> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found.
There's something deranged about a metric when deciding to take care of your own children, rather than pay someone else to do so, results in a worse number.
Economy is structured for extraction, not compassion. If this wasn't the case, we would prioritize people taking care of their children over GDP (just one example, lots of other examples; consider states recently allowing children to work in slaughterhouses and other dangerous workplaces [1] [2]). The purpose of the system is what it does. Line Goes Up Cult.
Vote for people who support better policy, few alternative options that can lead to some amount of success. Good policy is not hard, just takes will (confirmed by a quick review of other OECD/developed countries).
But at least we're at full/maximum employment amirite? [3]
If people can't work, they aren't earning income. If they don't have extra income, they aren't buying anything. So the state isn't getting tax income from these folks. In fact, they are probably paying them welfare. God forbid they can't make rent... It's almost impossible for children who grow up in this situation to escape it themselves. If the economy wanted to extract anything from these people, it would make sure they were working.
On the subject of policy, things like the expanded child tax credit and school lunches pay the government back incredibly well, so support for stuff like that isn't just helping your neighbor, it's helping yourself, too.
Furthermore, if we care about a growing population, we need to encourage people to have children. Seeing children as a massive burden and a trap away from your ability to work (because of childcare needs) leads to people just not having kids.
All the talk about "we need more kids" is completely moot, if you want people to have kids, give them a reason not to fear it. I am thankfully in a position where a phone call from the school means I'll work the rest of the day from home. My neighbor has limited options because she can't afford to work and childcare while her husband is at work. So her only options are: Don't work, work such that she never shares any off time with her husband, and thus is effectively living alone and basically that's it. And her job prospects aren't such that most jobs will cover daycare + more. In fact most jobs will barely pay above the cost of daycare.
Exactly. Because their solution is the whip, not the carrot. They are describing a very real need, people having kids, but they are absolutely going about it in both the worst possible way AND in the most malicious way.
They are not solving the problem, they are just pushing the problem onto people who's future will be destroyed. And it is causing many secondary catastrophes in our economy. And this article points out exactly one such. Healthcare is another. And food security is a third. There are others.
> If the economy wanted to extract anything from these people, it would make sure they were working.
If people don't raise people, there soon won't be people to economy. You have to invest in people (education, welfare, etc.) before they invest into the economy. These black-and-white deductions only make sense for spherical cows in void.
Some people become stay-at-home parents because they can't afford childcare, have to get welfare, maybe can't make rent, and maybe their children grow up in poverty.
Other people become stay-at-home parents because their partner earns a six-figure salary, they've decided to have 4-6 kids which they can afford, and with that many kids a stay-at-home parent just makes economic sense for a few years. Their household income is substantially above the national median, despite being a single-earner household. Their children do not grow up in poverty - in fact quite the opposite.
Guess which type of person the average HN reader meets more often?
it looks like some people have interpreted it as being written from a conservative point of view blaming the poor for their own problems, and definitely some phrasing suggests this but there is other phrasing that suggests otherwise so I would say it is probably downvoted because people have decided to take the least forgiving interpretation of the comment.
on edit: looks like I'm getting downvoted now! How exciting!!
things that are not particular conservative tropes.
> It's almost impossible for children who grow up in this situation to escape it themselves.
Understanding that people cannot escape poverty by 'themselves'
>On the subject of policy, things like the expanded child tax credit and school lunches pay the government back incredibly well, so support for stuff like that isn't just helping your neighbor, it's helping yourself, too.
seem to support paying more taxes to help less fortunate people.
These things taken together makes me think the parts that sound uncaring are maybe just poorly phrased.
> a) ppl not earning = on welfare
"probably on welfare" is what they say, which if you "can't afford child care" it might be that you need some government assistance of some sort when one of the partners drops out of the workforce to take care of the children.
This is of course different than "the benefit of the partner working in comparison to paying for child care is negligible", which would be another reason for one to drop out and take care of the children.
For some reason everybody came with the example of "the benefit of the partner working in comparison is negligible" examples in contrast to "can't afford child care", which would be understandable if they said well there's another reason than just not being able to afford why people drop - but they didn't make that comment.
So for these various reasons I think the comment was reasonable compassionate but did have a GDP viewpoint on why the system should be changed to allow people to continue working and afford childcare.
to clarify "the benefit of the partner working is negligible" this of course hits those cases in which one partner basically earns for a full time employment something close to what child care costs anyway. They CAN afford child care but child care is NOT WORTH IT.
Just had to clarify what should be a simple concept, but sometimes I worry.
on edit: this is essentially the point michealt made earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38111884 but they made it evidently as a reason why the original comment should be downvoted.
on second edit: of course assumption is the other partner earns a lot.
Did you even read the comment you are replying to?
> On the subject of policy, things like the expanded child tax credit and school lunches pay the government back incredibly well, so support for stuff like that isn't just helping your neighbor, it's helping yourself, too.
> So the state isn't getting tax income from these folks.
So perhaps resting our a bulk of taxation on income tax may not be a sustainable model. Especially when the corporate and high income wealth is so tax preferred (or evading taxes).
Refactoring our tax system to a less extraction model may be the better approach. Wealth taxes, financial transaction taxes, more effective property taxes (ie, land value tax) could result in a more livable country for the vast majority of people (numbers will go down a bit for the billionaires).
> Economy is structured for extraction, not compassion.
> Vote for people who support better policy
The problem here is that the latter is controlled by those in charge of the former because unlike those other OECD countries, bribery is pretty much legal in America.
I can't vote in the states that want child labor laws gutted. There are always loud voices in those states that say there's nothing wrong with it and that educating children as opposed to putting them to work is just governmental overreach.
I mean, there is a lot being put but this isn't the path to good policy. Good policy is arrived at slowly, thoughtfully and with people who are engaging the part of their mind that handles executive function. Usually with some compromises.
"A meat processer killed a 16-year-old. Yet US lawmakers want more child labor" is very much not a headline chosen by someone who is aiming for good policy. It is a clear ploy to get an emotional response. There are two topics that are reliably used for that - the first is protecting children and the second is war and combat metaphors (after thinking that, I read 'combat' in the 2nd link with a certain ironic smile).
The world is a very harsh place, and a lot of people are going to suffer through it. Blanket banning people from working - even 16 year olds - is unlikely to get to the best place. There are a lot of young people who's best path probably was working very hard at a job to get away from their families. Issues like that should be considered at length - and calmly. Just because the idea doesn't sit well doesn't mean it is a bad one.
"Yet again, the services rendered by women enter into the dividend when they are rendered in exchange for wages, whether in the factory or in the home, but do not enter into it when they are rendered by mothers and wives gratuitously to their own families. Thus, if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished. These things are paradoxes. It is a paradox also that, when Poor Law or Factory Regulations divert women workers from factory work or paid home-work to unpaid home-work, in attendance on their children, preparation of the family meals, repair of the family clothes, thoughtful expenditure of housekeeping money, and so on, the national dividend, on our definition, suffers a loss against which there is to be set no compensating gain. It is a paradox, lastly, that the frequent desecration of natural beauty through the hunt for coal or gold, or through the more blatant forms of commercial advertisement, must, on our definition, leave the national dividend intact, though, if it had been practicable, as it is in some exceptional circumstances, to make a charge for viewing scenery, it would not have done so."
The way the economy measures value is limited, manipulative, idiotic, and destructive.
I’d argue that the teaching of modern economics spreads a mindset that is a major contributing force to indescribable amount of unnecessary suffering and the destruction of our biosphere.
One of the healthier economic models is the Doughnut economics model.
Focusing on the multiple goals and limits seems like a much better way to measure the health of economies (or large systems). Is there any country that uses this model, or a similar one, as their main basis for measurement?
it makes sense. One adult can monitor many children. With childcare a single adult can watch 10+ kids. Makes more sense than having each adult watch only their own 1 - 2 children.
I don't think there have been many societies in human history that don't have some kind of communal child care for that exact reason. It is actually pretty deranged that we have each parent raise their own kids in relative isolation (until school).
I don’t think the OP is arguing against communal childcare rather the paradox of the way we choose to measure economic activity results in the same work outside of the home having more value than the work inside the home. Even if we were to assume efficiencies that would still imply that the work inside the home should have a value higher than zero.
Barter income is taxed at fair market value. Some people cheat on their taxes by failing to report barter income, but let's not conflate tax fraud with GDP issues. You can't legally avoid income taxes by asking your employer to pay you in firewood or diamonds or whatever instead of fiat currency.
The best way to generate value will be if you both get done for illegal trading of services without training or licenses and generate a few hundred thousand to a million in GDP via the legal fees, plus remediation though approved service providers.
Right. People are mistaking the map for the territory. Barter absolutely is part of the economy, and benefits the traders to the same degree a monetary transaction would; it just isn't included in most economic measures, because they're imperfect.
Not really IMHO. It only would if those goods get traded later on. One could probably even argue that it destroys value, as the labor is not bought on the market.
Two economists are walking in a forest and they come across a pile of shit.
The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.
They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.
Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."
"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"
GDP statistics include barter transactions at fair market value. However, sometimes small barter transactions aren't reported in a way that can be counted in official economic statistics.
Even on moral grounds I don't get the argument other than simplistic outrage for the sake of outrage.
It's more efficient but also better for everyone if kids to grow up socializing and interacting with others in a communal setting than alone at home with one single adult.
That’s because you’re still engaging with an argument about collective vs individual childcare not the one being advanced by the OP which is about the failure to measure some economically advantageous work just because of the circumstances in which it is performed. As I said in my post that you replied to even if collective work is more efficient that doesn’t mean the value of the same work in the home is zero which is what it’s currently measured as.
My mother did not work outside the home for the roughly ten-year span between my birth and my brother reaching school age. The communal setting, school apart, was called the neighborhood. This was the boom, so a given block could have quite a few kids on it.
Same here. Sometimes my mother would look after me and the neighbor kids, sometimes my neighbors mom would look after me and her kids and so on, for example.
Being at stay-at-home parent does not mean your kids won't socialize with other kids.
Also one could argue insofar this is actually "better for everyone". It will result in kids that are "more socialized" in some way maybe, but not necessarily socialized better. And it also doesn't take into account other developmental aspects.
If I look at young adults here (Europe) that have been more or less raised in daycare vs young adults that have been raised at home, I certainly don't see an advantage for the former (which might have many confounding factors of course).
Yep. Also, the parent staying at home is in a very vulnerable position - completely dependent and having really hard time to become dependent when needed. And when society demands one parent at home, independence can become effectively impossible.
The divorce laws take care of that imbalance. From child support, alimony and a presumed equal division of the marital assets the risk is quite low for the stay at home parent. Since no fault divorce was brought in they don't even have to behave like they are married, go out and have dozens of affairs, lie, neglect the kids and the home and you still get half plus most of you living expenses covered until the kids are supporting themselves.
To put it clearer: The law makes no distinction between a housewife and a unemployed woman, both get half even if the actions that resulted in the divorce were her fault and she engaged in them continously. Keep that in mind if you are unmarried.
They do not. 90% of US households have a total household net worth of less than $300,000. Even if you got all of that, it's not enough to make up for the lack of marketable skills. Similarly, a judge can award all the alimony and childcare in the world, but that does not help you if it does not get paid.
Then you'd be as poor as when you were married. At a certain point we need some level of accountability for the partner staying home, if you had a kid with someone who doesn't earn much money and you don't work yourself why would you expect to be middle class once you get divorced? You'll get your money, many men have most of their paycheck forcibly taken from them each week. You can't even get a driver's license in many states if you are behind on child support.
These insane expectations are part of the reason why marriage is a bad deal for the provider.
The mother would be not as poor as before marriage but way poorer, because now she's older, she's been out of the workforce for a long time, and still has to take care of the kid(s) after the divorce. The father, by contrast, has accumulated professional connections and work experience. Single mothers end up in poverty way too often, and alimony is an attempt to rectify this.
As with any legal process you can find examples where justice has failed, but overall a world with alimony and child support is way better than the world we had before, where women were condemned to destitution after divorce.
The previous comment was about divorcing someone without money. In your example my argument holds as she would receive not only half of the current assets but a claim on his future earnings, no matter how she behaves in the marriage.
In broad strokes: married people tend to be way wealthier than never married people, and divorced women do much worse than divorced men do. (Women are much poorer across the board also, of course). If your claim was true then the poverty gap between divorced men and divorced women would be much smaller, and we see that's not the case. If alimony/child support is such a raw deal for men it should be visible in the statistics.
Note the poverty rate for men who never got married vs men who got divorced. Marriage is not the raw deal for men you think it is.
Per all stats, men do better financially after divorce. They feel more lonely then women however. On average, women do worst after divorce financially and are at bigger threat of poverty.
And still, in USA, women do file for divorce more, because simply that financial control is not enough to keep someone in. Funny enough, it tends to be be organizations dominated by men who push against no fault divorces and toward even bigger financial dependence of their female partners.
Per all stats men do financially better in virtually all situations. They also work longer hours at more difficult jobs and take less sick and vacation days.
That's a great theory, but it often doesn't work out that way. She's likely to settle for less half just to get out of the marriage. She likely doesn't have a good way to get her own future earnings.
Even if it goes to plan with her getting alimony and partial retirement, she's still dependent on her ex-husband which is a frustrating and often vulnerable position. It means he is still in her life. He can harass and badger her about how she spends money. He may pay, but he might often be late, or sporadic, which causes her bills to be overdue and have late fees. Maybe he starts hiding money, he could even tank his income for a year or two to have the courts change the agreement. None of this stuff is transparent and can be very adversarial.
The average age a woman gets married is 31. This concept of the virgin bride who can't care for herself is long dead. She provided for herself for a decade prior to marriage. She can handle a few late payments.
I had no thoughts of a young bride. I'm thinking of a woman that'll get married, then raise some kids for a decade and end up in her mid 40s divorced and have been out of the workforce for a decade. I think you're projecting your thoughts and biases into my statements.
> but overall a world with alimony and child support is way better than the world we had before, where women were condemned to destitution after divorce.
Maybe we could start with making the minimum wage a living wage again so this doesn't happen.
And I'm very ambivalent about this. The problem with "justice" here is that the govt. has no incentive to cut off alimony because it means the govt. foots the bill. That's why even some outrageous outliers like someone's sperm being stolen from a bank has resulted in that man paying alimony. Judges exist to cover edge cases like that and its just not being done.
Well, it is reasonable for that person to want to be able to influence own outcome by having ability to actually earn. Instead of having to sue ex for money.
Also, alimony and child support are two different things.
What you call accountability for partner at home is not accountability. It is just complete helplessness and dependence.
Then get a job, but the idea that they are helpless is insane. They have the full force of the law behind them.
Go to family court as a woman, make up a sob story about abuse and provide no evidence and you'll have the power to prevent a father from seeing his children. That father is experiencing helplessness. Having to get a job isn't, that's accountability.
Employers do not want someone who was not employed for 10 years. So, we are back to "actually it is loosing deal for one partner to stay at home. It puts you at massive disadvantage and makes you dependent. Hence, it is simply not good for you".
Otherwise said, being at home makes you very vulnerable and puts you at risk of poverty. The longer you stay, the worst off you are. I am not the one pushing for the system where one parent has to sacrifice his or her independence when kids are born. I am just saying that if economy requires one of them at home, that person is being put at risk.
> Go to family court as a woman, make up a sob story about abuse and provide no evidence and you'll have the power to prevent a father from seeing his children. That father is experiencing helplessness.
In these situations, when father contests, courts tend to side with father. It takes a lot for father to not be allowed around the children in reality. It is simply not true that a single sob story would made course side with mother.
They do not and can not. Because even with large alimony, one partner is completely dependent on their ex. There is still huge imbalance.
Also, currently alimony even as those are rare and requires years of being without income. At that point, you can defend yourself by divorcing partner that does nothing long before alimony kicks in.
It’s not about how we measure it, it’s about actual productivity. Having some sort of communal childcare which allows the majority of parents to work full time will always be more productive.
> work inside the home should have a value higher than zero.
And it does. You don’t spend money on childcare and other services and can spend it on something else (assuming you have it).
> It’s not about how we measure it, it’s about actual productivity. Having some sort of communal childcare which allows the majority of parents to work full time will always be more productive.
What's measured is the amount paid. Hiring exclusively 1-on-1 tutors is "more productive" than communal childcare. Paying more money for the same services is also "more productive."
> more productive" than communal childcare. Paying more money for the same services is also "more productive."
That’s not obvious, those tutors might be doing something else which is more productive instead.
Just spending money does not do much on it’s own. e.g. paying $100 for a good/service when you can get an equivalent for $50 doesn’t “increase” productivity it just means your money is worth less.
If children educated by private tutors are not significantly more productive than those from a normal school longterm that would only lead to lower productivity/higher inflation.
> And it does. You don’t spend money on childcare and other services and can spend it on something else (assuming you have it).
But you lose, at least in the UK, from tax. If a married couple works, they each get tax allowances; first 10k is tax free, each, and then the next 30k is taxed at 20%, and the rest (up to 100k) is taxed at 40%.
If one person works and the other doesn't, they exist in a world where most couples work and bid up house prices, and they're taxed more for it. It's massively disincentivised to have a parent who raises your own kids and does other community activities (e.g. be on PTAs/school boards), unless you earn so much you can push through it.
Where I live (~DC), daycare costs 2.2k per month. With two kids and a 35% marginal tax rate (including state taxes and Medicaid/etc) you would need to make $81k per year just to break even.
Add up extra food costs (vs cooking at home) and extra cleaning costs ($140 every two weeks so about $4k and the value prop of having one SAH parent doesn't look as bad (which is what several college-educated friends have done, sp the ones with 2+ kids)
Agreed, and if things are so busy people need to buy in food every night then their kids are probably seeing the worst of them, which to me is the main issue.
I suppose what I meant more would distinguish between valid services that you buy because it makes your life easier, e.g. cleaning help, and government-mandated disincentives to stay at home, e.g. tax brackets.
And what is the purpose of that productivity? Except for generating tributes to the rulers? Why should people sacrifice the most important thing in life for productivity?
Then again, considering that many people already are just doing bullshit jobs, i.e. being employed for the sake of being employed, does it really matter if they are more "productive"? (as they are not really productive anyway)
Multigenerational housing sounds nice in theory. The reality is often rather ugly with constant conflicts over respect, authority, and household decisions. And as the grandparents transition from being caregivers to needing constant care themselves, it's often the wife who gets stuck with that work to the detriment of her sanity and career prospects.
Some families can make multigenerational housing work well, but it's not a realistic general solution for affordable child care.
I don't think it should be permanent, but the other extreme of "you're an adult now, good luck" is unreasonable too. It shouldn't be shamed to live with your parents after education and/or during early career. And if you can foot the bill to move out later in life after saving up, great.
Personally, it worked out for me. raise in my grandparents house until I was 12, but also grew up to see my parent go to military for ~6 years and my uncles getting kicked out later on as well. It's far from perfect but increasing divorce rates don't exactly show that being separated is better.
It only seems to work in other cultures because people are forced into it and have no other options. Very few people in the younger generation are actually happy with it. Hence the way young Chinese women now describe the ideal husband: "owns a home, owns a car, parents are dead".
Which boomers hate with passion: they quitted their parents home as fast as possible, and kicked their children as soon as it doesn't yield tax benefits anymore. All while using real estate as an investment vehicle which led to unaffordable prices of today.
We are boomers at 49 and 47. Our responsibility for our children ended at 18. What we do/did (21 and 26 now) for them after that is out of the kindness of our hearts. It’s definitely not our responsibility to take care of of their kids.
> What we do/did (21 and 26 now) for them after that is out of the kindness of our hearts.
yeah, other countries just call that "taking care of family" instead of treating it like a free handout. Beware that the US "kick the kids out the nest" mentality isn't a shared one worldwide, and even in the US is a fairly recent phenomenon.
>there are plenty of affordable homes in the US. You just have to be willing to live there.
maybe now, very recently with workplaces in tech specifically opening up to remote work. That wasn't the case when I graduated college as recent as 5 years ago. You don't get much negotiation for remote work and move wherever the job you choose takes you.
What you describe as a digital nomad lifestyle for you and your spouse speaks to your experience and value. Young 18-23 year olds don't get that flexibility in their new careers, nor have the savings lying around to start cosidering that.
>that a single adult can actually care for 10+ kids in a meaningful manner.
It's a good thing those daycare's aren't just one person renting out a large building, in that case. Real shame the people getting the most money out of it aren't doing any caregiving, though.
>And even if. The decision is basically, would you rather be working for your children, or for "the man"?
Sure, if most people could help it, they would never work a day in their life if they got 10m dollars (post tax). Not everyone, but I wager 80+%.
But that's not the fantasy we live in. While it was great to encourage women into the work force, the government took nasty advantadge of the 2-income households and made it the standard, all while spending power atrophied for decades. Now childcare is rising so much that it's more financially viable to NOT work for some parent's cases. It's all a mess.
That's certainly the case. It also seems to be an international issue - I'm living in Europe, but here as well, if we would both work, childcare and progressive taxes would eat up a good chunk of the additional income.
Not all of it, but enough to kind of not make it worthwhile anymore (even from a purely financial perspective, not considering factors that parents might actually want to be with their kids ;)
> It is actually pretty deranged that we have each parent raise their own kids in relative isolation (until school).
The quality of communal childcare varies widely; and having seen some examples of under-stimulating and inattentive care settings, I’d say the choice to raise one’s own children can be more rational than deranged, particularly if you have a caring and empathic relationship with your own children. In my own n=1 experiment, the decision to leave behind an income in the mid six figures to stay home with my child during her early formative years was anything but deranged.
> With childcare a single adult can watch 10+ kids.
Not quite. The rule is generally 6-8 kids depending on what state you are in, and the younger they get the lower the number is. 3-4 under 5 years old and only 2 under 2 years old.
childcare =/= raising kids. raising kids is done over the next several years of their lives, and schools, for example, play a big role here. childcare has traditionally been the job their parents. even in societies with communal activities: labor, rites, ceremonies, etc the onus still falls on the parents. see sparta for example. only when kids have attained a certain age can the rest of the community help in their upbringing.
> With childcare a single adult can watch 10+ kids.
1:10 is only valid for preschool age. It gets more expensive for kids under 30 months.
But the other benefit is that your kid has other kids to play with, and learns out how to interact with kids and adults outside of their own home (e.g. they learn how to stand in line and such). It is also a huge boon for the kids if their parents are less engaged (i.e. avoid excessive screen time).
The deranged part is the parent being the only person involved in raising their child / raising the child being the parent's only activity. This level of separation from extended family and community is a contingent feature a certain time, place, and social bubble, not something natural or inherent to the human condition.
The commercial daycare center is hardly the ideal model, but it is at least something besides total individualism.
My wife stays at home and this is simply not reality. Every day she and the kids are over at friends houses, playdates, hiking, etc. She basically hangs out with her friends while all the kids play.
The great part about this arrangement is that the adults get to plan all kinds of community events for families and kids. Parties, get togethers, camping trips, etc. Our lives are richer because of it and more communal because we're not all sitting in cubicles each day.
It's amazing and way less isolating than my own childhood of daycare. My kids get solid friends who they see almost everyday. We know the families well so they see their friends in more than one context.
Being a stay at home parent doesn't literally mean staying at home.
And to address the last point, my in laws live two blocks away, so my kids get a lot of time with them. And my parents live a short drive so we see them multiple times a week.
> The great part about this arrangement is that the adults get to plan all kinds of community events for families and kids. Parties, get togethers, camping trips, etc. Our lives are richer because of it and more communal because we're not all sitting in cubicles each day.
And it's an actually community. Not some "I care for your kids because I get paid for it".
> This level of separation from extended family and community is a contingent feature a certain time, place, and social bubble, not something natural or inherent to the human condition.
in my experience, this is a feature of city dwelling. when people live in villages there’s a tendency to have the same neighbors for a lifetime, and so to form more lasting bonds, which allows the full expression of our humanity. i have lived in some french villages and the community i experienced there isn’t different from how anthropologists described community among primitive cultures.
It isn’t just city dwelling but the reality of trying to escape poverty.
My parents did the “right thing” and delayed having children until they could feed us. I delayed getting married until I felt stable. In previous generations, I’d imagine my parents would look after my children while I was out tending goats or tilling a farm but it would be incredibly unfair for me to expect my aging parents to look after a child.
I can’t make the math work no matter how I slice it. I had a very fortunate childhood considering the childhood my parents had. If I have children, I want to give them at least the same level of comfort and security which right now I can’t. I think people who are having multiple children without thinking it through are being extremely selfish.
It's not about 'monitoring' them, it's about nurturing humans to adulthood (and giving them a wonderful childhood to boot). If it were all about efficiency, we could just put them in individual pens with auto-feeding slots or something.
This is a large part of why many economies of poorer countries look worse on paper than they really are. It isn’t that people aren’t doing the work, they just aren’t doing it for pay in a hyper-individualized way. The kids are taken care of, the food gets made, the sheep are herded, and no money gets transferred so GDP/capita languishes.
In this way economic measurements, investment bankers, the spooky IMF, etc are an active assault on community living. The Coffee-Cola Song comes to mind.
Other people help children too. Child care - especially pre-schools! - expose children to kids that are different than themselves, teaching them how to deal with others. They meet children that they would never meet through their parents. Other people also teach your children things that you might not consider or teach in a different way. Time away from one's caregivers is important.
You can insert something here about independent play: You really shouldn't give your children attention all the time. Helicopter parenting is bad. Young children? Stay close enough, but not hovering.
Not to mention that a stay-at-home parent is definitely not giving undivided attention. That adult still has to do adult things: Shower, make dinner, clean, etc and they will probably be expected to do a big share of it since they are home. Not to mention that most folks wind up socially isolated, especially if the other parent doesn't take the children and give the stay-at-home parent a break. Or if poverty prevents someone from spending time with others.
Quality time is precious: Time itself simply isn't the same.
Where are you talking about? In the US, borders are very much not open. Getting an non-employment based immigrant visa without the sponsorship of a family member is nearly impossible, and getting an employment-based visa is complicated enough that only large companies will even offer visa sponsorship.
Even assuming you have a good answer for that, what makes you think it matters? Birth rates are falling globally. Open borders only forestalls the inevitable.
Coming to the border, making a (legitimate|illegitimate) asylum claim, being processed, given a Notice to Appear, and being released into the interior of the United States is as easy as a $1-2,000 payment to smugglers.
From there, either working under the table or working off of a stolen identity is the norm. Thankfully, the latter is hard because the United States has a robust identity verification system with the secure, secret identifier known as the Social Security Number and thankfully all states require employment verification to prevent abuse of stolen identities and the abuse of these workers.
I don't know about "open borders" but about a million people a year come into the US; about 400k humanitarian migrants and 400k non-working immigration visas in 2022.
I don't think you can say that that's "nearly impossible", and even if it is, the numbers are still very large; by far the most in the world.
US has been the melting pot of the world for centuries, so I'm not surprised it has the most in the world.
That said, this shrinking growth is a worldwide issue. Unless America imports more Africans (again...) and other 3rd world countries to try and balance things out, it's going to be a rough gen Alpha and beyond.
In the US, borders are de jure tightly controlled but de facto open. Anyone who sneaks across the border and claims refugee status can stay indefinitely. Very few are actually deported. Many of them receive temporary work authorizations, and even those who don't are able to find casual jobs for cash.
You're not trying hard enough. "Open borders" does not mean literally "people can physically cross the border." It's a statement about who is and isn't legally allowed to immigrate. Accusing me of denying the humanity of undocumented immigrants is extreme bad faith, and you should feel bad about it.
While the tone of this statement may be a faux-news talking point, it is correct to say that the US is importing people to maintain stable population growth because it can't generate a domestic quality of life in which people see a future for their children.
Yes, GDP is famously crap. It wasn't developed as a number to be maximised, and we've known it makes no sense to maximise it ever since it was developed.
Samuelson remarked along the lines that (old-fashioned gender roles alert) "if a man marries his maid, GDP falls".
Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped politicians and journalists using it to keep score.
Amen. American business has to stripmine something, anything. Past generations put the brakes on doing it to natural resources so the tide has turned to human resources.
It's become particularly worse in the past 30 years or so as the cycle of stripmining has intensified. CEOs and execs and investors and private equity are quickly ransacking businesses and siphoning money. The idea of a sustainable business model has vanished as growth involves throwing billions of dollars into cornering and monopolizing a market so you can profit from the rent. It's even harder for new businesses to start up because costs are high enough that you NEED investment funds.
I wish I could do more than agree. I am pushing 60. The alarm was raised about wealth concentration and inequity from the time I was in high school. My generation and I didn't do enough to stop it. I'm not sure I did anything except sign the odd petition and vote. For the past thirty years wealth concentration has become the central dogma of the American economy if not the culture as a whole. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and laissez-faire.
> Regulations did nothing about wealth concentration though
Wealth concentration implies that someone doing something valuable over there is making what I do less valuable. It's the wrong thing to think about, IMO.
A valid question might be: could we have higher quality lives if we made it easier for people to create competitors?
Another one might be: how do I have a much better life than a monarch of my country from only 200 years ago?
> lobbying made sure of that
Lobbying does nothing. People who write and enforce regulations are the ones doing it.
You seemed to take the wrong argument from my stance so I'll need to be clear: The rising costs of business isn't due to regulation but rather wealth concentration and depressed wages. Business costs went up with inflation, but actual wages have not kept up. Ergo, someone could start a business on an average salary in the 80s but now cannot afford to do so.
For example I as a software engineer do not have enough money to start my own business despite having worked for around a decade. This is because the salary I earn and the amount I've saved is not enough to keep me afloat and start a business.
> Another one might be: how do I have a much better life than a monarch of my country from only 200 years ago?
Most of those gains are from socialized benefits, or due to the regulations we've created due to our experiences with rampant corruption or issues with societal growth.
> Business costs went up with inflation, but actual wages have not kept up
Inflation comes from: policies making things more expensive to do; taxes making foundational things more expensive (e.g. fuel, which affects most goods); minimum wage laws, which bumps up costs of goods and services; inflating the currency, which taxes your savings; ever-more tax and trading laws, that require businesses to employ more people to keep on top of them, and pay auditors to make sure they're following them. Inflation isn't out of nowhere. Businesses try and get prices down, so they beat their competition so you choose them and not someone else. But they are fighting all those forces, and more, all the time.
Wealth isn't the same as money. Having a majority stake in a valuable company is wealth, but it doesn't affect your wages at all. The idea of wealth concentration is built on the false premise that "net worth" is in any way to do with money, instead of mostly just being silly headline fuel.
> Most of those gains are from socialized benefits
No, they're from inventions. Most things that look like societal benefits are downstream of technology and enterprise. I can take painkillers if I have a headache, wear glasses if my eyes are imperfect (or now, contacts, or laser eye surgery), have healthy teeth my whole life, not worry about Polio or the Measles, and for an extremely low sum due to continuous improvement, innovation, and competition.
It is not taxable income. When a woman takes care of her own child, the government cannot levy taxes over that. The same when the parent fixes his own garage door. The government do not like these activities and that's why they'd prefer corporations which work people 8-6, so that the working potential of the population is fully available to them.
This argument makes sense initially, but when you consider it more deeply it doesn't really. If it was only about getting tax revenue and considering no other factor, the government could just print money and let people stay at home. I say it's less about levying taxes and more about harnessing the productivity of these women working outside the home. It is also clear to me that industrial nation governments have a higher goal of limiting population and physically eradicating the people of their nations, since most of their policies add to that trend.
This has always been going on through the history of civilization, but since nationalism became the strongest cultural force, the population no longer accepts being eliminated by foreign powers, so instead that work is being done by domestic rulers – focusing most of their efforts to exterminate the young to the benefit of the old.
> the government could just print money and let people stay at home.
This is your understanding of economics and you’re going around telling people they’re wrong. It’s okay to just admit you have no idea and ask a question rather than make a statement.
It's an unavoidable result of the division of labour. If it's more valuable for those parents to be child carers, they should quit their jobs and become child carers.
Any derangement is as a result of trying to link economic value with personal value. It doesn't mean the answer is to ignore the economic reality.
But this isn’t about economic reality: we exclude from measurement the contribution of homemakers.
To say they produce “more value” letting others care for their children is an effect of what we choose to measure — and emphatically not a measure of their actual economic contributions, as defined by what goods and services are provided.
Case in point:
Two housewives caring for each other’s children increases GDP since the salary is measured — even though both families are strictly worse off.
Probably universal healthcare, or at least one that's not so insane, with people avoiding treatment for simple problems fearing they will get slapped with a huge bill and go bankrupt.
A metric isn't a value judgement and it's almost certainly true that childcare has enabled a vast amount of mostly women to enter the workforce and do highly productive work.
You can have different opinions on whether that's good or bad, and I personally think you can make a strong case for it being a good thing, but there's nothing wrong with the metric itself.
When the median household income is 75,000 and the average household size is 2.5, yes, a metric like this can be a value judgement of policies.
I have another kid on the way and daycare for both kids (when the new one is about 8-9 months old) is going to be around $3,700/month, or $44,400 per year. For my family we will spend more than half the median household income just on child care. The story is almost the same with nearly every parent I talk to.
When we did the math on 2 kids in daycare, we hired a nanny. It was cheaper, more convenient and better for the kids. Plus, the nanny has become a lifelong family friend.
So an average Kindergarden group of 10 would net the operation 220k annually? That must be some high cost of living area, where child care workers earn decidedly above the median income. Or someone is extracting massive profits.
A metric is literally a value judgement. Especially when it's talking about economic value. Now, there are other kinds of value, but those aren't so easily amenable to metrics.
Well, that quoted whereever-it-comes-from number probably has a hidden undercurrent.
So "the economy" loses $122 billion from moms going home?
WHO is "the economy"? Well it's not the parents, because they are making the individual economic decision. Who could it be? The government? A bit, indirectly.... you know, like 15% of it, maybe.
Oh right, it's the rich/elites that rake in all the money, and set government policy. That phrase should actually be;
"The ultra-wealthy who control all the money and corporations lose 122 billion per year when their underpaid wage-suppressed mothers stop working, maybe we should throw them some more crumbs to get them back to work so we can collect that money back"
Where's the numbers about "overworking parents and denying childcare assistance so that people don't procreate, and 'costs' the US economy trillions?"
This is just, in an economic sense, another application of comparative advantage. If you can get paid more than your childcare costs, it's an economic loss not to do exactly that. You get what you measure.
We're agreeing. The issue is that what I've said is true _as defined_ (the value of work is what you can get paid for it; if hiring someone to do something costs X, and you can earn Y>X doing something else, then it's a deadweight loss of Y-X in economic terms to do X yourself instead), and you're pointing out that the definition of the metric has holes (which is true for all metrics). The consequence of management-to-the-metric follows.
Having people to look after kids while parents are away is not some aberration in human history that’s it’s made out to be. “It takes a village” is simply a cliched description of how it’s always been and it’s not a negative thing in general.
There is a distinction there, but the real economy is the informal economy. The 'formal' economy is just an approximation, constrained by what can be easily measured.
I was answering to the post that it's just a number, which I don't really agree with. This topic seems to be quite emotionally loaded.
> Because some people who don't care about raising children do care about the economy.
This seems even worse for me than "it's just a number", since in the long-term is a contradiction that leads to collapse. The economy is a sum of human activity, and the future economy will be done by today's children. If you don't raise them well you're simply extracting value created by others that wasn't quantified just so you can pad your metrics.
Not caring about children when you're thinking about the economy is like not training any new employees, but only extracting maximum value from your existing workforce, but done on a societal level.
I agree: The mindset behind this quoted thinking is disgusting.
May our children be our joy, our responsibility, our honor. I don't know the mindset that produced this, some form of "progressive" thought or outright communism (which is famous for this), but this must be countered wherever found. It is not Good or healthy.
It’s not just a values question, but a valid criticism of GDP as a measure. If you and I stay home and take care of our own kids, then that counts $0 to GDP. If we take care of each other’s kids and pay each other an amount that balances to $0, that contributes significantly to GDP.
Thanks for the clarification. I guess everybody who stays home to look after a child should have their GDP contribution rated the same as a professional provider.
I'm surprised this wasn't taken into account long ago? Are homemakers really excluded from any GDP calculation?
It's a one-sided statistic, and it's completely pointless. What is it supposed to prove? That raising children costs money? Well, no shit. Let's just cut this useless expense loose and die off as a species, then. No species, no GDP, no problem.
The people who want to take care of their children already feel strongly about it. Mentioning the impact on GDP influences the people who think it doesn't involve them and/or assume that touchy-feely policies mean higher taxes.
Hat tipping Keynes I like to distinguish rentier capitalists from all the other types. In short capitalists that collect rents on stuff. Different than say an industrial capitalist the in the business of manufacturing and selling stuff.
The latter sort of understands that he needs workers to staff his factories. And consumers to buy. So he understands that children are tomorrows workers and consumers. The rentier capitalist is a financial parasite. He can't understand doesn't want to understand. Anything that reduces his rents like taxes to pay for school lunches pissed him off.
In the last 50 years rentier capitalists have managed to completely suppress the power of industrial capitalists and labor. And have managed to convince most people to think like them. So people think a parent spending time taking care of a child instead of working is 'a loss to the economy'
You could make an argument that something like that is an externality. But capitalism’s goal is closer to incentivizing productivity by marrying needs and opportunity for mutual gain.
Mine is a comment that requires context, yours is the low-effort.
For example, prior to you being born, a family could survive on a single wage (typically the husband's) while the other parent raised the children. But societies were convinced that for our freedom, both parents should work, or be able to. And now you can barely even afford rent with two wages in many places, and often not afford both the rent and the family.
You can certainly survive off a single wage (I know many who do) if you’re willing to maintain a lifestyle similar to when single wage earner households were common - 1960’s.
Of course you’d have to live with all the healthcare, technology and housing (small!) like it was in the 60’s. But it’s absolutely doable.
Shocking how many people don’t make that trade off!
People complaining basically want their cake and eat it too. They want the lifestyle off a two income household but also the free time to raise kids without help. Life doesn’t work that way.
The number of people I know in their 30s who can only just afford food and shelter is so high - these are people in the same economic class who'd have had kids 20 years ago. We do extremely little to make a society that encourages people having kids, or honestly just living a life doing much other than working. Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords. The workers are still being paid under a living wage. Keep in mind its mostly privileged people who can afford a single income that have the option to exit the workforce. Unless we can make cost of living more affordable for everyone we can't expect anything to get better. In 1985 a median wage worker would spend only 55% of their check on housing healthcare transportation and education, now its 105%.
> Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords.
Labor in the US is pretty expensive in the grand scheme of things. $15 is peanuts to make, but a lot for parents to cover.
Take this scenario. You have an infant room with 8 kids and have 2 teachers in a LCOL area. Tuition is 325/week. Total incoming weekly tuition is 2600. If you find 2 people who will work for $15/hr thats 1200/week in labor costs. Plus FICA, insurance, and anything else required to pay per employee. With no redundancy (so no sick/vacation days). Then you have to pay rent, utilities, maintenance, front office staff, and have enough left over for someone find it all worth it.
There is really no way around it - if you want people at the bottom to make a decent wage then customers will have to pay it. And $15 isn’t exactly decent even in LCOL so daycare costs would probably need to rise at least another 33% in this scenario which moves the low end price of daycare from 1300/month to 1729/month.
> if you want people at the bottom to make a decent wage then customers will have to pay it
We could always consider it a public good. $35 billion a year is the rough estimated cost I've found to provide universal pre-k (ages 3-5), with people leaving the workforce costing $155billion elsewhere in the thread. We spend at minimum $880 billion on the military. Seems like a no brainer to me.
California is slowly moving that direction by expanding out DK. Our twins got to attend last year because of the new cutoff. And our local elementary school added a 2nd DK class this year due to the continued expansion (before they only had 1).
There definitely does seem to be a learning curve involved here. They try to teach DK to K standards because there are no other standards. Which is just unrealistic, especially as you start accepting nearly newly 4 year olds.
Doesn't matter, it's just good writing to spell out acronyms initially. At the very least, it also helps everyone else reading this to not waste their collective minutes googling uncommon acronyms when the commenter could simply spend an extra few seconds spelling them out initially.
> Take this scenario. You have an infant room with 8 kids and have 2 teachers in a LCOL area. Tuition is 325/week.
You’re pulling these numbers out of your ass, to be frank.
I live in a Low-Cost of Living Area (rural South Carolina, near Clemson) and we pay $160 per week for care for a good facility. Formerly, in a now High-Cost area (Charleston) we paid about $200 per week in 2020 with that rising to about $225 for an ok facility. If you wanted to pay $325 you’d have your pick of the litter of high-end facilities with nice add-ons like Spanish-immersion and music education.
For further context, my wife currently makes $15 per hour as a simple line cook in order to have a 9-5 style schedule, and covers daycare, vehicle expenses, and groceries on her paycheck. If we had a second child added we would be about break-even on her at that pay grade. For further context, her 9-5 prep-cook pay was $20 per hour at her Charleston employer and prior to was making 55k salaried with benefits and PTO as a sous chef.
The issue we faced as a family was lack of availability at most facilities. We spent a year on a waiting list to get accepted in. My wife couldn’t work even if she wanted to the first year. In the city, that might have stretched further.
> You’re pulling these numbers out of your ass, to be frank.
I am not. LCOL here and 325 is the low end. The ratio by law is 1:4. I'm using the wage ($15) that I've seen advertised for the job. I did the math on the rest. I think you're being unreasonably critical here.
We could instead look at averages but your anecdote isn't more valid than mine. Especially when you fail to mention the SC teacher:child ratio is 1:5 instead of 1:4, and that your kid is presumably not an infant since you've been paying for daycare since 2020 https://www.scchildcare.org/providers/licensing-requirements...
> Formerly, in a now High-Cost area (Charleston) we paid about $200 per week in 2020
SC having a higher ratio proves my point that labor is a major factor in price. Additionally, Charleston isnt HCOL (doesnt hold a candle to NYC, SF, etc) and a lot has changed in 3 years. Not just inflation, but the age of your child. You are comparing my scenario (infant) to yours (toddler) which have different costs.
Where I am in the US northeast, the cheapest licensed daycares are around $360/wk. If you want the nice daycare you are looking at more like $400+.
>For further context, my wife currently makes $15 per hour as a simple line cook in order to have a 9-5 style schedule, and covers daycare, vehicle expenses, and groceries on her paycheck. If we had a second child added we would be about break-even on her at that pay grade.
Do you pay no taxes? Because 35*15=$525/wk. After state, local, and federal taxes (not to mention property taxes) that should be about $367.50. Minus the $225 for daycare, that leaves $142. Assuming only a single car and around $92/wk in vehicle expenses ($400/mo -- including car payment, maintenance, and gas), that leaves $50/wk for groceries for three people. That seems extremely tight for a high cost of living area.
And I have no idea how you could break even with another $225/wk daycare payment. Even at a 0% tax rate, that would leave just $75 per week for all groceries and vehicle costs for three people.
I don’t think they are really out of line for their estimate. I live in a mid size city in the midwest and we have paid $50-$100 per day depending on the quality of the facility. I’m sure a weekly or monthly rate could knock that down a bit, but it’s still quite expensive.
I believe you, but how do the sums work? In my jurisdiction - a notoriously right-wing part of Canada - the staff:kid ratio is 1:4 for little guys, 6 for toddlers, and 8 for 4 years +. Call it 6 average. A group of 6 kids will bring in $960/week. At a minimum wage of $15/hour, a week's wages is $600 - call it $800 for the employer after expenses. That leaves roughly $160 excess funds per cohort.
Say there are 5 cohorts in a daycare - 40 kids. $800 excess funds per week or ~$3500 per month. Out of that comes rent, insurance, supplies, cleaning, utilities, and probably property taxes and maintenance on a typical triple-net lease. Seems like a losing proposition.
In my limited experience, daycare tuition in high cost of living areas is insane. Not sure why. You basically have to find some mom by word of mouth, running a daycare out of her house, to pay anything reasonable.
> In my limited experience, daycare tuition in high cost of living areas is insane. Not sure why.
You know why. Because labor costs are "insane". Not insane from the perspective of the low-wage earner making 60k in NYC, but insane for the 4 families that are paying their salary. That's $15k per family per year. But that's not the final cost, they then have to cover a share of center overheard + some margin which easily hits 25 or 30k.
that's not a very satisfying answer. The ones doing labor aren't benefitting, and a day care cares for more than 4 kids. so where's all the money going? Rent? So tiring hearing all these arguments in politics thinking of the kids, and meanwhile the kids' facilities are screwed over the worst.
and for a high CoL area, it's not even 1200 a month. It's more like 2500-3000. Literally a 2nd apartment's worth of rent. Unless things went down over the pandemic.
We're in a medium COL area and at ~$400/wk per kid. Our daycare accepts state subsidies and kids as young as 6 weeks. The wait list was ~15 months long. It's very much the cheapest in the area.
Friends about an hour outside of Portland are at ~$500/wk, wait list of ~12 months
Friends in Knoxville are at ~800k/wk, wait list of ~2.5 years, and they have access to university daycare.
Friends in the Bay Area are at ~350/wk, wait list of ~12 months.
Daycare is super local, from what I can see. Still, it's crazy expensive even with state subsidies. And the wait lists are really long. I've not heard of one that was less than a normal human gestation period.
TLDL: Anytime you have a wait list, you have screwed up your capitalism somehow. You should be raising prices instead. Daycare is unique as most families cannot possibly afford that 'true' market rate. Think lighthouses. This is why nearly every country on the planet, and some US states, step in to help. The US is the only country that has this problem, and it really is a big problem.
The thing that creates the specific downward pressure in the US is also the thing that makes it very GDP-productive. When business raises their voice, they get to call the shots and define society in a way that creates economic rent: so, car dependency, approaches to childcare, approaches to healthcare, and so on. A lot of money from these businesses is "on the books" and easy to assess for taxation and investment purposes, and the government tends to be satisfied with this arrangement since it makes easy to know who's in charge. Meanwhile, everyone suffers from having sprawled cities with expensive homes, oversized trucks, bad healthcare, etc. All of that results in an expensive childcare number.
But this structure is also rather unrelated to the real productivity of the economy - the creatively destructive portion of American business always has something to say about it. If those companies want their labor to be cheaper and less frequently disrupted, they have to go cause grief for one of these rentier businesses, socialize some things and cut into some monopoly inaction or low standards. But they only reach that conclusion by letting the economy get into a highly unstable position first.
Fundamentally, I believe the US either needs to subsidize childcare directly (either as guaranteed slots at childcare facilities or payments to families for a parent to stay home and provide care) or make peace that people will have less or no kids because they are unaffordable (unless you are of means and can afford children as if they are luxury goods) in the current socioeconomic macro.
Will this help? I'm unsure. Children are heavily subsidized in Scandinavian countries with pro natalist policies (in some circumstances, governments paying cash for children does not move the needle much and comes at a high cost), not subsidized much at all in China comparatively, and both cohorts continue to see a decline in total fertility rates. These are complex systems problems where the cost to modify inputs is high, and latency in feedback also high.
It isn’t really radical policy, when you consider public school funding works the same way.
A better term than subsidy might help. For example, we don’t describe property taxes that go to your school district as an “education subsidy”. It’s just a public service you pay for (that everyone benefits from at some point in their lives).
> Fundamentally, I believe the US either needs to subsidize childcare directly
We do this in America, although it’s through the back door in the form of generous tax credits. With two children we receive a fat tax refund every year. For those on the dole, solid increases in benefit allotments come for those with children.
Child tax credits ($2000/yr below the income phaseout) are an order of magnitude smaller than childcare costs. GP is talking about fully subsidizing childcare costs. And, uh, the income phaseout impacts it too.
Australian here. Subsidised childcare is great, and absolutely crucial for single parent households. It disproportionally benefits private interests though, not families.
For-profit childcare centres have absolutely mastered the art of simultaneously minimising operating costs (underpaying staff) while increasing pricing. These increases then create pressure to improve subsidies. With CCS at up to 90% for low income households this creates a flow of public funds directly to their shareholders while not actually improving anything for the people it should help.
In Norway at least, most childcare is provided by the state (via the local authority). There are some private nurseries but there are very strict rules on how they operate, to the point that the laws are hostile against their existence. What's interesting is that there are also private, not for profit, parent run nurseries, where the nursery is managed & budgeted by a board made up of the parents. There is an owner, making a reasonable salary like profit, but no shareholders. Nothing's perfect but works really well to optimise spending and minimise public money going to private profits.
> make peace that people will have less or no kids because they are unaffordable
Yes this is the right choice. We have immigration to make up for the missing workers. This is not a social problem like you are portraying it.
Society gains nothing from people having kids when we have unlimited immigration potential. Society would just be subsidizing someones lifestyle choice which is not its job.
You are encouraging genocide. Quite literally, as what you propose is one of the commonly accepted definitions of genocide, which is to impose economic hardships on a population that hinders them from having children as well as replacing them by mass moving other ethnicities into the lands that they once inhabited.
All because you believe it would benefit in some invisible deity of "society".
There are no missing workers and has never been. There are only missing wages.
Natives in America were historically the victims of genocide, because rulers and industry at the time decided it was too expensive to get them to labour effectively. The natives wanted to spend their time on other things, such as caring for their children. And European settlers were not reproducing quite fast enough for the hunger of the business rulers for young workers. So the natives were exterminated and replaced by cheap and effective labour brought in from Africa. How does history judge those actions?
And now hackers are here in 2023 using the same arguments again.
>one of the commonly accepted definitions of genocide
I need to see your definition or consensus sample:
the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were:
- killing members of the group (nope)
- causing them serious bodily or mental harm (you can argue mental harm, but it's a huge stretch)
- imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group (living conditions are down, but it'd be disrespectul to compare my living to slavery or a concentration camp)
- preventing births (I guess this is your angle. But discouragement =/= prevention. My parents discouraging me from having a kid isn't genocide. Moreover, this is a decision mostly made on free will; you CAN still have a kid, but the costs of raising a kid are always present)
- forcibly transferring children out of the group (nope)
>Natives in America were historically the victims of genocide, because rulers and industry at the time decided it was too expensive to get them to labour effectively.
yeah, because they furfilled at least 3 of the 5 definitions. You can easily argue all 5. What's happening today is 2 very iffy arguments across a nation, with ways out of society in the worst cases.
Economic subjugation / destruction of economic life is mentioned in several of these definitions. For example that a young family is forced to go into life long debt in order to have their own home, or pay exorbitant rents.
Especially the first definition in the list is worth reading, because it dispels the myth that genocide needs to be immediate and brutal. It can also a long-term plan carried out by rulers to exterminate an ethnic group.
> yeah, because they furfilled at least 3 of the 5 definitions. You can easily argue all 5.
There is nobody today that would argue that natives in America weren't subjected to genocide.
What is the purpose of society? In the US, the stated goals were to
> form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
I don't see "increase economic output" in there. I do see an explicit line item about Liberty for our Posterity (i.e. the authors' children and descendants). One might infer that actually that entire list was meant for us and our children too, and not just the people of the time.
That wasn't the stated goal of society, it was the stated goal of the adoption of a particular framework of government (replacing an earlier one which, implicitly, fell short in those areas, but may have been adequate to other areas important to the goals the authors had for society.)
Ok in that case, it's to end the the war of all against all, but genocide is a rather strong reason to dissolve the truce. The people unable to have kids because of policy decisions that it's economically inefficient would owe no obligation to society, including the obligation to warn anyone ahead of time that the contract with them has ended.
Alternatively conditions can be created where one parent, most likely the mother, can stay home and wages will automatically increase because of the reduced labor force.
Wages are not 1:1 corresponded with reduction in labor force, because companies will often gladly squeeze individuals harder and harder rather than pay more to hire more. Look at all of the people who complained about 'people not wanting to work' when fast food and restaurant industries had a lack of workers.
Additionally this can tend to have bad effects on the rest of our systems, for example the nursing shortage isn't resulting in better pay for most individuals despite them being in high demand. It's resulting in a rise in traveling nurses which also impacts the salary of other nurses. Companies are incredibly resistant to paying people more, especially when they have monopolistic control over jobs in certain areas which allows them to forcibly depress wages.
I would bet there is only so much squeezing you can do and losing 40-50% of the workforce would mean that you cannot sustainably as one person to do the job of two for an extended period.
The key word is 'sustainably'. If companies cared about that, we wouldn't be in this spot. Companies will gladly coast with the bare minimum even if it means losing people can ruin entire systems or projects as long as the next quarter results look good.
And companies always underestimate how much their burn and churn affects the next year at the cost of the quarter. I won't exactly sympathize with them as they degrade and a facility that doesn't drain blood from a rock rises.
Feminism arose in the US during the 1950s in the first place because a significant amount of women were not satisfied with being stay-at-home mothers and wives. Even if the world were suddenly taken back to the 1950s, the same thing would happen again eventually.
Also, if half the working population stayed home, the economy would be half as productive. Wages won't automatically increase; business will just go to some country or region where comparable labor is more abundant, and the country's economy becomes less competitive.
> Feminism arose in the US during the 1950s in the first place because a significant amount of women were not satisfied with being stay-at-home mothers and wives. Even if the world were suddenly taken back to the 1950s, the same thing would happen again eventually.
I don't think anyone is advocating for returning to the 1950s status quo. We should, however, do away with the delusion that couples can have both two careers and raise children. Sheryl Sandberg sent this message to women quite a while ago at this point, she just tilted it toward "give up on the family and focus on the career".
We can create incentives that allow it to make sense for a family to have a single income, and a mother to raise her own children again, without telling women they're required to do that. Right now there's not much of a choice at all. Couples are forced to have two incomes because they can't make economic ends meet otherwise. Giving women real choice is a whole lot better than what we currently have and better than the 1950s. Women who wants careers can have them, and women who wants to be full-time mothers should be able to do that without it meaning being destitute.
I agree that being able to have children on a single income without 1950s gender roles would be the most ideal outcome.
Like I said, though, I kind of wonder how a country could get there. If it became more common, the country would become less "productive" in the short term, because we don't count raising children towards the GDP, even though we should. So, in the short term, if voters and politicians keep chasing short term GDP growth, they'll never try to make the ideal outcome a reality. That would only start doing so when population goes down and immigration can't supplement population growth anymore, but by then it will be too late.
> If it became more common, the country would become less "productive" in the short term
technology and education already solved this. We're not in the 50's anymore with a Ford-esque assembly worker chain dedicated to pushing one pencil each. One modern 2020's man can do the work of 10 minimum wage men back then. So why does he have less earning power than his grandfathers?
we're plenty productive, and the govt. shouldn't treat their people like a tech company does chasing "infinite growth". pay people a living wage, give them choices in lifestyle (part time, full time, contract, etc.), invest more in training and growth so each worker can do more, because to be frank we don't need a single cashier dedicated full time to checking items out anymore (as one example). If that training is valuable enough to poach, bring back proper bonuses and other retention incentives (but let's be real, most of that training these days is in college).
And come down the other way too. Stop letting housing rent for people who are actually living in a place get out of control. Same with food (and it'd be a nice bonus to subsidize more sustainable, healthy foods while we're at it).
Feminism and women's liberation resulted in the waterwheel and steam driven textile factories being majority staffed with women during the industrial revolution?
> I thought it was WW2 and the lack of men to do the jobs they usually would.
That doesn't track the reality of the timeline of women in the workforce. Women temporarily worked during WW2, and after the war things returned to the previous status quo. Women weren't common in the workforce until the 1960s. It wasn't until 1967 that women's labor force participation broke 40%[1] but then it pretty quickly hit 50% by 1978.
"Women's liberation" is what brought women into the labor force. That doesn't mean it "ruined America", it just means the approach had flaws that need to be iterated on.
Cottage industries from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth did have women working though. It was just that there were no factories until the industrial revolution, so that industrial activity remained in the home "the cottage", for both husbands and wives.
> I thought it was WW2 and the lack of men to do the jobs they usually would.
I thought it was common to teach that women's employment rose with second-wave feminism in the 1960s.
My background knowledge: after WW2 ended, women were fired and replaced with men. The average age of marriage dropped, and the portion of women attending college descreased. Housewives were increasingly dissatisfied, which drew them to the second-wave feminist movement. This is why the book The Feminine Mystique sold well.
>I thought it was common to teach that women's employment rose with second-wave feminism in the 1960s.
that would time well with being one generation removed from the one that lost 400k to war. the 60's would be when boomers would start entering the work force.
I'm sure some of the silent generation women also entered, but they wouldn't lead the bulk of the workforce shifting by the late 60's/70's.
Invention of dish washer, washing machine, supermarkets (A&P) where you can do all your shopping in one place, they freed up the women labor force. Then WW2, men went to war, women started filling in some of the roles.
I don't think any progress in women can be attributed to feminism. They still don't have any ownership of their own bodies (abortion, sex work), their bodies are controlled by 80+ year old white males running the govt.
Yeah can’t have it all. I’d be willing to put up with some sexism if it meant everyday wasn’t a low paid grind to the gravestone. I would bet a lot of women would given how dissatisfied the workforce is currently.
The reality is also everyone can’t have it all. If a lot of people make choices that lead to a worse outcome for everyone then maybe we should prioritize other avenues of fixing the problem rather than continuing to optimize for complete freedom of choice.
I mean, dads have sacrificed dadhood for years (talking as a dad), without even a chiice. I've been in the privileged position of working from home, so I see my children every day, can take a minute or two to play together during the day, eat together, bring them to school, and of course when they were 0-1 years old they slept on me so many times (even while working. Computer did wonders!)
I don't know for a fact, but I suspect it is possible to have two parents working from home and an external person coming home a couple of hours during the day and have both career + children, but I'm not entirely sure (my wife is fully dedicated to children, although we are at the tail end).
That being said, the choice shouldn't be determined by sex. Breastfeeding is a thing, but with Canada's paternity/maternity leaves, the problem is heavily mitigated (1 year, although with very low compensation)
To be fair you have a choice: find an ambitious woman (or man) willing to be the "breadwinner" and appeal with your ability to care for children.
I'm not saying that choice is plentiful, but it exists. I'm sure there are other people willing to have kids but also wants to progress in their career.
>I suspect it is possible to have two parents working from home and an external person coming home a couple of hours during the day and have both career + children, but I'm not entirely sure
sure, we call those nannies or simply babysitters, depending on the amount of involvement. Not impossible but it is a large expense to consider. Alternatively, be fortunate enough to have trustworthy neighbors who has a stay at home parent who can keep an eye on things for a few hours.
I wouldn't mind a return of the latchkey kid. those stranger danger initiatives probably did more damage than good with regards to letting a kid properly engage with the world.
Also, to maximize health benefits for the children, breastfeeding is preferable (according to WHO, for 2 years), which partially takes away that choice (it's really hard to make a choice against child health if it's purely based on my interest).
That's just what they called kids who had a house key ("latch" being the keyhole). They would either be capable of walking home, going in the house, and being okay by themselves for some hours before the parents got home. Or in the older days they would simply wander the neighborhood or town and come back in before sundown. of course, these days that is considered borderline child abuse to kids under 13, but those days weren't that long ago.
Can't say much about the breastfeeding. if that needs to be from the source and is an invariant for you you are definitely treading in deep waters. Still not impossible, but wet nurses are a very archaic concept (and crazy expensive these days if they still exist).
Are you sure? Lots of kids are watched by nannies and this doesn't seem to have worse outcomes than daycares (though confounded by richer people having nannies).
> Plus FICA, insurance, and anything else required to pay per employee.
> Then you have to pay rent, utilities, maintenance, front office staff, and have enough left over for someone find it all worth it.
That means labour is not expensive, the tributes are expensive.
"Expensive labour" is an oxymoron. If something is not worth doing because it would be too expensive to pay anybody to do it, that means it's not worth doing. The whole meaning of having civilization is to make labour as "expensive" as possible, ie to see that the people doing the work receive as much as possible from their input. This includes making labourers as effective as possible by the help of education and having them operate more and more advanced machinery to increase production.
This hyperbole makes your point very easy to disprove. All it takes is one example and your statement is factually incorrect. Italy, South Korea, etc. Many definitions of "developed" basically boil down to income so you would basically need the USA to be the least developed of developed countries. But I will try and be charitable and assume you mean USA labor costs are on the low end of developed countries.
What metrics are you looking at? Wages in general in the USA are higher (higher median income). The 15$/hr example I used is higher than most minimum wages in Europe. For example the minimum wage in Germany is about 1600 euros a month or $10/hr for full-time work. The federal averge minimum wage is lower than some developed countries and higher than others, and many states have higher minimum wages than countries like Germany, UK, and France.
Regardless, even if US labor costs are low relative to developed countries (which doesnt seem to be the case), it doesnt change that its a major factor in daycare costs and that increasing wages would just make very high prices even higher.
This is hard to compare because federal minimum wage is just that. a floor. The vast majority of states have higher minimum wages on top of that.
California, for example, would be at the very top in 2022 ($15/hr). a mid CoL state like Illinois being $12/hr in 2022.
This is definitely the case with other countries too, but the US's (relatively) weak federal government is a consequence of this. They leave the states a lot of autonomy in these matters but set a bare basic floor to prevent obvious abuse. As a result, the federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009. Wheras states tend to increase every year or 2 (calidornia increased to $15.50 this year).
> California, for example, would be at the very top in 2022 ($15/hr). a mid CoL state like Illinois being $12/hr in 2022.
According to the OECD, the US was at $15.08 in 2022... which means almost rock bottom for the OECD. So your example of Illinois at $12 is the actual rock bottom, cheapest labor in the entire OECD.
$15/hr is approximately $30k/year if you made the latter argument. US measures its minimum wage hourly so I used that site's own conversion function to save me some mental bandwidth. Which I unfortunately lost by having to reply to this. Oh well.
This claim doesn't add up. The fertility rate actually increases the lower your income is, that is, the richer you are the less likely you are to have kids.
The issue is not that kids are expensive, it's that once you reach a certain level of income you don't want to give up your lifestyle in order to raise kids. People who are lower income don't have to give up on a lifestyle in order to have kids. They still have to work incredibly hard in order to raise kids, absolutely, but it's not like if they didn't raise kids they'd be able to go on vacations, enjoy eating out more often, attend more expensive social events with friends, etc...
An alternate explanation is that high income people have high expectations of their children. An upper-class couple is probably going to want to send their kids to private school, do competitive sports, tutor them in an instrument, etc. Thus, the cost of children is higher for wealthier people.
The fertility rate also lowers for other factors. Declines do not match up with incomes - I think implying cost of living, which is what anecdotally almost everyone I know says, is a nonfactor may be premature. In the US the birthrate has been mostly the same since the early 70s. The difference between the top and bottom birthrates by income is all of 28% (45 per 1000 women for $200k or more, vs 63 per 1000 women for under $10k) - thats significant but certainly not the only factor.
You argued that there are people in their 30s who can just afford food and shelter and implied that they are not having kids due to their economic situation, whereas 20 years ago (so in 2003) they would have had kids, presumably because their economic situation would have been better 20 years ago.
Yet the statistics show that:
1. Those with lower incomes have more kids than those with higher incomes.
2. This trend has existed for more than 20 years, closer to 50 years in fact.
Now that I've pointed this out you seem to want to argue that income is not the only factor that determines fertility rates. Certainly that is true, but given that it's true why did you seem to emphasize it so strongly in your post when it supported the conclusion you wanted to make, but when I point out the opposite only then do you decide to diminish the relationship between income and fertility?
If the relationship between income and fertility is not that significant when I point it out, then it's not that significant when you want to use it for your argument either in which case your entire point kind of falls apart.
Finally as an aside, there is no shortage of countries with either cheap or even free child care, mostly in wealthy countries such as Finland, Sweden, Norway. But guess what? Fertility rates in those countries are incredibly low.
> Fertility rates in those countries are incredibly low.
Fertility in Sweden has been higher than the average EU rate for a long time (although I think it's been a bit lower recently), and that has been attributed to the generous family policies and access to cheap (and good) childcare.
480 days of tax-funded parental leave per child (caveat emptor, terms and conditions apply).
Tax-supported child care, max cost per month to parents at about $100 per child.
Parents are allowed by law to select to 75% during the child's first 7 years.
About $100 per month and child in tax-funded child benefit(?).
Fertility rates in Sweden are very low among the native Swedish population, and very high among the large immigrant population from the Middle East, where each woman will have 8+ children. That high birthrate is completely cultural and not affected by economic factors or anything else, as anybody following the development in Gaza has noticed.
I don't think the two points are orthogonal, I think they're complimentary - please don't look for conflict here where I'm simply trying to reflect on multiple ideas. It could be that folks with higher incomes have a much higher expectation of quality of life, in terms of outcomes and activities for their children, it could be that people with higher incomes get greedy. In either case, an lesser cost of living might give more of them. Of people you know with higher incomes, why do they choose not to have kids? Again, its less than a 30% difference between the highest income and lowest income. The difference between the middle incomes and the lowest income is less than 15%. Simply saying that there are more factors at play, which I don't think is controversial.
I tracked down the transcript and I still don't understand the math here:
> GUO: In a month where they're bringing in, like, $40,000, $33,000 is going to payroll.
> ANDERSEN: Our salaries are 83% of our budget per month. That is absolutely insane.
> GUO: And this is pretty representative of the country. And for thinking, well, at least day care workers are getting paid well - right? - because most of the money is going to salaries. Well, they are not paid well. Kelsey pays 12 to $15 an hour.
>But Kelsey says she can't pay as much as those stores because she has more people to pay than they do. For Kelsey's 72 kids, she needs 25 people on staff
I guess this just shows my ignorance, but is a 1:3 kid-parent ratio the norm for day care? I know you can't automate child care like you can a cashier, but given that my grandparents raised 4-5 kids at any one time (they had like, 10 kids between one previous marriage each, but huge age gaps), and my uncle raised 3 himself (and sometimes My mom dropped me off with him. So 3.5), it seems very "inefficient" when considering this is only caring for a third of the time (as opposed to a 24/7 care as a stay at home parent).
>The safety of kids and the quality of care get a little more dicey if you have more than four infants to one teacher. So you just need a lot of grown-ups to take care of babies and even toddlers.
I guess a day care has a higher quality stay than my uncle since it mentions teaching. I guess it's tough to just throw your child at someone you don't trust who may do it for cheap, so there's pressures to not just be "my uncle's house" (not that he's a bad parent. But I was mostly there to play with my cousin and be fed lunch/dinner).
But when you remember the perspective of a school teacher teaching 20-40(!) kids at once for even less money, it makes you feel like something is off. Probably in the case of the teachers, but still.
>But we wouldn't leave 16-year-olds alone. In fact, we don't really leave anyone alone.
tangent but I'm really baffled by this sentiment. Like, I wouldn't leave the country for months with a 16YO, but by 16 I would feel they can operate for a few days without seeing a parent. Just make sure they have allowance to cover food. That's an age where they need to start operating independently anyway since they are potentially close to living alone in college, or moving out a few years into adulthood.
I feel like changes in culture are a bigger factor than economic reasons.
Around the world it's normally the poorer, not richer, countries that have more kids on average, so I don't think finances are the main story here. A lot of countries with excellent childcare policies like in the Nordics also have pretty low birth rates. (Not knocking those policies though, I'm sure the parents there do appreciate them)
Poorer places usually have lower costs for things like real estate and child care. Richer places tend to get “cost disease” especially in real estate.
This in turn means that people have to have higher level careers and usually two earners in a home to afford the cost of living.
Overall this all raises GDP but it results in an environment that is hostile to family formation.
It could be a feedback loop too. Fewer kids might coincide with more career oriented lifestyles which drive higher earnings but also bid up real estate and other costs, and so on.
In many parts of the world, it is common for grandparents to take care of the babies and even small kids. In other words, free daycare. Not so common in the US.
As people delay parenting, this option becomes less available. When people routinely had kids in their 20s, starting age of grandparents was about 40-50, when they were still had a lot of energy to help. In a world where people have kids in their 30s, the average grandparent has their first grandchild between 60-70. It means a sizeable fraction of them may be already too frail or even already dead, to contribute significantly in childrearing, needing assistance themselves. That compounds the problem, because then people have to raise small children at the same time their elderly parents start to need more assistance.
I wonder if we define rich/poor by real-estate affordability instead; will this change the stats? Many poor countries have extremely affordable housing even for their poor. Be careful of their homelessness stats, though. Because as a homeless in many of these countries you can go and build your "crib" with stuff you collect around. Many people live in these conditions but it's a legitimate home.
We have special neighborhoods that are 55+ only, it would be a huge boon if we had subsidized housing for young married couples full of other families.
>there is nothing stopping a developer from creating a "35-" development (Except a market of course).
I'd be down, that means young people can't actually own houses, unheard of for my generation.
But yes, it's no secret older folk either have better financial safeties that degraded by millenial/Gen Y (pension, social secrutity) and generally make more money. Great market to appeal to. Meanwhile, the 23- market takes out an un-bankruptable 100k over 4 years hoping to climb through the cracks.
This is nonsense. Daycare is expensive because no one provides it, and because no one wants Joey Bag of Donuts with no insurance or credentials watching their kids, whom they presumably love (although many people do just that because it’s their only option and few states do a sufficient job enforcing quality standards).
There are waitlists long enough that parents have to sign up before their child is born. That’s nothing, at all, to do with “landlords” or “investors”.
I’m so tired of faux-progressive outrage online that always only focuses on how one of roughly three things are to blame for everything, no matter how tenuous or invented the connection is.
> I’m so tired of faux-progressive outrage online that always only focuses on how one of roughly three things are to blame for everything
I have roughly 20 straight married friends and 4 have kids (all are making top 5% income) and 10 want them but are waiting until they can better afford housing. Thats the basis of my argument, that cost of living is a common complaint. Cost of living sucks, its worse than its ever been in many areas. In areas with low cost of living, they have the problem that housing is relatively cheap but jobs aren't plentiful. I don't think that's controversial, but please let me know what I'm missing.
Like the above comment said, you don't just want anyone watching your very young kid. So minimum wage 18 year old who maybe changed one diaper won't suffice. But sadly, actual caretakers aren't much more well compensated.
But let's do the math on Meanswell Bob anyway. Someone working $10/hour full time will be paid $1600 raw. if they can take care of 3 kids and have some extra payment for overhead (not even profit), we're talking $600/family to pay out, before they even profit. raise it to $1000 and we get $1000 profit per month. Parents feel like they are paying way too much and the caretaker isn't making minimum wage in profit, while taking care of 3 kids they don't care about.
$1000/month is great as a side gig, but this is a) a full time job that b) can't be automated easily and c) requires a high level of trust (i.e. experience and initial capital). Bob here either needs to take care of even more kids (possibly illegally, since there are regulations for this) or charge the parents even more just to make ends meet.
Most of the child care I’ve seen is single provider, restricted to a few kids. Most parents seem to want pre-pre-school. One of those costs a lot, the other costs less, but requires knowing someone who knows someone.
I also don’t think many people see it as a glamorous thing they want to get involved in, but the opportunity is clearly there. There’s probably a fortune to be made in figuring out how to “disrupt” the current industry.
To the other, I think if they’re top 5% in income, they’re looking for something very specific in some very specific neighborhood, and are completely unwilling to compromise.
I was in the top 10% in my relatively high (but not Seattle or SF) cost of living city, and had to move several miles outside of downtown. It was completely affordable with few sacrifices.
Somehow, I think it's just cultural. I spent many years outside of the US, and I think expectations for space are too inflated in America. There are many happy families in Europe raising two kids in a 500 sqft apartment.
I don’t know why anyone would disparage anyone taking care of their own kids. The “workforce” sucks and people should be ashamed they’ve been convinced a “career” is something they should aspire to at all costs. Maybe instead of giving people money to pay for child care they should give people money and just let them stay home and enjoy being with their children.
This isn't really hustle culture as much as feminism telling women that being a stay-at-home mum means not being emancipated, ironically telling them how to live life without following the path they want to follow.
But maybe you have a point in that the reason elites embrace feminism is to increase GDP (see also the USSR selling the shoving of women into grueling factory work as "liberation")
Women in the Middle East (Kuwait, UAE) don’t have the freedom to do everything they would like to, though they can do almost everything an upper middle class woman in the US can do. The one thing I heard constantly when I was there was how bad they felt for the women in the US who were forced to have a job and they would never exchange places with them.
I grew up in the middle east. Yes, there are some who want to do things, but not forever. Furthermore, women in the middle east own a higher percentage of small businesses compared to women in the US for example; most who want to work, actually want ownership and not to become yet another wage-slave.
> Furthermore, women in the middle east own a higher percentage of small businesses compared to women in the US for example
I'm not at all surprised by this. When you stay at home and depend on your husband's wage, it's much easier to start a boutique business.
Our church is traditional and most women stay at home. Many of the women have businesses. It makes sense. They work on them in the few hours the kids are in classes or napping. They earn enough to keep going and provide an outlet for them to contribute directly to the income
Whereas if I were to start a business, it would have to be with the goal of replacing my wage. The sorts of businesses the wives engage in would be impossible. They simply don't earn enough.
But some of the women's businesses may take off. It's a high risk high reward thing, except that the risk is actually low due to husband's income.
The middle-east is a lot of countries with different rules (ie: it includes Lebanon). But to help you understand, it's totally feasible for a woman in say, Qatar (the strictest), to become a business woman and do all her affairs by herself. If she is married, her husband become her "guardian". But don't be deluded, the woman family will stand in opposition if things go south. Also the husband doesn't have the right to his wife money under Islamic law. There is no splitting of hers.
In fairness, neither would a Kuwaiti man want to trade places with an American one. You get tons of oil money from the state, and even jobs like "doctor" and "lawyer" are considered menial and delegated to Indian non-citizen workers.
Costs of childcare from 7:30-16:00 in metro Nürnberg (Nuremberg) at publicly-subsidized locations open to all children, without any further income-based subsidies:
- 400 EUR/mo fees plus 80/mo lunch and drinks for 12 months - 3 years at Krippe (creche/nursery school)
- 120 EUR/mo fees plus 100/mo lunch and drink for 3 - 6 years at Kindergarten (preschool and then US kindergarten year), because Bavaria really, really wants children of non-German-speakers in preschool but found out that subsidizing only those children was politically untenable. There may be further discounts for the Vorschule (school preparation) year that starts at age 5 and is more like US kindergarten
There are further subsidies for parents who don't earn much, especially for 3 - 6 year olds.
In short, very inexpensive as long as you're not trying to work a full-time job, and it's a lot easier to scale a serious full-time job back to a part-time contract for a few years here than it would be in the US. In some areas, there are not enough Krippe and Kindergarten slots; in our area, you have to apply to several and do so a few months ahead of time if you want one reasonably close to your home. We had to take a Krippe slot in the next neighborhood.
Care outside of 07:30 - 16:00 is not nearly as well-organized or subsidized. I've made the choice not to find out; I work part-time and will do so until my kid is well into primary school, in large part because I want to spend a few hours a day making sure that he can speak and read English.
Some of the subsidized Krippes and Kindergartens are run directly by the city adjacent to the public school system; others are run by the major churches (Catholic and Lutheran), Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers' Welfare - traditional Social Democrat-aligned social services provider), and other community organizations. They need to meet certain standards to get those subsidies, and so far, the quality of care and education my kid has gotten at both his Krippe and now his Kindergarten compare well to what my friends in the US paid $2000+/mo for.
As in the US, Krippe and Kindergarten workers are not paid very well in Germany, and have had a few warning strikes in the past year.
Prepare for some complications when your kids enter primary school.
After school care is less well organized and ( as per my personal experience )
after school tutors are overwhelmed by the amounts of homework and learning that are necessary.
As a consequence kids of parents that depend on after school have a disadvantage. Since this is more often the case in low income families social strata probably get solidified.
For 3 kids, a Staff Engineer position in California with 500k W-2 income is comparable to a 150k income in Germany. It's madness!
(super rough estimates)
in California:
240k after tax which is 20k/mo. About 10k/mo for housing (remember, having 3 kids means you need a big house). 3x2k childcare. 6k gone. Everything is 3x more expensive so that remaining 2k will not go to far.
in Germany
75k after tax which is 6.25k/mo. 2k housing. 0.5k childcare. You're left 3.75k to spend
>About 10k/mo for housing (remember, having 3 kids means you need a big house)
big house doesn't mean you need to live in the the trenches of San Fransisco. Even then: very rough numbers on a 30 year lease suggests a 3M dollar home. I see listings around 2M from a quick google. so put 3-4k back in your pocket. Hell, you don't need to have every kid have their own room so you can probably fit into a 3 bed to cut more. And then simply not live in the core of SF to get back under a million.
>Everything is 3x more expensive so that remaining 2k will not go to far.
only if you make it so. Sure, food will be more expensive but not magically 3x the cost of Germany (Germany isn't exactly low COL). Most commercial tech will be the same price there as anywhere else in the country.
You can definitely make it work. You may not be able to get every single luxury, but we're far from penny pinching with a few tweaks.
Sorry, but wtf. News from Munich as it is today and what I get from new hires. Housing 3500€, because nobody will rent you 3 room apartment for a family with 3 kids. 2k housing is 3 room apartment in normal area today. Probably you don’t want stacked beds either.
Kindergarten per child at least 500€. Then Krippe ends, but school starts.
So 5000€ for rent and kindergarten. Maybe you live in other Germany.
Edit: the special thing about German (Bavarian) school system is that in the 4th year in school your teacher does a decision if your child may study. That means, the child is going to learn a lot to have good grades. That’s roughly 30€ pro lesson. At least 8 of them comes every month.
We don't talk about communism on HN, communism bad. They don't even have Ford F150 in Germany, and they have to WALK almost everywhere they go , just imagine that
I was about to say, "we do too have those monstrosities over here!" but then remembered it was actually the Ford Ranger, which looks freaking huge here, despite the increasing popularity of SUVs (small by US standards) and crossovers.
That math is so bad I don't even know where to begin...
Nobody pays the marginal rate on all of their income in the U.S. unless they're making millions in W2 income, so 500k W-2 salary is 280k after taxes, not including any deductions from taxable income (including deductions, the post-tax range is anywhere from 280k-350k for a unmarried individual with no kids).
Also, most things are not 3x more expensive than they are in Germany; if anything the opposite is true: our produce and meat are 1/4 of what Germans pay, we pay less for utilities, we pay less for auto fuel, we pay less for travel, we pay less for pretty much all our day-to-day expenses, and that's before you take into account exchange rates which makes things in American even cheaper compared to what Germans have to pay.
So $500k in California is the equivalent of about EUR 600-750k German salary. And $500k salaries are a lot more common in California than EUR 600k salaries are in Germany...
This discussion is usually framed in terms of "people can't work because they have to parent kids" when in reality is more like "people can't spend as much time parenting because they have to work". If money were not a problem, more people would quit their jobs or work part time to spend more time with kids.
And as other commenters have pointed out taking care of children is indeed a productive job even if a stay at home parent doesn't file a W-2. Furthermore, there's some research (though not without controversy) that kids cared for by parents have better outcomes than those placed in child care.
Solved problem in Scandinavia. I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies. And a big part of the reason is that things like child care, parental leave (paid and unpaid) are taken care of. So, you see a lot of women have kids and then resume their career a year or so later. In some extreme cases it can be longer. When I started there, our secretary came back from nine (!) years of a mix of paid and unpaid leave after having three kids.
However, what I noticed in Finland was a relatively high proportion of women in tech and leadership roles. That's what happens when people can combine a career and a family instead of having to choose. Most women are basically full time employed.
The Netherlands where I'm from has a lot less of this. Result: a lot of women are working part time (something that is relatively rare in other countries) so they can take care of their kids or pausing their career entirely for until their kids are old enough to go to school. Labor participation of women is lower and working part time means the career perspectives are also a bit limited. Companies don't put part time people in important roles. And of course it means less money as well. Child care is expensive to the point that working barely covers that cost. So, many women just quit their jobs. That's a form of hidden unemployment. It's not counted in the statistics but it has a cost.
I currently live in Germany which has a bit better system going more towards the Scandinavian direction. People moan a lot about availability of child care but it is pretty affordable and mostly people seem to manage to get some in the end. Likewise, parental leave is a bit more generous.
The demographics in a lot of places are not great. Populations are shrinking. And that's also going to have an economic impact. There are two ways to fix that: make it more affordable for people to have kids or just get a lot of immigrants. The irony is that the same people blocking the first are also not that keen on the latter happening.
>> I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies
According to the most recent data from the United Nations Population Fund, Finland has a birth rate of 1.4 which is lower than both Germany (1.5) and the Netherlands (1.6). Sweden is only slightly higher at 1.7, which is the same as the U.S.
> It's a good thing to take care your own children
If you want to, yes.
If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing
There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to
The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else.
I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.
This year I started a company building daycare software.
My goal is to grow it sustainably while targeting small, independent providers.
There is so much shitty software out there that is over priced. I want to build safe, secure software I enjoy using myself while also being accessible for folks who arent savvy with technology everyday.
I am moving very slow right now since it is just me but excited about the potential.
My first customers are free while we figure out features but my goal is to charge $0.25/child/month. Waitlist and landing pages are free. Text and email notifications are pay per use while offering free credits each month.
My wife is a teacher, my mom was an SLP and I am a parent who never had a small, local provider have tech in their day care and payments and comms were manual and paper.
The Australian government funds childcare. Every time they increase funding, the rates charged to parents increase by the same amount. Total conscience I'm sure.
My wife just stayed working full time because we need the money to afford our mortgage after interest rate rises. Almost 90% of what she earns goes to pay for childcare, and that's with her mother looking after our kids one day a week. If we had to pay for a full 5 days, it wouldn't be worth her working.
This is my problem with canceling student debt, and the government offering low-interest loans to students.
Yes, in a vacuum, it makes total sense. If you loan a bit of money now, a student becomes more educated, earns more, and pays more in taxes in the long run. It's a win win!
But the problem is that once you add that system, all the colleges in the country just start raising tuition to account for it, which is IMO a huge part of why they've gotten so expensive.
More expensive college means more people need loans and it spirals from there.
I wish there was a clean solution, but there isn't.
That system has its own flaws. How can government truly estimate the cost of administration? All costs vary from area-to-area, and some areas will naturally cost more.
And even if you somehow did that part perfectly, the money can be shuffled around and reorganized so it looks like the college is spending more/needs more income than it really does.
>How can government truly estimate the cost of administration?
Audits? we have a federal and state secretary of Education who should have resources to find this stuff out.
The answer to this is that colleges appeal to get more resources if they need it, and they need to prove those extra funds are in the interest of most/all students. Governments can still give grants and whatnot, so the hard cap is just a cap on one source of income.
>the money can be shuffled around and reorganized so it looks like the college is spending more/needs more income than it really does.
yeah, just like any other corporation. Exploits and tax evasion. This is the everyday life of auditors.
But colleges aren't exactly good at hiding what their overinflated administration is doing to begin with.
Except they won't because your in a maximized market with like 1000 wealthy people holding all the bags, all trying to cross-extract coins. The dusty old adages of classic economics no longer hold water.
Countries that provide government funding for childcare don't just throw money at childcare programs, they also regulate the price of childcare as well.
Don't know if it matters but I live in a country that provides pretty good funding for childcare and access is atrocious. You wait for months (or years!) and get a couple days a week. This is in the Netherlands.
In most of Germany, daycare providers are subsidized directly and the rate they can charge is fixed (depends on parents income). They are also quality monitored. The providers are usually small non-profit businesses.
Works well for the parents, but leads to low wages for the personell.
The solution to daycare is to really not daycare. Want kids? Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with:
* People giving up on kids and substitute it with dog ownership
* Daycare rackets wherein they just turn on blippi as soon as the parents are gone.
* Professionals that have migrated to a 4-day work week have figured out that they could create a co-op daycare/school and help raise one another's kids
* Go full remote and grind out the parenting/work until your kid is old enough for some sort of preschool. I've been actually seeing more and more parents just bringing their kids to work.
I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare. That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans.
>Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with
Those are all awful and while I see your point about subsidization being a band-aid, it's way better than what these "solutions" are. Because they clearly haven't "figured out how to make things work".
- a kid is not a pet. And there's a whole rabbit hole about how people adopted and abandoned pets as the pandemic came and went. Besides, not having a kid makes the whole thing moot and runs into current issues on first world population growth.
- To be honest, this is fine as long as they are honest about it. Not every Daycare doesn't need to be pre-pre school, you may just want a responsible, trustworthy adult to make sure the house doesn't burn down and you can offer that at a discount. But odds are they can't be honest due to regulations.
- I'm very confused on how this works unless every single people in the co-op has their day off on different days.
- this is probably the best compromise out of them all, but the most exhausting. It may be borderline impossible to do depending on the industry you're in.
>That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans.
I'd hope we don't get to a point that raising a child is a non-bankruptable loan. But if so, its still better for the current situation than student loans. Many people have children older, and that means they have more savings prepared. And late 20's/30's adults understand debt and interest a lot better than an 18YO leaving home for the first time.
I think the real solution is simply to solve the housing and minimium wage issues, though. Helps way more than parents to boot.
> I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare.
My take is that needing to figure this out is the real punishment here.
France has the highest fertility rate in the EU (and higher than that of the US) and subsidies apparently are the way forward.
They need to be applied correctly though. My country is currently doing worse than Japan even though it's spending, as a percentage of GDP, than France on subsidies - these are in the form of what amounts to an UBI scheme for parents per child.
The US has a lot of low-hanging fruit here, like having any sort of actual parental leave, not just whatever pittance the employer throws in people's way.
Yeah, it's not like these parents vanished into thin air. They are doing work that produces real value, we simply can't capture the output as a clean number in GDP or, maybe more importantly, tax dollars.
I'll preface this by saying my wife is a full-time parent for our two children so I am very supportive of full-time parenting, but from a raw economic perspective a 4-1 staffing ratio (at a daycare) or 10-1 at a preschool would be a lot more efficient as the current two children we have.
Depends on whether the outcomes are the same. If it's just about keeping them alive, sure, but if more individualized attention and family bonding results in better adults (or better behaved/cheaper to educate students) down the line, there's a price for quality that needs to be accounted for.
I don't mean for this to sound judgemental, I'm also very supportive of full-time parenting for those who want to do it.
But I do feel like daycare/preschool brings us closer to the traditional "it takes a village" model of raising a child, rather than the isolated 1950s suburban housewife model.
So it's not all about economic efficiencies, but also the value that society gets out of it. A child is socialised with other kids, and learns from adults other than their parents too.
The research is pretty clear that under 2 years, parental separation massively increases cortisol levels and is net negative. So we're not doing daycare at all.
Our 2.5 year old does 4 hour preschool 2 days a week for social exposure etc. And other activities throughout the week.
> rather than the isolated 1950s suburban housewife model
I'll note, people give the 1950s crap, but actually my parents in the 50s spent the entire day outside running around the neighborhood with friends. Kids in the 50s were vastly healthier socially than kids today.
> Kids in the 50s were vastly healthier socially than kids today.
No they weren't. Your parents just lived in a location where their socio-economic status and urban planning supported running around and playing all day. Their parents decided to build suburbs without sidewalks, mass transit availability, or stoops/porches. They did this to keep those people out. Your parents got to enjoy better urban planning as children than you and your kids.
> Kids in the 50s were vastly healthier socially than kids today.
depends on your race, if we're being blunt. certain other neighborhoods were "running around the neighborhood" in a completely different context.
social aspects aside, sure. I wouldn't mind the pendulum shifting away from the helicopter parent spectrum, but it really depends on your location. It could work in my current locattion, but not at most of my previous residences.
Not exactly. I'm not sure about the age of your kids, but it's not uncommon to see parents shopping and doing other chores with kids. I definitely remember being taken to the post office, grocery store, etc. When parents are taking care of kids they're not totally unproductive.
In theory yes but the 4-1 has lots of overhead plus extra facilities plus taxes. Is probably closer to 3:1 after overhead and 2.5:1 after transactional taxes
I'll grant the overhead but the taxes are not a loss from a GDP perspective, that's just money shuffling, goods are still produced, services are still rendered.
In-home daycare is also common too, and then there's not a ton of facility cost.
I thought we were talking economic output. GDP isn’t a good metric to use when you compare work that generates no GDP output. Someone already mentioned that taking care of your own kid generates a net gdp loss of 1.x your income where x is the ammount you would pay to a child care facility.
Well that's sort of a separate question, my point is that if I pay $5 for someone to cook me a hot dog, 1 hot dog is produced whether sales tax is 0% or 50%, and that's what GDP is measuring.
The gdp measures the hot dog and the transaction costs of the hotdog so you buying the hotdog adds both hot dog, cart vendor and health inspector and permit office into the mix.
We came to a similar conclusion and my wife wanted to stay home with the kids. Her income, when taxed at our full marginal tax rate, would have otherwise been nearly completely consumed by childcare and other costs we could avoid if she worked on the household.
So, we lost 5 years of her 401k contributions in exchange for her getting what she preferred, what the kids enjoyed, and a lot more meals at home as a family. That trade was well-worth it.
I agree - they are exercising the principle of opportunity cost. While most parents probably would make more than the $700 / month, the value might simply not be worth it.
I remember a study that concluded that in reality, there is a cap on how much additional money improves your day-to-day life. And if a family is already past that on one income, why do you need two?
The exact number doesn't really matter. The point is that the difference between the cost of childcare and what a parent may make as a second earner has a significant opportunity cost that may not make working outside the home a good deal.
Can’t put a price on those years. They're just incredibly precious. I can’t imagine people send their kids off to daycare because they want to. It’s just such a loss you can’t ever get back.
My two year old is awesome and says/does new funny things every single day. She's been a hoot since maybe 1-1.5. I'm super lucky to get to spend all day with her right now while on leave for my 1 month old. Being able to pop out of my room and see her during the day is also one of the best perks of remote work. She's only recently started to notice/take interest in other kids, and the other day we went to the park and the playground was empty, and she goes "Where's my friends? FRIENDS!!!!! My friends are hiding." She's also decided our cats' names are mama meowy and dada meowy (they're both male).
Yeah, kids start to become significantly more fun once they can talk. Watching a child's personality emerge is probably one of the most rewarding parts of having kids.
Seattle is 2200-2500 for young kids. That’s post tax money so add 30%+ to account for that. 70k a year is what you would pay at a private equity run child care facility
Yeah, I'm sure the facilities alone cannot be cheap and all labor costs more because they can't afford housing either. Build! Build! If the moon doesn't hit it it's not too tall!
Not all, lots of issues with private equity buying up all the childcare centers. Lots of regulatory burden and generally occurring at a time in people’s lives when they are low on the earning cycle
These numbers are also ignoring the gap in (median/average/decent) pay between the US and UK (2021 averages in USD: $58,260 for the US and $38,291 for the UK).
Oddly it has conditioned many friends who were stauch opponents of private schools (waste of money and only generates entitled poorly educated people) to feel more comfortable with paying the cheaper private school fees for primary school (or they took one look at the public alternative and realised the reality)
Considering it now - my PE funded nursery school is going to be a feeder nursery that gets lots of students into the fancy primary school that feeds to the best secondary schools ...
Ours took a major nose dive after PE got involved (Grandir), and literally became a dangerous place for kids. Got shut down for a week, unexplained injuries etc. All while forcing parents to pay super high rates due to lack of options.
If you have two children under 5 you could easily be £2k in childcare for both of them. And £2k probably doesn't even cover 5 days a week for two kids.
I daren't think about what it'd cost if you had 3 kids under 5 years old!
The nursery my daughter goes to just increased their prices from £1.8k/month to £2.1k/month for children under 2. It's slightly less for children over 2 and even less once they hit 3 and get 15 hours free
Oh, AA is kind of an outlier for the Midwest though. Where I lived in the Midwest, prices were not even close to this. Having a tier 1 academic institution changes things a bit.
Hah, I guess I was descriptive enough to narrow down the town. You're right, of course. This place is filled with high paying, advanced degrees. You could throw a rock in a crowd here and hit 3 physicians.
Has anybody noticed that the same politicians who are demanding "more babies" and decrying that millennials aren't having enough children are the same politicians that insist on allowing the free-market to dictate childcare costs?
The lack of children being born in the US and other western countries is (partly) a direct consequence of the lack of good quality, subsidised childcare.
More importantly, where is this money going? I know for a fact that the frontline workers who actually _look after_ children aren't seeing a marked increase in their pay. So it's just more profit for the private equity firms who own these businesses.
The free market isn't dictating the costs of childcare. The government is.
Every state has maximums for employee to child ratios. Every state has zoning restrictions for facility locations. Some states have college degree requirements.
If your state limits the ratio to 4 to 1, then the cheapest possible cost for coverage would be 1/4 of the employees' salary.
If you want to bring costs down, then loosen these restrictions. Allow facilities to set their own ratios and charge accordingly and consumers to make the choice of the risk they tolerate
So we can reduce the cost of childcare by reducing the quality? Sure, but these are children, not screws, or planks of wood, or consumer electronics.
The government is mandating minimum _safety_ standards for the people who are minding the next generation of humans.
We really need to be asking where that money is going and why costs are so high. The government really is not the problem here other than that they're not subsidising it enough.
> So we can reduce the cost of childcare by reducing the quality?
Yes. Just like certain apartments are cheaper than others when the unit has no washing machine or microwave. Or like certain cars are cheaper because they don't have a backup camera.
The cost doesn't disappear because you scream "Think of the children!"
If the government subsidized childcare by $400/mo, then providers would raise costs by $400/mo. They already know what the market can bear.
My cousin has several car dealerships. During the Cash for Clunkers program, the government was giving a $2000 new car tax credit. He raised the cost of every car on the lot by $2000 exactly.
If you want something to come down in cost, then you must make it's input costs decrease in price.
> If the government subsidized childcare by $400/mo, then providers would raise costs by $400/mo.
Then the government steps in and forces them not to. I understand that in the US the idea that the government could have the best interests of its citizens in mind is an alien one, but in much of Europe this is a solved problem. It requires political will.
The costs of childcare haven't actually soared, it's a captive market. Reducing quality is dangerous (because, again, these are small humans who require high-quality care from qualified individuals), so regulation is the only option.
I agree, mostly. Except in the case of childcare, in the UK anyway, average earnings for childcare workers hasn't increased in real-terms since 2008. So the cost of labour isn't going to come down, nor should it.
> same politicians that insist on allowing the free-market to dictate childcare costs?
I'm going to be honest. Im a republican voter living in Portland Oregon of all places. It's a high cost of living area. We go to a fairly traditional church where couples of all incomes are having 4-5 kids each and usually one spouse working. So basically, we go to church with other republicans living in a high cost of living area.
I vote the way I do because I honestly don't understand child care. I was never put in child care the way people seem to do it now
I'll be honest when I see my neighbors put their few weeks old babies into daycare I am simply filled with horror. Yet the parents seem to think this arrangement is great. Children should be at home with their mom or dad. I know many couples in this same area making it work. They have richer lives because having a spouse at home leads to greater community involvement and better neighborhoods.
Moreover, when I talk to my neighbors about finances, it is dubious whether they're actually making more. They're also not taking into account basic costs that inevitably crop up.
For example because my wife stays at home, we have one car. Because my wife stays at home, our entire community will get fed when they have a new baby because the mom's have arranged meal trains amongst themselves as a standard 'benefit'. Because of how close the mom's are after seeing each other day in and day out, we often 'share' money. If a family is having a tough time, money is just shoved onto them. This means things like emergencies are much less scary. Again, these are all costs those families would have to incur if they both worked and couldn't take part in the community. Even childcare for things like date night can be arranged pretty easily. It's amazing and I estimate we save thousands upon thousands per year because of it. Elizabeth Warren of all people covers these hidden benefits of staying at home extremely well in her book 'The Two income trap'. I highly recommend it.
Now going back to politics. I would venture that many more republicans have my arrangement. Thus when we see calls to subsidize daycare, we see people wanting our tax money for less desirable outcomes. Children raised at daycare instead of parents. Parents too stressed out that they the report they have no 'village'. Lack of community in our cities and towns and rural areas, etc. Lonelines. All these things are symptoms of the continued financialization of the nuclear family, the extended family, and the neighborhood.
Doesn't it seem too low to include all households? 60% of households don't have any kids and many households with older kids will also have no childcare costs.
> And taylor swift tickets cost $100 (made up number) for two hours of music
Yes, a very made up number, Taylor Swift tickets for this year's tour were between $50 on the low end and $500 on the high end (plus fees) for the initial sale[1], and averaged $1600 in the resale market, with some tickets for that were close to the stage selling for up to $6300[2].
The kindergarten teacher also watches much more than one child though. I do wonder how much money typically goes towards real estate cost and insurance.
It depends on how many kids you have. If you have 4 kids all needing full-day daycare, or even partial day to wrap around the school hours, it can often be less expensive AND significantly more convenient to just hire a nanny. Wrap around care is not generally much cheaper than full-day daycare from what I've seen.
$5000/mo with 4 kids is only $1250/mo/kid or only about $300/week/kid. Plus you don't have to go drop off or pick up your kids at a separate facility, as usually the nanny comes to the children.
As a child care provider working as a nanny you'd make $60k/year. Can you make $60k/year working at a child care facility?
I only have the one kid and the $5000/mo figure reflects that -- nannies juggling more kids charge more. Yes, the math is different for larger families.
Economic/GDP growth is converting work that is usually done for free and making it paid. Then Govt can extract taxes, super rich can have monopolies (and subsidies!) and the grunts can have highly-replaceable low paying jobs to pay taxes and rich people richer. Keep people happy by showing bullshit statistics about how their life is getting better! TVs are cheaper every year --> your life is so much better. But healthcare, food, energy going up -- sorry they are not part of the metric.
In Oslo, Norway we are currently paying about $300/mo for full time child care (it is more like kindergarten). That’s the maximum out-of-pocket that parents have to pay for a single child.
Our taxes contribute to the kindergarten system and the government requires that all children from the age of 1 have a right to attend. We have hundreds of both private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) kindergartens in the Oslo area. So it scales well and benefits the entire community and local economy.
I wish the US could experience what we have here in Norway.
> private (owned by the government) and public (for profit)
I think these may be inverted - public is what is owned by the government, private is for profit.
Nonetheless, children being raised by the state is not a positive. As a parent you get to see your child for a couple of hours a day during the week and for two full days during the weekend. Not ideal to be honest.
If a parent exits the workforce, and this happens at scale, wouldn’t it reduce the supply of labor and therefore increase salaries? Just a tenuous hypothesis
Broad-based, federally-funded before- and after-school childcare is the next logical extension to follow here.
Serves the state politically in terms of education and control, prevents crime, and keeps the economy humming (preventing deflation and supporting burgeoning debt service costs)
Really important to see both sides of the child care equation. States will often make available subsidies for families to cover the cost of child care, but then will overlook the issues that cause there to not be enough care providers. There's a catch-22 in that well-intentioned states will increase the standards in order to operate a day care, but that causes some care providers to exit the market. The proverbial grandmotherly character who opens her house to a few kids before and after school really can't legally operate in my state, which then makes it harder for someone with the means or subsidies to even find the care.
Happening in the UK as well. For those where both parents work basically the child is raised by the state or people outside the family. I believe this can be called what it is, poverty, and it's reaching extreme levels.
Having lived through the "Reagan Revolution", I've frequently encountered the wry observation that Reagan's economic policies, which are said to have forced women into the workplace as previously single-income families struggled to survive, did more for "women's lib" than the ERA which has so far failed to be ratified as an amendment.
If the standard of living has fallen so far that any second income is just going to be a wash against a $700 monthly expense for a wide group of people, I find it frustrating that culturally we can't talk about class.
It made sense back in 80s and 90s when the money IN were far more money OUT, nowadays, it makes more sense to conserve the spending since the ratio of income/spending is reversed by inflation and low wages.
Republicans are all pro-life, no abortion yada yada, but they are so against increasing minimum wage. Against child credits, which is a huge help to parents and did in fact reduce child poverty. Seems like a double standard when their actions seem making life worse for those who are alive.
At this point, the US is hybrid artificial hive-mind intelligence optimizing for creating the largest megacorp monopolies in the world instead of optimizing for their working population.
The child credits also causes inflation. I benefitted a lot form them and even I can see that. I can't imagine a more disastrous policy at this time than expanding those.
Taxes pay for all sorts of things that ‘we don’t like’. It’s a benign statement.
Certainly, paying taxes for daycare is more fruitful for the country as a whole rather than paying taxes for welfare for those who do not work (yet have many children) — a huge net negative for society, and of course taxes for waging war which you don’t seem to bat an eye at.
Today's children will be enabling your future retirement. You're going to be their burden, whether it's paying for your social security or keeping the value of your stocks high.
> According to a recent survey by Care.com, for parents that pay for childcare, 67% are already spending 20% or more of their annual household income on such services.
Care.com inflates market prices to pursue its own margin goals. Caretakers who aren't using care.com or agency, operating in a cash business, charge far less than reported in the care.com marketplace.
This aside, you're still paying 15-25 dollars per hour in the NYC metro area for such services.
High childcare costs universally generates outrage. But should it?
Perhaps this is how the population eventually flattens. Maybe it is okay that the marginal cost of another human being keeps increasing.
If adding a child to the planet is expensive, people will have fewer. The population will plateau. An even worse overpopulation problem may be averted or mitigated.
The problem is that the incentive doesn't work. Low-income folks have more children than high-income folks, even though they're the ones who are more adversely affected by childcare costs (larger percentage of budget). If disincentivizing having children through high childcare doesn't work, then we should accept that people will have as many kids as they want to, make things easier for the people who are already alive, and find other ways to manage overpopulation (easy access to contraception being the most effective and humane)
Low income and unemployed people have the most children and are heavily (if not completely) subsidised by the government. So this will only work if you want those to multiply.
Furthermore, the USA is not overpopulated, the world is. This is a Western problem. People from India or Nigeria have no problem having 5+ children, so your solution makes no sense other than to punish working parents.
> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found.
If this is the market value of childcare, and those children are being cared for, then can we say that the value has been transferred rather than lost?
Following the link to an article about the study suggests the figure is an aggregate of a few other estimates:
> The report found that not having child care — or enough child care — costs individual parents more than $5,500 a year, or more than $78 billion in total. And businesses lose $1,640 on average for each working parent due to lost revenue and hiring costs because of insufficient child care, totaling $23 billion annually. And the government loses, too — about $21 billion in lost income and sales tax revenues a year, or $1,470 less per working parent because parents without enough child care earn less and therefore consume less in their communities.
I suppose this assumes that the level of care given to the children is approximately equivalent in both cases. In which case, I presume the argument is that more efficient childcare (fewer carers per child) is better.
In America, government programs tend to ignore the middle class and go straight to families earning far less than $100k annually. The studies reporting aggregate economic losses include middle class earners but the beneficiaries of the bill are those on the lower income scale.
It is, sort of, through Dependent Care FSA programs which let you contribute money pre-tax and then spend it on child care. For some reason though, the limit is $5000/year which isn't nearly enough to cover any sort of frequent child care. It's also sort of a pain to administer these programs.
There's also a child care tax credit which gives a similar amount of tax savings. So overall you do have some tax benefits to help with daycare costs, but they could be better.
The solution proposed is that the Federal government intervene in subsidizing child care.
I disagree. Because Federal intervention comes with caveats to shape the image of the "noble poor" Federal intervention is a trojan horse to create a dependence on them. Don't take their poisoned charity.
I feel like the chasm between a work-at-home mid-west farm family, a single mother raising a kid in a metropolis, and a dual-income SV couple with an au pair have very little in common.
Federal intervention fails not because of a lack of empathy but because our regional cultures and beliefs play a significant role in the sacrifices and choices that shape how we think our kids should be raised.
Stop letting Washington raise our children as if all 350 million of us were a monolith of shared values.
How do you implement this as a policy or political belief?
When we were having our 2nd kid, there were complications that killed my daughter and almost killed my wife. The trauma caused us to need to move closer to family and I went several months without a job. We relied on family to help us pay bills.
Should we have lost our first kid because we didn't think things through and plan enough financially? I didn't consider when I had my first kid that several years later I would be dealing with trauma that would derail my life and career.
Everyone seems happy now and we have money, but your point is that I should have never started a family at all since I did have a period of time where "childcare was too expensive"?
If its one adult per 10 kids and they each pay 700 the child care is making 840k per kindergarden teacher. Assuming the adult makes 60k a year thats 780k of overhead. Where is it all going?
Having children is overrated anyways. If you don't have money or time, don't make them. Let's see how economic pundits achieve never ending growth without new people.
Higher birth rates make for higher GDP. Encouraging careers for birthing parents suppresses birth rates. We are playing the short game, not the long game.
We're reaching end stage capitalism, where the giant corporate forces are so large that governments and regulatory agencies and the Fed have little ability to corral them while workers' rights are being eroded and pay is stagnant. I'd ask how long before we start seeing company stores opening up again, but IBM beat me to the punch with their pathetic new retirement scheme.
First they made the cost of living so expensive that two parents need to work to live comfortably, and now they've made it so expensive that childcare is unaffordable, which just puts more stress on the entire family.
The propensity of the wealthy to keep their ill-gotten gains is going to heavily depend on how they treat benefits in the US, but the problem is that Republicans are going to demand a "free market solution," which is going to be virtually indistinguishable from school vouchers. It will result in daycares simply raising their rates and pocketing the difference.
Public school systems largely already have plenty of property to house preschool kids. Make it a federally funded program and put daycares under the existing school systems. Yes, some small business owners will be out of luck, but their employees will all be vastly better off because those jobs pay virtually nothing and the benefits are always garbage if they even exist, and the kids will be better off because the workers will have more accountability.
2.1 children per woman is the fertility rate for population reproduction. It is scary to me to think how much needs to change in the developed world that the 3-children household becomes the norm.
>So they can afford child care while they're working
>So they can pay for the dinner they can't prepare themselves because they're working
>And the people who work in school and childcare
>Do so to afford 2 cars
>So they can go to work
>So they can afford school & childcare
>And they can afford to pay service workers to prepare their food
>...
People are starting to wake up to this madness for shilling every single human to become a worker unit. Children are suffering. People who've shilled for this arrangement should be charged with crimes, as they've harmed children, if only indirectly.
But states and corporations should bear the brunt of the punishment, as they've worked in unison to create propaganda that agentizes the uneducated to shill work as a noble end, rather than a means to an end, all so GDP and profits can soar.
When your god is money and efficiency, you suffer, especially your children.
There's something deranged about a metric when deciding to take care of your own children, rather than pay someone else to do so, results in a worse number.