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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

People want free money. If the system allows them to get money and inconvenience their employer or do neither they will overwhelmingly do it. I can’t be the only person to note that teachers are much more likely to have children during the school year than over the summer.

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I think it's less defensible that people want free money than it is than corporations want free money. Because fundamentally lots of people don't want to live off handouts.

It's kinda telling that economics treats trained workers as something that springs into existence unbidden. While raising children is mere 'leisure' and government funded education is dead weight loss.

> It's kinda telling that economics treats trained workers as something that springs into existence unbidden. While raising children is mere 'leisure' and government funded education is dead weight loss.

Every word above is false. Gary Becker’s economics of the family has many, many flaws but assuming children happen by accident is not among them. Leisure is not “mere” in economics. It’s everything that’s not work. It’s what work is for. The point is not the production; it's the consumption. If we could do the latter without the former sustainably that would be paradise. There are none, zero, no economists who think government education is dead weight loss. Even Bryan Caplan of The Case Against Education thinks it’s at least 30% human capital building and it’s glaringly obvious after the past few weeks that the child minding function of school is enormously valuable.

I work off the following. What drives policy is the core. Everything else is mere words.

In practice economists assign a value of zero to child rearing. Because simply economists hate reasoning about externalities.

I'd be interested in seeing the data on this. My wife's a teacher, and in her school district there is no maturnity leave, you need to use sick time. So we were trying for the opposite - to make sure our child is born during the summer.

365.25 days in a year, roughly 80 days of summer, seems like a solid bet that they'll likely give birth during the school year just by chance alone, no?

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