In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All (opens in new tab)

In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.

Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.

So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?

FTA

> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum

Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.

> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children

I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.

If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".

The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.

You can’t really compare them without a better definition.

This is probably because they are actually measuring hyperactivity when there is universal care versus 40% of it going unmeasured.

I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.

It's not an intractable issue. It's just a matter of economics.

You'd think the Economist would care more about this study: https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...

Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.

Then do it today so mothers can continue to work and help the economy.

Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.

This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.

> The US was founded on individual rights

Excluding those whose land was stolen and redistributed by government.

> not community sacrifice

Excluding government-funded infrastructure projects like canals that enabled growth. And support that immigrants received from ethnic communities.

> Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty

Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.

I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you

> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.

Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.

> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.

Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).

> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.

You clearly didn’t grow up in an immigrant neighborhood in the city

Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.

Don't forget: When they help billionaires and trillion dollar business, it's framed as driving prosperity and stimulating the economy.

Only one political party rallies against "government handouts" and blames the individual for their problems.

Why would you generalize your opinion to all when this is extremely clear?

How can things get better if you can't even be bothered to criticize at a granular level? Since we are a Democracy this matters.

Maybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.

I don't see how the US's feeble and lackluster response to COVID counted as "kicking into gear".

We need a public healthcare system, but whether it should be single payer is not readily evident, and I rather suspect that clinging to that particular model is what's causing progressives to get stuck trying to push it through. It's probably because most people in US immediately think of Canada when they think of socialized healthcare, and there's very little awareness of what other countries do on either left or right, so we're essentially perpetually debating the Canadian model. We should look at Europe instead and pick something that's both proven to work and more agreeable with American sensibilities. German, perhaps.

To me that seems like a necessary trade off for the benefits gained. The stricter laws wouldn’t have necessarily been achieved nor maintained had they not been enacted at the state level.

What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over

Sure but you have to pass a Constitutional amendment to fix that, and I don't see that happening on something as divisive as gun ownership.

The steel man of your argument sounds like:

If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.

While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it

And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc

Are immigrants privileged then?

Thanks for sharing your experience! I should really try it. I'm just shy.

That's a good point, but the model could still work.

I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.

Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.

As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."

My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.

Probably because that’s not true.

Since when did public (government) schools become run for profit?

I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?

One state offering something is a start but we're still far behind maternity, pre-k, childhood nutrition, and primary or secondary education in general for most of the population relative to peer nations. Plus this administration's cuts to Medicare or SNAP which will also hit the poorest kids the most. Plus the national debt they are saddled with.

Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.

Free childcare is an investment in working parents, not the children.

I would not say that free childcare is an investment in children.

I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.

I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.

Until recently, you had personally known everyone, for years, who you might hand your child off to for a few hours.

We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.

Until recently in human history 100% of humans were illiterate.

Yes, let's go back to the 1300s, when we didn't need no stinkin' government licensure! Or flush toilets.

Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.

Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.

I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.

I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.

I agree with you. But to steelman the argument on the other side, their concern is that subsidizing care for children creates a moral hazard by encouraging irresponsible people to have even more children. It's a feedback loop which creates an escalating burden on the rest of society. I don't think that denying care to children is effective or morally justified; I'm just trying to explain what seems to be the underlying argument.

> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.

This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.

And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.

This is a common misconception. For asymptomatic adults there is no proven benefit to regular "checkups".

https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.36756

There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...

The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.

Expanding to undocumented providers is probably ripe for abuse. Although perhaps abusable either way.

What stops someone from saying “I’m an undocumented provider with 500 kids. Pay me 500 x AMOUNT”.

Public schools have residence and identity requirements. What’s an undocumented childcare provider going to have?

I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think the national politics would support that at the moment. I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds... but they might against 18 or 19 year olds. It's a foot in the door persuasion tactic rather than try to get everything all at once.

> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.

I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.

Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.

Everyone knows Medicare isn't "free".

Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.

Health insurance isn't free either and it's way more expensive than Medicare. We're all also already paying for Medicare...

It’s wrong.

And in many states there are also CHIP plans for children who don't qualify for Medicaid.

https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/childrens-health-in...

Land value tax won't help unless you greatly reduce the zoning and regulation over what can be built on the land.

Putting the land to its most efficient use isn't possible if all you're allowed to build is a two-story detached single family house.

Our property taxes are already crazy high and continue to go up every year. How does this help?

Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.

In Quebec it was a 20% jump in mother employment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...

By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.

If governments aren’t willing to value women at what their work at home is worth, they’re not serious about tackling the birthrate problem. Show me a country with universal childcare with a TFR above 2.1. It’s a cheap substitute for the love and attention only a mother can provide young children

Exactly. I was raised by two working parents who were very involved in my life, and I wasn't a "latchkey" kid by any means. While the "traditional" spouse at home does work out pretty well if the single wage earner can do well, to be sure. That doesn't mean other situations can't prosper. It's not a magically set up that is the solution for everyone.

In some places (esp those with low access to birth control and sub-par sexual health education), there are too many unplanned children being born to people who do not have the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty.

Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.

Yes. And stop bringing your kids to breweries.

I’ll even begin to entertain this argument only once the burden of having and raising children falls on society as a whole, and not individual women. Until then, absolutely not.

Sounds like you're volunteering your time and resources to help raise them! Thanks, you can stop by the adoption agency any time today. :)

Man, even the Soviet Union was able to provide free childcare. Really makes you think, doesn't it.

In an emotional development sort of way: maybe. Subsidized childcare however provides two jobs to the economy for the price of one and every single person worried about birth rates is either a white supremacist or the sort of emotionless economist that 2:1 is appealing to.

Why would that be better? I think you'd miss out on economies of scale and end up paying more.

Those subsidies tend to be €X00 per month. I am not aware of any scheme that even attempted to replace 80% of forfeited wages. A subsidy that ends up with you having to move impoverish yourself is not going to have the desired effect.

No, we wouldn’t. This subsidy directly benefits the survival rate of children while universal basic income is too broad. healthcare is more affordable than UBI.

There's potentially an argument for a ponzi scheme for one-ish more generation after which robots can do elder care and it's not necessary anymore.

Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.

Every modern economy, socialism included, requires a growing population.

You’re right about the main benefit of population decline though. It gives Nature a needed break

Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.

People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.

Exactly. What else are you going to call it, but free? That's literally the word for it.

Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.

We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.

Right. I believe every socialist should feel offended by the term “free healthcare.”

Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.

Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.

However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.

It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.

Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)

Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.

However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.

Your house not spreading fire to the neighboring houses or forest is most of the actual dollar value in a fire department, from a fire perspective.

Saving people and a local healthcare force are fringe benefits, accounting wise.

Local fire department isn't free