This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
Is that productivity really needed/used for standard of living gains? Or do you need two incomes now because of a combination of capital taking bigger cut and dual-incomes bidding up the price of things.
Also you have the phenomenon of companies trying to increase sales by reducing the service life of their products, which just increases churn without increasing living standards.
There is no competitive pressure to improve educational outcomes because society doesn’t really care. It’s a signaling mechanism for the top quintile and a childcare holding pen for the rest.
E.g. the cost and quality of your average bus driver has not changed appreciably in 4 decades.
In theory, the quality of the education system itself should be improving (online classes & evaluation, recorded lectures, more materials, sharing of the best techniques, etc.), of which the teachers are a single input. But, we know how that's turned out. Education is a political football and society doesn't actually care about the outcome.
You could have parental-supervised online learning be 5x as good as in-person, but society demands we send kids to school to get them out of the house so a parent can work. We pay lip service to the actual education of the child.
No real point except pulling the veil from our revealed preferences.
That's a plausible explanation, but a bunch of charts with no analysis other than red arrows[1] pointing to the early 70s, makes for a terrible argument in support of it.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...
In other words, you know it's not trying to prove something, but rather reaffirm what some people already believe? I'm not sure that's any better. If anything that's worse, because you're knowingly engaging in lowering the quality of conversation on this forum.
>It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread.
But why add a random site that does nothing but contribute to the noise?
>I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
The onus is on the person making the claim to prove it, not on the respondent to disprove it. If all you're presenting is a bunch of charts with arrows on them, I don't see why I have to debunk each individual chart[1]. It suffices to show that the argumentation style is flawed.