++The success of the expanded child tax credit shows why anti-poverty programs should be unconditional. +
++Since 1975, politicians have built huge portions of the American safety net — like the child tax credit (CTC) — around the idea that excluding the poorest Americans from government assistance will motivate them to climb out of deep poverty on their own and get a job. +
++This long-standing bipartisan consensus is manifest in the twin ideas of work and income requirements. Work requirements are simple: You either have a job or you don’t, and that binary is what determines whether you’re eligible for a handful of welfare programs. +
++Income requirements are a little wonkier. They stipulate that anyone without any income will receive no benefits. Only after earned income surpasses a specified level do benefits begin kicking in — which is where we get another dry name: “phase-ins.” +
++In practice, benefitting from programs with income requirements is conditional on already having a job. If you’re unemployed and have no other income, you’re out of luck. In the CTC, phase-ins exclude some 19 million children whose parents don’t have enough income to meet the requirement for receiving the full benefit, while the US retains some of the highest child poverty and mortality rates among peer countries. +
++The consensus excluding the poorest Americans from some forms of government assistance through phase-ins held until President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Its anti-poverty centerpiece was to cut phase-ins from the existing CTC and crank up the payment, creating what’s known as the expanded CTC. +
++The results were historic. Over the course of 2021, child poverty was cut nearly in half, and the long-running fear at the heart of the American welfare system — that unconditional aid would discourage work — never came to pass. +
++Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education). Come 2022, phase-ins returned to the CTC, approximately 3.7 million children were immediately thrust back into poverty in January, and the rest of the year saw the sharpest rise in the history of recorded child poverty rates. +
++Phase-ins have long had critics across the political aisle, but their arguments have generally been grounded in small-scale pilot experiments, appeals to morality, or even philosophizing about human nature. Now that we have real-world evidence from a nationwide, year-long experiment, the expanded CTC’s success should ignite efforts to roll back phase-ins across the board. That also means cutting them from the CTC’s sister program, the earned income tax credit (EITC), which phases in as a supplement to wages for low-income Americans and helps about 31 million Americans. +
++The expanded CTC is estimated to have reduced child poverty rates anywhere from 29 percent to 43 percent, with the vast majority of that drop attributable to removing phase-ins. Extending that success to include the EITC would cut child poverty by an estimated 64 percent. +
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++Child poverty rates in the US rarely budge more than 1 or 2 percent per year, making any of these approaches a pretty big deal. And even so, they still fall well short of eliminating child poverty outright, which should be the policy objective. Poverty, as the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote in 2018, is a “slow-motion trauma” presently being inflicted on 9 million American children. But cutting phase-ins across both programs would establish a powerful channel for dialing down an avoidable source of trauma, should this new evidence shift the political winds. +
++“I’ve been grappling with the long arc of the work,” said Aisha Nyandoro, creator of America’s longest-running guaranteed income program, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust. “The time that it actually takes to shift narratives and perspectives. How do you couple that with the immediate urgency for change, when you know individuals are the ones suffering? How do you hold the urgency of now, while also pushing for the long arc of the work?” +
++We could start by eliminating phase-ins for good. +
++A brief history of phase-ins +
++Through the 1960s and early ’70s, just about everyone agreed that the welfare system wasn’t working as it should. The number of recipients tripled within a decade as racial segregation began to ease, stoking a racist backlash against welfare dollars that could, opponents argued, deter Black mothers from the kind of labor — maids, nannies, agricultural work — that was expected of them. +
++At the same time, left-wing organizers — particularly from the “welfare rights movement” — thought too many people were still left out. They sought to expand eligibility by flooding the system with new recipients until deep reform was necessary. Though that appetite for reform was widely shared, the vision for what would come next forked sharply in two different directions. +
++Left-wing organizers and President Richard Nixon alike wanted guaranteed income-style programs, where anyone in poverty would receive full benefits, no matter their employment status or income. +
++Critics like Sen. Russell Long, a Democrat from Louisiana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, feared that giving full benefits to people without a job or other income would reward idleness instead of work. Instead, he proposed a “work bonus” plan that passed as the EITC in 1975, the first program to exclude the poorest Americans from government assistance by phasing in benefits alongside earned income. In other words, phase-ins were born. +
++Since their inception, the purpose of phase-ins was never to directly reduce poverty. Instead, as a 1975 Finance Committee report stated, their “most significant objective” was “encouraging people to obtain employment, reducing the unemployment rate and reducing the welfare rolls.” +
++The following year, Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign swept this anti-welfare logic into the political mainstream. Through campaign rhetoric that focused on now-debunked ideas like “welfare queens” and baseless claims of widespread welfare fraud, he burned the fear of welfare dependency into the national consciousness. +
++Despite the lack of evidence of fraud, the sentiment took root, to the point that Democratic President Bill Clinton enacted welfare reforms in 1996 that sought to “end welfare as we know it” by introducing a series of work requirements to receive benefits. The American safety net, in other words, had been remade around the logic of phase-ins. +
++Phase-ins, explained +
++So how do phase-ins work, exactly? Phase-ins adjust benefit levels based on income, which is determined through tax filing. Accordingly, the benefits are disbursed as an annual tax credit (with the exception of a portion of the expanded CTC benefit). +
++While work requirements apply to government programs like SNAP and Medicaid, phase-ins apply to tax credits like the CTC and EITC, which together comprised over $160 billion in federal anti-poverty spending in 2020. +
++If you’re a visual person, think of phase-ins as the left-hand slope of a trapezoid. (“Trapezoidal programs” are what policy wonks call programs that both phase in as income rises and phase out as income surpasses an upper threshold.) For example, here’s the trapezoid for a household with one child receiving the federal EITC: +
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++At zero dollars of income, there are zero dollars in benefits. Then, as earned income rises, benefits phase in on an upward slope, until reaching a maximum amount. Then, after a plateau, the benefits begin phasing out to avoid giving money to people who don’t need it. +
++Getting rid of phase-ins would mean starting the maximum benefit right at zero dollars of earned income. Since the expiration of the federal expanded CTC, 11 states have passed smaller versions of the program without phase-ins, like Vermont: +
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++See the difference? If you’re a parent making $0 in income in Vermont, you get the full state CTC ($1,000 per child under 6) — as opposed to the $0 you would get from the phased-in federal CTC. +
++By design, phase-ins are very good at reducing the welfare rolls by excluding millions in deep poverty from receiving benefits. The logic of phase-ins assumes that kicking someone off welfare will lead them back to work. That isn’t always the case, nor should it be. The majority of non-workers who benefit from welfare are “people who cannot or should not be working,” writes Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project think tank. They include children, students, caregivers, the elderly, and those with disabilities, who together made up roughly 86 percent of non-workers in 2017. Forcing these groups into the labor market often looks like a policy failure, not success. +
++Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that using phase-ins to incentivize work is a good idea, the evidence that it actually raises employment is shaky, and growing more so. The strongest argument in favor rested on a rise in employment following the 1993 EITC expansion. But a recent paper by Princeton economist Henrik Kleven argues that, actually, the EITC isn’t what increased employment at all. +
++“The evidence [supporting phase-ins] is really based on this one expansion of the EITC that coincided with a very hot economy, welfare reform, skyrocketing incarceration rates, and changing cultural attitudes about women’s work,” said Jack Landry, a research associate at the Jain Family Institute (JFI), a nonpartisan applied research organization that focuses on guaranteed income. “There isn’t another piece of evidence to go to for this.” +
++The matter remains unsettled among economists, who are still trading blows, trying to hone in on exactly how many — if any — single mothers the EITC might’ve pushed into work in 1993. This debate occurs against the backdrop of the literature on unconditional transfers at large, which finds no significant employment effects. +
++What is not contested is the huge anti-poverty effect of dropping phase-ins, at least in the short term. Maybe an extra $300 per month empowers a few mothers on the margin to work an hour or two less per week, and maybe 10 years down the line, we’d see behavioral responses that don’t show up in the program’s first year — is that “risk” worth rejecting a policy design that can cut child poverty by up to 64 percent today? +
++Dropping phase-ins was almost solely responsible for the expanded CTC’s dramatic success +
++When Congress passed the expanded CTC in 2021, it made a number of tweaks in addition to dropping phase-ins, like including 17-year-olds and making half of the benefit available as monthly payments. And it made one other big change: raising the max annual benefit from $2,000 per child to between $3,000 and $3,600, depending on the child’s age. +
++You might suspect that increasing the payment by at least 50 percent played a significant role in the extra poverty reduction. But as it turns out, it didn’t. Independent reports from both JFI and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) have found that the boosted impact of the expanded CTC was almost entirely driven by the absence of phase-ins. +
++The CBPP report estimated that if the temporary expansion were made permanent, it would lift 4.1 million children above the poverty line in one go. Of those 4.1 million, raising the payment level would account for 543,000 children; the remaining 3.6 million children lifted from poverty would come thanks to the absence of phase-ins. +
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++JFI’s report goes into more detail about the relative contributions of each possible tweak to the CTC. It compares not only the anti-poverty implications of eliminating phase-ins and raising benefit levels relative to the original CTC, but also the costs of each. +
++The JFI report found that if you were to keep the bigger check and bring back the phase-ins, child poverty would only drop by 7 percent, and deep child poverty by just 2 percent — all for an extra cost of $45 billion per year. +
++If you flip it, though — if you get rid of the phase-ins but let the max benefit drop back to $2,000 — you still get a 19 percent drop in overall child poverty and a 32 percent drop in deep child poverty, all for a comparatively modest $17 billion. +
++In other words, cutting phase-ins is more than twice as effective at reducing poverty compared to increasing the benefit amount, and costs less than half as much. +
++Another 2021 JFI report estimated that if you were to keep the benefit at $3,600 but let the phase-ins return, child poverty would increase by 53 percent, driven by all the recipients who would no longer be eligible because they don’t earn enough to qualify. When the Census Bureau released its poverty statistics for 2022, the first full year without the expanded CTC, the JFI estimate looked, if anything, modest. After policymakers let the expanded CTC expire, bringing back phase-ins and lowering the max payment, child poverty rose by 139 percent, the sharpest increase ever recorded. +
++Landry, a co-author on both JFI reports, explained that cutting phase-ins is so much more effective because the poverty rate is held down by precisely those who phase-ins exclude. +
++“And it’s not just about parents who aren’t in the workforce. It’s also about parents who have some earnings, but don’t have enough earnings to qualify for that full CTC,” he said. “Increasing the benefit amount doesn’t help them because they’re still on the phase-in.” +
++So why do some analysts still argue for phase-ins? +
++In late 2021, when the extended CTC was up for renewal, 448 economists signed an open letter supporting the program. But a small, vocal group of experts is still concerned that an expanded CTC and similar programs could discourage work, a narrative that continues to have significant influence in Washington. +
++A few weeks before the expanded CTC was set to expire, amid calls to make the program permanent, Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, made the case against removing phase-ins in the New York Times. The crux: that short-term benefits would be overshadowed by long-term consequences. “Giving the same amount to parents regardless of whether they work will cause some parents to stop working,” Winship argued, resulting in a long-term drop in employment that would ultimately counteract the short-term poverty reduction. +
++Winship was unsurprised that his fears of parents choosing to work less didn’t show up during the expanded CTC. It only lasted for one year and was recognized all the while as a temporary program. “These kinds of behavioral effects take time to set in,” he writes. In the long-term, after a decade or a generation of the program being in place, that’s when he would expect to see, as Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think-tank American Compass, put it, “communities in which labor-force dropout is widespread and widely accepted.” +
++Advocates tend to neglect this point: Some behavioral changes that might not show up in response to a temporary program would arise in response to a permanent one. An extra $300 a month for one year may be nothing to quit your job over, but over a decade, or a generation, we might see hidden effects arise. This is part of the challenge guaranteed income pilots currently face: There is a limit to what small-scale, finite experiments can tell us about a permanent national policy. +
++Long-term speculation, however, can go both ways. The generational impacts of unconditional transfers could just as well lead to long-term investments in education and skills training, support entrepreneurship, and actually raise productivity and economic activity in the long run, all of which would boost, instead of wipe out, poverty reduction. +
++In 2018, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis estimated that childhood poverty costs the US $1.03 trillion per year, or 5.4 percent of the GDP. They found that every dollar spent on reducing child poverty would save the public 7 dollars from the economic costs of poverty. +
++Results from basic income pilots across the US also stand in contrast to Winship’s concern. “Our moms get the guaranteed income and not only do they continue to work, they level up their work,” Nyandoro, who runs the nation’s longest-running guaranteed income program, told me. “They’re able to move from jobs to careers. They’re able to go back to school. They’re able to get out of debt.” +
++The most recent evidence in favor of phase-ins Winship cites is a 2021 paper by a group of economists from the University of Chicago, led by Kevin Corinth and Bruce Meyer. It predicted that making the CTC expansion permanent would spark a 1.5-million-person exodus from the labor force. As analysts were quick to point out, however, the paper is based on a model that already assumes unconditional cash reduces work. Predicting work disincentives using a model that already assumes them tells us nothing about whether the assumption itself is tethered to reality. +
++Corinth and Meyer have since responded to criticism of their work disincentive assumptions, arguing that they fall well within the range used in other studies. These academic debates will continue, but in the meantime, where should the burden of proof lie? +
++Eliminating phase-ins from the CTC was a massive anti-poverty success and had no short-term negative employment effects. Recipients spent the extra few hundred bucks on necessities, from food and clothing to shelter and utilities. Even small businesses voiced their support on the grounds that it would boost spending and entrepreneurship. +
++On the other hand, a minority of skeptics retain speculative concerns that a few generations down the line, newfound consequences might overshadow these benefits. +
++According to Halah Ahmad, JFI’s former lead researcher for policy, these policy debates won’t resolve on the basis of evidence alone. “That’s something that a lot of research organizations are engaging with now,” Ahmad told me, “this question of how much further we can get with evidence, when we know that narrative eats evidence for lunch.” +
++She also raised the idea of policy feedback loops, where the assumptions baked into existing government programs shape our expectations, like self-fulfilling prophecies. Phase-ins convey that only parents with jobs deserve to receive the benefit for their children. “But in Europe, where [unconditional] child allowances have been around for a lot longer,” she said, “there’s a different assumption. Why would you put children in a worse-off position because of the labor market outcomes of their parents?” +
++The CTC worked better without phase-ins; the EITC would too +
++The expanded CTC’s failure to generate sufficient political momentum has left advocates wondering what’s next. “There was this incomparable policy moment when you had this abundance of evidence but somehow no political will,” Ahmad said. +
++One option is to go bigger. Policy feedback theory suggests that the more people who benefit from a government program, the larger the base of support it generates. Eliminating phase-ins from the CTC expanded the base of recipients, but evidently not enough to build sufficient political support. So why stop there? Every social policy that uses a phase-in is an opportunity to lift more Americans from poverty by removing it. Which brings us back to the EITC, the low-income wage supplement, where phase-ins began, and where their elimination could do a lot of good. +
++“Many Democrats spoke eloquently about the injustices of phasing in the CTC, but then decided to go ahead and continue phasing in the EITC, despite the fact that EITC and CTC are basically the exact same benefit,” wrote Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project. +
++In April, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) reintroduced a bill that extends the success of the expanded CTC to the EITC: the End Child Poverty Act (ECPA), which replaces the entire CTC and the child provisions of the EITC with a universal child benefit of $393 per month. No phase-ins. People’s Policy Project estimates that ECPA would cut child poverty by 64 percent and deep child poverty by 70 percent if signed into law. +
++That would leave the non-child provisions of the EITC (a modest $600 or so per year, at maximum) in place, and still subject to phase-ins. But something interesting happens if you remove phase-ins from the whole EITC: It becomes a guaranteed income. Then, you could adjust the payout to set the income floor across the entire economy, with the universal child benefit layered on top for the extra expenses of having children. +
++Unconditional anti-poverty policies would mark a significant shift from the safety net of the past few decades. But the year-long experiment with eliminating phase-ins was the largest signal yet that they work, at least in the short term. And in the long term, tenuous concerns over what might happen generations down the line do not justify leaving millions of children in avoidable poverty today. +
++It’s a good time to be a worker and a bad time to be a consumer — the problem is most people are both. +
++Explaining the state of the American economy at the moment is a conundrum. The labor market is good — as is much of the economy — and people say that everything is terrible. +
++The past couple of years have been a solid stretch for workers in America. Unemployment is low. People who want to find jobs, by and large, can. Wages are up — even accounting for inflation over the past several months, and especially for people at the lower ends of the income spectrum. Workers really have been able to flex their muscles, whether that means quitting their jobs or unionizing or going on strike. +
++And yet, amid all this, poll after poll shows that Americans say the economy is absolutely awful (what Americans do in this supposedly awful economy is a different thing, which we’ll get to later). That such a strong labor market isn’t making a dent, opinion-wise, is a little weird. It seems like this jobs landscape should make the public feel better. So why do people say it doesn’t? +
++There are some obvious answers as to why Americans are so disgruntled. Everything is super expensive. The pandemic hangover is persistent — long covid isn’t just physical, it’s emotional. The government supports doled out in recent years — expanded unemployment insurance, the student loan pause, the child tax credit — have expired. The country’s political system is not exactly working spectacularly, not to mention the sense of dread heading into the 2024 elections. +
++But what if full employment — meaning a labor market firing on all cylinders — or something close to it, like we’ve got now, just isn’t that popular, at least in its current form? +
++Some elements of it clearly are. People generally like higher pay, lower unemployment, and unions. But it’s not that simple — the American public isn’t on cloud nine over the state of affairs. +
++Hot job market, cold hearts +
++To get this out of the way, there is absolutely evidence that full employment in other contexts has gone over much better. In the recent past, the United States largely had a full employment economy in the pre-Covid Trump era in 2018 and 2019. People generally felt pretty good about that. There is a partisanship element to all of this — when a Republican is in the White House, Republican voters say everything is awesome and Democratic voters say everything is terrible, and vice versa, even if they don’t really change their spending. +
++“The reason we think it’s puzzling, why people are unhappy now, is because the evidence that a full employment economy makes people happy is overwhelming,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. +
++Right now, people are frustrated by inflation that, while cooling, is still higher than it has been in many people’s lifetimes, and they’re still missing 2019 prices. Consumers and businesses are dealing with higher interest rates that have come as a result of the Federal Reserve’s attempt to tame inflation, meaning items such as mortgages and car loans are more expensive. All of the noise coming from that can drown out the positive aspects of the economy, including the labor market, which not everyone experiences uniformly. +
++“Full employment is so good for the economy. It raises wages, it brings people into the labor force who have been traditionally left behind, it is an extremely equalizing force,” said Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council. But that equalizing force might be part of the perception problem. “I think a lot of people respond to that negatively because they’re on the other side of that equation.” +
++[Related: The problem isn’t inflation. It’s prices.] +
++This type of labor market means that businesses big and small have to compete more for workers, which they don’t love and complain about loudly. In turn, it means consumers might have to wait more or have a worse time at a restaurant, cafe, or hotel, because staffing just isn’t what it used to be. That latte isn’t only pricier, but it takes longer, and customers are now being asked to tip more often as companies try to keep workers happy and subsidize their pay without cutting into their own bottom lines. This labor market means more “Help Wanted” signs, which are generally a good thing, though that’s not always intuitive. +
++The flip side of full employment is not enough workers. Companies need workers just as much as workers need companies. When employers say, “Oh, it’s so hard to find good help these days,” that means better pay for their employees (though it also sometimes means shorter staffing). The public hears the former voice more often and louder than it does latter. +
++“There is a recognition that a strong labor market is great for workers but not necessarily good for businesses,” said Joanne Hsu, who runs consumer surveys for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “People tell us that they’ve been hearing bad news about labor markets with respect to business conditions.” +
++The Michigan survey’s current readings find that people report hearing more negative news about employment than they did in the mid to late 2010s. “A surprising share of consumers are mentioning labor markets as a topic of negative news about the economy,” Hsu said. +
++Why do people feel like this? A lot of it is perception +
++It may be the case that people should say they feel better about the economy than they do, but nobody can tell anybody how to feel about things or say the reality they’re living isn’t, well, real. As to why full employment isn’t breaking through, sentiment-wise, there are likely a number of factors in play. +
++Partisanship and negative media bias play a role. Republicans aren’t going to say things are good when Joe Biden is in office, and apparently, Democrats have their own qualms, too. (Whether Democrats are actually mad about the economy or just nonplussed by Biden is an open question.) The media tells stories through the lens of business owners, CEOs, and investors, all of whom are less likely to love how hard it is to find workers; stories about the workers who are benefiting tend to be less plentiful. Layoffs make headlines, especially when they’re at big names in media and tech — and even when they’re a teeny tiny sliver of the labor market. Social media often thrives on negative content. +
++Inflation is, of course, painful and an enormous mood dampener. It’s not clear how much higher wages have played into higher prices (the answer appears to be likely not very much). Still, consumers worry that higher pay for workers and organized labor making more demands could lead to higher prices on items ranging from their cars to their Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Inflation also feels like a thing happening to people outside of their control. When things go well for people at work — when they get promotions and raises — they often attribute it to their unique circumstances and talents, not macroeconomic conditions. +
++In a robust labor market like this one, many people feel secure about their jobs and confident about their prospects. At the same time, they’re seeing businesses scrounging around for employees. They can’t get a plumber to come fix their sink, their favorite restaurant has shorter hours, or their local vet clinic has completely shut down. “When you run into that, then you see the downside of the tight labor market, and I think this is particularly acute because people with jobs — which is most people who want jobs right now — have money to spend, and they can’t always spend it in the ways that they want,” Hsu said. “Even good news can be spun into bad news.” +
++Given the strength of the current labor market, it’s fair to think things should feel better. Many people (though not everyone) are making quite a bit more than they were four years ago. It can feel almost more frustrating that your job is finally paying you well, you’re in the spot you wanted to be in, and you still can’t afford things easily. Gas and groceries remain a pain. You finally got to take that vacation, but it was more than you expected to pay, and the service at the hotel was dismal. Moreover, full employment does not address how prohibitively expensive some major pillars of our economy are — health care, child care, higher education, housing. “Making it” in America today doesn’t feel very made. +
++“You need more than fully realized wages, you need many other pieces that comprise your cost of living to be significantly more affordable,” said Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “The reason many of these things aren’t affordable is because their markets are so broken.” +
++Even though people are saying the economy is bad, a lot of them aren’t acting like it +
++In conversations with economists, journalists, policymakers, and others who pay attention to the economy, one theme often comes up: The way people say they feel about the economy right now doesn’t line up with where the data, historically, would indicate it should, or even with their own actions. +
++From 2019 to 2022, American families saw their net worth increase and their incomes go up. While wages overall lagged inflation for much of the pandemic, that’s no longer the case, and they’re growing faster than prices are rising. +
++The economy has seen wage compression as low-wage workers, specifically, have been able to take advantage of the tight labor market. That may cause some consternation for more middle- and upper-middle-class Americans, who aren’t used to much economic discomfort and are accustomed to the gap between them and lower earners being bigger. (The gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, of course, is much wider, which makes you wonder if an economy so unequal could ever feel that good.) +
++As Derek Thompson at the Atlantic noted in 2022, plenty of people say that their personal financial situations are okay and that even their local economies are plugging along, but then they say the national economy is trash. +
++Many Americans are better off financially than they were pre-pandemic, and many of them are acting like it, too. Consumers and businesses have kept spending. New businesses have been created. None of this is to say that all is hunky dory. If you’re trying to buy or sell your house right now, things are far from ideal. Credit card debt is on the rise. I cannot say this enough: Higher prices suck. Still, actions speak louder than words. +
++“If people were actually pessimistic about the future of the economy, they’d start saving, when in fact they’re spending like crazy,” Wolfers said. “If you look at the behaviors that would reflect the belief that the economy was good or bad, all of those behaviors suggest they’re incredibly optimistic, and they’re roughly as optimistic as you would expect based on things like the unemployment rate.” +
++“If you just look at people’s actual spending habits, which I think is probably a fair measure of their actual view of their financial condition and where the actual economy is going, it is screaming that people feel very comfortable with where they think things are,” Ramamurti said. “We should evaluate conditions more by how people act rather than what they say.” +
++The economy has been in an odd moment for years now, as has the way people feel about it. It’s not that full employment shouldn’t be a goal, or that it’s not a good thing, but depending on the context, it’s complicated — maybe a little more than, on paper, it would seem. +
++Americans are having smaller families. Why are we obsessed with large ones? +
++Hannah Neeleman, the Juilliard-trained dancer turned homesteading influencer better known as Ballerina Farm, announced in October that she was pregnant with her eighth child. +
++Wearing a flowing prairie dress and a cozy-looking sweater, Neeleman appeared with her husband, Daniel, in an Instagram video shot in their rustic-chic Utah kitchen. She cradled her belly. He cradled a large bowl, which may or may not have been full of sourdough. +
++Neeleman, who posts beautifully lit videos of farm and family life (sometimes with a few dance steps thrown in) to her 7.3 million Instagram followers, isn’t the only influencer shouting out an addition to an already large family. JD and Britney Lott, who chronicle their adventures traveling in a bus with their seven kids, posted in September that an eighth was on the way. The de la Motte family, who regale TikTok audiences with their string concerts, announced in August that “Baby #11” was coming soon. +
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Amber de la Motte, Instagram: @the.happy.caravan
++Families like theirs — ones that could field a full baseball team — are racking up billions of views on TikTok and Instagram. The current vogue for 10-person family dances and morning routine videos for a brood of 12 is a product of the particular time in which we live, experts say. The birthrate is falling, having even one kid can be ruinously expensive, and long or unpredictable work hours limit the amount of time most people can spend with their families. The average American woman had three children in 1950, a number that has declined to about 1.6 today. +
++In this landscape, watching videos of big families can be a way of gawking at an unfamiliar spectacle, soothing (or triggering) our own anxiety, and sampling a domestic experience many of us will never have. Viewed with a critical eye, these accounts can tell us something about what we value as a society — and what we need to value more highly. +
++The rise of the big-family influencers +
++American audiences have always had a fascination with big families, both real and fictional. They turned out in droves to see the 1959 musical — and 1965 film — The Sound of Music, about a plucky nun who becomes governess to the seven singing von Trapp children (both are based on a true story, and there were 10 kids, not seven). The 1948 novel Cheaper by the Dozen (also based on a true story), about two “efficiency experts” who have 12 children, was adapted into a film in 1950, then again in 2003, then again in 2022. +
++Real-life big families, from the Dionne quintuplets (born in 1934) to the McCaughey septuplets (born in 1997), have also become subjects of cultural obsession. The reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8, about a family with a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, premiered in 2007 and ran in some form for 10 years. 17 Kids and Counting launched in 2008 and focused on Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar and their growing family. (The family would grow to 19 before the show was canceled in the wake of sexual abuse allegations against Josh Duggar, the family’s eldest son.) And in 2009, Natalie Suleman became a tabloid fixation after she gave birth to octuplets (she already had six other children). +
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Dougherty Dozen, TikTok: @doughertydozen
++In the past, a family needed to somehow catch the eye of network executives in order to get a reality show like 17 Kids and Counting, said Laura Vanderkam, a time management expert and mother of five who has written about large families. But now, someone like Alicia Dougherty, who posts TikTok videos of the meals she prepares for her 11 kids, can simply start uploading without barriers or gatekeepers. +
++Not every parent with a TikTok account and a demanding kitchen routine will match Dougherty’s 6.2 million followers, but content about large families is undeniably popular. According to TikTok, the hashtag #bigfamily got 2.7 billion views in the past year, while #largefamily got 1.1 billion. “People are always fascinated by anyone who is countercultural,” Vanderkam said, and “we’re definitely at a moment of small families.” +
++Neeleman, for her part, has become a cottage industry and a strand of cultural criticism unto herself. A homesteading, homeschooling Mormon mom who quotes the Bible and can usually be found feeding the livestock or gathering farm-fresh eggs with two or more kids in tow, she’s been called “the ur-tradwife of Instagram.” +
++Neeleman is more mainstream influencer than true tradwife — short for traditional wife —adept at selling her brand to a wide audience (though there is a significant overlap between big-family influencers and tradwives, many of whom eschew birth control and extol the virtues of having many kids). +
++Dressed in earth tones and muted florals, she bakes, arranges flowers, and prepares dishes using her farm’s pork and beef, available for purchase on the Ballerina Farm website alongside sourdough starter and a variety of branded merch. Her life, though “imperfect” in certain picturesque ways (flour on her apron, strands of hair escaping from her braid), always looks gorgeous, with perfect light, fresh lilacs, and kids who help with the chores. The implication is that one can raise seven (soon to be eight) children and barely break a sweat. “The lifestyle she portrays” could be described as “care work as elegance,” said Meg Conley, who writes about care, capitalism, and the home. (Ballerina Farm declined Vox’s request for comment in an unsigned email, explaining that “Hannah and Daniel have their hands full wrangling kids and cattle.”) +
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Hannah Neeleman, Instagram: @ballerinafarm
++On one level, the draw of content like Neeleman’s or Dougherty’s is pretty uncomplicated. “It’s just visually cool to look at lots of cute children,” Vanderkam said. The logistics of caring for those children can also be entertaining for their very extremity: Dougherty’s sped-up videos show her preparing a kiddie pool full of nachos or an entire table covered in spaghetti and meatballs. “Making one sandwich is not that interesting,” Vanderkam points out, but making 11 sandwiches at once is a bona fide spectacle. +
++There has always been an element of gawking in Americans’ interest in very large families. It’s in Suleman’s tabloid nickname, “Octomom,” and the constant criticism she received after having octuplets. It’s in the comments on Neeleman’s recent pregnancy announcement, which, among the well-wishes, include responses like, “Don’t they watch the news, do they care for the environment, are they religious nuts? … Why oh why …” +
++While some people may be hate-watching Neeleman’s blissful baking-with-baby videos, others are just trying to figure out how she makes it all work. +
++For many, having even a small family can feel harder than ever. In a 2018 Morning Consult/New York Times poll, about a quarter of respondents said they had or were planning to have fewer kids than they ideally wanted. Of those, 64 percent cited the high cost of child care as a reason — and child care has only grown more expensive since. An ongoing housing shortage, including a shortage of three- and four-bedroom apartments, makes shelter a constant concern for many families. A lack of paid leave, flexible work, and after-school care leaves millions of parents scrambling to balance paying the bills and picking up their kids. Meanwhile, threats to children, from school shootings to formula shortages to Covid and other viral illnesses, seem to compound without end. “A lot of people feel that even having two kids is out of reach,” said Leslie Root, a demographer and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied fertility. +
++In this context, parents who feel overwhelmed with one or two children — or childfree people nervously contemplating the possibility of procreating — may turn to big-family influencers to find out how they are managing their lives, Vanderkam said. +
++These influencers can also project a kind of calm and satisfaction that can feel seductive in a frightening and confusing world. Root calls it “brazen well-being” — they appear to thrive despite the many forces that threaten to pull American families under. Like tradwives, they often present a return to the home and a particular version of the past as a remedy for the ills of the present. +
++In one January video, Neeleman takes three of her children out onto their 328-acre property to milk the cows and ride a rocking horse in the spacious barn, then back to the airy, wood-paneled farmhouse where she strains the milk through cheesecloth and washes the milking pail to a high shine. “I enjoy my morning milkings flanked by my little daughters,” she writes in an Instagram caption. “Like a mother quail and her covey of offspring, we scurry down to the barnyard like schoolchildren late for class.” +
++“By the end of the milking,” she concludes, “everyone is fed and happy.” +
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Amber de la Motte, TikTok: @thehappycaravan
++How big-family influencers spread an exclusionary view of parenting +
++Followers and critics of the Neelemans have pointed out that they are far from the average farming family. Daniel Neeleman’s father, David Neeleman, founded JetBlue along with several other airlines. Ballerina Farm was listed for $2.75 million before the Neelemans bought it in 2018. Their kitchen centers around an Aga cast-iron stove, described by Neeleman as “a homesteader’s dream,” that retails for at least $20,000, if not more. Based on the size and price of their property and the cost of raising cattle and pigs for meat, it’s highly unlikely that the Neelemans are living off the proceeds of their farm, Conley told journalist and cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen in a 2022 interview. +
++Not all large-family influencers are wealthy. Amber de la Motte, mother of the musical de la Motte family, recently told the Cut that her family struggles to afford rent and food, but nearly all fit the profile of the typical momfluencers that author Sara Petersen laid out in her recent book Momfluenced: They’re white, cis, thin, and straight. +
+ ++Their whiteness, in particular, protects them from the criticism that Black parents and other parents of color have faced. Across American history, large white families have been “idealized as representing traditional values or religious beliefs,” Traci Baxley, author of the book Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World, said in an email. Black families, meanwhile, have been portrayed by media and lawmakers as “irresponsible or over-prolific,” and have had to endure policies, such as forced sterilization, that restrict reproductive autonomy and limit family size, Baxley said. +
++To this day, “often there’s no room in society’s mind for Black families who are intentional about creating big families,” said Baxley, a mom of five. “I have been asked, by white women, if all of my children had the same dad!” While influencers like Neeleman have been able to gain a following for their big families, that path isn’t available to many parents of color. +
++The valorization of large white families, and especially those led by stay-at-home mothers, also has historical ties to white supremacy. In the 19th century, as a reaction to anxieties about the Industrial Revolution, “white, upper-class women were tasked with acting as the moral centers of the home, paragons of virtue who nurtured and upheld the nuclear family,” Petersen has said. The ideal family was explicitly portrayed as white, while early 1900s family manuals about protecting or sanctifying a home often contained eugenicist messages against racial mixing, Conley said. +
++More recently, some tradwives have urged other women to have lots of children specifically to perpetuate whiteness. In 2017, one YouTube creator issued what she called “the white baby challenge,” according to the New York Times. “Citing falling white birthrates in the West, she urged her followers to procreate. ‘I’ve made six!’ she wrote. ‘Match or beat me!’” +
++It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that influencers with lots of kids are coming to popularity at a time when the fall of Roe v. Wade has led to bans on abortion in more than a dozen states. Those bans coincided with a rise of tradwife influencers spreading misinformation about birth control as well as the persistence of wellness rhetoric that frames contraception as unnatural and dangerous to health. +
++Even influencers who don’t explicitly talk politics are often indirectly promoting a political stance, Conley said: “There’s a formula to becoming a large influencer family, and some of that formula does include white Christian nationalist messaging.” Families who have incorporated some of that formula into their branding “may not recognize the themes,” she said, “but they’re spreading them nonetheless.” +
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JD & Britney Lott, Instagram: @americanfamilyroadtrip
++Large families on TikTok can teach us something about all families +
++Our cultural fixation on influencers like Neeleman can be productive if we let it be. “If people can be thoughtful about where their fascination is coming from, and then channel that differently, I think that could be potentially transformative for the way we approach care work at a societal level,” Conley said. +
++Part of the appeal of these influencers is the way they render the often invisible labor of having a family visible, and make it appear joyful and beautiful, at a time when care work is, as Conley points out, devalued by both economic policy and cultural norms. Child care and elder care workers are among the most poorly paid workers in America, and the work of parents and family caregivers is typically unpaid and often overlooked. Against this backdrop, creators like Neeleman have made the daily tasks of parenting — making dinner, dressing the kids, holding the baby — not just art but also commerce. “They figured out how to make care work economically valuable,” Conley said. +
++Their method isn’t really scalable — not everyone can make money on sponsored posts or branded aprons, especially if they don’t fit the influencer mold. Instead, valuing care work in an inclusive way could look like participating in mutual aid, Conley said, or lobbying elected officials for universal preschool, paid leave, or a universal basic income. +
++Ultimately, the popularity of big families in the influencer economy can reveal ordinary Americans’ desire to have our labor recognized and supported, no matter what our families look like. As Conley put it, “Even if it doesn’t look like something that someone would put on Instagram, we are all performing care work every single day.” +