David Goodhart’s The Care Dilemma is an interesting and thoughtful book about marriage, parenthood and ageing, filled with good ideas for how to address the gaps in our approaches to caring for the young and the old.

Since the 1960s, Goodhart writes, there has been a profound emphasis on choice and equality. More women have entered the workplace, divorce laws have loosened, contraception is uncontroversially accessible et cetera.

Goodhart by no means laments these cultural and political shifts as a whole. But he thinks that we have veered too far the other way. Working parents can spend too little time with their children. Family breakdown can mean that parents are not in their children’s lives at all. Insecure or individualistic lifestyles can mean that young adults do not have children in the first place. An ageing Britain, meanwhile, is not prepared for the demands that a greyer population will make.

This might sound like Goodhart wants to have his liberal cake and eat it. On the one hand, it is good that we have freedom and equality. On the other hand, people are misusing them. Well, Goodhart makes the valid point that people want — or at least claim to want — different outcomes than they have. A lot of mothers claim to want to stay at home with their kids rather than heading back to work. A lot of childless people claim to wish they had kids. 

The Care Dilemma, then, is short on moralism, and this makes a lot of sense. After all, not everything in our lives is the result of deliberate choice. As a childless 33-year-old, I’ve never sat down and thought, “Gee, I don’t plan to have kids until I’m at least 34.” Our lives, in many cases, are the result of an accumulation of micro-choices — as well, of course, as sheer dumb luck.

Goodhart draws on a lot of fine proposals for ameliorating societal atomisation. For example, he references Ellen Pasternack’s excellent Critic essay “Who will look after the kids?”, which critiques “daycare ideology” and asks, “Why do we have this system, when we could instead take the budget for childcare vouchers and give it to parents to spend as they see fit?” It is at least possible, in other words, to have more choice and more traditional outcomes.

Goodhart has a healthy disrespect for political correctness. He notes, say, the bleak and undeniable fact that abuse is much more common from stepfathers than biological fathers. Importantly, this does not mean that stepfathers cannot be wonderful guardians. Average differences do not define individual behaviour — and, of course, the abusive remain a minority. Yet, as Goodhart writes, “average outcomes matter”. There is no contradiction there.

No one could criticise Goodhart when it comes to the density of his suggestions. Some of them, arguably, are too modest. For example, he discusses the looming crisis in health and social care as the British population ages. Noting a decline in applicants for nursing degrees, he suggests a plan for student debt forgiveness. A good idea. Yet — as Tim Worstall has asked for The Critic — do we really need nurses to have degrees at all? Goodhart is absolutely right, throughout the book, that people who work in care deserve more respect. But it is worth adding that mere credentialism was a bogus route to higher status.

Mr Goodhart’s previous book Head, Hand, Heart made the case that Britain overvalues the “knowledge economy”. It is somewhat surprising, then, that his book is so cerebral. One doesn’t get much of a sense of the pain behind Britain’s loneliness epidemic or its social care crisis. “I have spoken to dozens of residential home carers and former carers in the past year,” says Goodhart at one point. But we don’t hear a lot of the stories. There could have been more human colour to give the statistics emotional force.

… we cannot simply think our way towards a more pro-natal, family-oriented society

This matters because we cannot simply think our way towards a more pro-natal, family-oriented society. “Freedom is a great horse to ride, but you have to know your destination” is the Matthew Arnold quote on the first page of the book. This is not just an argument about what is true but about what is good. The Care Dilemma is full of facts but short on moral and spiritual thinking — eminently understandable, of course, because facts are a safer and less confrontational domain, but changes in our normative understanding of life require more than a shift in our view of the data. I assume that Mr Goodhart has his tongue in his cheek when he raises the fact that married couples use fewer resources and contribute less to climate change than divorced couples but it is a revealing joke. We don’t just need statistics (as much as we need them!). We need poetry.

Still, this remains a serious and thought-provoking book. While it might be lacking in rhetorical power, it is heavy with empirical insight — its different lines of thought exposing the reader to all kinds of important questions and potential answers. A little more argumentative tightness might at times have been welcome (a vague reference to opportunistic euthanasia “as some claim is already happening in Canada”, for example, might have been adequate in an op-ed but not a book). But you’ll always find some lifeless petals in a patch of flowers. This is a book for anyone who cares about the dilemmas of Britain’s demographic future.