> Who is forcing women back to work?

A modern Western lifestyle. Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle.

The working-dad stay-at-home mum has long gone.

> Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle

It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.

That's not true. A comfortable lifestyle perhaps, but "basic" can be had on just a single average salary.

I think your frame of reference may be a bit warped. What is an 'average' salary?

The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.

And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?

edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad

That looks like it counts everyone over 14 including students and retirees. And it's the highest it has ever been in real terms.

That's $2983 per month.

Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).

This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.

> That's $2983 per month.

Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.

My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#nNffey40fm

And of course, this is the median salary. 50% of people make less.

Do you make less than 35k a year ?

ACA has subsidies for lower income households

Generally subsidies don’t apply if you’re getting an employer subsidy, and they drop off quickly as you rise over the poverty line.

I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.

> That's $2983 per month.

Gross. More like $2200 after tax.

Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.

And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.

So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.

[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...

On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen.

3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.

>" On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen."

If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.

Medicaid is for low-income earners.

The parent described the median-income earner.

In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.

That's just insane. The US healthcare system is absolute shit. Yes, I'm an American.

That leaves 0 margin for error. If your kid breaks a bone and you have to pay for $X000 ambulance ride to an out of network hospital you're screwed for years.

A single family member earning a wage as a low income worker is not making enough to pay for the health insurance for a family with newborns, on top of rent, food, transportation, clothing, all the costs of having a child, saving for emergencies/future/education, and some semblance of entertainment and having a life.

This is correct, and something that needs to be said. Having both parents work is not an inevitable state of affairs. As little as 50 years ago, it was not unusual for one parent to stay at home and raise children. In contrast, the Soviet Union had long since moved to a two working-parents model because of financial pressure, and Soviet women regarded the American housewife with astonishment[1]. Whatever the merits and tradeoffs may be, we need to recognise that significant change has taken place.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...

Reality. Way too many people only can make ends meet by both partners being full-time employed - and in some cases (such as shown by a recent Last Week Tonight episode) even that is not enough to prevent being homeless.

Rents are too high, and wages are too low.

Most people being unable to afford taking even a moderate amount of time off is the deeper problem. The sustainable answer is to fix the underlying economic problems - end this trickle up financial treadmill that has caused the majority to become so poor and disempowered [0], rather than creating a patchwork of allowances for specific system-legible purposes. For example bringing it back into the emotional realm - even if there were a comfortable 12 weeks of guaranteed parental leave, that itself wouldn't help a family who had lost their baby. Nor would it help someone who had to care for a terminally ill parent, nor after losing them and needing to deal with their estate. Nevermind the myriad of unenumerable reasons someone might need months off.

[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.

Society actually needs all of what you mentioned:

- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons

- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying

- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives

- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money

Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").

The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.

So yeah, the nuance to my comment is that the first things you list are important for social reasons - keeping your same position in the face of these additional burdens. I admit that my above comment is addressing the social problem purely through economic means (if an employer doesn't engage with your needs, walk away and find a new employer when you're available again). Unfortunately what we're offered in the US is mainly this economic lens, both policy and politically.

I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.

IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.

People don’t have to have children. And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.

> People don’t have to have children.

Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument.

> And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.

I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.

It doesn't need to be veiled, that's already the official policy: people are responsible for providing for their children. You have to have money to have kids. It's just a little less.

On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.

Poor people have more children than rich both per capita and in aggregate

Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.

Birthrates among poor people are way down:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.

Birthrate isn't my point. Per your chart birth rates are down for everyone. The fact remains that poor people have more children. And more to the original point, people aren't being forced to leave their children.

My point is lack of access to contraceptives and lack of women’s financial independence might be the reason poorer women have more children. My conjecture is their higher birth rates have little to do with them being poorer.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with the original comment which is to say that women don't have to go to work. Nor do men.

I am "poor" by choice because my wife takes care of the children in our household. Our lives are richer than those of countless lonely $ millionaires.

This is the real answer. Nothing else is going to change that. A basic lifestyle isn't that expensive and it's exponentially better than 99% of people's lives 50 years ago. Just making smart shopping decisions can literally double or more your buying power.

I really don't get the point of doing something you don't enjoy for 8-12 hours a day just so you can have expensive things.

> The fact remains that poor people have more children.

Not quite. $ rich people can't afford time with children.

What’s wrong with “only people who have enough money should have children”?

I mean, that’s just being a responsible parent.

as a society we should not allow people to get paid so little that even a full-time salary is not enough for them to have children.

that is what's wrong.

if we want a balanced society then we need to enable everyone to have children, not just those who are able to get well paying jobs.

in austria and germany this is solved with giving parents tax breaks and unconditional extra money for each child to offset the higher cost of raising children.

So if I choose a career as a not so good artist the government should subsidize me so I can have kids?

to follow the existing examples, every child gets government money regardless of income. it's like UBI for minors.

and if you get a minimum wage job as an animation assistant doing inbetweening work, then the laws should make sure that the minimum wage is high enough that you can afford your living costs.

combined both measures will allow you to have children.

if you are self-employed and you are not earning enough money from your art you need to apply for unemployment benefits with all the conditions related to that.

Didn’t you hear? Children are a consumer good now.

Yeah and also, most (upper) middle class families in the US are making a lot more money so can actually afford much more time home with their children, compared to the paid leave that Europe has. So that's actually better from one point of view, the only "downside" then is traditional gender roles. Who cares about 1 year maternal leave, when you can already afford 10 years maternal leave?

Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..