Garrett M. Petersen

Thoughts on Parenting (Before Becoming a Parent)

My wife and I are having a baby. He is due in a little over a month. So before we start this journey, I’d like to write down some of my thoughts, beliefs, and opinions about parenting. Since I’m not yet a parent, these thoughts are primarily influenced by books, intuition, and my observations of friends with small children. I plan on looking back on this post in a year or two to see how the actual experience of parenting changes my views.

There are three books that have had a large impact on my views on parenting, and I’d like to mention them upfront. The first is Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. In this book, Bryan uses evidence from twin and adoption studies to argue that parenting is less important to children’s adult outcomes than most people believe. His conclusion is that parents can give themselves permission to not stress out about raising a little future CEO. Instead, parents can focus on doing things that make life more enjoyable for themselves and their kids right now.

The second book that influenced me is Emily Oster’s Cribsheet. This is a data-driven look at many different aspects of parenting. Unlike Caplan, Oster isn’t pushing a specific point. Instead, she gives a broad overview of what the science says about many different areas of parenting, from breastfeeding, to sleep training, to daycare.

The third book I want to mention is not by an economist: Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman. This book presents an autobiographical narrative about the American author’s experience raising her kids in France. What’s so interesting about this book is that it illustrates a lot of cultural differences in parenting styles and outcomes. When every kid in your culture is raised in a certain way, it’s hard to distinguish what is and isn’t a human universal, so an intense case study of just one other culture is enough to dispel a lot of false assumptions.

I’ll share my thoughts about parenting, starting general and getting more specific.

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Developing a new SaaS pricing model

In personal news, I’ve been brought on as the chief economist for Abio, a software as a service company specializing in enterprise software for Canadian construction firms. The company is technically decades old, but it’s in a process of transition that makes it feel much more like a startup.

The most fun thing I’ve done for the company so far is to develop a pricing model for their product. It’s not trivial, since they sell a multi-functional product to companies that vary widely in scale. Here’s a snippet of the post I wrote for their blog:

We want to encourage all of our clients to use more of our features so that rules out some common pricing SaaS models. Many SaaS companies divide their services into tiers, allowing users can buy additional functionality for additional money. Doing this would make Abio significantly less valuable to some clients, and we didn’t want to do that.
Charging everyone the same flat price is a total non-starter. Doing so would either mean pricing out smaller companies or losing money on bigger ones. So the clear answer is to charge by usage. Simple, right?
It’s not so simple.
Since Abio is a bundle of services, it’s not clear what kinds of usage clients should pay for. Charge for every kind of usage and we end up nickel-and-diming clients. This conflicts with our goals of making prices transparent and of encouraging clients to use all of our service’s functionality. On the other hand, if we just charge for one or two services, the system becomes gameable. Someone could strategically use all the free parts of the software and pay us next to nothing while eating up our resources.
The solution we came up with was to bundle the services together into packages and charge each client for the number of packages they use in a month. Effectively, this means you pay for the service you use the most. So one package can grant you A unique users, B workers on payroll, C paycheques, D quotes, etc. all for X dollars.
Yeah, get out your pencils. This blog post is a word problem now!

Read the whole thing at their website.

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The Kindness of Strangers with Michael McCullough

Today’s guest is Michael McCullough of the University of California, San Diego. We are discussing his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code.

How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. As McCullough argues, these choices weren’t enabled by an evolved moral sense, but with moral invention — driven not by evolution’s dictates but by reason.

Today’s challenges — climate change, mass migration, nationalism — are some of humanity’s greatest yet. In revealing how past crises shaped the foundations of human concern, The Kindness of Strangers offers clues for how we can adapt our moral thinking to survive these challenges as well.

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