Response to Current Affairs

Recently I’ve received some criticism on my position on paid leave as outlined in Parental Leave: Is There a Case for Government Action? In my report, I provide evidence that the private market is providing a growing amount of paid leave over time and I suggest that providing paid leave through a government mandate or social insurance program is likely to include a variety of trade-offs and/or may not meet some of advocate’s purported objectives.

Although Nathan J. Robinson’s criticism of my report is steeped in vitriol, it still provides an opportunity to clarify my position. If I had to boil his critique down to one or two major criticisms, it would be that, in his view 1) I did not include a representative discussion of the benefits of creating a government paid leave program (and some of these benefits are mentioned in papers I cite for costs) and 2) I do not take the same position as certain academics I cite.

To the first point: Although not obvious from the paper, when I speak about paid leave publicly, I almost always first state that paid parental leave holds benefits for companies and parents and I am in favor of businesses voluntarily providing paid leave.

Moreover, voluntarily provided paid parental leave arguably holds greater benefits for parents than government supported or mandated leave, because employers incorporate the costs and benefits of leave-taking into their business model and therefore have reduced incentives to discriminate against likely leave-takers, including childbearing-age women. 

Why focus this paper on government supported leave’s trade-offs? First and foremost, because research groups and news outlets have spilled untold amounts of ink describing possible and likely benefits of government supported paid leave elsewhere. Those benefits are mostly well-known in policy circles and easily understood.

The main contribution of this paper is to challenge the prevailing view that government benefits could be realized without costs or trade-offs to workers (and indeed, workers’ lives may not be “markedly improved” after all, once associated trade-offs are taken into account). Indeed, the paper is intended to bring some balance to the existing debate by outlining trade-offs that are rarely seriously considered.

The paper is not a comprehensive review of the paid leave literature. However, it does carefully and accurately relay findings from the paid leave literature on potential costs and trade-offs of government intervention.

The second criticism--that I do not share all the same views on paid leave as academics I cite--does not make sense. Think tank scholars and academics cite other scholars all the time whom they disagree with on many points. 

As always, I enjoy hearing thoughtful criticisms of my work but the Current Affairs’ critique is off the mark. Moreover, by selecting two Cato studies and drawing conclusions about the whole of Cato research, Robinson commits one of the logical errors he spends so much time deriding: cherry-picking.