideas and the like, how is it that you come to do your output?
Phoebe: I used to be very much someone who did a lot of work late at night. I was very often very creative and full of energy, but now I have to go up at 6:00 AM every day.
So I don't do that anymore. And I've learned to be creative at other times of the day. The most valuable creative thing I can always do is talk to people about what I'm doing. I have. Network of friends that overlaps in many ways, like with the policy world and with my policy work, which is very, which I really like.
I'm very lucky to have it. So there's always like a pool of people I can talk to about ideas, get ideas from, and really I'm someone who needs to be around other people and to be talking to them in order to be, I think created creative would be producing things of value. That's probably the number one thing for me.
I like to work a bit, work a bit, which my friends who prefer to quietly concentrate, probably don't approve of, but it works well for me.
Ben: Excellent. And is there anything surprising about motherhood or maybe you've changed your mind about motherhood now that you are a mother?
Phoebe: It's interesting what a stranger your child is to when they're born.
I think that's quite a sort of fascinating thing that we don't talk about much. I was one of those. This is a very common saying. You don't hear it spoken about all that much. Like when I met my daughter when she was born, I was extremely pleased to see her. I was delighted that she was well. It was very exciting.
But I wouldn't say that I immediately loved her and I really cared about her and did everything to protect her. But I didn't know who she was. Like they really are like a stranger to you. And you have a strong sense of a fascinating inner life and thoughts happening and reactions that you don't totally understand when you look in your, with your baby's face and you see them interacting with the world.
The best things, particularly about their first year and a half or so, is getting to see who they are and getting to actually understand and know them. And it's a very, very unique and interesting and mysterious thing. But I don't, I'm not sure that people realize how exciting that is and, it's a very like, dynamic relationship in that way. And often you feel that your child knows you much better actually than you know them, particularly when they're like six or seven months old. And that's pretty incredible. I didn't really expect that. I also expected to be a more instinctive mother. I thought I'd immediately know, understand my baby's cues and all her cries.
Actually I was very confused by lots of them for a few weeks. Initially my husband, who has never really spent any significant time around children the way I have, was very instinctive and seemed to immediately be on her level and understand what she wanted. And that was also pretty cool to see.
Ben: Yeah, there's a lot you have to learn about your child which doesn't go how you might have thought. Excellent. Current projects that you are working on or current or future thoughts that you have?
Phoebe: Oh, I'm writing an article about epidurals in the UK and in the world, which I'm very excited about.
I also wrote an article about daycare and all the things that people say about daycare inaccurately, both those who are very for it and those who are very against it. And then in my work at the Think Tank Onwards, I'm writing an interesting paper looking at ways in which we can make life easier for young people/
So actually looking at some of those policies that we've discussed, like changes we can make to the tax system, can we front load child benefits? What kind of effects might these things have? So I'm excited about that.
Ben: Great. And if you would have any advice for listeners, I guess you could put this advice of advice going into motherhood or advice in terms of wanting to work on think tank policies or anything you would like to share what would you suggest.
Phoebe: I do meet lots of people who are interested in going into the UK think tank world. It's quite a strange little world. It's a very small world. I strongly encourage people who are interested to get in touch with anyone working on a policy area that seems right to them. Think Tank is very, always, very happy to meet with people.
They're happy to explain or like the idiosyncratic processes that go on at their organizations and at big tax in general. And generally I think it's an important habit for younger people to get into if you see anyone who has a job that interests you or is doing something that you want to understand how they got to where they are, just to email them and ask to meet.
And most people, certainly in my experience now, I find that I'm very happy to do it. Always happy to sit down and explain how they got to where they are, partly because people do just like talking about themselves.
Ben: Great. So yeah, reach out to think tankers or people who you might wanna learn from and go and speak to them.
That sounds like great advice. With that, Phoebe, thank you.
Phoebe: Thank you, Ben.