The market in attention

09/13/2023 Brandon Christensen Culture attention, child-rearing, free markets, Hedgehog Review, marketing, parenting, Talbot Brewer

The strongest arguments for unregulated markets all turn on some variation of the thought that free markets are the most efficient way of satisfying our preferences and hence advancing our good as we conceive of it. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that free markets are also good at shaping our preferences or forming our conceptions of the good. Hence, the strongest arguments for unregulated markets no longer apply to what has become the largest economic sector in the global economy today. There is no obvious reason to extend laissez faire ideals to the market in attention, and there are especially strong reasons not to extend them to the market in our children’s attention. We have, nonetheless, sleepwalked into a sweeping experiment with this extension. The results of this experiment are now becoming clear:

Read the rest, from Talbot Brewer in Hedgehog Review.

Isn’t this just a variant of “we need government to control/regulate this for the children’s sake”? As a parent I pay closer attention to these types of arguments, but someday my kiddos are going to be adults. Wouldn’t it be better to give them freedom to choose and guidance on consequences?

Black-and-white libertarianism

02/17/202002/17/2020 Brandon Christensen Liberty childhood, freedom, liberty, parenting, personhood

I was hanging out in my daughter’s room the other day and noticed a new picture of her on the wall. My daughter is nearly 3 now, but that photo showed to me a person who will someday be a young girl, a woman, a daughter-in-law, a college student, a worker, and, if all goes accordingly, a grandmother or at least a sassy old lady who plays too much bingo down at the local Methodist church.

A little later on that same night, after the kids were tucked in and sleeping and I was on this damned computer doing NOL stuff, I thought about liberty and what it might mean to my daughter, and also about how the meaning of liberty has changed over time in my own mind.

For starters, “liberty” is kind of a corny term now. It’s becoming archaic. “Freedom” has started to become a corny word, too. (Its cause is not helped by American politicians using the term “freedom” to describe Washington’s overseas ambitions.)

Knowing what I know now about the libertarian movement in the United States, I don’t think I will introduce my daughter to the formal movement. No summer seminars, no Reason subscription, no Ayn Rand moment where I hand her Atlas Shrugged and tell her how much that book has changed my life.

I think a better avenue for discovering her freedom will be to encourage her to go to the best college she can get in to (sorry Rick), figure out a way to be grateful for employment, and read plenty of literature and science fiction.

The formal libertarian atmosphere probably won’t be around in the same way it was for us. Will it be more decentralized or more centralized? I don’t know how academic it will be, either. I hope it’s somewhat academic, with more of an emphasis on history and culture rather than economics and philosophy. The think tanks and foundations will still be around. They’ll still be dirty and they’ll still better than the alternatives. We had FEE and IHS. FEE has already fallen off the map. IHS might still be around, but it will have plenty of competition.

What if my daughter discovers my notes on liberty? Will she be proud? Will she giggle? Or worse: Will she be embarrassed? Will she become a libertarian if she stumbles across my writings? It’s too early to say. That photo, though, of a little human being smiling back at me in black-and-white, was profound. She is my daughter, sure, but she is someone different than me. She is her own self.