East Jerusalem, and Jericho, where residents are ever prepared for gun or missile fire, these children learn to share a fascination with giraffes and extend empathy to each other. Other versions of this experiment exist in different forms in many public schools and colleges. Focusing on children from kindergarten to eighth grade, Mary Gordon established in 1996 the “Roots of Empathy” program, a nonprofit organization with twelve sites in Canada and three in the United States. In it, a parent and baby pay a series of visits to a classroom (twenty-seven visits in all), and a trained empathy instructor helps the children recognize what the baby is feeling.40 Even such time-limited exposures can lead many to begin to redraft their maps.
By whatever means we find to alter them, the maps themselves seem to vary according to our membership in given social categories—gender, race, national origin, and social class. Again the clues can be indirect. A series of studies show that the poor give more to others than the rich. Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization that researches charitable giving, reported that “poorer households ($25,000 and below annual income) gave away 4.2 percent of their incomes while richer ones ($75,000 and above) gave away 2.7 percent.41 In another study, the social psychologist Paul K. Piff and his colleagues found that low-income people were more “generous, charitable . . . and helpful to others” than were the wealthy.42 The rich who live in neighborhoods with many other wealthy people give away an even smaller share of their income than do rich people living in more economically diverse communities.43 The vast majority of income the rich do give away, another study found, is not directed toward the poor but to such things as the opera, museums, and their alma maters, institutions that largely benefit people like themselves.44
So what is the link between a person’s empathy and their generosity? In an experiment, Piff’s group discovered that if higher-income people were shown a sympathy-eliciting video and instructed to imagine themselves as poor, they became more willing to help the poor. But the reverse was also true: when lower-income people were instructed to think of themselves as rich, they became less charitable.45 Notwithstanding generous-hearted rich men such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, the desire to protect wealth can get in the way of empathizing with those who don’t have it.
Ideas about our placement in the world alter the maps we draw. Among American college students, ideas conducive to empathy seem to be losing, not gaining, hold. In a meta-analysis of 13,737 students—some who entered college in the late 1970s to early 1980s, some in the 1990s, and some in the 2000s—a team of psychologists discovered a decline in what they called “empathic concern.”46 (This was indicated by answers to questions such as how well statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” described the student.) Maybe students today are more preoccupied with their own uncertain futures than earlier students were. But if, as the national gap widens between the very rich and very poor, the young express less empathy than those their age used to, we may be heading for serious trouble.47
In the end, the world may indeed be in a race, with a “good” team pressing for more empathy with our fellow creatures on the earth and the “bad” team pressing against it. But to increase the odds for the good team, we will need to discover far more about the making of maps. How can circumstances—such as those of the surprising battlefront Christmas dance, or the summer camp for children of warring states—enable us to empathize better and more than we do? In empathy, women have taken the lead. But so too have many men, such as the great fictional Huck Finn and the extraordinary, forgiving Eric Lomax. By itself, more empathy will not solve all the world’s problems; but more empathy would make it an entirely different world.
Families, Class Gaps, and Time
FOURSo How’s the Family?
Over the last half-century, talk of family has often focused on the working mother—her hours, her wages, her commute, the sympathies of her boss, the culture at her workplace. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the “mom is working, so how are the kids?” conversation. Later people spoke of “work-family balance,” but still held to the question: if she is working, how are they doing?
Over time, talk moved to an array of changes that a working mother would need to raise thriving children—partners who share the second shift, state-of-the-art childcare, a shorter workday, a three-day weekend, flextime, or flexplace, for example. Although some called for public programs such as European-style parental leaves and federally funded childcare, such calls were gradually abandoned in America as being hopeless pipe dreams. In the hallway at conferences, conversations on work-family balance through the 1990s and 2000s seldom mentioned tax policies that exacerbated a growing class gap, or the deregulation of advertising to children. Such issues seemed far beyond the scope of “mom is working, so how are the kids?”
Meanwhile, a separate but parallel conversation arose linking a free market to family values.1 Cuts to public services, deregulation, reduced corporate and individual taxes, privatization—such policies, its advocates claimed, strengthen both a free market and the family. In their talk of “family values,” conservative commentators generally exclude gays, oppose a woman’s right to abortion, and link the idea of a free market with that of a strong, loving home. The smaller and less active the civilian government, they propose, the stronger the family.
For the most part, these two conversations—“mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “free-market family values”—have moved along separate tracks. Even today, those who engage in the one do not engage in the other, or not at the same time. So what if we link the two conversations and ask: In an era of the working caregiver, how do free-market policies affect families? In search of the answer, we discover a surprisingly rich body of evidence.
But first a word about why this question matters. When American women moved en masse into the workforce, they were not alone. The female labor force participation rate increased 20 percent worldwide between 1993 and 2003, while the participation rate of men decreased in all regions but Southeast Asia.2 Over 70 percent of working-age women in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland are now in paid work, as are 53 percent in Spain and 46 percent in Italy.3 The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and most other states of the European Union fall in between.4 So the rise of the working woman in America is part of a global trend which shows no sign of reversing itself.
And there are many stakeholders in this trend. As Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, wrote in the preface to the 2012 Global Gender Gap report:
With talent shortages projected to become more severe in much of the developed and developing world, maximizing access to female talent is a strategic imperative for business. The World Economic Forum has been among the institutions at the forefront of engaging leaders to close global gender gaps as a key element of our mission to improve the state of the world.5
Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) report links each nation’s ranking on an index of gender equality to its GDP and its score on the so-called Global Competitiveness Index.6 If women were to perform paid work at the rate men do, the authors state, the American GDP would rise “by as much as 9 percent, the euro-zone G.D.P. by as much as 13 percent . . . [and] the Japanese G.D.P. by as much as 16 percent.”7 When women work they also earn, of course; as they consume more goods and services, they push up the GDP.8
State officials have still other interests in the employment of women. Especially in Europe, women are encouraged to earn money and contribute to social security to help bankroll the state pensions currently drawn by retirees in a “graying” Europe.9 To sustain pension funds, some countries are raising the retirement age of public employees—from 65 to 67 years old in the United States, from 60 to 62 (and 67 for some workers) in France, and from 65 to 67 in Spain.10 Meanwhile, 2.1 children per woman are considered necessary to maintain a country’s population. But in some countries, the fertility
