Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and today's episode is a hallway-style conversation in honor of back-to-school season on the economics of parenting, but not in quite the way you'd think. So much of the discussion around parenting and tech today is about the use of specific products or devices. So in this conversation, we wanted to broaden the context and instead explore what it means to use economics as a framework for understanding the nature of parenting.

For example, using game theory to think about parenting in terms of our interactions, our choices, incentives, but also the way broader economic environments change parenting styles in different cultures.

And last but not least,

how tech might be impacting all of that. The first voice you'll hear is Kevin Zulman, professor at CMU,

a game theorist and philosopher and co-author of the recent book The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting. And the second voice is Fabrizio Zilibati, a macroeconomist at Yale, working on a book called

love, money, and parenting. One of the real central struggles for parents, I think, is making

this balance between, you know, what makes life easy today, what gets your kid to stop crying

or to stop fighting with you or whatever, and what makes a good kid in the long run.

You know, you can give them an extra cookie now and they'll stop bugging you for it, but also

you're not teaching them good eating habits.

We try to find ways of planning and designing their interactions with their kids so that they can

get their kids to do things that are both in the long-term interests of the child,

but also make life easy on the parents. And that's where game theory comes in.

And that's exactly where game theory comes in. Yeah, we describe game theory as the science of

strategic interaction. And the idea here is that any time you've got two different people whose

interests aren't exactly the same, you know, you have a child who wants another cookie for dessert and a parent who wants their kid to finish their vegetables.

And so one of the focuses of game theory has been on how can you create strategic interactions, games, between two different individuals so that both individuals can come out

in a way that's good for both of them. Can you give us an example of the ways in which that

tends to play out in sort of real concrete daily parenting dilemmas? You're driving on vacation.

The kids are harassing one another in the back seat and dad turns around and says if you guys don't

behave we're canceling the vacation. Which is you're never supposed to do because then inevitably

it happens and what do you do then? Yeah, exactly. Every parent knows you're not supposed to do it,

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