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No. 80, Fall 2001

An Interview With Jennifer Roback Morse

Q: How would you state the thesis of your book?

Dr. Morse: I believe that modern America has developed a notion of freedom that is incoherent, not only from a libertarian point of view, but really from any point of view. We have come to define freedom as meaning not limited government, but as being unencumbered by personal relationships. A person is not free if she is dependent, emotionally or financially, on her husband. A person is not free if her children are dependent on her.

This view of freedom is incoherent for two reasons. First, it is not possible to sustain a free society, in the sense of reasonably limited government (let alone a nightwatchman state) unless children develop personal, human attachments to their parents. That means that the individual person of the mother and father really are irreplaceable, and so are to some extent, constrained by their relationship with their child and with each other. Second, I do not believe it is possible for human beings to find happiness in the absence of meaningful human relationships. That means commitment, and the act of commitment necessarily limits our options afterwards.

My book uncovers an inconsistency among libertarians, one which had never occurred to me until I became a mother. My argument is that a free society relies on the vast majority of the people being self-restraining the vast majority of the time. We cannot enjoy the benefits of a minimal state unless people can control themselves. Otherwise, we have to rely on government coercion to ensure compliance with the laws against force or fraud. Therefore, libertarians must address the question of how people become self-restraining, or how people develop a conscience. Once we open that question, we will inevitably come to the question of how people are treated as babies, since the groundwork for conscience development is laid in the first 18 months of life. For this reason, libertarians can not be indifferent to the kinds of decisions people make in their family lives.

Q: Conservative traditionalists have championed what seems to be a little-discussed double standard, by which married mothers should be discouraged from taking part in the workplace, but welfare mothers should be required to work at paying jobs. What's your view, both as a libertarian economist, and as a mother?

Dr. Morse: I agree that this is a double standard. The idea seems to be that a child in a single parent family is better off in a no parent family! Welfare reform in effect said to welfare recipients, "society values work in the market place, and economic independence. We expect you to conform to those values by getting a job to support yourself, at least to some extent."

I think we need to have the courage to say something similar regarding marriage. Society values the family. We believe you should get married and stay married. (In fact, the evidence shows that being born into a single parent household is the single strongest predictor of child poverty.) But, the institution of marriage has been attacked for so long by so many people that few politicians have the courage to take that kind of stand. At the very least, we need to remove the implicit barriers to welfare recipients getting married.

Q: It seems clear from your book that it was the birth of your daughter and the adoption of your son that led to the rethinking of your approach to married life and motherhood. Would you tell us more about the adoption of your son and your analysis of the cause of his problems that led to this change for you?

Dr. Morse: My husband and I adopted a 2 and a half year old boy from a Romanian orphanage in 1991. Six months later, a daughter was born to us. Our little boy was described to us as healthy, and he was, and is, healthy as a horse. We joke in our family that he has a world class immune system. He never gets sick, even when everyone else in the family is sick. He fought off any number of diseases that must have swooped through that orphanage. But emotionally and socially, he has had many problems stemming from being left alone in a crib in a room full of other babies in cribs. There is nothing biologically wrong with him. We are convinced that he would have been perfectly normal if he had had anything like a normal childhood.

I hesitate to speak in too much detail about our experience out of deference to him and his privacy. He is a big boy now, and he has feelings about all this. He is a good boy, but has had lots of difficulties.

Because of him, we have come to know a lot of other families with kids from similarly difficult situations. So what I have to say here, and in the book, is really based on an amalgam of many stories. I can tell you for sure, though, it never would have entered my mind to learn about these kinds of children and their problems if it had not been for our son.

The most obvious personal shock was that I had to get off the career ladder. I had planned to have my babies, pop them in day care and go back to work like all self-respecting modern professional women. It became clear to me very quickly that my child could not make it in day care. Naturally, my first inclination was to hire a nanny. Then I started cutting back on my hours when it became clear that there really was no substitute for my time. Finally, I figured out that trying to do a full-time job in part-time hours was way too stressful for everyone. When my husband got a high-tech job in California, I took the opportunity to leave my academic job and go quarter time at the Hoover Institution. All of that took a lot of soul-searching and adjustment. The crucial issue for the child, though, is the attachment between mother and baby. (That is why there was really no way any "care-giver" could replace me.) That first relationship lays the groundwork for all the child's future connection with the rest of the human race. A normal baby relaxes into the care of his mother, allows himself to be held and rocked, and looks into her eyes. A neglected child will resist being held, and won't make eye contact. They will arch their backs to resist their mother's embrace. (In a bit of gallows humor, some adoptive parents call this "the orphan salute.")

They may not recover from this early neglect, even when they are adopted by competent and loving parents. These kids, if left alone and untreated, come to believe that they have to rely on themselves, that the world is fundamentally an unsafe place, and that they are entitled to do anything they need to do in order to get by. It is this pathological self-centeredness that really caught my attention. As an economist, I knew that we count on self-interest to keep the free market economy running smoothly. I realized that this attachment disordered child looks a lot like the worst stereotype of homo economicus. That in turn led me to see that we economists have been counting on a lot of groundwork being laid in the personality before the person ever gets to the market place.

As it turns out, the Romanian orphans are among the most disturbed kids in the adoption world. A few other Eastern European countries have consistent problems. (There seems to be a lot of fetal alcohol syndrome among the Russian adoptees, for instance.) But the only group of kids who are as consistently troubled as the Romanians are children who have spent substantial time in American foster care.

Q: One review of your book questions your inclusion of the work of psychiatrist Foster Cline in your bibliography. Do you care to comment about the controversy?

Dr. Morse: In my opinion, Foster Cline has made real breakthrough contributions in understanding the attachment process. Everyone who works in the area relies on his theories. Even people who have developed their own therapeutic approaches nevertheless use his "attachment cycle" theory as a basic tool.

His work has been controversial for a couple of reasons. First, many of his methods rely on very firm setting of limits on children's behavior. I need not say that limiting children's behavior is not in vogue. Second, many of his methods are counter-intuitive, to say the least. Some rely on "disturbing the disturbed," by doing things that the children do not expect. These methods are sometimes hard to explain to people who are not accustomed to dealing with extremely disturbed kids. Third, his methods require judgment. You can easily use too much discipline, for instance, or set limits too tightly. Any method that is not "cook book" and requires judgment, can be abused in the hands of a person with poor judgment.

I have read a couple of articles written by conservatives who have attacked attachment disorder theory in general, as part of a particular attack on therapist Connell Watkins. Watkins is currently in prison as a result of a child dying while under her care. I think it would be really unfortunate to dismiss the entire field of attachment disorder and attachment therapy because of this case. The criminal justice system did its job, and held the therapist accountable.

Very few policy-wonks and journalists realize just how sick these children are when they come into care in the first place. It is not simply lack of personal experience with a child who tortures animals for fun, or who fellates the family dog, or who smears his own feces around the house. I believe many people have ideological blinders that prevent them from understanding these kids.

Conservatives and libertarians are accustomed to placing the blame for problems on government incompetence or malefaction. The problem is that a large percentage of the children who come into the child welfare system are deeply disturbed before the government ever gets their hands on them. The usual Bad Guy, the government, is not fundamentally the problem.

Likewise, liberals prefer not to look too closely at how sick these kids are. The usual liberal Bad Guy, namely corporate capitalism, is nowhere to be found. Single motherhood and drug abuse are certainly the two most common contributing factors to kids ending up in foster care. The problems the kids have are not readily amenable to the usual kinds of liberal social programs. By the time the kids enter the system, they have often been permanently damaged, and are very resistant to conventional treatment. That is why desperate parents resort to unconventional therapies. I have heard parents say that Connell Watkins saved their child's life.

Don't misunderstand me. She deserves to be punished. But what about the therapists who tell parents to just take the child home and love them more? What about the social workers who place seriously disturbed children in a family, and don't tell the family about the child's problems? None of those people are ever held accountable for anything. Yet, collectively, they are arguably responsible for many deaths, of the children, and of the people the children later kill.

We readily assign blame for obvious, visible failure, when a child is killed or injured in therapy. But we don't notice the costs of doing nothing. Nor do we give credit when a therapist succeeds. Sometimes success is turning a potential ax-murderer into a mere car thief. Think about what it would be like to try and treat children who are that disturbed. The sensationalism around the Connell Watkins case has been a disservice to these sick children and to the people who give their lives trying to help them.

Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work , by Jennifer Roback Morse, Dallas: Spence Publishing Co, 2001, 273pp., $27.95

This is an analysis by a libertarian of the dynamics of the family, what they are and should be, aimed at persuading other libertarians. Libertarians don't pay enough attention to the ways in which groups actually operate, says Jennifer Roback Morse; their model is the individual Economic Man, a mythical creature who knows his self-interest and preferences and acts to maximize them by trading and contracting with others, recognizing no unchosen obligations. She herself, she says, tried at one point to create a life-philosophy by analogy out of free market economics and libertarian political theory. Her book, "is an extended reflection on why that analogy doesn't work." Motherhood created her need to write this book.

The argument is this. Free societies, to be successful, need "self-restraining, self-monitoring, self-governing adults." If too many people are not self-regulating, the society may not survive - therefore it is important that libertarians in particular pay attention to how best to produce the kind of person necessary to the smooth operation of extremely limited government. Moral philosophers like Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers gave little thought to this issue, because the society in which they lived took the strength of the family and the community for granted. However, today there is on the part of both paternalists who believe that government can substitute its care and institutions for those of family and community and devotees of the market who believe that individuals are completely autonomous; a belief that any individual choices about relationships are equally good, as long as the material needs of children are met. However, not every way of raising children is that good at creating self-regulating adults, says Morse. We have seen that children raised in institutions where they have little or no human contact fail to thrive, and there is evidence that children who suffer less extreme neglect may still find it hard to learn to trust adults.

The factor that the family properly provides is love, which, Morse says, is self-giving rather than self-centered. The opposite of the laissez-faire family that she deplores is not the government-run family, but the family that takes seriously the development of basic attachments between parents and children - and by implication takes seriously the marriage commitment itself. Morse concludes from the difficulties that institutional children can have (she and her husband adopted an Eastern European orphan when he was 2 1/2) that "children have to be raised one at a time by people who love them."

The book is divided into four parts, plus a prologue and introduction and a conclusion. The first part discusses the helplessness and neediness of the infant and makes the important point that libertarian social theory has not looked closely at the fact that "people are completely incapacitated during infancy and partially so in old age and illness." Every baby, she states categorically, needs at least two people to support him, whether it is the mother's blood relatives, as in the Five Nations of the Iroquois, or state welfare and institutions, as in the case of many contemporary single mothers. The family, however constituted, forms about the helpless infant in an example of spontaneous order, she says, and is the foundation of society, and "like the market and every other social institution, the family has a logic of its own." She discusses the development of trust as the infants' needs are met and they are gradually introduced to the care of other people, to becoming trustworthy themselves, and to "the deeper attachment we ordinarily call love," as well as to economic and political life.

The second part of the book discusses in some depth the limitations of contracts and why these relationships are not contracts. The third part is called "The Irreplaceable Family," and devotes four chapters to why there is no substitute for the family - not just the fact that government is not a substitute, but she also finds single parents, divorced parents, and paid childcare providers who give primary care "inadequate substitutes."

This is the most controversial point of the book, I think, and Morse is aware of that fact. She qualifies her judgment by writing "I do not say that it is impossible [for such circumstances to produce the qualities of cooperation and connectedness in children], just that the odds are against it." She therefore calls for a libertarian social theory that "must inculcate an ethos of generosity and loyalty within the family," a statement that she recognizes "may cause consternation." Finally, she zeroes in with objections to paid child care, which she equates as using the market as a substitute for the family and stresses the Hayekian "tacit knowledge" that parents have about their own children. ("Raising children collectively is comparable to centrally planning an economy.")

Part Four, "Love and Liberty," analyses love (defined as willing another's good), the costs of love, and why deciding to love is a reasonable decision, despite its costs. The problem, she says, is the libertarian assumption that all relationships can be contractual.

I consider this to be a seminal book, by which I mean a book that will start discussion, even disagreement, in libertarian circles, in what is pretty much uncharted territory. Certainly most libertarians, especially those who have children, will find much here that resonates for them, and a basic approach that is needed. Philosophically, although Morse is clearly familiar with the works on Ayn Rand and their importance to many libertarians, she doesn't take into account the fact that this makes her very vocabulary, especially the use of the word "sacrifice" as one of the costs of love, open to misunderstanding. She doesn't define sacrifice, leaving the door open for people to assume Rand's definition: giving up a higher value for a lesser one, the opposite of what Morse means. That's really only a detail, but more globally, there will also be many readers who find unrealistic the ideal two-married-parent model that Morse promotes. I suspect that Morse's answer to that criticism would be that she hopes to offer an analysis of the ideal that will help those whose circumstances can't meet the ideal to approach it better than they might otherwise do in today's world. I myself would like to see that subject explored more fully in future works, especially how the exceptions to the model that are so prevalent function and can function - some of them, for instance, do rely with beneficial effect on the blood relatives of the mother. Also, Morse concentrates on the stay-at-home-mother and the breadwinner father in her model, although she herself hardly fits the assumed definition of a stay-at-home-mother; having been an economics professor and a writer and speaker for years, she is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. I'd like to see another book explicating the relationship between a woman's becoming the kind of creative person she can be - "fulfilling her potential" - and being the primary caregiver to her children. There are other possibilities for women besides self-immolation - going in and out of the labor force in different periods of life, for instance, or finding professional work that can be done out of the home.

But she's right in the assumption that a book like this has been needed by libertarians. In her youth, she constructed her own laissez-faire approach to family. I had a different experience: I was a divorced woman with a child who remarried and formed a close family unit with my new husband, and had objectivist-libertarians whom I knew trying their best to keep us from taking in my ailing father to live with us. (Happily, they did not prevail, and he lived with us for three years before his death, an experience with many costs, but which I would not have missed for the world.)

It has always been my belief, as a feminist, that feminism is a psychosocial doctrine as well as a narrowly political one that began as an outgrowth of classical liberalism. Today, feminism has few stated political goals; its goal of equal political liberty for women has been pretty much reached in the United States. But feminists have always had social goals too, and called for women to support each other in those goals and to analyze social institutions. This book speaks particularly to the libertarian feminist belief that it is individual action and transformation that can and should change society, not legislation. If we don't want the government to solve the social problems we see, we will have to do it ourselves. And Love and Economics is a fascinating and provocative start in such a direction.