I fail to see why that's superior to a universal childcare subsidy, which can be used for childcare or retained if someone wishes to care for their child themself. Or better yet, a universal child allowance that parents can use to defray whatever child raising costs they see fit.
And I say that as someone whose current plan is to be a stay-at-home dad while my (female) partner continues to work.
You could say the same about the taxes used to pay for public schools.
> fail to see why that's superior to a universal childcare subsidy
For one, it doesn't free up labor. Two, most systems I'm aware of let one take a childcare subsidy and use it at home. Paying providers by default makes administration easier by reducing the number of payees. (There is also an oversight cost with private payments.)
Absolutely, because it is true. Especially considering how much we overpay for public schools (costs having been rising faster than inflation for decades with no improvement in student outcomes).
If it was a childcare voucher that was guaranteed to get your child a seat that could be maybe exchanged for cash if you don’t want to go to work, that would be fine.
It’s the same problem with UBI. I don’t need a basic income or childcare subsidy.
I need a basic purchasing power.
Compared to the existence of HCOL areas without a subsidy, no, its not even incentivizing, much less forcing that.
Compared to a hypothetical system which accelerates existing price divergence by adding extra subsidies in already high-cost areas, sure, but drawing people out of HCOL areas also mitigates HCOL.
With a net reduction in agglomeration effects and resultant productivity. Pointless experiment,
I’d rather the government unleash infrastructure building in HCOL to make it cheaper and incentivize child-care workers (and other essential functions) to move there.
With growth every LCOL will become an HCOL if we don’t solve the problem now. See: Real-estate prices in Boise, Idaho.
What is the evidence for this in the countries with universal childcare [1]?
I believe the missing ingredient is the additional production of women who were forced out of their careers by having kids. Those women are more productive working. That additional production may singularly offset the system's marginal cost.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co...
I should have added that I've typically heard it in liberal suburbs, not rural America.
Good, recent example is this thread [1] right here on HN (in particular this comment [2]).
Most things are the same price or cheaper as a percentage of median income today except housing. That’s because housing is treated as investment meant to appreciate, leading to perverse incentives to artificially restrict supply.
IMHO housing is the economic problem in the Western world. Most of the reason younger people feel poorer than their parents is housing. Most of the pressure on families is housing. The demographic collapse issue is due in part to housing costs. Real estate is cancer and the most important economic battle of today is finding a way to break the real estate market.
All the people panicking over demographics should be in favor of state and federal density mandates, telework where possible, and zoning reform.
The same is true for healthcare. Pfizer needs to demonstrate ongoing growth to their shareholders; insurance companies are bound by the ACA to a maximum profit margin so can only increase profits by growing costs; half the new commercial real estate in my area is medical buildings going up.
I think you may be right about the overall problem, but I'm not sure I agree that density is the solution.
People starting families don't just want a house, what they want is enough space. Mothers want a yard they can send the kids out into when they need a moments peace, closets to store everyone's junk, and bathrooms big enough to walk into while pregnant.
I think disaggregating populations into more medium and small cities would help keep costs down and give people more space.
All of this also means said mother can't go to the corner to pick up supplies, but must drive to the store. There isn't an abundance of neighbors to help out or restaurants with cheap delivery; everything must be done themselves.
The notion that families require low density is very culturally-specific and a choice more than a necessity. Yes, four people need more physical space than two, but not to the extent of modern suburbia.
Most of human history has been spent in much lower density living situations than we have now, and I'm pretty confident there is a negative correlation between housing density and fertility.
there is no need for each home to have their own garden. but a multi story building with a dozen or more families that can share one.
take a look at some cities in germany. stuttgart, ruhrgebiet, and many others. they are actually a lot of small cities close together with lots of green space in between. each has their own shops, offices, schools, etc within walking distance and an extensive public transport network to connect them.
We need a multi pronged approach. Basically any policy that improves housing affordability without too much negative or perverse incentive elsewhere should be favored.
And increasing density only works up to a point. Once you can no longer increase density, the prices start climbing back up.
I think rezoning for more mixed use neighborhoods is a good idea, and some high-density living is good (not everyone has kids, or wants to have them) but I am skeptical of increasing density in general.
searching for an answer i found this:
https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/data-study-on-...
which observes that crime increases up to a density of 500 people per square mile, but then decreases as the population density increases further.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173288/tpusa-young-women-sum...
> The influencer saved her most controversial take for last: Daycare is feminist garbage too. It raises cortisol levels in children. It creates disordered attachment styles. It is pernicious poison, Marxist cancer. “I believe the feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce,” Clark said.
One of the hardest things about being human is that human children are ludicrously high maintenance. We have some of the highest maintenance offspring in nature. High parental investment requirements may be a factor in our evolution of complex social systems and longevity (“the grandmother effect”) but it also creates massive pressure and strife in the areas of gender and social dynamics.
I feel like non parents don’t get this. I have kids and listen when I say that nothing can prepare you for how high maintenance human children are. There are no words. Even the process of pregnancy and delivery are a life threatening medical condition that used to kill a large number of women. Our species really is uniquely burdened this way.
Many cultures have what amounts to a system of soft socially enforced slavery in which 50% of the population, namely women, are pressured or compelled to dedicate their lives to reproduction and raising children. Cultures that don’t do this either face declining birth rates or have to subsidize it financially instead because someone has to do it. Humans do not emerge from eggs and raise themselves.
I think this means if we want gender equality and don’t also want demographic collapse we must subsidize high quality child care.
I guess it works if you don't want those experiences and are happier working.
It seems more scammy to me that universal childcare, pre-school, et cetera are twisted to mean mandating both parents work. It doesn't. Countries with universal childcare still have plenty of stay-at-home parents. What they don't have is parents, predominantly moms, forced to stay at home with their kids.
Right now it's not like parent needing to do other things is some low-simmering quasi-strike disciplining labor markets. It's more like the expense of having kids disciplinarians would-be parents.
A post of post-work post-scarity stuff runs through more people working. It is counter intuitive, but that is how things work. So long as people who would like to work are not, it will hang over our heads and we won't be able to shrink the workweek.
If you need some real-world evidence, see right now, at this period of record low unemployment, the one of the UAW's demands is a shorter work-week.
What really sucks is some European countries have already solved this dilemma by both offering childcare and paying a benefit to stay at home mothers, so parents can act in whichever way suits their individual situation.
To me, this clearly benefits society, but it requires each side release their hostages.
Don't get me wrong: for some children, childcare is a better alternative than what awaits them at home, but I think for most it produces worse outcomes.
And this kind of thing will force some women into the workforce, because there's no free lunch and some women will have to work to offset the cost to pay for these programs.
Yes! It's totally fine for your wife to want to be a homemaker. But if you're asking for a world where economic necessity forces her into being one, I totally think there's a moral shade to that preference. (Even if it's simply a preference.)
(Clarification: "wrong" as in unethical. I don't think you're a bad person for having that preference. Far from it, I think you're thinking of your kids.)
> this kind of thing will force some women into the workforce
Is there evidence of this in Luxembourg, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Germany or Portugal [1]?
Keep in mind that plenty of women are forced out of their careers to take care of their kids. Adding them back into the economy boosts productivity (whatever they were doing is likely more productive than raising only their own kids, systemically). Taxes from that productivity alone may be the missing variable that balances the equation to not force those who truly choose to stay at home into a profession to keep up with COL.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co...