Jonathan Haidt is one of the most important and impressive writers of the day. Tyler Cowen is one of the most interesting and intelligent minds of our age.

The two of them recently spoke on the topic of Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. I highly recommend this conversation for all sorts of reasons. The most interesting part might be the questions Cowen asks based on a premise that humans, including children, are rational maximizers.

Haidt, who deeply understands human psychology, has pretty good answers. To be clear, I don’t think Cowen is positing that human children should be left to their own devices. Cowen is a probing interlocutor, who I assume wants Haidt to explain why, psychologically, kids would consistently engage in behavior that makes them unhappy.

Haidt gives good answers, but I’m not sure he gets to the heart of the matter.

Cowen’s first question along these lines is not about children but about Haidt himself.

Haidt tells Cowen that “right-wingers” make better parents (because we immerse our children in community), so Cowen asks Haidt why he hasn’t just become a right-winger. Because the community into which we “right-wingers” immerse ourselves and our kids are mostly religious communities, Cowen is effectively asking Haidt why he isn’t a religious conservative.

Amazingly, Haidt, an atheist, does belong to a synagogue. But Haidt has his limits. He knows that conservative values are good for people, but he also knows that people don’t choose their values instrumentally. “It’s not that simple,” Haidt replies. “You don’t just say, ‘Well, my research shows that this produces better outcomes. Therefore, I will change my values and goals to be …’ No, it doesn’t work that way.”

The premise of Cowen’s question is this: Our belief systems, values, and affinities can all be rationally chosen based on what we calculate will bring us maximal utility. Haidt is correct that “it doesn’t work that way.”

Later, Cowen uses this rational-optimizer framework to bring doubt on the notion that social media and smartphones harm kids — or at least on the proposition that adults need to take action to protect kids from social media and smartphones.

“You’re worried about screen time,” Cowen says. Over the course of a back-and-forth, Cowen asks, “If screen time is making kids so miserable, why won’t they seek out methods to make their screen time more efficient? You seem to suggest they won’t. It’ll just be more and more screen time. … Why are they so failing to maximize?”

I will admit that I ask this same question all the time. Why are my children so failing to maximize? Why don’t they simply do their homework during study hall? Why did he eat so many mini apple pie desserts that he cannot sleep? Why did he move his A pawn on his first move?

While I wonder this about my children, I don’t actually expect them to stick to happiness-maximizing activities. For one thing, they are children, who have very little experience, and they simply don’t know what makes them happy in the long run.

Also, children are humans, who often give way to their appetites, and fulfill their short-term desires to the detriment of their long-term good.

This is important. A lot of folks these days try to craft political and moral systems based on the premise that people, when allowed to choose freely, will generally choose what is best for them.

Haidt rightly argues that people are constrained by collective-action problems. Kids use TikTok because other kids use TikTok, and while everyone would be happier if nobody used TikTok, the one person who opts out of TikTok will be left out of all the conversations and maybe communications of their friends and classmates.

This is why I write that it takes a village to keep kids off of smartphones. Collective action — parents getting together, institutions discouraging smartphones — can reduce the draw of social media and smartphones.

But the collective-action problem is not the most important problem with Cowen’s arguments. More importantly, we often simply do things that are bad for us in the long term because they are easier or more pleasurable in the short term — and this is especially true for children.

I spend too much on X for my own good. Why don’t I just stop? Because I’m fallen and imperfect.

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Being a parent involves steering kids toward the things that are good for them and for the family, just as being a civilization involves steering all people toward things that are good for them and are in the common good.

This means that the job of parents and the job of a culture is often to steer people away from what they would otherwise choose. This may upset those who see self-actualization and individual autonomy as the highest goods, and so it may clash with the elite norms of today. But those elite norms are wrong.