Stop Following the Script

Producer’s Note: This transcript was created using AI. Please excuse any errors.

Annie: If you could just kind of start by telling us a little bit about what you do, your path to getting here.

Corinne: So I’m an economist, and when I tell people that, then they often ask me, you know, about the stock market or how they should be investing or what’s gonna go on with interest rates, and I’m like, “No, no. Not that kind of economist.” But if you wanna talk about fertility timing or the marriage contract, I’m your girl.

So my whole career I have studied the economics of being a woman and, you know, how women make trade-offs between career and family, how families create value, the economic value of things that are produced at home, whether that’s, you know, a home-cooked meal or whether that’s the human capital of our children, which is also children are also produced at home, and children are one of the largest sources of value in the economy.

Um, and I do this in both the U.S. and developing countries, so my path was not a linear one to get into doing that. I basically graduated college, and I wanted to be a journalist, but I needed to pay off my student loans, and so a bunch of my friends, because I was an econ major, were interviewing at consulting firms, and so I just decided on a lark to also interview. Got a job at McKinsey and was like, signing bonus, which will help pay off-

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: … the student loans. So I went to McKinsey for two years, and then was trying to decide whether to, like, get an M.B.A., which is what you do when you go to McKinsey, or, you know, or go back to school in some other way, and I’ve always loved school. I knew I wanted to go back to school. And I think being at McKinsey, where we’re big on, like, it’s the 80/20, like 20% of the work gets you 80%-

Annie: Yep.

Corinne: … there, and the 80% solution is good enough and whatever, made me really yearn to be around people who value the 100% solution, and that’s academics.

Annie: Yes.

Corinne: And so I decided to go get a Ph.D., not thinking I was actually gonna be an academic or become a professor, but thinking I wanted to have a Ph.D. and I wanted to be a practitioner and I wanted to work on issues that affected women, at the time I thought in developing countries. That was really where my passion was.

But as I started working on my Ph.D., I became just fascinated with the economics of the family and the household and of issues that affect women’s lives and of studying women as economic agents. And so that’s what I’ve done with my career, and I started working as a professor and teaching at Wharton as my first job after getting my Ph.D. I’ve been here ever since, and recently after getting tenure, I kind of put all of that research that I’d done over a 15-year career into a book, which is my book, Having It All.

Annie: You keep saying economic agents, right? So-

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: … I wanna kind of come to that. So it was really interesting, just randomly yesterday, ’cause I knew I was having this conversation with you today, but I did not create this conversation. But somebody who’s in their 20s, who I’ve been mentoring for a while, actually asked me about, “Well, you know, you have a bunch of kids. I’m thinking, do I want kids? Do I not want kids? Like, what is your take on work, career, you know, kids, so on and so forth?” And I was like, “Well, it’s a complete myth that you can fully focus on your career and somehow fully focus on your children, and you just have to go into it realizing that that’s not so. And if your kids know you love them, you’re good ‘Cause she was feeling that she’s a career person, she’s very passionate about her career. She’s like, “How am I supposed to fit kids into that?” And I’m like, “You fit them in however you can,” right? And it’s all good, promise. I was promising her it was all good, and I said, “Then you make the decision that you want.”

So let’s talk about that, because we can think about, you know, when my mom was growing up, that it was incredibly rare for a woman to fully have a career. The career was homemaker, you know? And then obviously there was this shift that came with women’s liberation movement really in the ’70s to, no, women can be CEOs also. Which all sounds fine and good, but you’re saying, okay, it’s not just what I said, which was that idea that you’re still supposed to be, like, perfect mom. It’s not just that it didn’t go away, but that it intensified. So can you dig into that a little bit for us?

Corinne: Yeah. So I want to go back to the history a little bit, because if we take, like, a longer window of history, and this is part of what Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for, what you actually see is that, like, women were very active in producing, like, the economic spoils of the household. When we had, like, an agrarian economy-

Annie: Uh-huh.

Corinne: … women were spending a lot of time working. And maybe we didn’t call it employment, but they were producing the economic product of the household alongside men. They were not spending a lot of time parenting. In fact, even the term parenting is very new, right? So then you get to the period that, where as you said your mom was growing up, and in that period, suddenly households are getting richer. Men and families are moving off of farms, they’re urbanizing, and as they urbanize, suddenly there are jobs where men can earn enough that he can support the household all on his own. And so for the first time, households are able to kinda have this luxury good of having a mom who’s a homemaker, right?

But there’s no norm that you’re spending all day with your kids, because she was previously working all day on the farm. She wasn’t spending all day with her kids. So what that means is she is spending a lot of time on home production, which gradually starts to get displaced by time-saving home technologies of, like, it’s a lot faster to run a load in the washing machine than it is to kind of have to spend, uh, you know, all day scrubbing your clothes. But it’s also that she actually had a lot of leisure time. So when you go back to these kind of stay-at-home moms, they actually had a lot of leisure time. Stay-at-home moms in the 1970s spent less time with their kids than working moms do today.

Annie: Wow.

Corinne: Yes. So then y- we get this kind of reversal, so it’s almost like a U-shape. Like, women were working. We reached this, like, nadir of women’s work in, like, the 1950s, like, you know, Leave It to Beaver, right? And women are re-entering the labor force, and at first it kinda adds up, because they’re able to maintain that same norm of, like, you don’t really parent your kids. Like, you keep your kids alive, but you don’t really parent them, right? And so that works. Like, when I think about my childhood in the 1980s, like, we were still very much in that model of like, “Okay, like, good luck. Go bike around the neighborhood-

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: … and, you know, come back for bedtime.” And by the way, like, my bedtime routine was go to bed.

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: Right? It wasn’t, like, 10 books and, like, you know, a nice, like, bed pillow-side chat, which is, like, what I do with my kids. And I, and I love it, by the way, but that’s very different than what my mom was doing. My mom was, “Go to bed,” and then she was gonna work, right? She was a single mom.

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: And so while she wasn’t parenting us, she was working. But it- that starts to change, but it starts to change in the early ’90s, and in the early ’90s we see the rise of attachment parenting. We see the rise of the kind of competitive college application culture, where you need to have kids do a bunch of activities, right? We start having organized sports teams you have to drive your kids to. And I can see this in the time-use data. So when I compare 1975 to kind of the modern data, I see that in 1975, parents were not helping kids with homework.

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: That category basically doesn’t exist. It’s a big category in the modern data. In 1975, infant care wasn’t that much of a parent’s day, but now it’s a big category because we understand that for child development you gotta hold your baby. You, you wanna breastfeed. You don’t just hand them a bottle in the crib and, you know, go about your business, right? We see time playing with your children, again, another category that almost didn’t exist in the 1970s, and now we play with our kids instead of sending them outside and, you know, saying like, “I don’t wanna see you till dinner.” We play with them. And we see travel. Driving the kids back and forth to activities is another area where parental time has increased a lot.

And so I think that is setting up a lot of women for feeling like failures, and for some young women, like the woman that you were talking to, to wonder if this is something that she wants at all. Because it does feel impossible, because the model of the career you wanna have and how you balance it all comes from an era where it all was a smaller number of things. And now we think that you have to be this, you know, supermom, Dr. Becky, gentle parent, Instagrammable, you know, making perfect lunches and, you know, stimulating activities for your children that are recommended by an occupational therapist, and we’re supposed to be the lean-in girlboss, and that just doesn’t add up.

Annie: So let’s just start with- There are opportunity costs to any choice you make in regards to your children, and have we lost sight of some of the benefits that we’re giving up of some of the things that we used to do?

Corinne: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s one of the things I say to parents, and I’m like, “Just because something is evidence-based, it doesn’t actually mean that you need to do it.” Because the evidence is always this thing in isolation, right? Without changing anything else, trying to keep as many other things constant as possible. And for you, if there’s a big cost of this thing, right, if it’s, oh, if I put my kid in organized sports, they’re not gonna have any time to see their friends, and they’re gonna have anxiety-

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: … right? Then like maybe that trade-off isn’t actually worth it. So I think that’s 100% right, and I think there are two forces that are acting on parents during this period, and there’s one that is like you wanna listen to, and there’s one that is like how do we as a society try to get over this? And so let me break that down.

So the first force is this understanding of child development, which is like, oh, okay, we didn’t know before that like actually holding your infant was important and was going to, you know, help their cognitive development and could literally be linked to, you know, better labor market outcomes later on, right? And so we didn’t have the science.

But there’s a second force which is also about economic incentives, okay? But I think it’s a little bit more pernicious, which is what economists Valerie and Garey Ramey coined as the rug rat race, which is to say that if you’re competing for scarce spots in something, then you’re trying to one-up the other person. And any time you’re trying to one-up somebody, things actually become inefficient. So if you think about like a nuclear arms race-

Annie: Mm.

Corinne: … it’s inefficient to keep trying to go higher and higher and higher, and then end up in the same stalemate-

Annie: Right.

Corinne: … as if you were just down here, right? It’s the same with like advertising dollars, right? Advertising dollars, y- as soon as one company spends, the other company has to spend. Now both of us are spending a ton of money on something that leaves us with the same split of the market that we actually had when we started down here, right? And, you know, th- there’s some people who think that that’s what’s happened with parental investment right now, that it’s become an arms race where I’ve gotta make sure that little Johnny has this like extensive CV by the time they apply to college. And, you know, I’m sitting here being like, “What does a 17-year-old have to put on their CV?” Right? And so there is a question right now of like are there ways to like hit the reset button, right, in a more collective way?

Annie: What you’re talking about, this, the rug rat race, right, which is for sure inefficient, doesn’t that amplify- economic disparities?

Corinne: Yeah. Well, 100%. And so what we see is that the more intensive investments have gotten in children, and the more we expect that, it definitely opens up these huge disparities, and that is why I also see a connection with women’s careers stalling out, and that’s why it’s actually women who are higher earning, who are more socioeconomically privileged, that we see kind of having a greater reduction in their hours when they have children, because they’re able to make that investment.

So I’ve talked about child penalties, kind of flip it on its head, and I’m like, “It is actually a child privilege,” because it’s women who can afford to invest those hours in their kids, and what does that mean, then, for the kids of parents who can’t do that? For very poor women, we don’t see a child penalty in earnings, because they cannot afford to shift some of their investment from their own human capital to their child’s human capital.

Annie: Gotcha.

Corinne: And like with any arms race, it’s really hard to turn it off, because the incentives are there for parents, right?

Annie: Yeah, and so I’m thinking about this in relation to what you’re talking about with sort of the rise of time and investment in kids, because I wonder how much of that has to do with this more liquid information market, and people selling books about parenting. Like, when you say there wasn’t such a thing as parenting.

Corinne: No, that’s exactly right. It’s like the way that Dr. Becky has, like, a thriving multi-million dollar empire is by saying, “Parenting is hard, and you need me to tell you how to do it,” right? And so I remember seeing, you know, she had this thing on Instagram that was like- Parenting can be so hard sometimes. And I was like, “Yes, you feel me.” And then it was like swipe, swipe, “That’s why you should join my new, like, members only, but you have to kinda pay this much for it,” right? And it was like, oh, like what we’re gonna do about the fact that it’s hard is, you need to pay somebody.

So it is this, again, cultivating this sense of lack, because the only, and that’s what the economic incentives are for the influencer economy, is that if I say like, “You know what? You are already equipped to like be a great parent,” and if you say, “All your kids need is to really know that you love them,” right? You’re not gonna sell shit. So I think you’re absolutely right. My fear with all of this is twofold. It’s one, that I think the worst thing for kids is for their parents to be very stressed out, right? For their parents to be in a state of, you know, disequilibrium.

Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Corinne: For parents, like watch parents be dysregulated. We always talk about kids being dysregulated. So the worst thing for kids is when things aren’t adding up for their parents. Because, you know, we all know, you have a bad day and you’re more short-tempered with your kid, and you’re not, and sometimes we catch ourselves in those moments of you’re snapping and you’re responding a certain way. You’re like, “Okay, whoa, I need to take a deep breath.” But if I’m trying to run around to a million different activities and I’m trying to do my job, get tenure at Wharton, but also, you know, make sure I can be this Instagram-perfect mom, then I end up like not being the kind of mom that I want to be.

And so I worry that this, like, impact on parents is actually making this very counterproductive, and that’s why like people say, yeah, it’s like the 17-year-old h- who has the CV but also has had a therapist they’ve been going to for anxiety since they were age eight, right? And th- that, what’s that trade-off? And one of the conduits for that, it’s not just the, the trade-off for kids of these activities that you mentioned first, it’s that we are throwing parents off balance by putting so much on parents’ shoulders.

But the second consequence is more existential, literally, because if you make things so hard for parents, then a lot of people say, “Well, that does not spark joy. That does not maximize utility for me to actually become a parent. Like, why would I take a life where I get to have fun and I have time for my priorities and I have time to invest into my job that pays me in money, and why would I put it in the metaphorical blender in order to like have a kid, which sounds fun, but like now it also sounds like a lot of work and a lot of money?” Because most of these investments are not just time investments, they’re money investments. And so we see fertility rates in free fall. And as a parent, as someone who loves parenting, I’m like, “This sucks.” Being, being a parent is amazing. Having children is amazing.

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: And like people should wanna do that and they should get the message that like no, it doesn’t actually have to be that hard. But we’ve gone so far, it’s like very ironic, right? We’ve gone so far into the model of being amazing parents, that people are choosing to just not be parents at all.

Annie: Because the expectations are just anything short of what you see on Instagram now becomes failure.

Corinne: And that you have to self-sacrifice-

Annie: Right.

Corinne: … right? When I don’t think that that’s good for kids or parents.

Annie: Right. I would, I just wanna say, make a very bad influencer, ’cause I give two pieces of advice. One is your kids just need to know you love them, and there’s a lot of different ways to do that, right? I was like, you have people who are like, “You have to breastfeed,” you know? Or people who are like, you know, “You have to co-sleep, or you have to do this, you have…” I say, “None of it’s true. Your kids just need to know you love them.” That’s number one. But the other one I, I tell them, and this is- I’m sure is not satisfying for most people, is at some point you will drop your baby on its head. And it doesn’t make you a bad par- like, the, because it, uh… There’s so many people who think they know the answer And if you look across the world, or across history-

Corinne: There’s not one answer.

Annie: … there’s not one answer. And that’s kind of why I was talking about the cost-benefit analysis. Like, there’s benefits to choice A, but there’s gonna be benefits to choice B as well, and when you’re choosing A, you’re giving up the benefits of B. There are just opportunity costs to that choice. You mentioned the word utility, so we can think about, let’s imagine that we’re like, “I just wanna do science-backed parenting,” as if somehow that’s objective. So first of all, can you just explain to people what utility is?

Corinne: It’s the sum total of your joy, fulfillment, contentment, and meaning over your lifetime. And the difference between utility and profit is that whereas any accountant would look at a firm’s balance sheet and be able to say like, “Oh, okay, I know what your profit was,” right? Only you know what your utility is, because only you know what you value, what you hold most dear, right? And so for some people, like, their utility is, like, having a lot of nice things, and they’re gonna probably spend more time working than I am, because in my utility function is actually, like, spending a lot of time with my kids. And so I, and maybe having fewer nice things. So you know what weights you put on which things. And when we’re maximizing our utility function, the tricky thing, and this is the field of behavioral economics, is this idea that sometimes there’s a delta between our first instinct and our true utility.

Annie: Okay.

Corinne: Okay? Your utility is this sort of deeper, more permanent kind of state of value, and sometimes our decisions are made with this, like, instinctual brain that’s shaped by evolution. And when we’re talking about women, caring is one of those evolutionary forces that I think is often kind of exploited against us, because on the savanna, we had to care for our partners, so our partner was gonna help protect us and find food for our offspring.That’s how we’re gonna pass on our genes. And we had to care for our community so that they would share food with us, you know, during a famine, right? But right now, whether or not you’re the world’s best PTA volunteer is not gonna determine whether you make it through the winter. Right. But your genes still feel like it does.

And so it feels like an actual threat to be like, “Oh, I have to say no to this colleague and they’re gonna be upset with me.” And we can mistake that for our own utility, right? That feeling of, you know, what the social consequence is or how is somebody else gonna judge me if I do this. Social status is really important for evolutionary survival, right?

I don’t think it’s as important for determining your deep contentment and fulfillment over your lifetime for when you’re 85 years old, what are you gonna look back on and say, “That was a life well-lived,” right? I sometimes describe it as like a video game score where it’s a video game across your entire life, and so you’re in one stage of the game right here, right? But you’ve gotta know that like, “Oh, I care about what’s gonna give me points in every stage.”

Annie: You know, one of the things that we know is true of humans is that we think we know what our own preferences are You know, which is obviously gonna be a big driver of what utility… What, what do I like? What makes me happy? But we’re actually surprisingly poor at knowing what that is. And I think that everybody has figured that out, right? Like, that to your point about it’s not just that other people are trying to convince you that your utility function should align with those, but that we actually outsource that, it feels like. Like, we’re, we’re trying to get somebody to tell us, actually, what our utility function is supposed to be. So what are we supposed to do as women when we’ve got lean in and we’ve got, you know, stay at home and hold your kids 20 hours a day?

Corinne: Your whole podcast exists because decisions are hard, right? And when decisions are hard, it’s easier to just kind of follow a script or follow a default. And so I think a lot of what women do is I don’t think that we actually think about, like, what do I want this to look like and how does it impact my utility function? So the systematic decision of, like, choosing a college, where you kind of go through and you’re like, “Here are some traits and I’m gonna list them out,” like, I don’t think we do that with a lot of decisions. I think we follow cultural scripts.

So one of the things I tell people, because I’m a cold-hearted economist who’s now divorced and remarried, is like I tell people, like, actually think about your partnership as a business decision, right, as a financial decision, because that’s gonna have a huge impact on your career, and be a little bit more strategic in, like, interviewing a partner, and don’t just kind of follow the script of like, “Oh, he’s a nice guy. He’s my boyfriend, so of course the next thing we do is we get married.” Like, does it have to be? Does it have to be this guy? Like, does this guy bring enough to the table for it to be this guy? I think that we don’t break it down as often as we should in really thinking about, well, how will this choice impact my utility function?

Annie: Okay, so I wanna connect this with something that I try to tell people all the time, is that there’s all sorts of things that are implicitly included in decisions that you make, and you ought to make them explicit ’cause it makes the decisions better. You try to figure out what the things that you value are, what is going to make you happy, what your utility function is, as you’re trying to choose one partner over another, partly ’cause there’s lots of people you could fall in love with.

Corinne: And I think that’s a really helpful way to frame it. So if women do not actually make explicit to say, “Well, I value my career, and that means that I need to share the load at home equally, and I want to know that you actually are not just committed to, but are capable of making dinner and ordering furniture online and helping to make our house a home,” right? If they don’t have that discussion, the default is gonna be that she’s gonna do the lion’s share, and that’s what I see in the data, is that, you know, even when she’s the primary breadwinner, even when she makes four times as much as him, right, that she still does the lion’s share of the home production. And so not talking about it, I think will tend to serve whoever’s the dominant group, right?

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: Not making those sort of implicit things explicit will end up resulting in defaults that I think are less favorable to women. And so the reason I want to spell it out is because I want women to know what kind of deal they’re getting into, and the implicit deal, seeing the data, is if there’s a job opportunity in a different state for a man’s job, they move, and for a woman’s job, they don’t move. If you talked about that explicitly, is that the deal you would make? Probably not, right? But that’s what ends up happening by default. And so I’m asking women to think about a little bit what impact does my partner have on my utility function over my lifetime? What kinds of characteristics do they need to have? And then let’s make some of those things explicit. The same way when I’m searching on the dating website, I have a minimum height filter.

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: Right? Well, when I have a conversation with somebody, I should actually have a minimum number of things that he knows how to cook filter, right? And I should have a filter for him caring about the work of living because it’s not just that he says he’s willing to do it, but does he actually care about it? Does he actually care about the fact that it’s clean or that it looks nice or that the kids are eating healthy food? Because if you care about something more, the default’s gonna be you. You’re gonna end up doing it.

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: The reason I’m passionate about this is because leaving things in the implicit space serves the dominant group, and therefore in this case, it undermines women. And it’s a bad deal for women, and I think it’s linked to this other piece that we talked about, the existential crisis that we find ourselves in if people don’t wanna get married and they don’t wanna have children.

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: I think women are saying, “You know, I used to need to get married because there was this exchange of kind of my home production labor, my reproductive labor for this, you know, market wage, and now I have my own paycheck, and so I don’t need to do that. And so, you know, is this still something that I want if the terms of the deal have not changed with kind of the reality on the ground?”

Annie: Right.

Corinne: And so I don’t think that couples would explicitly lay out, “Okay, well, even if you earn more, I still expect you to do more at home.” I don’t think that anybody would say that.

Annie: I think it would be a bad dating strategy.

Corinne: But I also don’t think that couples have said, “Hey, let’s talk about this. Right now you earn more money than me. But what would happen if you lost your job because AI replaces all the computer programmers? Are you willing to take care of the kids or to be a stay-at-home dad? Is that something that’s ever interested you?” And I think having that conversation is gonna reveal a lot, and I think sometimes people are kind of afraid to follow all the branches of the tree, right? To say in these different scenarios, what’s going to happen? And that’s what I mean by reducing some of the uncertainty you can reduce because sometimes it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

And you know, that’s one of the interesting shifts I think we’re going to see with AI is that I r- do think that there are more women in AI-proof industries because women are more, are in more care industries, so like nursing is very AI-proof, right? And it’s gonna upend the balance of earnings within some households, and I don’t know if those households are prepared for that. I don’t know-

Annie: Because they haven’t had the conversation.

Corinne: Mm-hmm.

Annie: So I, yeah, I love this. I mean, it’s like think about what utility function is. It’s gonna be noisy ’cause our preferences get revealed to us as we experience things, but that’s fine ’cause you can adjust afterwards. Make what’s sort of implicit explicit, not just for yourself when you’re searching, but in the way that you’re actually talking to a potential partner that you may be expecting to pair with for life, right? And then figure out not just, like, as you think about what the implicit agreement is, is it asymmetrically applied? Are they gonna apply it asymmetrically? But also really dig deep into this kind of counterfactual thinking, right? Like-

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: … well, what if this happens? How are we gonna deal with it? What if this happens? How are we gonna deal with it? What if right now I say I don’t want a child, but how are you gonna feel if 10 years down the oad I actually change my mind about that? These types of conversations that feel difficult, if we go back to the street fight between present you and future you, it’s scary to have those conversations because what if you break up over them or get an answer you don’t like, or what if the person doesn’t wanna talk about it and they’re kind of mad at you that you’re even bringing it up?

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: Because it feels yucky to have those conversations. But future you is gonna thank you for it

Corinne: And I wanna say one more thing to like, you know, to younger women and to, and to younger men when you’re getting into relationships, is that one of the places where I think it’s hardest to predict your own utility function is on either side of becoming a parent, particularly for women.

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: So I don’t think all of the increase in time with our children is just because, you know, we’re being guilted into it or whatever, right? I think that there is a part of it that is that evolutionary self, which is that literally your utility function changes after you have a child. Because before you have a child, right, your brain is programmed to propagate your genes, it means taking care of yourself.

Annie: Right.

Corinne: After you have a child, right, like the best way to like propagate your genes is now to take care of the literal embodiment of passing on your genes that is crying next to you, right? Begging to be fed, begging for your time and for your attention. So I think it’s very hard to predict your own preferences on either side of that shift, and I think that’s why we hear from a lot of women that they have some feelings of their career maybe not progressing the way that they expected. A lot of that is society, a lot of that is partnership, right? But some of that is their own preferences surprising themselves, right? That it’s like, “Oh, I never thought I would be the person who would breastfeed for a year and who would wanna take a step back and wanna go part-time and wanna be on the PTA, but I am that person.” So in some of those conversations, I think it’s also important to think about like not just who we are, but who we might become.

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: And are there ways that you can provide some insurance, right? If you care about equality, if you care about gender equality, if you care about a woman contributing, not just through parenting, which I think is a great way to contribute, but also through her other talents and skills that, you know, can contribute, right, to the world. How are you building that in? How are you building in some early investment, some early leaning into her career? How are you building in the idea that, okay, how are we going to lean into your career after the fact if you do decide to take some time off, or you do take a longer parental leave? How are we going to kind of try to correct for that? And that’s why I think you almost need some of the defaults to go the other way, because mom becomes the default for so many things.

Annie: Mm-hmm.

Corinne: So, you know, if dad is the person who’s the only one who cooks, the only one who grocery shops, right? Then it’s gonna stop things from becoming quite so unequal when you kind of go through this, this big shift-

Annie: Right.

Corinne: … that I do think is more immediately transformative to women than it is to men. Of course, there’s, you know, a lot of transformations that happen to men, and I think there’s more that can happen over time. But in that immediate period, you know, after birth, right, I think there is more of a chemical upending-

Annie: Yeah, yeah.

Corinne: … of decision-making for women than there is for men.

Annie: Yeah. You know, I was just thinking about, it’s like you have this physical embodiment of that falling more on mom during pregnancy. And then we sort of forget that, that that continues on even after you can’t physically see it.

Corinne: That’s why the way I’ve explained it to people is to say, like, “Well, do you think if a woman miscarries, do you think that her husband, or if it’s a man, like feels that exactly the same way?”

Annie: Right.

Corinne: And I think everybody can understand, like that’s probably not true, right? And so as you said, right, it’s like during pregnancy it’s, it’s very clear, but that doesn’t change at the moment of birth, especially, you know, when someone’s still breastfeeding and then is very chemically connected, you know, still to that child. So I think that’s one of those places where, you know, as trying to think about the science of decisions and utility functions, I think it’s fascinating. And I think if you had told me that when I was 17 years old, I would’ve gotten so mad-

Annie: Yes.

Corinne: … because I wanted so badly to believe that I could be exactly equal to a man, right?

Annie: Yes. I have to say, uh, for me that’s definitely true, because when I was in my 20s, very career-focused. The number of children I wanted to have was zero.

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: And I have four. So it changes once you have a baby. That changes once you sort of make that decision and the way that you relate to that. Um, I also don’t want to remiss in, be remiss in letting you just tell the listeners about the Open Hearts Initiative, what that is, why you founded it, so on and so forth.

Corinne: Yeah. Well, I love that question because I don’t usually get asked about that, and this is sort of very much in, like, what’s my utility function, is that I, I run this small nonprofit and I run it as a volunteer, and that’s someplace where, like, I get sort of value and fulfillment in my life, and it has to do with homelessness in New York City, and it’s really about connecting housed and unhoused neighbors together to kind of create a strong sense of community and to educate people about the homelessness crisis.

And I think that where it interacts with kind of my other work on, like, educating people about decisions, what this podcast is about, is that I think people always think that you have to get fulfillment through, like, your main career, right? And I take this somewhat, as you may have guessed from my approach to romance, cold-hearted approach where I say, “Look, your job is a technology to convert your time into money. That is what your job is. It’s a machine that you put time into, you get money out of. And if you’re lucky, it spits out fulfillment at the same time,” right? But if you have to put all of your time into that money machine and it spits out a ton of fulfillment, but no money, okay, that’s a bad job.

Annie: Right.

Corinne: It’s not doing its technological purpose. And so it might be okay to say, “I’m gonna be a little bit more mercenary when it comes to my career. I’m gonna find a place that, you know, I put time and I get money out, and I’m gonna find a different machine to get fulfillment out of.” And so for me, you know, this is, I very much have chosen to keep this as a passion project and not keep this as part of my job, and it’s something that, you know, brings me a lot of fulfillment and allows me to feel like I’m giving back.

And by doing that, by choosing to do that, that means that I have to have stronger boundaries in my work life when people say, “Oh, can you serve as a mentor for this? Can you be on this panel? Can you volunteer your time? Can you, you know, donate speaking to this for-profit organization?” Uh, right?

Annie: Right.

Corinne: And I have to say, “No.”

Annie: That, that’s one of the most amazing ones. It’s like the non-profit, quote unquote, for financial advisors.

Corinne: Yes, exactly. So it’s like, and I think, no, like I, I choose to like donate my time to this specific source, and that’s why, you know, now I, I have to have stronger boundaries other places. But yeah, if you’re in New Y- if anyone listening is in New York City, um, and if you’re interested in this cause, Open Hearts Initiative has chapters all over New York City that connect housed neighbors to, you know, do things with their unhoused neighbors, and to, you know, have language exchanges and resume workshops and create care kits, and to just bring our community together to then ultimately try to figure out how do you get out of a very unfair and very segregated housing situation.

Annie: Well, that’s a… We will make sure to link to that in the show notes so that people can connect with that. All right. What would be the single most important decision-making tool or strategy that you would wanna pass down to the next generation of decision makers, men or women?

Corinne: Yeah. Right, and I hope people know, like in my book, I think that men are surprised they get a lot out of my book, and it’s not just… Part of it is from understanding issues that affect the women that they care about, but some of it is just that like the book is also just an economist’s guide to like making decisions about like love and career. And so this concept of utility maximization, and that it’s something practical that you can do for yourself, and trying to actually take the time to understand what is your utility function versus what’s a message you’ve gotten from someplace else, I think that that is a really important tool. Because it’s like you can’t maximize, and making decisions is always about maximizing. And when you’re at the poker table, you’re trying to maximize revenue.

Annie: Right.

Corinne: Right? But in our lives, like what are you maximizing? If you haven’t taken the time to understand what you’re maximizing, you can’t make good life decisions.

Annie: Yeah. So I love what you just said because look, it’s not just women who should be having this conversation with men. The defaults favor the men more, so we probably wanna focus on the women more, but it, men should be interviewing their partners as well. Like-

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: … men should understand what the trade-off is, what the economic agreement is in the household, how duties are gonna be shared. What if they lose their job, right? Like, they don’t wanna be surprised that they lose their job and their partner says, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m leaving you now.” Right? Which we know does happen.

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: And so it’s equally important for them, it’s just because men are the beneficiaries-

Corinne: Yeah.

Annie: … of the sort of structure of society focused on getting women to do it, but a man should be reading this book as well.

Corinne: And as you said, it’s like men in surveys are telling us they wanna get married, they wanna have kids. So it’s like understand how to make that deal add up for her, right? And then understand how you need to show up as a partner to make her, to get the yes.

Annie: Exactly. So we always ask this question on The Decision Education Podcast. What do you think the impact on society will be when the Alliance succeeds in its mission to ensure Decision Education is part of every K through 12 student’s learning experience?

Corinne: That’s a good question. Well, I think one of the important things there is, like, something that you can do through K through 12 education is actually democratize some things so that a lot of people have access to it, right? Because there’s a lot of things that I teach my Wharton students that, like, it’s like, well, everybody should actually understand this. You shouldn’t have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an M.B.A. to understand this. And so, as we talked about this, like, inequality, I think if you are able to do something through K through 12 education, you’re able to equip everybody with a set of tools that they need.

And so, an example of that in my own work is that, like, we took an M.B.A. negotiation curriculum, and we adapted it for eighth grade girls in Zambia, and we see, like, huge impacts on, like, schooling, on delayed marriage, on lots of good things in their life. Everybody actually needs these skills, right? And so, I think that you would really see positive impacts, but I think it’s more important that you would see these positive impacts across the socioeconomic spectrum, rather than centered on the people who can usually access these tools.

Annie: Yeah. Well, okay, so I’m just gonna carry you around with me when people ask that question, because that was a very good answer, and one I will 100% steal from you. Uh, just fair warning. If listeners wanna go online and learn more about your work or follow you on social media, where would you send them?

Corinne: So substack, corinnelow.substack.com. Um, Instagram, CorinneLowPhD, although in line with my utility function, I’m spending a lot less time producing content for social-

Annie: Yeah.

Corinne: … media companies right now. So more on Substack. And on my website, corinnelow.com, that’s if people have speaking inquiries, um, and also I have some free resources. If you wanna find out if you’re aligning your time with your utility function, I have this really beautiful color-coded time tracking spreadsheet. You can also do it together with a partner to see the balance of time within your household. So that’s all on my website, corinnelo.com. Okay,

Annie: Okay, well, I, and obviously, I just wanna say for you that everybody should go read Having It All. It’s a must-read, in my opinion. Uh, no matter what age you are, really, ’cause it’s gonna help you no matter what. And it’s a fabulous book, and I just completely endorse. So anything that we mentioned, including your book and your website, will be linked in the show notes for readers, so people will be able to find out more about you. I appreciate you so much coming on the podcast. This has been such a fun conversation for me. Everything you say puts, like, five thoughts in my head. I didn’t get to everything ’cause it- that would be a 12-hour podcast.

Corinne: Well, maybe we’ll have to do a part two sometime.

Annie: Maybe we will, because I think that other people’s utility function probably wouldn’t be listening for 12 hours while I just get to explore inside of your brain. But this was so fun, and I so appreciate you coming on and having this conversation with me.

Corinne: Thanks, Annie. It’s always a pleasure.

Published September 16, 2026