And so what does it mean to actually understand one's preferences, right? How is it that people can get misled by what they think are their preferences, but really aren't?

Well, it's so interesting to me because we've had this whole movement of behavioral economics and there's these giants of this field, you know, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein.

And mostly they talk about financial decisions.

They talk about the way that people might purchase the wrong things or they might not save enough money.

They sometimes talk about food, right? It's like, OK, why are you going to go for the cookies instead of the more nourishing food? But there's this much broader set of decisions that I think that we make that really affect our happiness.

And those are things like who we marry, where we live, and what kind of career to invest in.

And we don't really talk about behavioral economics with those bigger decisions.

I mean, let's

I

do get it.

And I joke, you know, I'm like, every parent listening knows the, like, extended bedtime routine, and you're reading stories, you're processing highs and lows, and, like, okay, I grew up in the 1980s, so my bedtime routine was go to bed, right? Yeah.

We went upstairs and that meant that my mom was someplace else like having time.

She was a single mom and that was how that actually added up and how it doesn't add up for us anymore.

So where does that come from? There are two forces in the data and I need to introduce some economists to speak here to talk about them.

So economists talk about something called human capital, which is the value of your education, your learning, your socio-emotional skills, right? Everything that comes in that package that's going to allow you to not just earn in the labor market, but produce for society, right? Produce things that we value, okay? So that's human capital, the same way, you know, like financial capital has value, you can invest, our human capital has value.

And so could you talk a little bit about status quo bias? So I think

Yeah

... on, "Okay, I can get the baby food pouch for my kid, and I'm gonna be able to squeeze it out, and I know that it's safe.

I can get the pre-made salad, and it's not gonna give our family diarrhea," right? "I can just buy fruit off the shelf." We can't afford, as individuals, to have laboratories in our homes to try to test our food supply, right? Doesn't make any sense.

And so it's something that is more efficiently provided by the government, and that's why we had, until recently, set up a system of very robust food safety controls.

And this dates back over 100 years since the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which kind of alerted people to major issues with food safety and quality.

And then we started building up this system.

And that system has been building up, going in the direction of greater safety and protection until very recently-

What, what has been occurring that i- it has changed some of the dynamics at play here?

Yeah.

It's free money, and so not putting that money in has a big opportunity cost.

Those are the two things I'd like you to try to get in order before your kid goes to pre-K or kindergarten.

But if you're having another kid, you might have a period where you're not saving more than that, more than that-

Yeah

... because you're getting through this period, and then you still have a lot of earnings years to sock money away.

But just make sure that you do take that time to, once your youngest kid goes to, whether it's pre-K or kindergarten, whenever it's free, once that happens, that's the time that I want you to sit down with your spouse and kind of do a little financial reorganization and decide how you're gonna start putting more into investments.

At what point does we'll catch up later stop being realistic? And what does it actually mean to catch up when

you're starting so late? OK, you are doing OK.

You said you're 29 years old like you are doing OK.

Here are the two things that I want you to not wait on.

One, if you have high interest credit card debt, then I do want you to make that a priority in your budget to be working towards paying that off because that is just costing you so much money over time.

And the other thing is, if you or your spouse's employer offers a 401k match, that is a hundred percent return on any money that you put into it.

It's free money.

How do you get on the same page with a partner who finds money conversations overwhelming or painful? That

Mm-hmm

...

but that doesn't, the cost doesn't scale when you add a second kid? And so I think you have to start thinking about potentially different solutions when you're thinking about multiple kids instead of just one, or you really think about the timing so that you're able to not have both of those hitting at the same time.

Yeah

... whenever you stop paying for childcare, I want you to put that date on your calendar, and that's the start saving and start investing again date, okay? [laughs] So you have a date with yourself to get your house back in order because the issue is it often becomes, like, a slippery slope, where you're like, "Okay, we took debt to do this, and now we're just gonna kind of keep doing that." So it is a limited period of time, but you've got to hold it to that limited period.

Mm-hmm.

But, like, you know, I was the 12-year-old feminist who was signing petitions to say that girls and boys shouldn't be treated differently.

And so in my view, like, I was gonna have the career that I wanted, and I didn't really think about how a partnership intersected and a marriage intersected with that.

I just kind of took each decision as it came.

It was like, this guy's nice and I married him.

And, you know, then I was like, okay, and now I kinda want a baby.

Let's have a baby and we'll make it work 'cause our lives are working so far.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

...

but that doesn't, the cost doesn't scale when you add a second kid.

And so I think you have to start thinking about potentially different solutions when you're thinking about multiple kids instead of just one, or you really think about the timing so that you're able to not have both of those hitting at the same time.

Yeah

... whenever you stop paying for childcare, I want you to put that date on your calendar, and that's the start saving and start investing again date, okay? [laughs] So you have a date with yourself to get your house back in order, because the issue is it often becomes, like, a slippery slope where you're like, "Okay, we took debt to do this, and now we're just gonna kind of keep doing that." So it is a limited period of time, but you've gotta hold it to that limited period.

Even if you do hit that crunch where you have one year where you have two

daycare fees at the same time, and then you say, well, this is more than my salary.

Should I even be working? That is the wrong math, okay? Because that is one year.

And if you step outside the labor force, right, the loss of the investment in your human capital- is going to add up to way more than just your salary in that single year, right? So I think we have to understand the same way like when a kid goes to college and if you have two kids who are in college at the same time, you're like, this is impossible, but it's time bound, right? So if you happen to have daycare that you have to pay for two kids in a single year, what can you do to pull resources into that period, right? So you hold off on upgrading the car, but I think the key thing is thinking about your financial planning first over a longer time horizon.

And so I am not in favor of high-interest consumer debt.

I'm going to be the scoldy economist who is going to say, no credit card debt.

And also, you have to be maxing out your 401k match because that's free money.

Yeah.

The most intense it gets is, you know, the like one weekend where they have playoffs and they play two games and not one.

And that is so important is like what you just said is like choosing your peer group, choosing your community so that you're not constantly comparing yourself to something that's not sustainable for you.

Because as I said, the time investments, when you're comparing yourself, if you are a working mom And then your comparison group is all moms who work part time or who, you know, do not work at this moment in time.

And then you're like, oh, but they're giving this to their kid.

They're doing that.

The birthday cupcakes are homemade and the baby food is, you know, made in the food processor and all that.

Right.

So how do you sort of reconcile these two competing things where it's expensive, but, you know, you want to have kids? Well, I think

Mm-hmm, yeah.

So even if the situation doesn't get fixed, empower women to say, "Look, you have agency, and you can make choices that still make your life better." So when we're talking about the squeeze, once you understand how bad it gets in that, you know, middle life period where you've got young kids and young career at the same time, then you give yourself permission to do what I call the minimum viable product, right? To say, "All right, it just is gonna be just okay for right now, and that's all right.

It's okay that the house is a little messy.

It's okay that I don't have the fresh herb garden on the windowsill.

It's okay that we cook one big meal and then we eat the leftovers." You would love to volunteer for the committee.

You would love to try to make the office a better place, but you might be saying no to some of those things to get through the squeeze because what I see in the time use data is that time goes off a cliff as soon as those kids are in full-time school.

Money gets easier because paid childcare comes off your monthly budget, and time gets easier.

So where's the disconnect still happening?

But how is that dynamic of work from home kind of evolving, do you think?

Well, we have seen a lot of companies are trying to drive return to office, right? And the reason is because so much research shows that there's things that happen when we are together in terms of idea sharing, in terms of innovation, that just don't happen the same way at home.

And so a lot of companies are also considering hybrid models, and that's why, you know, I have been encouraging firms to think, you know, if I want return to office, if I want the benefits of being together and synchronous, does that need to be, you know, 8:00 AM till 9:00 PM, or can I get those benefits, you know, from 10:00 to 4:00 of kind of core hours where we try to be in office, but then let people, you know, take care of other things and let people kind of be more flexible for that second part of their workload? Um, and so I think that's some of the things companies might, might wanna consider.

But when we think about work from home, you know, what's interesting is I think because when you're in the office, you're connecting with other humans, and that's the piece that AI can't replace.

I do think people should be thinking, "If I am in a work from home job, I should be more worried that I'm more replaceable.

The less human contact that I have, right, the more that I actually need to be concerned about the long-term trajectory of this job category." So I think we should be looking for ways to create more human connection, but we also shouldn't be sacrificing the very real need to do care labor and to do other types of production, like home production, in our lives.

And so that's about setting those boundaries on those in-office times and not expecting it to kind of bleed into all hours.

So are companies more receptive now than even before the pandemic about the dynamics of everything that's going on in people's lives right now?

Yeah.

They do more of the childcare.

But when a woman earns more, she still does more of the cooking and cleaning and the childcare.

And that's what I call winning the bread and baking it too.

And you don't sign up for that.

You don't make that explicit, right? It's that you get married, in my case, we had equal earning power when we got married, and then he at some point decided to leave his job and kinda try to start a business.

Had some setbacks doing that.

If you think about f- future self, what would be your advice to listeners on if they're thinking about that future self that they're crafting, how do they approach that in a way that they'll have enough of what matters most to them so that they're not the 76% that Tom Gilovich talks about in the twilight phase of your life?

Uh, what do you know about women around that age, which I assume is the ageWell, maybe it's about skills getting out of date, but maybe it's about, like, "Oh, no, I have to help my parents now too, and my kids."

Yeah.

I think of it, I talk about this period in life that's like a squeeze, right? Which is when, you know, our kids are young, and I think the aging parents create, like, a second squeeze on women, and it is because of sy- systemic failures because we don't have real support in society to be able to, like, provide longterm care to our parents or assist us with that, that it ends up falling on kind of individuals to close that gap.

And so yes, it is going to affect your time in the labor market, and that's where one of the things I try to do in the book is to say even if the systems don't change, 'cause I can, like, go on and on about how I want systems to change, but even if the systems don't change, I want to empower women to, like, get back in the driver's seat of their own lives.

And you do that by really recognizing it's a 24-hour day.

That's the constraint.

And so I've got to figure out where I'm gonna invest my time and where I'm gonna invest it when over the course of my life.

So of all I just said, how are we gonna get the government to pay for this? Like, WTF, hello, this is a job.

I love it.

Exactly.

[laughs] You're in my intro MBA class.

Um, so what is a utility function? It's like your individual profit function because when we think about firms, they're maximizing profit, and they're maximizing profit subject to the constraints of how much they have to pay people, how much their inputs cost, who's gonna buy their stuff, right? Well, individuals are maximizing utility, but the difference between utility and profit is that any accountant could look at a firm's profit and agree a- about the same.

Say, like, "Look, this is how much profit they made." But nobody could actually say how much utility you're getting from something because nobody from the outside knows what your values are.

It's individual.

It's personal.

[upbeat music]

Right.

So then they tell their daughters, right, and their nieces and whoever, right, "You've gotta make sure to protect yourself.

Don't let this happen to you.

Make sure you can always earn a living." So women enter the labor force in these big rates, and now women have their own paychecks.

They don't need a man's paycheck, right? And because marriage is kind of insecure, you're not really gonna get the benefits of the commitment if you don't have assets as a household, because assets are the thing that are gonna be divided by the court in case of divorce.

But if you're a family that's kind of living j- paycheck to paycheck, there's nothing that's gonna be divided.

There's no commitment value in marriage anymore.

Absolutely.