Most also own a home, that they bought... by saving money. They do not come from privileged backgrounds, and at least one family immigrated to this country.

Now, nothing is wrong with material goods as such. Nothing is wrong with sacrificing having children for the sake of a higher goal (as a Catholic, you already understand that to be something people can do, e.g., the priesthood or the religious life). But a society that has traded the privilege of raising a new generation in not for superior goods but for inferior goods, for the sake of empty self-indulgence, surely smacks of malaise and decadence. Is it any wonder why so many of us are depressed when we celebrate a perverted form of individualism that is ultimately self-destructive? We have a nature and this recent fad that denies human nature or perverts it will not produce happiness.

I don't mean that out of some disdain for families who cannot do that. My own parents (immigrants to this country) could not, and I wish they could have, and I am happy we can pull this off. To be fair, they made up for it by accepting jobs that let them be home more. Like my dad refused promotions so he could be home with his children more often, and my mom became a teacher to spend more time with us. The value of such a gift is incredibly understated in modern society, as is the joy of children.

> The problem is that there is no support in the U.S. for working couples who choose to move away from family for economic opportunity.

There is a lot more than their ever was (governmentally at least), and people are not having children. The issue is we've abandoned all community institutions, but this is due to the aggregate choices of many people, not a social policy, IMO. Speaking of the families I was talking about, we rely on each other for many things you'd rely on family for, like babysitting.

I mean, this is just not true, you know. Being with babies whole day every day is not fun for overwhelming majority of adults, neither male nor female. They may see meaning in it, but like, fun it is not. And it definitely is not easy fun when you are on fourth or fifth baby, meaning care about siblings too.

Also, managing both 5 kids and full time job would be pretty hard even if good daycare is available. Your "she can go to work because she has college" completely ignores logistics of it and expectations on software engineers these days.

As a child I wanted to be a stay at home dad, which i realize makes me somewhat odd, but we are odd people

I don't remember this being my dream as a child, quite the opposite actually.

This isn't to argue that women should be barred from working. It is merely to emphasize that this rather vicious characterization of women who raise their own children as "oppressed" or "subjugated" has the very real potential to amuse those women who are confident enough in having chosen their children over their careers.

But thats only an issue because all the extremes seem to speak on behalf of all women

I have the wrong body parts so my observation is irrelevant

> create choices

> shame women for making the choice that already existed and you didn't have a hand in creating

It used to be that the cities had lots of single-income families. They only had to compete with each other in the bidding war for good housing.

Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes, so now we have lots of two-income households in that bidding war. Same-sex couples also became legal, adding even more two-income households.

Meanwhile, low-cost forms of housing were legislated away. You can rent an apartment or be homeless, but you can't rent an SRO (single-room occupancy) or bed cage. The homeless scare away families, and the lack of SRO options forces single people into the bidding war for larger housing.

I'm no expert, and it seems likely that women joining the workforce in large numbers would increase housing prices due to increased purchasing power, but this seems like a bit of a stretch. unless you go back to the times of wide-spread lynchings, wouldn't same-sex couples have lived as "roommates"? also forget about couples, two or more acquaintances sharing a housing unit has been legal and common for quite a long time now. I'm skeptical that this is a significant cause of shock to the housing market.

A bigger issue is that a lot of formerly big housing, at least in New York, has now been subdivided, since the whole is less than the sum of its rents. You are also seeing a large rise in people willing to be roommates with people they don’t know, so if you have three income-earning singles they’ll outbid a two-income family. And students are a special case of that, since the rents will go as high as their student loan balances can sustain.

CityLab recently documented the rise and fall of the SRO:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

It'd be great to agree on the facts, even if people can't agree on how they feel about the facts or if anything should be done to change the facts.

the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported.

but the quoted causal relationship above is not even plausible, let alone supported. women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families, just like men. other societal changes may have aided or hindered that ambition to various effect, but they don't form the driving force as you state.

"Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained Before she was a politician, Warren wrote a controversial book about family life and economics.

The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

* The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.

* Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.

* Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...

> women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families, just like men. other societal changes may have aided or hindered that ambition to various effect, but they don't form the driving force as you state.

Regardless of why, increased labor participation from woman joining the workforce in greater numbers than previously [1] was going to drive inflation for inelastic goods and services like housing, childcare, and education. It now has become a prisoner's dilemma: participate in the treadmill or find a way off.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-be... (PDF, page 2)

When you want to move, both partners need to find better jobs at roughly the same time. And that just doesn't happen very often. And, if you are already established with support networks because you already have kids, rebuilding those networks can be almost insurmountable without one of the parents literally taking time off to put that support network back together.

incidentally, my first foray into student loans made me realize a similar trap formed by government guaranteed student loans combined with the inability to discharge them via bankruptcy. those factors practically guarantee rising educational costs due to risk-free money flowing to both educational and financial institutions.

EDIT: Anecdotally, it seems that equality was strived for and it's not turning out as great as a lot of folks hoped for. Educated women don't date down like men did/do which makes finding a partner in itself much more difficult [1], women want the same career opportunities as men while also taking leave that puts them at a disadvantage, which is unavoidable; you will be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to not take their leave to focus on their career, regardless of gender, and men usually take less or no paternity leave even when offered [2]. A lot of people raced to find success and actualization in the workplace, and it is turning out poorly [3]. We have housing, childcare, and education cost inflation due to more dollars chasing the same amount of those necessities. [4]

I want to be absolutely clear that I support woman having equal rights, equal pay, and should never, ever be discriminated against. I shouldn't have to say that, but you know, the Internet. The above paragraph are my observations as an armchair anthropologist.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19878117 (HN Thread: After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468767 (HN Thread: The Loneliness Epidemic)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20474292 (My HN comment above citing the Two Income Trap)

The real test for whether something is good or bad isn't whether people are happy, it's whether they would choose to go back. And I think you'll find that most women are not all that eager to go back to the 1950s. If they are, there are subcultures within the U.S. that can provide that, but those subcultures aren't really flourishing in terms of growth rates.

I should hope not. For the same reason measuring women against the standard of “men” isn’t equality.

Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.

Indeed. My wife is not a stay at home mom because I force her to be. It it her voluntary choice (and I am happy to support her decision and be the sole income earner in the family) that she gets more happiness and joy from raising our children than as a drone at a desk job or climbing an unfulfilling and meaningless career ladder (her words, not mine).

I think what isn't reasonable is when both parents want to work and expect to achieve similar results. You can't have it all, and you're going to be deeply disappointed when you try and fail.

All of this assuming we (as a society) actually want people to keep having kids (which, at least in the West, societies/governments seem to want).

I think answering that is more important than focusing too much on what made it possible. Making it possible and easier for women to join the workforce is overall a good thing, it means that single women can compete (hopefully) equally with single men in terms of income and as a result enjoy the same economical freedom without being forced into marriage. But going from that to having homemakers suddenly decide to also work in addition to their spouses is the missing connection, because theoretically just because it was possible/easier doesn't necessarily mean that they needed to. Was it because now couples wanted to earn more money? So it was "greed" that in the end created the inflation and the prisoner's dilemma?

>> women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families

From a historical perspective, women entered the job market because a world war (ww1) consumed the pool of available men through drafting them to die on the front line and having a war engine that increasingly needed more and more resources.

We are talking about a change from ~20% to almost 50% over the time span of 4 years. Neither birth control nor cultural ambitions has that fast effect on society. War does.

while women working during war helped to unveil the value and abilities of women in the workforce, war didn't drive the shift to 2-income households by itself. if women had no other ambitions, they would have just gone back to "home economics" after the wars and the economy would have stayed the same.

The president said a month before the war ended: We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

It is hard to find a stronger sign of a cultural change. 20 years later the second world war started so even if there had been a movement to return to "the old days", it would not have had time. The second world war saw again an major increase in women participation in the work force, including major initiatives for equal pay. Men were being sent to the front line and the factories needed people.

The world wars was the period where the cultural change occurred. Trying to revert the culture back to pre-1914 mindset would had been about as impossible then as it is now. Instead people continued on the cultural path that had been established.

This applies to a narrow subset of urban locations

Legal changes is fascinating euphemism for "not being punished for it anymore".

City dwellers seem to think of smaller towns as some sort of dessert wasteland, but I can get to anything a city dweller can in the same amount of time. There's just as much stuff out here, we just also have enough room to live comfortably. The low property prices and crime are great too.

I do think hit the nail on the head with the self sufficiency. I have absolutely no need or desire to commute into the nearest big city (big it is fun for day trips every once in a while).

The area directly outside the urban core that contains only housing and bad traffic is definitely not somewhere I would want to live, although owning a proper house instead of renting an apartment is very important to some people.

Also, many small towns have higher crime rates per capita than cities.

Per capita crime rates do not matter. What matters is the question "How likely am I to be the victim of a crime if I live in area X?".

Depending on the type of crime, you are around 4x as likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you live in a city[1].

Per capita rates is a statistical curiosity. Being 4x more likely to be shot is what people actually care about. When the population density is 10 - 100x different, a small difference in per capita rates is meaningless.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That seems like hyperbole unless you live above a shopping complex.

I herd my 12 kids down from my far-too-small apartment. My wife and I go in separate elevator cars so that we can fit. We'll go enjoy a trendy restaurant because we're city people and we do that. We walk along toward the subway station, sometimes stepping out into traffic to avoid tents. Every 30 seconds, we count the children to make sure that we have the same number we started with. We really should do more than count, in order to prevent substitutions. Sometimes we have to back up to find a kid who is slow. Sometimes we must run to stop a kid who is running ahead. We check shoelaces, then lead the kids onto the escalator. At the platform, we continue counting while keeping kids away from the platform edge. Once the subway arrives, we get on, hopefully 100% of us. We guard the door to make sure nobody exits before the correct stop. At the correct stop, we herd them off, hopefully getting 100% of them onto the platform. We check shoelaces again, and then head up the escalator. We continue on our way, counting as we go. The kids are tired. Some need to pee, without warning. Too late! We find the restaurant. People glare at us. Oops, backtrack for a missing kid, hopefully not swiped or squished or infected. Again we go to the restaurant. We order a meal. It's only $1400 for the family, such a deal. Oh, they want to tack on a huge tip for themselves, so more. People are still glaring at us. Food gets dropped. A glass slides off the table and shatters, splattering the drink on several people. At least my kids don't scream and throw things, so I get some credit for that. Now we can go to the parkland or activities, but several kids are looking sleepy. Well, back home we go. This happens 3 times per day, every day, just so we can eat. We can't possibly carry enough overpriced groceries home for cooking, and anyway the kitchen in our apartment is a joke. We just have to accept spending $1,533,000 per year to eat.

The oldest kids can help herd the younger ones, but I have the responsibility. I still have to check. Failure causes serious trouble.

Also who on earth ever takes "12 kids" out to eat, in the city or out of it? Do you and your wives go in separate minivans, or do you own a bus?

In reality, of course I don't live like that. I'm in a big house in a non-urban city, I almost never go out to eat, and there is no subway here. We drive a Ford E350 with 15 seats in 5 rows, and the vehicle title or registration does actually say "bus". The kids usually surprise other people with good behavior, but they are still kids. They aren't the sort to throw tantrums, but spills and other accidents will happen.

Much of the rest is in your statement of what to imagine: using a restaurant, not being in traffic.

But on your last throw-in dig, that’s disingenuous. Poverty is not unique to large cities. I’ve lived in rural towns as small as 7,000 and poverty there is just as visible and acute.

What choice did they have? Birth control wasn't widely available until the 60s.

But effective condoms were widely deployed to the non anglophone armies in World War One, and had existed long before then.

It’s true that there was a theocratic campaign against all birth control from the 1920s that finally succumbed in most countries in the 1960s, but that’s not all of history.