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.
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.
https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4141600-pro-natalist...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...
https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Policy_res...
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3136991/can...
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s always a jew.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
uh no. I didn't read rest of your comment.
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.
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.
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.
Transitional kindergarten. Basically staying a year early around 4.
If on the other hand people are finding that childcare costs exceed their wages, then what reason is there to believe that the government will be able to buy childcare so cheaply?
There's an argument to be made that childcare should be provided for free even at a loss. But of all the public good the government could provision, "keep your shitty job even when it doesn't make economic sense to do so" is a weird one. It's LARPing productivity at that point.
What about 0.5 - 3?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
NPR had a good story on how daycare is a failed market : https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153931108/day-care-market-ex...
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.
We could have a culture where it's typical for people who stay home with their kids to additionally be paid to watch the kids of another family.
There was a way from 1950 to ~1990s though, we could start looking here: https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX...
> 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.
Labor in the US is significantly cheaper than any other developed country.
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.
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.
In 2022 the US had a lower minimum wage than every OECD country other than Romania, Croatia, Hungary and Czechia.
21 developed countries have more expensive labor than the US, and only 4 are less expensive.
Labor in the US is cheap among Developed countries.
https://www.oecd.org/employment/unemployment-rates-oecd-upda....
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).
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.
Thanks for making it so clear.
$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.
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...
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 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(?).
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)
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.
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.
Why isn't the Free Market providing it then?
> 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.
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.
In short, I’m calling BS.
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.
You are conflating issues, there is nothing stopping a developer from creating a "35-" development (Except a market of course).
And age discrimination in housing is actually illegal, the 55+ and 65+ situations are special exclusions.
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 wrong. If this was the case there would investors lining up to make a killing.
Planet money did an episode on this
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153931108/day-care-market-ex...
> 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.
Depends on the state laws based on age of the child. Its not upto the daycare.
What do you mean? We've gotten rid of RvW and a lot of states are making abortion illegal.
We are politicing the HELL out of this problem.