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Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.
Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.
The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
0-18 months, there is no skill other than being the parent(s).
In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.
In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.
1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars
2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.
We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
