Dr. Karen Guzzo
speaker
132 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Karen Guzzo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And so I think it's something like 38 states and D.C. where the average annual cost for infant care is more than the cost of tuition for a public university. I mean, that's the kind of stuff people are faced with. So what happens is just what you're saying is people leave the labor market. And when I say people, I mean mothers.
It's almost always mothers because they do often make less money than their partners. And it's also the case that they do need to recover. Because we don't have paid family leave in the United States, about one in four women return to work within two weeks of giving birth. That is way too early. That is absolutely shameful.
And only about a fifth of people have access to paid leave in the United States. And so, you know, we don't make this a very family-friendly country. We shame high-earning women and well-educated women for working too much and not staying home with their kids. And then we shame poor women for wanting to stay home with their kids because their income doesn't offset the price of childcare.
You can't win. And that's really, I think, a big problem.
Yeah. So Elon Musk is interesting in the sense that there are a lot of people in the tech world who are good at math and think that makes them good at demography because it's a math-related field. But they don't really understand some of the theories, some of the ways we do modeling and think about this.
So at one point, Musk was projecting something, and he had projected us all the way down to zero. And I was like, well, no, that's not – Right. But he has this huge influence. And so people are listening to him. So it is important to take him seriously. But some of the stuff he just says, to be honest, is pretty bonkers.
He has this whole thing about C-sections that women should have C-sections because that allows their baby's brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers. I mean, babies' heads, their skulls are not fully fused for an evolutionary reason to go through the birth canal without, you know, crushing their brains.
And so the idea that we're listening to this guy, I mean, it chills me.
So one of the things that's interesting is that this all has this idea that reproduction is the future and it's the key to everything. And all we have to do is control women. So for me, it's always really hard to separate the arguments about populations from the fact that this is about what women should or should not do and who gets to decide what women do.
And so when I think about low birth rates right now and what does that mean for the economy, well – It does mean potentially fewer workers. But then we also have things like technological advance. We're having a whole separate conversation about the meaning of automation and robotics and AI. So maybe we don't need as many workers.
And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now either. If we wanted to raise birth rates right now, young people are saying, yeah, I want to have kids. I just can't right now for these reasons. We could try listening to those reasons or we can say, you know, we're going to give you a medal if you have six children.
Yeah, great being here.
Showing 121–132 of 132 · page 7 of 7
← Previous