My wife is back to having a wage, and both kids are back to full-time daycare. They both really enjoy school. And comparing them to their peers who stay at home, they're usually way ahead when it comes to counting and numbers, vocabulary, spelling, reasoning, and social skills. Which I mean makes sense, they're around people who got degrees in education with professionally thought-out lesson plans every day.
But has this changed massively over the past 30 or 40 years? Not really.
Frozen dinners have been around since longer than most of us have been alive. Working couples in the 1980's were figuring out what they'd do with grandma. Nursing homes have been around for a looong time. Mail-order delivery of boxes has been a thing since the end of the 1800's -- there were Sears warehouses long before Amazon warehouses.
That's all I'm saying. However, employees genuinely are much more productive than they were in the 1980's, thanks to e-mail and cell phones and the Internet and collaborative online document editing and so much more. You can get things done in an hour that used to take you 2 weeks of back-and-forth.
The productivity growth is real. It's not an illusion based on what GDP doesn't capture.
> Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all.
But isn't that the issue?
Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all. She (it was usually a she) could get the kids off to school, pick them up after school, check in on grandma, do the shopping, cook a simple meal.
Now: the working-age person goes to work, perhaps because the family fell apart, perhaps because other rising costs (e.g. health care) forced it. Before and after school care is paid for. Someone is paid to check in on grandma. Walmart+ or Amazon occasionally delivers heat-and-eat meals.
GDP went way up! Amazon contractor has a job delivering boxes. Someone is paid to check in on Grandma, and someone else to watch the kids. Someone works in the factory making heat-and-eat meals.
But are we really better off? Is it better to staff out the kid- and Grandma-watching and to heat up a dinner in the microwave? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, but I'm certainly not sure that "we really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives."