Molly White

That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. Did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way? She lived with us for a year. Right. So I didn't know the answer there. Right. No. So that's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. Yeah. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyperneoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. She took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this is what you do. So biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient.. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is to a ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market I think it's the oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

It's always the women who are expected to stop "prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society". I wonder if anyone suggested to Vance that he should stop prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, and take a sabbatical from his investment job to care for their newborn while his wife did her clerkship. Or his father-in-law?

Also, it's pretty wild that Vance saw the options to be: 1) MIL leaves her professorship to be a live-in nanny; 2) MIL pays for their childcare. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital and partner at the Revolution investment firm at the time. Meanwhile, Usha Vance would have been making (ballpark) $70-100k as a SCOTUS clerk, and would safely have been able to expect several hundred thousand dollars in signing bonuses alone the following year when she joined a law firm.