I have nothing to say on the substance of this issue but I really appreciate this approach in general: engaged and thoughtful, but not denigrating other ideas or pretending that there is some easy solution out there. My personal and work situation has changed dramatically and I don’t have nearly as much time to read. Today I have time for one thing and I’m glad I chose this. Thanks as always.
I don't have a coherent grand theory here other than to say that the interest groups focused on driving up wages/credentialism in childcare are clearly in the wrong. Matt's plan to bring in immigrant workers to maintain affordability would, in fact, be a great benefit.
One rare place I generally agree with the conservatives is that if you're going to subsidize childcare the funding should be professional daycare vs stay at home parent agnostic. Substantially biasing society towards a new vast political constituency of professional care workers would be bad and create an massive spiral of cost increase.
The "crisis" here is that the opportunity cost of parenting vs going to work is greater than it's ever been and it's bad for children when having someone to care for them is a prohibitively expensive luxury good.
But didn’t you just take someone else out of the workforce by making them take care of the kids? Out of two parents and a third person, I’m not sure why it’s best for the parents to be in the workforce and the other person out rather than one parent and the other person in the workforce and the other parent out.
If it’s just that the third person can take care of more kids than one parent can, well I don’t think that’s true - presumably some of the subsidy can be used by people who want to pay their neighbor or sibling who is a stay-at-home parent to take their kid too.
Just basic specialization of labor? Of course a specialized child care center can provide care more efficiently than everyone doing it themselves. That's true of everything in the economy, burden of proof is on you if you want to argue the child care sector is some kind of weird exception.
Sure, but that doesn't answer the question of why the government should be in the business of deciding for families how much specialization they want to avail themselves of. If we're going to offer childcare subsidies, then they need to be universal to all families regardless of the choices they make in this regard.
I happen to be of the opinion that we shouldn't offer such subsidies; they're mostly desired by my PMC peers who feel childcare biting into their disposable income, and they won't move the needle on fertility basically at all. Middle-class and working-class folks certainly don't seem to have an issue in having kids, because their expectations regarding the sacrifices they'll make are very different when they set off down that road.
To the extent that reforms are required, we desperately need to look at why historical and modern informal arrangements work so vastly more efficiently than the formal childcare sector rather than pouring money into it.
I don’t understand how the level of sacrifice involved in having children could fail to influence willingness to have children. The PMC is significant, and people like disposable income. This aversion plausibly explains a lot of delayed or foregone child rearing!
Money is a very small part of the sacrifices made to raise children.
Time, freedom, and flexibility are far, far greater casualties. Delayed childbearing among my PMC peers is, in my experience, far more a function of wanting to live a more interesting life and do more fun stuff before settling down both with a partner and a child, than it is a function of waiting for capital accumulation.
And so be it. But offering a few grand for childcare annually will affect child-bearing patterns only at the very edge of the margins.
Note, again, that people outside the PMC far more frequently make the conscious decision to have more kids, starting earlier, and make the sacrifices needed, despite having far fewer material resources to spare from necessities.
If you want to blow four grand a year per household on trying to increase TFR, spend it in an outright social media propaganda campaign to reduce the salience of travel and fancy hobbies and increase the popularity of big families.
We shouldn’t do this, of course, but it’ll almost certainly move the needle more.
The proof is in the price signals. Center based childcare even with its supposed economies of scale costs as much or more than a lot of people make. For some jobs, having professional childcare + continuing to do the job is clearly less efficient than doing the childcare yourself. Of course economic efficiency isn’t the only lens on this.
I'm becominh increasingly hostile to the idea that something as fundamental as childcare needs to be ruthlessly optimized for efficiency.
What kind of society has to import people en masse to care for its own children?
Especially when people generally don't even have that many children!
The economy seems more and more like a giant engine that consumes people for fuel. And it is so fuel-hungry that we have to bring in the world's poor to keep it fed.
Belisarius, you seem to be under the impression that the economy is an evil entity that forcibly drags parents away from their children for the sake of "efficiency."
Many parents, however (especially highly educated ones with a professional career), want to work outside the home when they have kids! I'll repeat something I wrote on a previous comment thread: I love my son with all my heart, but I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. When my maternity leave ended and I went back to work, I almost wept with relief at going back to a place where people communicated by intelligent speech and not by screaming, where I could have interesting conversation with fellow adults, where I didn't have to change anybody's diaper.
While I disagree with the moral judgments wrapped up in the post to which you’re responding, I think this post gets at the heart of what I mean when I say that PMC folks like us have different expectations regarding child-rearing.
Even though you and I seem mostly immune to the “cultivated child” parenting trend, we still have vastly higher expectations of our own standard of living and independence of action after kids than many middle- and working-class folks I know
And I just don’t think that our preferences here should be subsidized, certainly not when I don’t expect it to actually move the needle on TFR.
My wife and I are both PMC folks, and neither of us stayed home (or wanted to) with our kids.
So I'm not casting any judgement on people who choose to do that, obviously.
My objection is to importing immigrants to do this kind of childcare, because we don't want to pay our own workers enough to have an adequate supply of childcare workers.
1. Because it's so fundamental means that it should have even more efficiency. Would you prefer it to be less efficient?
2. Rich societies. Which we are.
3. People don't have as many children because the cost of having children has gone up so much. That's exactly my point here.
4. The economy is just people, it's not some monster. And if the world's poor want to come here, build a better life for themselves, and provide value while doing it, why should we be opposed to that?
>>3. People don't have as many children because the cost of having children has gone up so much.<<
I've never understood this. We're a lot richer now than we used to be, back in the days when people had a lot more children. Even with women in the workforce.
(1) It's not clear to me the extent to which people a century ago chose to have children, as opposed to lacking access to high-quality contraceptives.
(2) We're richer because automated machines can produce most physical goods more cheaply. But childcare requires actual human labor, which does not get proportionally cheaper. So having a child requires forgoing an increasingly large number of physical goods. (The fancy name for this is Baumol's cost disease.) This is true whether or not the childcare comes from a homemaker or a daycare worker.
Worse, because parents with children are a tiny minority, they don't have a large effect on the prevailing salary level in any given industry. Consequently your salary is almost certainly calibrated only to pay for the (cheap) physical goods and not the (cost diseased) childcare.
We don't have to go back 100 years. In 1975 average American family size was 3.42, compared to 3.13 now, while per capita income (apparently not adjusted for inflation) went from $7800 to $69,000 (my guess based on the GDP deflator is that the $69,000 was about $16,400 in 1975 dollars).
And while Baumal's cost disease makes childcare *relatively* more expensive, if we're talking <$12/hour, it's not that much of total family income. Granted, if you're well below median income, then childcare can be a lot more expensive.
"Back in the day" having children was "cheaper" because children were often either free farm labor or potential factory employees bringing income into the family. Additionally it was generally considered acceptable to spend less time on average watching children as they were essentially "free range" all the time. Also, that laissez-faire parenting style combined with archaic medicine meant that infant and child mortality was way higher back in the day, so it having lots of children meant you had "spares."
Cultural mores don't change overnight, so a lot of families continued to have lots of children even as the economic incentives decreased, but the equilibrium as mostly shifted by now.
w.r.t para #2 the answer is pretty clearly "a society where people live in nuclear family units without extended and older family in the same building", and I believe that our host has voiced some clear opinions and policy prescriptions on how we might address _that_ as well.
w.r.t #4 I'm not sure how "bring in the world's poor...and make them objectively less poor" is a bad result here?
An economy where people are really strongly averse to being stuck at home with their own children. Even when that is the efficient thing, people really don’t like the experience or the social status / identity of being stay at home parents.
I don’t know. When hunter-gatherer societies saw agricultural societies, with their comparatively astronomical birthrates, they might have said “what kind of society has to pump out kid after kid just to grow food?” But that doesn’t make the agricultural model worse, or better. It’s just different needs for different circumstances.
I have no idea how immigrants are being “consumed” by the economy like fuel--do you mind expanding on that? They’re a resource, but they aren’t depleted in providing their benefits like fuel is.
I think we should do both/either. If a parent wants to temporarily leave the paid workforce to focus on childcare, we should enable them to do that via robust paid leave. If a parent wishes to return quickly to the paid workforce, we should have affordable childcare universally available.
(In practice my belief is it's better for at least the first 24 months or so for the child to stay home with a parent; so my hope is paid leave should be default. But I'm not expert and I'm prepared to be told this is wrong.)
I bet if we took all the people in corporate America with bullshit jobs that contribut nothing to society and are a drag on the economy, and had them work in childcare, we wouldn't have a childcare labor problem.
I'm being flip, but in contrast to most commenters here on either side of the ideological spectrum, I strongly believe that many sectors of our economy -- large chunks of advertising and finance, and almost all of "marketing", to name a few -- are bullshit in the sense that they contribute little to society. They may be profitable and represent a lot of economic activity, but much of that activity is useless in broader human sense, or, worse, detrimental to society and the economy by warping markets and obscuring information valuable to consumers.
No, we disagree entirely. I think they actually are useful, and that their employers continue to voluntarily hire them proves this. Only jobs created by coercive activity (that is to say, the government) can be wasteful (though this doesn’t necessarily mean they are).
With regards to marketing, how do you propose we transmit information without hiring anyone to do it? And with regard to finance, how do you propose people aggregate resources more efficiently than we presently do?
Most finance and marketing, not all. And I would argue many jobs/industries can be wasteful. Look at tobacco. Lots of economic activity, huge profits. All they had to do was supply an addictive, poisonous product to consumers and market it with lies about its safety. I would hazard that all the man hours of productivity and profit lost to emphysema, lung cancer, and asthma over the last hundred years would dwarf the economic contribution of the tobacco industry. That would seem to mark those jobs as wasteful.
This makes more sense for more people to the extent that childcare is cheap. The more of a luxury good childcare becomes the more people ought to be in a position to make a rational economic choice to be stay at home parents. What's the argument that skewing this inflection point by subsidizing only professional childcare accrues meaningful economic benefits over a neutral subsidy?
"The more of a luxury good childcare becomes the more people ought to be in a position to make a rational economic choice to be stay at home parents."
Childcare doesn't get cheaper when you pay for it by forgoing a career as a software developer/bank manager/railroad dispatcher/CEO/Buc-ee's employee. The rational economic decision isn't to become a homemaker; it's to not have kids.
Does it actually? How much is just shifting unpaid parenting labor into a place where it's captured by statistics? Are we assuming the expected future productivity of kids in daycare is equivalent to those with stay at home parents or are there trade offs to consider? How much more expensive will the industry get if we create real pressure to professionalize all parenting? Who can afford kids in that world? Can the subsides possibly keep pace?
One person watching four kids while three other parents go to work leads to more overall output, higher standards of living, and more tax revenue than if all four parents stay home watching their own kid.
Right, there's a potential for some efficiency there in, but the more professionalized it gets the more the overhead costs eat into the margin, as soon as the kids are going to an independent facility instead of one of the parent's homes you're introducing a huge regulatory/cost burden. You also have to account for the expected value accrued to the child of these different arraignments.
Conservatives are not going to agree to more low-skilled immigrants coming here, and progressives aren't going to support bringing in immigrants explicitly because you can pay them less.
Both the cons and progs are wrong here, but just as the explicitly neoliberal position is almost always the correct one, it's almost always the unpopular one too.
Why is this more correct than redistributing income from wealthy Americans to childcare workers in the form of higher wages, and to lower income Americans with kids who need assistance paying for childcare? As the article acknowledges, childcare is an inherently labor-intensive industry, with little potential for productivity gains through technology or other forms of innovation. But higher wages in childcare would put productivity and innovation pressure on other industries that do have the potential to be more productive if labor is more expensive.
1. The increase in inequality comes from more poor immigrants entering the country who become a lot richer than they previously are, so yes I believe it is both better for them and for people who need childcare to immigrate here.
2. The only people who benefit from just subsidizing demand are current childcare providers.
3. You can still do redistribution from rich people to poor people if you want. In fact, increasing supply instead of subsidizing demand gives you more room to do even more redistribution.
4. The idea that we should drive labor costs up artificially so hopefully there could be some innovations that eventually bring down labor costs is really weird bankshot thinking.
5. Progressives really need to stop thinking the way to solve every problem is to restrict supply and then subsidize demand. It hasn't worked in housing, it isn't working in childcare, and it won't work in education or healthcare either.
I would not call it "weird bankshot thinking" to say that the wage for the lowest-paid form of entry-level full-time work -- the wage that anchors the rest of the wages in a society -- should be a living wage that is not grossly below the median income in the society.
Equality matters, and is an essential cornerstone of a functioning democracy.
Equality and childcare are fundamentally opposed. There is inherently a pretty steep hierarchical relationship between one whose best economic option is to take care of your kid, and you who can comfortably afford to have her take care of your kid. The main reason childcare is so expensive is America is too equal for it. Everybody’s middle class; middle class people can’t easily afford 1:3 or 1:5 or name your small-child staffing ratio of other middle class people’s wages.
I think the steelman re the cohesion point is that if there is an underclass of immigrant workers making very low salaries, then that's less cohesive than a typical northern european country where everyone is ethnically homogenous and income distributions are super compressed.
My counter to that would be that the people who would be the purported victims in this new immigrant underclass are still definitionally doing much better off than they would have been otherwise (as they voluntarily chose to come here).
Wouldn’t everyone who has to live in a stratified and unequal society with less cohesion in some sense be bearing the costs despite only the (direct or indirect) employers of the immigrant underclass being beneficiaries (and incumbents involved in the same labor pool being specifically harmed by downward wage pressure)? I agree that the hypothetical immigrants think this is a positive-sum transaction almost by definition, but immigration is also surely among the most externality-heavy interventions it’s possible to engage in. Matt thinks these externalities are mostly positive (hence “One Billion Americans”) but that’s obviously not a consensus position—hence the book.
I feel like one restrictionist but otherwise neoliberal response to the issue raised in Matt’s post is “do literally nothing and let Baumol’s cost disease solve the issue.”
I'm quite ok with more immigrants, so long as the intake is balanced across class and professional lines.
What's not going to enhance social cohesion is to roll out a new H1-B visa classification for low-skilled, low-paid childcare workers who will effectively be indentured servants given the notorious flaws in that program.
Just allow a million high-skilled and 750k each mid- and low-skilled immigrants to legally come here each year, let the market sort them out what they do for a living, and allow the marvelous, magnetic attractions of our culture to work their magic as always. We can easily make good Americans of a flow of immigrants equal to 0.6% of the population annually.
The trick is to keep it from gutting the newly enhanced bargaining power the working class holds at the moment, which is why it needs to be balanced in favor of bringing competition for you and Henry and me, not the dude who drives my Amazon delivery truck.
Matt can essentially re-use this article and just replace references to child care to ELDER care - an even larger and looming crisis that has already begun. My prediction is that even conservative Americans will come around on the strategy of mass immigration once the elder care crisis really starts to impact majority of Boomers (mid-2030's).
I like the optimism and hope you're right! But in my view the result is more likely to be "My [immigrant] doctor and [immigrant] caregiver are great. By the way, did you see [latest outrage on the TV]? We need to lock down the borders right now!"
The other aspect of elder care is that for part of the population, it requires a 24-hour attendance that does not sync up with living arrangements or labor laws. Parents live with their young children, but many adults do not live with their very elderly parents. With much older or medically vulnerable elderly people, there is an intermediate zone where someone doesn't need constant nursing but where you want someone there in case there's a fall in the middle of the night. Labor laws require 3 full time people for a 24 hour period, unless you are paying massive overtime (or not complying with the law). Creating some type of compensated live-in arrangement that would be legal would be a net economic and social benefit.
One I have seen done informally is old people offer the rooms in their empty-nest houses for free or steeply below market, in exchange for light housework. I know someone making a living in the arts in a very high cost of living area based on this type of arrangement. Can raise some eyebrows, maybe illegal, but it seems like a great deal for both of them.
One thing this has overlooked is that the overwhelming majority of the “childcare crisis” takes are emanating from and focused on the professional classes who stop after 1 kid anyway.
The highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing model most of our class peers embrace makes raising two kids completely draining and unsustainable, more emotionally and in terms of time than financially.
Middle and working class families continue to opt for a median of two children and often more, because they value children more and have more realistic (or at least less intensive/cultivating) expectations about how they will raise them. Childcare crisis be damned, lol.
I really don’t think much of anything will move the needle because childcare isn’t the driver, culture is.
I'm going to push back a bit on the "highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing model." You're not wrong, but...
My husband and I both have demanding careers, and now, in the waning years of my fertility, we're trying to decide whether to have a second child. What scares me off most is the idea of caring for an infant again. No matter how "cultivating" and "micromanage-y" you are, an infant requires pretty much the same things: round-the-clock, extremely tedious cycle of "feed, burp, change diaper, rock to sleep, repeat, all while sleep-deprived" that is completely incompatible with any kind of professional career, unless you spend a metric whackload of money on childcare. There is no "free-range" or "hands-off" way to raise an infant.
Yea, my kid just turned 4, so I remember all of this well, lol. I am in the "no" camp on #2 precisely because I know my kid was well-behaved and a good sleeper as an infant and I have a large extended family which has made me aware of how rare that is.
But... that's not the whole picture... the style of parenting a lot of our peers embrace seems to extend that period of utter exhaustion from 18 months to 18 years. So many of my kids' friends' parents are half a decade or more older than us, having delayed childbearing until they felt "ready" financially by metrics which make no sense, and are already, with 4-and-5-year-old kids, leaning into a life of organized extracurricular activities, shuttling kids near-daily to faraway places for enrichment and cultivation, paying for family therapy to "resolve" "issues" which seem to be completely ordinary parts of growing up, etc, etc.
It's appalling to watch. One parent in particular is nearly-dead 100% of the time we encounter them, and then still desperately worries that they're not doing enough for their kid, who is already training in two sports, learning an instrument, sitting through a language course, and some other things I can't remember. And who, in turn, is already very, very fragile and deals with failure badly, for which he's in therapy. And they actually did have a second, now around 4 months old, which is terrifying.
Whereas my kid gets home from preschool, gets some TV time, does a puzzle with me, eats lunch, goes down for a nap, wakes up, goes to the park to play under grandparents' watchful eyes until dinner is ready, then plays on her own or with the neighbor kids, reads with us, and wraps up with another bit of TV before bed.
She has a swimming class once a week, gets a playdate once a week or so, we host a classmate's family every other week for dinner, and our pre-school is a co-op for which we work two mornings a month and a weekend day a quarter. That is the extent of our structured time commitments.
Which leaves us free to go do shit for both us and her, and her time to cultivate herself however she damned well pleases.
EDIT: Just to clarify, the TL;DR version of this is that I don't want a second kid despite our liberalized parenting because I am extraordinarily lazy, need sleep to function, and enjoy my me-time. If we were raising our kid under the "intensive cultivation" model, I'd have shot myself already.
Had a second kid despite similar objections, and, while of course the second is fantastic and loved, it feels more like 3x than double the work.
The second newborn/infant phase is so much worse when also dealing with a 3-year-old's potty training and quasi-autonomy that actually takes 5x as long.
I agree that newborns are intrinsically a lot of work, but there are choices that make it harder or easier. E.g. you can do cry-it-out at 3 or 4 months --- some say even earlier. Also, formula is fine; the benefits of breast milk are greatly exaggerated, but mothers are often pressured into breastfeeding, which can only be done by one parent (and pumping is doubly time consuming). These are both subjects where people have very strong feelings --- especially among the "highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing" types.
Same experience. Our kid was a noisy sleeper — would do shit like raise legs vertically then drop them with a loud thud (while remaining asleep!), and it kept waking us up. My wife was opposed to kicking the kid out, but reality eventually disabused her of some of her misguided beliefs, and it was a huge improvement.
Right, this reminds me of another choice that makes things easier or harder: the American Academy of Pediatrics "recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months." [1] because this supposedly reduces the rate of SIDS. However, my understanding is that the evidence that this is true is flimsy at best, and may well be BS. My guess is the latter: parents don't radiate some magical protective field that is blocked by walls and thus protects children in the same room but not in other rooms.
I very much so respect where this comment is coming from (I was MUCH happier when we opted to do things like incorporate formula).
But I want to push back a bit on how it’s about choices. I suffered from pretty severe PPA around my own lack of sleep right after birth. It stopped me from being able to fall asleep even when I wasn’t on baby duty and messed with my ability to stay asleep (I would jerk violently awake constantly). While it may have been linked with some of our early choices around feeding and sleep, it’s also just genetic to some degree. My sister had it and warned me it was likely I could as well. Medication helped me a ton, and I’m grateful to have it on hand if we do go into a second. I just don’t know how much of it was about our choices given that we were super stressed first time parents and how much of it was simply my hormones being all over the place.
I'll elaborate on where this comment is coming from: my wife had severe (her doctor's word) PPD, and I'm absolutely certain this could have been mitigated (or even eliminated) by different choices.
Her OBGYN pushed her to get nexplanon implanted right after birth, but unbeknownst to us, a known side effect of nexplanon is that it can stop lactation. (The manufacture's documentation --- available on the FDA website! --- is very explicit about this, but OBGYNs will gaslight people and say that it's simply not true.)
Long story short: her milk basically didn't come in. This was a problem because the La Leche League and their innumerable co-conspirators have brainwashed many mothers into thinking they're shitty parents if they don't breastfeed. So, with the help of a doctor who's a specialist in lactation and a shitload of pumping (including twice a night!), my wife managed to get some milk to come in. At this point, our kid was used to using a bottle, and refused to breastfeed (despite many frustrating hours of us trying to get her to latch). So, my wife spent a year pumping (again, including multiple times a night) so that we could bottle-feed it to our kid. All the while, she felt like a failure for not being able to breastfeed. (Apparently breast *milk* is not enough. Apparently you need to breastfeed for proper psychological attachment between mother and child. Or something.)
This was, to put it mildly, horrible. If we had just used formula, life would have been much happier and our kid would have been fine. I hope there is a special place in hell for the scumbags who have brainwashed everyone into thinking they are shitty parents for not breastfeeding (and, more generally, for not making choices to make life easier).
Sleep was the same deal. My wife was convinced (by various bullshit books backed by bullshit psychology papers) that if a baby cries, it is damaging to them, and there is no safe level of baby crying (much like how there is no safe level of lead). This basically precluded any form of sleep training since even "no cry" methods involve some crying. (Crying is what babies do; there is no avoiding it.) Eventually I convinced her that we should do a form of fading, which worked wonders. (Altho I had to basically do it myself because of the small amount of crying.)
Even getting our kid out of our bedroom was contentious. Our kid was a very noisy sleeper and kept waking us up. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics says that kids should sleep in their parents room for 6 months to reduce the chance of SIDS. This recommendation is based on evidence that is, at best, flimsy and is probably not true. (As I mentioned above, "parents don't radiate some magical protective field that is blocked by walls and thus protects children in the same room but not in other rooms.")
So there you have it: three choices that made life much more miserable. I am 100% convinced that making different choices would have significantly mitigated the PPD and made the whole process much less miserable.
I'll add another thing that's kind of a choice and kind of not: for various reasons, we got very little family support in the weeks and months after birth. Historically, you'd have a lot of support from friends and family, but for various reasons, our society makes that less common. (E.g. a lot of "professionals" move for work --- often away from their families.) I'm convinced that a lack of support is also a major reason for how common PPA/D is in the US.
All that said, baby number two is due real soon now. I'm sure we'll make some better choices this time around (altho breastfeeding is still non-negotiable). Short of the baby having medical issues (knock on wood), I'm certain it'll much less miserable than last time.
First I’ve got to say that I agree with you so wholeheartedly on all of this. I will purposely casually mention doing a chill version of cry-it-out to new parents to let them know it’s okay. Same with formula.
The only hitch for me is that sometimes, you can do everything the more chill way and *still* have issues. Right around my daughter’s first birthday, my PPA (which had been completely gone for months by that point) came roaring back. Everything was going super well, we felt very settled and I wasn’t particularly stressed about anything. BUT I was still breastfeeding to some degree and my daughter seemed to decrease the amount she drank. I didn’t particularly care one way or another. I liked breastfeeding well enough for its calming and sleep-inducing properties, but reducing feeds didn’t seems bad to me. My assumption is that this led to a hormonal shift as my supply had to drop. I personally don’t think I did anything to make this happen, it just happened. I got back on my anxiety med and it went away after a little while.
It’s mostly just my reminder that you can absolutely do a ton to mitigate the impacts of PPD and PPA, but a gentle reminder that sometimes bodies can be whack, yo, is nice too.
Don't know how true this is, but I've read that having large(ish) families has (again, after many years) become something of a desirable lifestyle and indeed a mark of status for the affluent in America.
I think the evidence is that it's a bathtub curve but that the right side really is the almost vanishingly portion of the population that has 'fuck-you' money and beyond. Elon Musk can father as many kids as he pleases while providing them more resources than most UMC people see in a lifetime at not the slightest compromise to either his wealth or his lifestyle, but you have to have so much money (ideally possessed at or near peak parenting age, unless maybe like Musk you're not as constrained by female fertility *and* can just fob off parenting responsibilities on various mistresses) to be in that position that a "mere" several million dollars simply doesn't cut it.
I think you're overstating the degree to which money is the constraint here rather than time.
At my level of upper-middle-class-professionaldom (let's just say well below $300k annually for my household), a second child would slow our investment plans somewhat and very little else, financially.
But it would suck down the vast majority of our free time for the next 18 months and a lot for another 3 years thereafter before we'd finally see some tapering, whereas with my current kid we're already in the tapering phase and enjoying it a lot.
For the "active cultivation" PMC parents, that phase doesn't end until the kid leaves for college, as far as I can tell.
This is well beyond anything I have direct experience with, but I had in mind an amount of wealth so high that you would basically just hire a PMC striver-type to look after your kid full time and thus funge money against time (even at a ratio far less favorable than more basic daycare) while outsourcing all the intensive parenting. Just get some STEM Ph.Ds to look after your kids...
I guess if you don't actually give a shit about the kid beyond seeding your genes far and wide, sure, but that doesn't seem to be the case even for most very wealthy men, and is equally common/uncommon among poor ones.
The corresponding strategy to achieve evolutionary domination for the poor-but-hot is to just sell a shitload of sperm to fertility clinics in their 20's. Or be a complete cad while young enough that women care about looks over all else and hope for a few accidental pregnancies.
Basically, yeah, but for the rich person in this scenario I think it's probably easier to tell yourself a story in which it's not that you don't give a shit about the kid but that you can preserve your own time while still providing them with near-equal (or, with respect to tutelage, potentially better) enrichment to what you could provide them yourself by throwing money at the problem. You think of yourself as still being a k-strategist, just one with so many resources than you can shift to a more r-type strategy without compromising on per-child resource expenditure.
Maybe? A lot of our peers seem to have 2 kids, and a few have 3. Only children families like ours are less common than I would have expected.
But we're also in that bit of the income distribution where another kid would just slow some of our savings and investment goals rather than impacting our consumption and lifestyle any, so maybe we've hit post-scarcity on that front?
Which is different than it being a bad outcome. The other day someone was outraged that parents would be out having dinner and give the kid an iPad so they could have a moments peace vs. “engaging” with the child. It sure seems like dramatically increased parenting demands are causing a decline in fertility. One manifestation of that is higher child care standards making child care more expensive.
We're doing our best to implement a pale imitation of the relatively free-range childhood I enjoyed, and she still gets an iPhone after she's done dinner in a restaurant sometimes because she is *uninterested* in sitting and talking with the adults for another half hour while they linger, eat, and chat.
Engage all you want, but your kid gets a vote too.
Totally agree (for self-interested reasons). My family just moved to Boston and the shortages of the key goods (housing, childcare) that Matt mentioned is obvious (~2x the cost for both from low-cost NJ). One thought as to how to facilitate more immigration for childcare: why not expand the existing au pair visa program and allow entrants to work at childcare centers instead of having host families as well as changing the pay structure a bit (currently room-and-board plus relatively low wages)? Currently, the visas are limited to a select list of countries but expanding that would obviously increase supply.
I like the out-of-the-box incrementalism here and it's a good thought, but while I'm not an expert on the au pair program it seems like it mostly works in practice the way it's supposed to work on paper (European teens and twentysomethings get to bum around America in exchange for performing early childcare for a year or two). I can't help but feel reluctant to make massive adjustments to programs that do more or less what it says on the tin in service of significantly more dramatic labor market adjustments that really seem to call for a separately-administered program.
Again, not a bad idea, I just worry that this risks breaking (or least stretching beyond recognition) a program that mostly isn't broken in service of a potentially meritorious but conceptually distinct reordering of the labor market.
I'm broadly pro-immigration, but I'm not really clear why the immigrant in question here would do the childcare job for $11 an hour when they could go work at the gas station for more than twice that. What am I missing? Are these visas going to be job-specific? That's inching a bit closer to indentured servitude than I'm comfortable with.
Also, Matt's handwaving about 'well the job pays twice as much as the per capita income in Grenada' ignores that living in the US is at least twice as expensive as that country too, so it kind of washes out.
Let's just do lots of high-skilled immigration, and accept that the low-skilled stuff is politically toxic and so best avoided. (Isn't that what popularism is all about?) On a personal level I'm about a half step away from open borders, but I realize that this is just extremely unpopular & deeply unrealistic. I think letting in all of the world's PhDs and STEM Master's is a way, way bigger priority, and would probably engender less opposition
Right now, there is a "postdoc crisis" largely due to the boom in employment in private industry, the stagnant wages in academia and the inability for grants to keep up with inflation, and the backlog on visas as a consequence of COVID and some Trump era damage to the State Department. It has become really difficult to hire strong postdocs, especially domestically. Also attract strong domestic PhD students to PhD programs.
A lot of Americans rightfully say "I can't survive in Boston on 50K with a PhD, I'm going to go work for this biotech for 120K." It is a rational calculus, even if they would prefer to stay in academia. Or if someone has the chance to make 75K right out of school if they are even a little bit on the fence and not utterly committed to the career pathways a PhD opens up, they aren't going to go do a PhD program and make 30K or less.
However, there are many, many people from all over the globe willing to accept low salaries for a chance to do scientific training in the US. Right now a lot of those people are from places like Nigeria, Bangledesh, India, the Phillipines, and the Caribbean. Many of those people are happy to work for 45-50K as a postdoc, or live on 30K or less as a PhD student.
People complain about immigrants suppressing wages in high skilled work too.
That's how i got here! Admittedly it was '99, so then i was getting 35k, but i and the other Euro post-docs thought it was great, while the Americans had all gone to work in biotech.
>People complain about immigrants suppressing wages in high skilled work too
Yes I but A) am not concerned about this (sorry, just being blunt). And B), I don't think postdocs are a political constituency that's going to swing elections. Working class people are, so we have to cater to their quirks.
I mean, if you think I'm being a little unsympathetic to postdocs- I'm in a white collar industry with literally no geographic barriers (can be done remotely from anywhere on Earth), and an increasing influx of offshore competition in the last 2 decades. They suppress my wages too- I just tough it out and compete harder
“…why the immigrant in question here would do the childcare job for $11 an hour when they could go work at the gas station for more than twice that. What am I missing?”
Work hours for childcare are almost entirely Monday - Friday daytime. Gas stations are, many of them, 24x7. No one commits armed robbery on a daycare. The risk of breathing gas fumes is quite low in a daycare facility.
Wage increases in the US absolutely are not wiped out by higher costs of living. You can see this in the flow of remittances from the US to South/Central American countries - remittances back to Grenada make up 4.5% of Grenada's GDP (a similar amount to the construction industry in the US). In high school I cleaned pools for my summer job, and worked with a lot of Salvadorans, both legal and illegal. The arrangement was pretty clear - they moved here to earn higher wages, lived in substandard housing (the guys I worked with slept six to a room), and were able to send back the difference to support their families.
A large number of these immigrants are here on job-specific visas already. The H-2A farm visa program is probably has the most bipartisan support of any program, given that farmers (Republicans) rely heavily on these workers to harvest crops.
Does it wash out? People are pretty inconsistent about this. I sometimes try to claim that Bay Area wages wash out in the housing market, but the retort is usually that no, in fact, we’re just rich people consuming the luxury good of presence in this region. What makes it different across borders?
I suppose that, in an effort to strongly agree with Matt's take here, this is an opportunity to share one of my most radical opinions, one that I may not have the time or vigor to defend extensively today due to being tired from a lot of ongoing travel, thus I might do more listening and learning to any disagreements I might get than replying.
I have yet to find a compelling reason that I find acceptable as to why anyone should not be able to live, work, or travel in any place of the world they want. And if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, they should also be able to utilize the social services there, of which their costs are often offset by those taxes. Citizenship is a much more difficult question, and on that I am quite open to ideas for extensive rules as to who should be allowed to participate in the political process of a given society. But on those other questions, I don't find my belief anywhere near that difficult, even while ceding that it is likely hideously unpopular.
So to conclude on topic, bring on the immigrant child workers!
1. Some parts of the world are much more desirable to live in than others. If you had truly unlimited movement of people around the world, those places would be totally swamped. As one example, California already has a severe water shortage. What would happen if 100 million brand-new Californians showed up? What would they use for drinking and cooking and washing? Where would they all live - in tents along the I-405? You can't just snap your fingers and bring 30 million new houses or apartments into existence.
2. When you say "anyone," did you mean truly *anyone*? Members of the Taliban or Al-Shabaab, Honduran drug traffickers, assorted criminals/terrorists? If not, then you're back to needing some kind of massive bureaucracy to decide who is allowed to settle where. If yes, then you're darn right this is going to be "hideously unpopular."
3. I'm going to be blunt here: a lot of people come from societies that don't share my values. I'm a woman, and I want to be free to walk around or ride my bicycle by myself, to work and earn my own money, to have control over my sexuality and reproduction (birth control), to be my husband's partner rather than servant. There are a lot of people in the world who think these beliefs make me a brazen whore, and who would gladly put me in my place with violence or the threat of violence if they could. Do I want them as neighbors? Hell no! Insert analogous examples for LGBTQ+ people and atheists.
Yea, I find it nonsensical that there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that culture and imagined community don’t matter…
The places which are “good” to live would stop being so great for many or most of their people if their populations doubled or tripled in the span of a few years, not just or even mostly because of the physical impacts but because they’d stop being communities of any sort, without any shared framework or institutions for solving problems and resolving conflicts, and without even the cultural underpinnings to understand those conflicts.
"because they’d stop being communities of any sort, without any shared framework or institutions for solving problems and resolving conflicts"
Until 1875, the American imagined community was capacious enough to include immigrants of arbitrary origin, and American culture's assimilatory effect strong enough to efface all the institutional conflicts that open borders caused. I see no reason those phenomena cannot be again.
Of course, and if you wish to permit entry to as much as 1.5% of the population in immigrants each year, with a class and skill make-up selected to avoid labor-market distortions, I’m there for it. Most of the US isn’t, which is why I usually say “2 million a year,” but history tells me we can accommodate double that handily if we get some of the housing issues sorted.
But that ain’t “open borders”.
The differential between living standards in the developed and non-developing world is wider than in 1875, transportation infrastructure and mobility far greater, and information about the US far more widely diffused. Open borders virtually guarantee several tens of millions of immigrants each year until everything comes tumbling down.
That, we cannot accommodate, neither physically nor metaphysically.
It will cause a societal collapse, as inevitably as the sun will rise tomorrow.
Before 1875 passage from Europe to the US took weeks, not hours, and was priced according to the resources a weeks-long trip required. And once an immigrant got here there was no federal welfare programs and only the most rudimentary ones at the local level. There are also more than four times the number of people on earth now and far, far, far more who can scrape together the cost of a one-way plane ticket.
Ad 3: yes, but if they don't share your (typical American) values, are they really going to want to come live here? If so,
(1) they probably are here for the economic advantages, and
(2) they probably know that American culture is different from their birthplace, and, moreover,
(3) they'll have to act differently to stay a productive member of society, because
(4) if they do try to "put [you] in [your] place with violence or the threat of violence", don't you think the police will step in? If not, your complaint isn't with immigration, it's that your local PD is incompetent!
Assuming a democracy, why would the police step in on behalf of drosophilist and not on behalf of these other people she wouldn't want here? After all, I think that the median American is vastly more liberal than the median person on Earth.
That’s one problem. The other is that policing requires 95%+ of people to willingly follow the law and at least 30% to assist in enforcing it. Without those, you have to have an occupying army rather than a civil police force.
And if you rapidly allow the population to increase by a great fraction, made up of people who do not have the cultural underpinnings to agree with the laws in question, all that falls apart near-immediately.
"What would happen if 100 million brand-new Californians showed up? What would they use for drinking and cooking and washing? Where would they all live - in tents along the I-405? You can't just snap your fingers and bring 30 million new houses or apartments into existence."
You can't snap your fingers and bring 100 million Californians into existence all at once either. It takes people time to move. And if California liberalized their zoning rules (say, to be like Tokyo), they should have no problem constructing houses as fast as people immigrate in.
As for water: yes, this is genuinely tricky. Graduated water rates would help; your first 365 gallons shouldn't cost more, but I see no reason that government should stop the second 365 gallons from (say) doubling in price if 100 million people move in. Of course,
> (365 gallons/person)(100 million people)=37 billion gallons
is still a lot of water. But that's where
> "if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, they should also be able to utilize the social services there, of which their costs are often offset by those taxes"
I sometimes try to persuade progressives on this very issue by arguing that labor is always going to be at a disadvantage to capital in the current world if capital is free flowing but labor is not. I often get a knowing nod, followed by "but I still hate that idea". As you say, it is unfortunately hideously unpopular.
Seriously it boggles my mind how often I have suggested the idea that labor should have, at a minimum, the same ability to move around in search of better returns on investment that capital inevitably does, only to be met with blank stares if not outright hostility by people who's entire politics is allegedly labor-focussed.
People care about who their neighbors, workers, and co-inhabitors of a region are, which is a concern that applies to labor but not capital -- the asymmetry is inherent because labor is more than bunch of 1s and 0s in a spreadsheet or some steel girders in a pile.
Separately, I find arguments to the effect of "you can let people immigrate but restrict the franchise!" to be unconvincing -- the irregular status of people present in the United States in contravention of its laws is already a sore spot for the Democratic party, but more importantly the moral case for disenfranchisement is incredibly weak for any descendant of immigrants -- it isn't like a baby gets to choose where it will be born, so it seems unfair to allow their parents into the country and yet restrict their children's (and children's children, etc. etc. etc.) capacity to participate in its political life, and I don't expect any hard form of jus sanguinis instead of jus soli to last even as the population of non-citizens grows ever larger. "Present without enfranchisement" is just not a commitment that can be credibly adhered to.
The thing is American workers from janitors to doctors are collecting a rent on their citizenship. I don’t want my fees as an attorney to reach equilibrium with those of English speaking Indian barristers.
As a lazy person, I realize that "move to a place with good social services and bum around" would be a thing. That isn't an insurmountable obstacle, but it's a bigger one than you might think: there are lots of social amenities where it's impossible or impractical to exclude people who haven't paid. Think police, fire, public health, sanitation, clean environment, infrastructure, even things like building codes and national defense. So there's one reason.
I'm still with you though! Because my own radical opinion is that "being born on the wrong side of a line on a map" is likely to be our era's "being born with the wrong skin color." Future generations are going to find it indefensible that we discriminate on that basis and they will have no sympathy for any of our excuses.
I’m pretty confident that the historical sweep of the nation-state will be long enough that “future generations” are going to be very far removed indeed, and as such I care no more for their opinions than a poor Roman citizen cared for mine.
"I have yet to find a compelling reason that I find acceptable as to why anyone should not be able to live, work, or travel in any place of the world they want. And if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, "
What happens when significant numbers don't fit into the economy and need social support?
See my reply to City of Trees above. "Social cohesion" isn't a "religious" idea, it's a gentle euphemism for there being no way to have a functional society where some people believe women are equal to men, and other people believe that a woman who wants equal rights is a shameless slut who needs her father/husband to give her a good beating. Likewise for those who believe in equality for LGBTQ+ people, and those who believe that homosexuality is an abomination to God and is punishable by death.
You’re talking to a wall. He accuses us of religious thinking while ignoring the vast pile of accumulated sociological research on imagined community and the limitations thereof.
The open borders/one world crowd are religious zealots, no more, no less.
I’ve recently come around to the idea of a year-long maternity leave for all. The real pressure point in childcare staffing is in the infant rooms, because of the required staffing ratios for infants. Also, I believe, but could be wrong, that most parents would rather stay home with their 3-month olds than send them off to daycare. When they get older it’s different. They’re less delicate and parents at that point ready to move on with their working lives.
As a woman I have complicated feelings about this--in a very privileged minority way. I am a professor who runs a research lab, and have watched other women have children in my position. While at some universities there is teaching release and release from serving on committees and a year added to the tenure clock, work doesn't completely stall to a halt when you have a child, and freezing your lab for a year is just simply impossible. Students need to graduate with their dissertations, funding doesn't magically appear because you are on maternity leave, and student and staff salary still needs to be paid. Being gone for three or four months is one thing, a year and it could really derail your and everyone under your mentorship's careers.
In places like Switzerland, the Nordics, etc. there is a huge dearth of women in leadership roles in business and academia. It is overall probably better for society in the vast majority of cases more what most women and families want, but there seems to be no free lunch when it comes to women's equality.
I'd say that the structure of academia is mostly to blame here.
There is an inherent impact for any high-value worker to be out of work for months at a time, and if it happens without warning, it can be especially bad...but that's not the case with pregnancy and maternity leave.
And yet many other businesses cope with it well enough.
If academia cannot, then it sounds like it needs reform.
I don't know that other businesses cope with it well enough. Some very large businesses have enough redundancy built in and have good cultures around it. In many countries where there is generous maternity leave, there can be more discrimination in hiring married women of childbearing age, more discrimination in promotion, and more pressure to mommy track and take part time work, even outside of academia.
I think it can be mitigated in countries that allow and encourage men and women to each take some of the parental leave. But that is contingent on really changing the culture surrounding men taking that leave as well as women which is happening slowly in some places. Otherwise you get in scenarios where nominally either partner can step back and take the leave but in practice it is the woman. And of course many (most?) women don't want to juggle work and want to spend time with their infant. But the structural barriers to making it feasible for women to take leadership roles seem just so challenging no matter how you arrange society.
I think the issue is that it’s like a startup founder taking a year of maternity leave in one of the early years of the company. When something is established enough that someone else can run it for a year you can do that, but when something is novel and dependent on the vision of the particular director, you can just substitute.
It seems like society has been pushing delays to childbirth later and later which has a number of significant downsides. What if we tried to do the opposite - move it earlier?* From a career perspective, would it have been easier to have a year off when you were 22-24 instead of later? Maybe a gap year between college and grad school?
*asterisk to note that this means trying to find your S/O earlier which is its own thing.
My colleague faced this when her grants ran out right around the time of her maternity leave. She was able to eventually get funded again, but it was harder without much in the way of resources (both lab supplies and people). Now I think about it, the biggest thing that helped her was hiring a full-time nanny!
This is a no brainer to me as well. It supports breastfeeding and attachment and there is no real benefit to kids under one interacting with their peers because of where they are developmentally. I was lucky to be able to split the first year with my husband and keep the kids home that long, but still had to pump when I went back to work at six months -- if I could have afforded a year (my husband was in grad school) I would have for sure. The one downside was that both kids got RSV within a week or so of starting daycare and ended up in the PICU -- their immune systems were not prepared for all of those kids!
When I was a kid, my friend down the street had a nanny. I think she was from Senegal, but I can't remember...it was definitely a West African country. She was very kind and warm and I liked her a lot.
She had a daughter that was a couple years older than me and my friend. Occasionally on days when school was out but it wasn't a federal holiday, she would bring her daughter and son along due to lack of other childcare options, and my friends parents were OK with that. First off all, it was a little confusing for me...who takes care of her daughter while she is taking care of my friend? Why does my friend get to have her time and not her own kids? How did her daughter not hate my friend's guts for having so much time with her mom?
Then one time, all of us kids were talking about punishment (we were raised by professional class people in NW DC in the '90s, so time outs were popular and corporal punishment was seen as abusive among our parents... my parents were liberal democrats and her parents were ex-millitary conservative leaning folks...so across the political spectrum this was the norm). Her daughter informed me that her mom when she misbehaved would whip her with a belt--something her mom was never allowed to do with my friend and her brothers. It was incredibly confusing to me that such a loving, warm woman was the type of person who would beat her children. Corporal punishment (and not just spanking, but whipping with a belt) is much more common in many West African cultures than it is in the US, and especially so in the '90s.
It really gave me a crash course on how complicated the world is. How unfair it is, how my parents moral norms of acceptable behavior are not universal, etc. And this was all when I was 6-7 years old.
I think I turned out ok and ended up being a more tolerant open minded person for it, but there are some parents who want to shield their kids from that particular brand of injustice just a little longer than that.
To be fair to my mom, I think she handed the discussion about it perfectly. She essentially told me that people can do things that she believes are wrong, but still have other good qualities, be a good mother in other ways, and that the world is complicated.
I don't think spanking was such a shock to me at the time...this was the '90s after all and I had friends whose parents spanked. My grandparents spanked me a couple times against my parents' wishes. It was more the beating with a belt from your mom seemed really intense.
To this day I'm around a lot of working class families (I live in a pretty socioeconomically diverse neighborhood is a mid sized Southern city) and while there certainly are some Americans who whip their children with belts, it's definitely not considered as acceptable as spanking in my experience.
Very surprised surprised Matt didn't mention regulation here. Obviously there are reasonable limits on child ratios, but states like Massachusetts that go beyond that have a very direct effect on costs.
These were the two big parts of the Biden bill that Manchin killed (perhaps rightly, since it was the restrict and subsidize version, not the immigrate version).
My in-home daycare provider immigrated to the US decades ago, though I have never asked her from where. Doing some napkin math, she pulls in around $8,000 per month and could pull in more if she wanted to hit the max ratio. I know that that’s not accounting for taxes and expenses, but her husband is a CPA so I assume she maximizes her situation.
Her house is nicer than mine and in a nicer neighborhood. She also is taking 4 weeks off for the birth of her first grandchild over the winter holidays, which she can easily do without jeopardizing her situation because she actually slightly undercharges in the current market and is otherwise extremely reliable.
Looking at my state’s requirements for in-home daycare, it actually doesn’t look terribly onerous. There appear to be no minimum square footage requirements and the time spent training and licensing sounds manageable.
I also think having a single caregiver has great benefits for my daughter as opposed to a revolving door of people working at a childcare center, but that feels more like personal preference.
This is all to say that I very much so agree with Matt on this one.
Making good childcare available to all should be considered together with universal pre-K. Many European countries seem to be able to do this, albeit under tax regimes far different than our own.
I don’t see how we can achieve this without immigrant help absent an increase in job market participation. Achieving the latter is a complex matter that I am not an expert in but I do feel that we can get more out of our existing domestic working age population (and by increasing the upper limits on that age by voluntary incentives).
Matt’s thoughts about immigrants and childcare prompt me to raise an even larger (and growing) issue -- the crisis in home healthcare (and in senior care facilities). Like childcare, these are not easy jobs yet are woefully underpaid. As boomers need more and more care, the crisis is going to become a major point of conflict that transcends ideological, age and income lines. Younger age cohorts will rightfully balk at shouldering the fantastic expense of providing care to the bulging boomer age bracket. Combining the childcare needs and senior care needs may yield a more persuasive argument for increasing immigration (along with the dearth of laborers for home construction, a significant factor in the rise in construction costs).
I don't really understand how immigration is going to fix the child care problem as (correctly) described here. After all, immigrants could work at a gas station too. So to really help, there would need to either be so many immigrants that we have a slack labor market (which is fundamentally a failure in a different way) or some restrictions that prevent the immigrants from leaving the child care profession, which has all kinds of other problems.
Obviously some people are interested in child care apart from the wages, or there would be a much worse crisis. But there's no reason to think that immigrants are more likely to pick child care than native workers, so again this is the "create labor market slack" solution.
I have nothing to say on the substance of this issue but I really appreciate this approach in general: engaged and thoughtful, but not denigrating other ideas or pretending that there is some easy solution out there. My personal and work situation has changed dramatically and I don’t have nearly as much time to read. Today I have time for one thing and I’m glad I chose this. Thanks as always.
You are missed, and good to hear from you whenever we can!
I don't have a coherent grand theory here other than to say that the interest groups focused on driving up wages/credentialism in childcare are clearly in the wrong. Matt's plan to bring in immigrant workers to maintain affordability would, in fact, be a great benefit.
One rare place I generally agree with the conservatives is that if you're going to subsidize childcare the funding should be professional daycare vs stay at home parent agnostic. Substantially biasing society towards a new vast political constituency of professional care workers would be bad and create an massive spiral of cost increase.
The "crisis" here is that the opportunity cost of parenting vs going to work is greater than it's ever been and it's bad for children when having someone to care for them is a prohibitively expensive luxury good.
subsidizing childcare is better than giving stay at home parents money because having two parents in the workforce is better for our economy
But didn’t you just take someone else out of the workforce by making them take care of the kids? Out of two parents and a third person, I’m not sure why it’s best for the parents to be in the workforce and the other person out rather than one parent and the other person in the workforce and the other parent out.
If it’s just that the third person can take care of more kids than one parent can, well I don’t think that’s true - presumably some of the subsidy can be used by people who want to pay their neighbor or sibling who is a stay-at-home parent to take their kid too.
Just basic specialization of labor? Of course a specialized child care center can provide care more efficiently than everyone doing it themselves. That's true of everything in the economy, burden of proof is on you if you want to argue the child care sector is some kind of weird exception.
Sure, but that doesn't answer the question of why the government should be in the business of deciding for families how much specialization they want to avail themselves of. If we're going to offer childcare subsidies, then they need to be universal to all families regardless of the choices they make in this regard.
I happen to be of the opinion that we shouldn't offer such subsidies; they're mostly desired by my PMC peers who feel childcare biting into their disposable income, and they won't move the needle on fertility basically at all. Middle-class and working-class folks certainly don't seem to have an issue in having kids, because their expectations regarding the sacrifices they'll make are very different when they set off down that road.
To the extent that reforms are required, we desperately need to look at why historical and modern informal arrangements work so vastly more efficiently than the formal childcare sector rather than pouring money into it.
I don’t understand how the level of sacrifice involved in having children could fail to influence willingness to have children. The PMC is significant, and people like disposable income. This aversion plausibly explains a lot of delayed or foregone child rearing!
Money is a very small part of the sacrifices made to raise children.
Time, freedom, and flexibility are far, far greater casualties. Delayed childbearing among my PMC peers is, in my experience, far more a function of wanting to live a more interesting life and do more fun stuff before settling down both with a partner and a child, than it is a function of waiting for capital accumulation.
And so be it. But offering a few grand for childcare annually will affect child-bearing patterns only at the very edge of the margins.
Note, again, that people outside the PMC far more frequently make the conscious decision to have more kids, starting earlier, and make the sacrifices needed, despite having far fewer material resources to spare from necessities.
If you want to blow four grand a year per household on trying to increase TFR, spend it in an outright social media propaganda campaign to reduce the salience of travel and fancy hobbies and increase the popularity of big families.
We shouldn’t do this, of course, but it’ll almost certainly move the needle more.
The proof is in the price signals. Center based childcare even with its supposed economies of scale costs as much or more than a lot of people make. For some jobs, having professional childcare + continuing to do the job is clearly less efficient than doing the childcare yourself. Of course economic efficiency isn’t the only lens on this.
because a childcare worker can watch multiple kids at a time
True, though this trade off is probably a function of the number of kids in a family and the skills of the would-be stay at home parent.
I'm becominh increasingly hostile to the idea that something as fundamental as childcare needs to be ruthlessly optimized for efficiency.
What kind of society has to import people en masse to care for its own children?
Especially when people generally don't even have that many children!
The economy seems more and more like a giant engine that consumes people for fuel. And it is so fuel-hungry that we have to bring in the world's poor to keep it fed.
Belisarius, you seem to be under the impression that the economy is an evil entity that forcibly drags parents away from their children for the sake of "efficiency."
Many parents, however (especially highly educated ones with a professional career), want to work outside the home when they have kids! I'll repeat something I wrote on a previous comment thread: I love my son with all my heart, but I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. When my maternity leave ended and I went back to work, I almost wept with relief at going back to a place where people communicated by intelligent speech and not by screaming, where I could have interesting conversation with fellow adults, where I didn't have to change anybody's diaper.
While I disagree with the moral judgments wrapped up in the post to which you’re responding, I think this post gets at the heart of what I mean when I say that PMC folks like us have different expectations regarding child-rearing.
Even though you and I seem mostly immune to the “cultivated child” parenting trend, we still have vastly higher expectations of our own standard of living and independence of action after kids than many middle- and working-class folks I know
And I just don’t think that our preferences here should be subsidized, certainly not when I don’t expect it to actually move the needle on TFR.
My wife and I are both PMC folks, and neither of us stayed home (or wanted to) with our kids.
So I'm not casting any judgement on people who choose to do that, obviously.
My objection is to importing immigrants to do this kind of childcare, because we don't want to pay our own workers enough to have an adequate supply of childcare workers.
I'll try to respond to each of your points.
1. Because it's so fundamental means that it should have even more efficiency. Would you prefer it to be less efficient?
2. Rich societies. Which we are.
3. People don't have as many children because the cost of having children has gone up so much. That's exactly my point here.
4. The economy is just people, it's not some monster. And if the world's poor want to come here, build a better life for themselves, and provide value while doing it, why should we be opposed to that?
>>3. People don't have as many children because the cost of having children has gone up so much.<<
I've never understood this. We're a lot richer now than we used to be, back in the days when people had a lot more children. Even with women in the workforce.
(1) It's not clear to me the extent to which people a century ago chose to have children, as opposed to lacking access to high-quality contraceptives.
(2) We're richer because automated machines can produce most physical goods more cheaply. But childcare requires actual human labor, which does not get proportionally cheaper. So having a child requires forgoing an increasingly large number of physical goods. (The fancy name for this is Baumol's cost disease.) This is true whether or not the childcare comes from a homemaker or a daycare worker.
Worse, because parents with children are a tiny minority, they don't have a large effect on the prevailing salary level in any given industry. Consequently your salary is almost certainly calibrated only to pay for the (cheap) physical goods and not the (cost diseased) childcare.
We don't have to go back 100 years. In 1975 average American family size was 3.42, compared to 3.13 now, while per capita income (apparently not adjusted for inflation) went from $7800 to $69,000 (my guess based on the GDP deflator is that the $69,000 was about $16,400 in 1975 dollars).
And while Baumal's cost disease makes childcare *relatively* more expensive, if we're talking <$12/hour, it's not that much of total family income. Granted, if you're well below median income, then childcare can be a lot more expensive.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183657/average-size-of-a-family-in-the-us/
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=U.S.%20gdp%20per%20capita%20for,a%204.82%25%20increase%20from%202017.
"Back in the day" having children was "cheaper" because children were often either free farm labor or potential factory employees bringing income into the family. Additionally it was generally considered acceptable to spend less time on average watching children as they were essentially "free range" all the time. Also, that laissez-faire parenting style combined with archaic medicine meant that infant and child mortality was way higher back in the day, so it having lots of children meant you had "spares."
Cultural mores don't change overnight, so a lot of families continued to have lots of children even as the economic incentives decreased, but the equilibrium as mostly shifted by now.
w.r.t para #2 the answer is pretty clearly "a society where people live in nuclear family units without extended and older family in the same building", and I believe that our host has voiced some clear opinions and policy prescriptions on how we might address _that_ as well.
w.r.t #4 I'm not sure how "bring in the world's poor...and make them objectively less poor" is a bad result here?
Right I mean they don’t have to come if they don’t want to, but they’re obviously very motivated to!
Something being "important" does not make it immune from the laws of economics anymore than it make it immune to the laws of gravity.
An economy where people are really strongly averse to being stuck at home with their own children. Even when that is the efficient thing, people really don’t like the experience or the social status / identity of being stay at home parents.
I don’t know. When hunter-gatherer societies saw agricultural societies, with their comparatively astronomical birthrates, they might have said “what kind of society has to pump out kid after kid just to grow food?” But that doesn’t make the agricultural model worse, or better. It’s just different needs for different circumstances.
I have no idea how immigrants are being “consumed” by the economy like fuel--do you mind expanding on that? They’re a resource, but they aren’t depleted in providing their benefits like fuel is.
Better for the economy, worse for kids. Seems like a bad trade to me.
is it worse for kids to grow up in households that have more money, if it means they went to daycare? I'm skeptical.
Luckily it's not worse for kids.
I think we should do both/either. If a parent wants to temporarily leave the paid workforce to focus on childcare, we should enable them to do that via robust paid leave. If a parent wishes to return quickly to the paid workforce, we should have affordable childcare universally available.
(In practice my belief is it's better for at least the first 24 months or so for the child to stay home with a parent; so my hope is paid leave should be default. But I'm not expert and I'm prepared to be told this is wrong.)
if they are a good parent
I bet if we took all the people in corporate America with bullshit jobs that contribut nothing to society and are a drag on the economy, and had them work in childcare, we wouldn't have a childcare labor problem.
Didn't we literally just see someone *eviscerate* that theory pretty completely, like literally last week?
I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to, but my curiosity is piqued.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
I think that paper only disproved that the people in BS jobs know it.
If they do nothing, why don't their employers fire them and make more money?
My thoughts exactly!
I'm being flip, but in contrast to most commenters here on either side of the ideological spectrum, I strongly believe that many sectors of our economy -- large chunks of advertising and finance, and almost all of "marketing", to name a few -- are bullshit in the sense that they contribute little to society. They may be profitable and represent a lot of economic activity, but much of that activity is useless in broader human sense, or, worse, detrimental to society and the economy by warping markets and obscuring information valuable to consumers.
No, we disagree entirely. I think they actually are useful, and that their employers continue to voluntarily hire them proves this. Only jobs created by coercive activity (that is to say, the government) can be wasteful (though this doesn’t necessarily mean they are).
With regards to marketing, how do you propose we transmit information without hiring anyone to do it? And with regard to finance, how do you propose people aggregate resources more efficiently than we presently do?
Most finance and marketing, not all. And I would argue many jobs/industries can be wasteful. Look at tobacco. Lots of economic activity, huge profits. All they had to do was supply an addictive, poisonous product to consumers and market it with lies about its safety. I would hazard that all the man hours of productivity and profit lost to emphysema, lung cancer, and asthma over the last hundred years would dwarf the economic contribution of the tobacco industry. That would seem to mark those jobs as wasteful.
This makes more sense for more people to the extent that childcare is cheap. The more of a luxury good childcare becomes the more people ought to be in a position to make a rational economic choice to be stay at home parents. What's the argument that skewing this inflection point by subsidizing only professional childcare accrues meaningful economic benefits over a neutral subsidy?
"The more of a luxury good childcare becomes the more people ought to be in a position to make a rational economic choice to be stay at home parents."
Childcare doesn't get cheaper when you pay for it by forgoing a career as a software developer/bank manager/railroad dispatcher/CEO/Buc-ee's employee. The rational economic decision isn't to become a homemaker; it's to not have kids.
the argument is that nudging people into the workforce raises GDP
Does it actually? How much is just shifting unpaid parenting labor into a place where it's captured by statistics? Are we assuming the expected future productivity of kids in daycare is equivalent to those with stay at home parents or are there trade offs to consider? How much more expensive will the industry get if we create real pressure to professionalize all parenting? Who can afford kids in that world? Can the subsides possibly keep pace?
One person watching four kids while three other parents go to work leads to more overall output, higher standards of living, and more tax revenue than if all four parents stay home watching their own kid.
Right, there's a potential for some efficiency there in, but the more professionalized it gets the more the overhead costs eat into the margin, as soon as the kids are going to an independent facility instead of one of the parent's homes you're introducing a huge regulatory/cost burden. You also have to account for the expected value accrued to the child of these different arraignments.
I agree with Matt here but we're the weird ones.
Conservatives are not going to agree to more low-skilled immigrants coming here, and progressives aren't going to support bringing in immigrants explicitly because you can pay them less.
Both the cons and progs are wrong here, but just as the explicitly neoliberal position is almost always the correct one, it's almost always the unpopular one too.
Why is this more correct than redistributing income from wealthy Americans to childcare workers in the form of higher wages, and to lower income Americans with kids who need assistance paying for childcare? As the article acknowledges, childcare is an inherently labor-intensive industry, with little potential for productivity gains through technology or other forms of innovation. But higher wages in childcare would put productivity and innovation pressure on other industries that do have the potential to be more productive if labor is more expensive.
Because increasing supply is always better than subsidizing demand.
Always? Even if it comes at the cost of exacerbating wealth and income inequality and eroding social cohesion in a society?
In short, yes.jpg.
To elaborate in more detail though:
1. The increase in inequality comes from more poor immigrants entering the country who become a lot richer than they previously are, so yes I believe it is both better for them and for people who need childcare to immigrate here.
2. The only people who benefit from just subsidizing demand are current childcare providers.
3. You can still do redistribution from rich people to poor people if you want. In fact, increasing supply instead of subsidizing demand gives you more room to do even more redistribution.
4. The idea that we should drive labor costs up artificially so hopefully there could be some innovations that eventually bring down labor costs is really weird bankshot thinking.
5. Progressives really need to stop thinking the way to solve every problem is to restrict supply and then subsidize demand. It hasn't worked in housing, it isn't working in childcare, and it won't work in education or healthcare either.
I would not call it "weird bankshot thinking" to say that the wage for the lowest-paid form of entry-level full-time work -- the wage that anchors the rest of the wages in a society -- should be a living wage that is not grossly below the median income in the society.
Equality matters, and is an essential cornerstone of a functioning democracy.
It should be a living wage, yes. But why does it matter how it relates to the median?
not everyone can make close to the median though -- and who gets to decide which wages *should* get paid more or less?
Could we not improve equality by deporting poor people?
Equality and childcare are fundamentally opposed. There is inherently a pretty steep hierarchical relationship between one whose best economic option is to take care of your kid, and you who can comfortably afford to have her take care of your kid. The main reason childcare is so expensive is America is too equal for it. Everybody’s middle class; middle class people can’t easily afford 1:3 or 1:5 or name your small-child staffing ratio of other middle class people’s wages.
You don’t believe in the very concept of social cohesion and therefore have precisely zero right to pontificate about it, ffs!
I think the steelman re the cohesion point is that if there is an underclass of immigrant workers making very low salaries, then that's less cohesive than a typical northern european country where everyone is ethnically homogenous and income distributions are super compressed.
My counter to that would be that the people who would be the purported victims in this new immigrant underclass are still definitionally doing much better off than they would have been otherwise (as they voluntarily chose to come here).
Wouldn’t everyone who has to live in a stratified and unequal society with less cohesion in some sense be bearing the costs despite only the (direct or indirect) employers of the immigrant underclass being beneficiaries (and incumbents involved in the same labor pool being specifically harmed by downward wage pressure)? I agree that the hypothetical immigrants think this is a positive-sum transaction almost by definition, but immigration is also surely among the most externality-heavy interventions it’s possible to engage in. Matt thinks these externalities are mostly positive (hence “One Billion Americans”) but that’s obviously not a consensus position—hence the book.
I feel like one restrictionist but otherwise neoliberal response to the issue raised in Matt’s post is “do literally nothing and let Baumol’s cost disease solve the issue.”
Bringing in more immigrants is going to increase social cohesion?
You cannot truly believe this.
I'm quite ok with more immigrants, so long as the intake is balanced across class and professional lines.
What's not going to enhance social cohesion is to roll out a new H1-B visa classification for low-skilled, low-paid childcare workers who will effectively be indentured servants given the notorious flaws in that program.
Just allow a million high-skilled and 750k each mid- and low-skilled immigrants to legally come here each year, let the market sort them out what they do for a living, and allow the marvelous, magnetic attractions of our culture to work their magic as always. We can easily make good Americans of a flow of immigrants equal to 0.6% of the population annually.
The trick is to keep it from gutting the newly enhanced bargaining power the working class holds at the moment, which is why it needs to be balanced in favor of bringing competition for you and Henry and me, not the dude who drives my Amazon delivery truck.
Matt can essentially re-use this article and just replace references to child care to ELDER care - an even larger and looming crisis that has already begun. My prediction is that even conservative Americans will come around on the strategy of mass immigration once the elder care crisis really starts to impact majority of Boomers (mid-2030's).
I like the optimism and hope you're right! But in my view the result is more likely to be "My [immigrant] doctor and [immigrant] caregiver are great. By the way, did you see [latest outrage on the TV]? We need to lock down the borders right now!"
People are too good at compartmentalizing.
The other aspect of elder care is that for part of the population, it requires a 24-hour attendance that does not sync up with living arrangements or labor laws. Parents live with their young children, but many adults do not live with their very elderly parents. With much older or medically vulnerable elderly people, there is an intermediate zone where someone doesn't need constant nursing but where you want someone there in case there's a fall in the middle of the night. Labor laws require 3 full time people for a 24 hour period, unless you are paying massive overtime (or not complying with the law). Creating some type of compensated live-in arrangement that would be legal would be a net economic and social benefit.
One I have seen done informally is old people offer the rooms in their empty-nest houses for free or steeply below market, in exchange for light housework. I know someone making a living in the arts in a very high cost of living area based on this type of arrangement. Can raise some eyebrows, maybe illegal, but it seems like a great deal for both of them.
A more mundane version of the setup in Ozarks. I work in healthcare, specifically with older pts at EOL and this is becoming more and more common
AI and robots will come to the rescue.
Maybe.
One thing this has overlooked is that the overwhelming majority of the “childcare crisis” takes are emanating from and focused on the professional classes who stop after 1 kid anyway.
The highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing model most of our class peers embrace makes raising two kids completely draining and unsustainable, more emotionally and in terms of time than financially.
Middle and working class families continue to opt for a median of two children and often more, because they value children more and have more realistic (or at least less intensive/cultivating) expectations about how they will raise them. Childcare crisis be damned, lol.
I really don’t think much of anything will move the needle because childcare isn’t the driver, culture is.
I'm going to push back a bit on the "highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing model." You're not wrong, but...
My husband and I both have demanding careers, and now, in the waning years of my fertility, we're trying to decide whether to have a second child. What scares me off most is the idea of caring for an infant again. No matter how "cultivating" and "micromanage-y" you are, an infant requires pretty much the same things: round-the-clock, extremely tedious cycle of "feed, burp, change diaper, rock to sleep, repeat, all while sleep-deprived" that is completely incompatible with any kind of professional career, unless you spend a metric whackload of money on childcare. There is no "free-range" or "hands-off" way to raise an infant.
No disagreement, insofar as it goes, but...
Yea, my kid just turned 4, so I remember all of this well, lol. I am in the "no" camp on #2 precisely because I know my kid was well-behaved and a good sleeper as an infant and I have a large extended family which has made me aware of how rare that is.
But... that's not the whole picture... the style of parenting a lot of our peers embrace seems to extend that period of utter exhaustion from 18 months to 18 years. So many of my kids' friends' parents are half a decade or more older than us, having delayed childbearing until they felt "ready" financially by metrics which make no sense, and are already, with 4-and-5-year-old kids, leaning into a life of organized extracurricular activities, shuttling kids near-daily to faraway places for enrichment and cultivation, paying for family therapy to "resolve" "issues" which seem to be completely ordinary parts of growing up, etc, etc.
It's appalling to watch. One parent in particular is nearly-dead 100% of the time we encounter them, and then still desperately worries that they're not doing enough for their kid, who is already training in two sports, learning an instrument, sitting through a language course, and some other things I can't remember. And who, in turn, is already very, very fragile and deals with failure badly, for which he's in therapy. And they actually did have a second, now around 4 months old, which is terrifying.
Whereas my kid gets home from preschool, gets some TV time, does a puzzle with me, eats lunch, goes down for a nap, wakes up, goes to the park to play under grandparents' watchful eyes until dinner is ready, then plays on her own or with the neighbor kids, reads with us, and wraps up with another bit of TV before bed.
She has a swimming class once a week, gets a playdate once a week or so, we host a classmate's family every other week for dinner, and our pre-school is a co-op for which we work two mornings a month and a weekend day a quarter. That is the extent of our structured time commitments.
Which leaves us free to go do shit for both us and her, and her time to cultivate herself however she damned well pleases.
EDIT: Just to clarify, the TL;DR version of this is that I don't want a second kid despite our liberalized parenting because I am extraordinarily lazy, need sleep to function, and enjoy my me-time. If we were raising our kid under the "intensive cultivation" model, I'd have shot myself already.
Had a second kid despite similar objections, and, while of course the second is fantastic and loved, it feels more like 3x than double the work.
The second newborn/infant phase is so much worse when also dealing with a 3-year-old's potty training and quasi-autonomy that actually takes 5x as long.
I appreciate this comment very much.
I agree that newborns are intrinsically a lot of work, but there are choices that make it harder or easier. E.g. you can do cry-it-out at 3 or 4 months --- some say even earlier. Also, formula is fine; the benefits of breast milk are greatly exaggerated, but mothers are often pressured into breastfeeding, which can only be done by one parent (and pumping is doubly time consuming). These are both subjects where people have very strong feelings --- especially among the "highly active, cultivating, micromanaged child-rearing" types.
Yes to “get the heck out of my bedroom” at 4 months. Worked like a charm aside from the need to literally sleep on my wife the first night.
Same experience. Our kid was a noisy sleeper — would do shit like raise legs vertically then drop them with a loud thud (while remaining asleep!), and it kept waking us up. My wife was opposed to kicking the kid out, but reality eventually disabused her of some of her misguided beliefs, and it was a huge improvement.
Ours slept fine, I just knew we needed to do this sooner rather than later for it to work effectively.
Within three days she continued to sleep fine, just elsewhere, lol.
Right, this reminds me of another choice that makes things easier or harder: the American Academy of Pediatrics "recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months." [1] because this supposedly reduces the rate of SIDS. However, my understanding is that the evidence that this is true is flimsy at best, and may well be BS. My guess is the latter: parents don't radiate some magical protective field that is blocked by walls and thus protects children in the same room but not in other rooms.
[1] https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2022/american-academy-of-pediatrics-updates-safe-sleep-recommendations-back-is-best/
I very much so respect where this comment is coming from (I was MUCH happier when we opted to do things like incorporate formula).
But I want to push back a bit on how it’s about choices. I suffered from pretty severe PPA around my own lack of sleep right after birth. It stopped me from being able to fall asleep even when I wasn’t on baby duty and messed with my ability to stay asleep (I would jerk violently awake constantly). While it may have been linked with some of our early choices around feeding and sleep, it’s also just genetic to some degree. My sister had it and warned me it was likely I could as well. Medication helped me a ton, and I’m grateful to have it on hand if we do go into a second. I just don’t know how much of it was about our choices given that we were super stressed first time parents and how much of it was simply my hormones being all over the place.
I'll elaborate on where this comment is coming from: my wife had severe (her doctor's word) PPD, and I'm absolutely certain this could have been mitigated (or even eliminated) by different choices.
Her OBGYN pushed her to get nexplanon implanted right after birth, but unbeknownst to us, a known side effect of nexplanon is that it can stop lactation. (The manufacture's documentation --- available on the FDA website! --- is very explicit about this, but OBGYNs will gaslight people and say that it's simply not true.)
Long story short: her milk basically didn't come in. This was a problem because the La Leche League and their innumerable co-conspirators have brainwashed many mothers into thinking they're shitty parents if they don't breastfeed. So, with the help of a doctor who's a specialist in lactation and a shitload of pumping (including twice a night!), my wife managed to get some milk to come in. At this point, our kid was used to using a bottle, and refused to breastfeed (despite many frustrating hours of us trying to get her to latch). So, my wife spent a year pumping (again, including multiple times a night) so that we could bottle-feed it to our kid. All the while, she felt like a failure for not being able to breastfeed. (Apparently breast *milk* is not enough. Apparently you need to breastfeed for proper psychological attachment between mother and child. Or something.)
This was, to put it mildly, horrible. If we had just used formula, life would have been much happier and our kid would have been fine. I hope there is a special place in hell for the scumbags who have brainwashed everyone into thinking they are shitty parents for not breastfeeding (and, more generally, for not making choices to make life easier).
Sleep was the same deal. My wife was convinced (by various bullshit books backed by bullshit psychology papers) that if a baby cries, it is damaging to them, and there is no safe level of baby crying (much like how there is no safe level of lead). This basically precluded any form of sleep training since even "no cry" methods involve some crying. (Crying is what babies do; there is no avoiding it.) Eventually I convinced her that we should do a form of fading, which worked wonders. (Altho I had to basically do it myself because of the small amount of crying.)
Even getting our kid out of our bedroom was contentious. Our kid was a very noisy sleeper and kept waking us up. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics says that kids should sleep in their parents room for 6 months to reduce the chance of SIDS. This recommendation is based on evidence that is, at best, flimsy and is probably not true. (As I mentioned above, "parents don't radiate some magical protective field that is blocked by walls and thus protects children in the same room but not in other rooms.")
So there you have it: three choices that made life much more miserable. I am 100% convinced that making different choices would have significantly mitigated the PPD and made the whole process much less miserable.
I'll add another thing that's kind of a choice and kind of not: for various reasons, we got very little family support in the weeks and months after birth. Historically, you'd have a lot of support from friends and family, but for various reasons, our society makes that less common. (E.g. a lot of "professionals" move for work --- often away from their families.) I'm convinced that a lack of support is also a major reason for how common PPA/D is in the US.
All that said, baby number two is due real soon now. I'm sure we'll make some better choices this time around (altho breastfeeding is still non-negotiable). Short of the baby having medical issues (knock on wood), I'm certain it'll much less miserable than last time.
First I’ve got to say that I agree with you so wholeheartedly on all of this. I will purposely casually mention doing a chill version of cry-it-out to new parents to let them know it’s okay. Same with formula.
The only hitch for me is that sometimes, you can do everything the more chill way and *still* have issues. Right around my daughter’s first birthday, my PPA (which had been completely gone for months by that point) came roaring back. Everything was going super well, we felt very settled and I wasn’t particularly stressed about anything. BUT I was still breastfeeding to some degree and my daughter seemed to decrease the amount she drank. I didn’t particularly care one way or another. I liked breastfeeding well enough for its calming and sleep-inducing properties, but reducing feeds didn’t seems bad to me. My assumption is that this led to a hormonal shift as my supply had to drop. I personally don’t think I did anything to make this happen, it just happened. I got back on my anxiety med and it went away after a little while.
It’s mostly just my reminder that you can absolutely do a ton to mitigate the impacts of PPD and PPA, but a gentle reminder that sometimes bodies can be whack, yo, is nice too.
I am just here to +1 the absolute draining idea of going through the newborn phase with a second (which we are still debating).
Solidarity! I hope it works out well for you, whatever you decide.
Don't know how true this is, but I've read that having large(ish) families has (again, after many years) become something of a desirable lifestyle and indeed a mark of status for the affluent in America.
I think the evidence is that it's a bathtub curve but that the right side really is the almost vanishingly portion of the population that has 'fuck-you' money and beyond. Elon Musk can father as many kids as he pleases while providing them more resources than most UMC people see in a lifetime at not the slightest compromise to either his wealth or his lifestyle, but you have to have so much money (ideally possessed at or near peak parenting age, unless maybe like Musk you're not as constrained by female fertility *and* can just fob off parenting responsibilities on various mistresses) to be in that position that a "mere" several million dollars simply doesn't cut it.
I think you're overstating the degree to which money is the constraint here rather than time.
At my level of upper-middle-class-professionaldom (let's just say well below $300k annually for my household), a second child would slow our investment plans somewhat and very little else, financially.
But it would suck down the vast majority of our free time for the next 18 months and a lot for another 3 years thereafter before we'd finally see some tapering, whereas with my current kid we're already in the tapering phase and enjoying it a lot.
For the "active cultivation" PMC parents, that phase doesn't end until the kid leaves for college, as far as I can tell.
This is well beyond anything I have direct experience with, but I had in mind an amount of wealth so high that you would basically just hire a PMC striver-type to look after your kid full time and thus funge money against time (even at a ratio far less favorable than more basic daycare) while outsourcing all the intensive parenting. Just get some STEM Ph.Ds to look after your kids...
I guess if you don't actually give a shit about the kid beyond seeding your genes far and wide, sure, but that doesn't seem to be the case even for most very wealthy men, and is equally common/uncommon among poor ones.
The corresponding strategy to achieve evolutionary domination for the poor-but-hot is to just sell a shitload of sperm to fertility clinics in their 20's. Or be a complete cad while young enough that women care about looks over all else and hope for a few accidental pregnancies.
Basically, yeah, but for the rich person in this scenario I think it's probably easier to tell yourself a story in which it's not that you don't give a shit about the kid but that you can preserve your own time while still providing them with near-equal (or, with respect to tutelage, potentially better) enrichment to what you could provide them yourself by throwing money at the problem. You think of yourself as still being a k-strategist, just one with so many resources than you can shift to a more r-type strategy without compromising on per-child resource expenditure.
Maybe? A lot of our peers seem to have 2 kids, and a few have 3. Only children families like ours are less common than I would have expected.
But we're also in that bit of the income distribution where another kid would just slow some of our savings and investment goals rather than impacting our consumption and lifestyle any, so maybe we've hit post-scarcity on that front?
“ most people would consider that a bad outcome.”
Which is different than it being a bad outcome. The other day someone was outraged that parents would be out having dinner and give the kid an iPad so they could have a moments peace vs. “engaging” with the child. It sure seems like dramatically increased parenting demands are causing a decline in fertility. One manifestation of that is higher child care standards making child care more expensive.
That was good for a chuckle, yea.
We're doing our best to implement a pale imitation of the relatively free-range childhood I enjoyed, and she still gets an iPhone after she's done dinner in a restaurant sometimes because she is *uninterested* in sitting and talking with the adults for another half hour while they linger, eat, and chat.
Engage all you want, but your kid gets a vote too.
"she is *uninterested* in sitting and talking with the adults for another half hour while they linger, eat, and chat."
I feel major solidarity with her.
Touché.
Totally agree (for self-interested reasons). My family just moved to Boston and the shortages of the key goods (housing, childcare) that Matt mentioned is obvious (~2x the cost for both from low-cost NJ). One thought as to how to facilitate more immigration for childcare: why not expand the existing au pair visa program and allow entrants to work at childcare centers instead of having host families as well as changing the pay structure a bit (currently room-and-board plus relatively low wages)? Currently, the visas are limited to a select list of countries but expanding that would obviously increase supply.
I like the out-of-the-box incrementalism here and it's a good thought, but while I'm not an expert on the au pair program it seems like it mostly works in practice the way it's supposed to work on paper (European teens and twentysomethings get to bum around America in exchange for performing early childcare for a year or two). I can't help but feel reluctant to make massive adjustments to programs that do more or less what it says on the tin in service of significantly more dramatic labor market adjustments that really seem to call for a separately-administered program.
Again, not a bad idea, I just worry that this risks breaking (or least stretching beyond recognition) a program that mostly isn't broken in service of a potentially meritorious but conceptually distinct reordering of the labor market.
I'm broadly pro-immigration, but I'm not really clear why the immigrant in question here would do the childcare job for $11 an hour when they could go work at the gas station for more than twice that. What am I missing? Are these visas going to be job-specific? That's inching a bit closer to indentured servitude than I'm comfortable with.
Also, Matt's handwaving about 'well the job pays twice as much as the per capita income in Grenada' ignores that living in the US is at least twice as expensive as that country too, so it kind of washes out.
Let's just do lots of high-skilled immigration, and accept that the low-skilled stuff is politically toxic and so best avoided. (Isn't that what popularism is all about?) On a personal level I'm about a half step away from open borders, but I realize that this is just extremely unpopular & deeply unrealistic. I think letting in all of the world's PhDs and STEM Master's is a way, way bigger priority, and would probably engender less opposition
You are not free from these dynamics in STEM.
Right now, there is a "postdoc crisis" largely due to the boom in employment in private industry, the stagnant wages in academia and the inability for grants to keep up with inflation, and the backlog on visas as a consequence of COVID and some Trump era damage to the State Department. It has become really difficult to hire strong postdocs, especially domestically. Also attract strong domestic PhD students to PhD programs.
A lot of Americans rightfully say "I can't survive in Boston on 50K with a PhD, I'm going to go work for this biotech for 120K." It is a rational calculus, even if they would prefer to stay in academia. Or if someone has the chance to make 75K right out of school if they are even a little bit on the fence and not utterly committed to the career pathways a PhD opens up, they aren't going to go do a PhD program and make 30K or less.
However, there are many, many people from all over the globe willing to accept low salaries for a chance to do scientific training in the US. Right now a lot of those people are from places like Nigeria, Bangledesh, India, the Phillipines, and the Caribbean. Many of those people are happy to work for 45-50K as a postdoc, or live on 30K or less as a PhD student.
People complain about immigrants suppressing wages in high skilled work too.
That's how i got here! Admittedly it was '99, so then i was getting 35k, but i and the other Euro post-docs thought it was great, while the Americans had all gone to work in biotech.
>People complain about immigrants suppressing wages in high skilled work too
Yes I but A) am not concerned about this (sorry, just being blunt). And B), I don't think postdocs are a political constituency that's going to swing elections. Working class people are, so we have to cater to their quirks.
I mean, if you think I'm being a little unsympathetic to postdocs- I'm in a white collar industry with literally no geographic barriers (can be done remotely from anywhere on Earth), and an increasing influx of offshore competition in the last 2 decades. They suppress my wages too- I just tough it out and compete harder
“…why the immigrant in question here would do the childcare job for $11 an hour when they could go work at the gas station for more than twice that. What am I missing?”
Work hours for childcare are almost entirely Monday - Friday daytime. Gas stations are, many of them, 24x7. No one commits armed robbery on a daycare. The risk of breathing gas fumes is quite low in a daycare facility.
Wage increases in the US absolutely are not wiped out by higher costs of living. You can see this in the flow of remittances from the US to South/Central American countries - remittances back to Grenada make up 4.5% of Grenada's GDP (a similar amount to the construction industry in the US). In high school I cleaned pools for my summer job, and worked with a lot of Salvadorans, both legal and illegal. The arrangement was pretty clear - they moved here to earn higher wages, lived in substandard housing (the guys I worked with slept six to a room), and were able to send back the difference to support their families.
A large number of these immigrants are here on job-specific visas already. The H-2A farm visa program is probably has the most bipartisan support of any program, given that farmers (Republicans) rely heavily on these workers to harvest crops.
Does it wash out? People are pretty inconsistent about this. I sometimes try to claim that Bay Area wages wash out in the housing market, but the retort is usually that no, in fact, we’re just rich people consuming the luxury good of presence in this region. What makes it different across borders?
I suppose that, in an effort to strongly agree with Matt's take here, this is an opportunity to share one of my most radical opinions, one that I may not have the time or vigor to defend extensively today due to being tired from a lot of ongoing travel, thus I might do more listening and learning to any disagreements I might get than replying.
I have yet to find a compelling reason that I find acceptable as to why anyone should not be able to live, work, or travel in any place of the world they want. And if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, they should also be able to utilize the social services there, of which their costs are often offset by those taxes. Citizenship is a much more difficult question, and on that I am quite open to ideas for extensive rules as to who should be allowed to participate in the political process of a given society. But on those other questions, I don't find my belief anywhere near that difficult, even while ceding that it is likely hideously unpopular.
So to conclude on topic, bring on the immigrant child workers!
Compelling reasons coming right up!
1. Some parts of the world are much more desirable to live in than others. If you had truly unlimited movement of people around the world, those places would be totally swamped. As one example, California already has a severe water shortage. What would happen if 100 million brand-new Californians showed up? What would they use for drinking and cooking and washing? Where would they all live - in tents along the I-405? You can't just snap your fingers and bring 30 million new houses or apartments into existence.
2. When you say "anyone," did you mean truly *anyone*? Members of the Taliban or Al-Shabaab, Honduran drug traffickers, assorted criminals/terrorists? If not, then you're back to needing some kind of massive bureaucracy to decide who is allowed to settle where. If yes, then you're darn right this is going to be "hideously unpopular."
3. I'm going to be blunt here: a lot of people come from societies that don't share my values. I'm a woman, and I want to be free to walk around or ride my bicycle by myself, to work and earn my own money, to have control over my sexuality and reproduction (birth control), to be my husband's partner rather than servant. There are a lot of people in the world who think these beliefs make me a brazen whore, and who would gladly put me in my place with violence or the threat of violence if they could. Do I want them as neighbors? Hell no! Insert analogous examples for LGBTQ+ people and atheists.
Yea, I find it nonsensical that there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that culture and imagined community don’t matter…
The places which are “good” to live would stop being so great for many or most of their people if their populations doubled or tripled in the span of a few years, not just or even mostly because of the physical impacts but because they’d stop being communities of any sort, without any shared framework or institutions for solving problems and resolving conflicts, and without even the cultural underpinnings to understand those conflicts.
"because they’d stop being communities of any sort, without any shared framework or institutions for solving problems and resolving conflicts"
Until 1875, the American imagined community was capacious enough to include immigrants of arbitrary origin, and American culture's assimilatory effect strong enough to efface all the institutional conflicts that open borders caused. I see no reason those phenomena cannot be again.
Of course, and if you wish to permit entry to as much as 1.5% of the population in immigrants each year, with a class and skill make-up selected to avoid labor-market distortions, I’m there for it. Most of the US isn’t, which is why I usually say “2 million a year,” but history tells me we can accommodate double that handily if we get some of the housing issues sorted.
But that ain’t “open borders”.
The differential between living standards in the developed and non-developing world is wider than in 1875, transportation infrastructure and mobility far greater, and information about the US far more widely diffused. Open borders virtually guarantee several tens of millions of immigrants each year until everything comes tumbling down.
That, we cannot accommodate, neither physically nor metaphysically.
It will cause a societal collapse, as inevitably as the sun will rise tomorrow.
correct
Before 1875 passage from Europe to the US took weeks, not hours, and was priced according to the resources a weeks-long trip required. And once an immigrant got here there was no federal welfare programs and only the most rudimentary ones at the local level. There are also more than four times the number of people on earth now and far, far, far more who can scrape together the cost of a one-way plane ticket.
Then if we put a tax on traveling to America, you would have no problems with free immigration I presume?
I have no major problem with, for example, the EB-5 Visa program.
Ad 3: yes, but if they don't share your (typical American) values, are they really going to want to come live here? If so,
(1) they probably are here for the economic advantages, and
(2) they probably know that American culture is different from their birthplace, and, moreover,
(3) they'll have to act differently to stay a productive member of society, because
(4) if they do try to "put [you] in [your] place with violence or the threat of violence", don't you think the police will step in? If not, your complaint isn't with immigration, it's that your local PD is incompetent!
Assuming a democracy, why would the police step in on behalf of drosophilist and not on behalf of these other people she wouldn't want here? After all, I think that the median American is vastly more liberal than the median person on Earth.
That’s one problem. The other is that policing requires 95%+ of people to willingly follow the law and at least 30% to assist in enforcing it. Without those, you have to have an occupying army rather than a civil police force.
And if you rapidly allow the population to increase by a great fraction, made up of people who do not have the cultural underpinnings to agree with the laws in question, all that falls apart near-immediately.
"What would happen if 100 million brand-new Californians showed up? What would they use for drinking and cooking and washing? Where would they all live - in tents along the I-405? You can't just snap your fingers and bring 30 million new houses or apartments into existence."
You can't snap your fingers and bring 100 million Californians into existence all at once either. It takes people time to move. And if California liberalized their zoning rules (say, to be like Tokyo), they should have no problem constructing houses as fast as people immigrate in.
As for water: yes, this is genuinely tricky. Graduated water rates would help; your first 365 gallons shouldn't cost more, but I see no reason that government should stop the second 365 gallons from (say) doubling in price if 100 million people move in. Of course,
> (365 gallons/person)(100 million people)=37 billion gallons
is still a lot of water. But that's where
> "if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, they should also be able to utilize the social services there, of which their costs are often offset by those taxes"
comes in.
I sometimes try to persuade progressives on this very issue by arguing that labor is always going to be at a disadvantage to capital in the current world if capital is free flowing but labor is not. I often get a knowing nod, followed by "but I still hate that idea". As you say, it is unfortunately hideously unpopular.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Seriously it boggles my mind how often I have suggested the idea that labor should have, at a minimum, the same ability to move around in search of better returns on investment that capital inevitably does, only to be met with blank stares if not outright hostility by people who's entire politics is allegedly labor-focussed.
Good comment and your first line is particularly great.
People care about who their neighbors, workers, and co-inhabitors of a region are, which is a concern that applies to labor but not capital -- the asymmetry is inherent because labor is more than bunch of 1s and 0s in a spreadsheet or some steel girders in a pile.
Separately, I find arguments to the effect of "you can let people immigrate but restrict the franchise!" to be unconvincing -- the irregular status of people present in the United States in contravention of its laws is already a sore spot for the Democratic party, but more importantly the moral case for disenfranchisement is incredibly weak for any descendant of immigrants -- it isn't like a baby gets to choose where it will be born, so it seems unfair to allow their parents into the country and yet restrict their children's (and children's children, etc. etc. etc.) capacity to participate in its political life, and I don't expect any hard form of jus sanguinis instead of jus soli to last even as the population of non-citizens grows ever larger. "Present without enfranchisement" is just not a commitment that can be credibly adhered to.
Isn't that exactly how most of Europe works.
The thing is American workers from janitors to doctors are collecting a rent on their citizenship. I don’t want my fees as an attorney to reach equilibrium with those of English speaking Indian barristers.
As a lazy person, I realize that "move to a place with good social services and bum around" would be a thing. That isn't an insurmountable obstacle, but it's a bigger one than you might think: there are lots of social amenities where it's impossible or impractical to exclude people who haven't paid. Think police, fire, public health, sanitation, clean environment, infrastructure, even things like building codes and national defense. So there's one reason.
I'm still with you though! Because my own radical opinion is that "being born on the wrong side of a line on a map" is likely to be our era's "being born with the wrong skin color." Future generations are going to find it indefensible that we discriminate on that basis and they will have no sympathy for any of our excuses.
I’m pretty confident that the historical sweep of the nation-state will be long enough that “future generations” are going to be very far removed indeed, and as such I care no more for their opinions than a poor Roman citizen cared for mine.
“Presentism” is a terrible reason to do anything.
"I have yet to find a compelling reason that I find acceptable as to why anyone should not be able to live, work, or travel in any place of the world they want. And if they are paying taxes from the labor and consumption they are creating where they are, "
What happens when significant numbers don't fit into the economy and need social support?
Can you elaborate on “don’t fit in the economy”? I’m not sure that’s how economies work but am curious now.
See my reply to City of Trees above. "Social cohesion" isn't a "religious" idea, it's a gentle euphemism for there being no way to have a functional society where some people believe women are equal to men, and other people believe that a woman who wants equal rights is a shameless slut who needs her father/husband to give her a good beating. Likewise for those who believe in equality for LGBTQ+ people, and those who believe that homosexuality is an abomination to God and is punishable by death.
You’re talking to a wall. He accuses us of religious thinking while ignoring the vast pile of accumulated sociological research on imagined community and the limitations thereof.
The open borders/one world crowd are religious zealots, no more, no less.
We already have that society in America. Millions of Americans believe exactly those things you describe. How do immigrants change that equation?
I’ve recently come around to the idea of a year-long maternity leave for all. The real pressure point in childcare staffing is in the infant rooms, because of the required staffing ratios for infants. Also, I believe, but could be wrong, that most parents would rather stay home with their 3-month olds than send them off to daycare. When they get older it’s different. They’re less delicate and parents at that point ready to move on with their working lives.
As a woman I have complicated feelings about this--in a very privileged minority way. I am a professor who runs a research lab, and have watched other women have children in my position. While at some universities there is teaching release and release from serving on committees and a year added to the tenure clock, work doesn't completely stall to a halt when you have a child, and freezing your lab for a year is just simply impossible. Students need to graduate with their dissertations, funding doesn't magically appear because you are on maternity leave, and student and staff salary still needs to be paid. Being gone for three or four months is one thing, a year and it could really derail your and everyone under your mentorship's careers.
In places like Switzerland, the Nordics, etc. there is a huge dearth of women in leadership roles in business and academia. It is overall probably better for society in the vast majority of cases more what most women and families want, but there seems to be no free lunch when it comes to women's equality.
I'd say that the structure of academia is mostly to blame here.
There is an inherent impact for any high-value worker to be out of work for months at a time, and if it happens without warning, it can be especially bad...but that's not the case with pregnancy and maternity leave.
And yet many other businesses cope with it well enough.
If academia cannot, then it sounds like it needs reform.
I don't know that other businesses cope with it well enough. Some very large businesses have enough redundancy built in and have good cultures around it. In many countries where there is generous maternity leave, there can be more discrimination in hiring married women of childbearing age, more discrimination in promotion, and more pressure to mommy track and take part time work, even outside of academia.
I think it can be mitigated in countries that allow and encourage men and women to each take some of the parental leave. But that is contingent on really changing the culture surrounding men taking that leave as well as women which is happening slowly in some places. Otherwise you get in scenarios where nominally either partner can step back and take the leave but in practice it is the woman. And of course many (most?) women don't want to juggle work and want to spend time with their infant. But the structural barriers to making it feasible for women to take leadership roles seem just so challenging no matter how you arrange society.
I think the issue is that it’s like a startup founder taking a year of maternity leave in one of the early years of the company. When something is established enough that someone else can run it for a year you can do that, but when something is novel and dependent on the vision of the particular director, you can just substitute.
assuming: "can't just substitute"?
You're kidding yourself if you think it's good for your career that a company can bring someone in and do your job for you and not miss you.
I didn't say that there wouldnt be a cost associated with it.
Just that it could be done without things absolutely falling apart.
It seems like society has been pushing delays to childbirth later and later which has a number of significant downsides. What if we tried to do the opposite - move it earlier?* From a career perspective, would it have been easier to have a year off when you were 22-24 instead of later? Maybe a gap year between college and grad school?
*asterisk to note that this means trying to find your S/O earlier which is its own thing.
My colleague faced this when her grants ran out right around the time of her maternity leave. She was able to eventually get funded again, but it was harder without much in the way of resources (both lab supplies and people). Now I think about it, the biggest thing that helped her was hiring a full-time nanny!
Yes! I'm in academia too, and I agree 100%.
This is a no brainer to me as well. It supports breastfeeding and attachment and there is no real benefit to kids under one interacting with their peers because of where they are developmentally. I was lucky to be able to split the first year with my husband and keep the kids home that long, but still had to pump when I went back to work at six months -- if I could have afforded a year (my husband was in grad school) I would have for sure. The one downside was that both kids got RSV within a week or so of starting daycare and ended up in the PICU -- their immune systems were not prepared for all of those kids!
When I was a kid, my friend down the street had a nanny. I think she was from Senegal, but I can't remember...it was definitely a West African country. She was very kind and warm and I liked her a lot.
She had a daughter that was a couple years older than me and my friend. Occasionally on days when school was out but it wasn't a federal holiday, she would bring her daughter and son along due to lack of other childcare options, and my friends parents were OK with that. First off all, it was a little confusing for me...who takes care of her daughter while she is taking care of my friend? Why does my friend get to have her time and not her own kids? How did her daughter not hate my friend's guts for having so much time with her mom?
Then one time, all of us kids were talking about punishment (we were raised by professional class people in NW DC in the '90s, so time outs were popular and corporal punishment was seen as abusive among our parents... my parents were liberal democrats and her parents were ex-millitary conservative leaning folks...so across the political spectrum this was the norm). Her daughter informed me that her mom when she misbehaved would whip her with a belt--something her mom was never allowed to do with my friend and her brothers. It was incredibly confusing to me that such a loving, warm woman was the type of person who would beat her children. Corporal punishment (and not just spanking, but whipping with a belt) is much more common in many West African cultures than it is in the US, and especially so in the '90s.
It really gave me a crash course on how complicated the world is. How unfair it is, how my parents moral norms of acceptable behavior are not universal, etc. And this was all when I was 6-7 years old.
I think I turned out ok and ended up being a more tolerant open minded person for it, but there are some parents who want to shield their kids from that particular brand of injustice just a little longer than that.
To be fair to my mom, I think she handed the discussion about it perfectly. She essentially told me that people can do things that she believes are wrong, but still have other good qualities, be a good mother in other ways, and that the world is complicated.
I don't think spanking was such a shock to me at the time...this was the '90s after all and I had friends whose parents spanked. My grandparents spanked me a couple times against my parents' wishes. It was more the beating with a belt from your mom seemed really intense.
To this day I'm around a lot of working class families (I live in a pretty socioeconomically diverse neighborhood is a mid sized Southern city) and while there certainly are some Americans who whip their children with belts, it's definitely not considered as acceptable as spanking in my experience.
Very surprised surprised Matt didn't mention regulation here. Obviously there are reasonable limits on child ratios, but states like Massachusetts that go beyond that have a very direct effect on costs.
It's not just childcare but elder home care as well. this helps older seniors stay in their home/appartment rather than going into assisted living.
These were the two big parts of the Biden bill that Manchin killed (perhaps rightly, since it was the restrict and subsidize version, not the immigrate version).
My in-home daycare provider immigrated to the US decades ago, though I have never asked her from where. Doing some napkin math, she pulls in around $8,000 per month and could pull in more if she wanted to hit the max ratio. I know that that’s not accounting for taxes and expenses, but her husband is a CPA so I assume she maximizes her situation.
Her house is nicer than mine and in a nicer neighborhood. She also is taking 4 weeks off for the birth of her first grandchild over the winter holidays, which she can easily do without jeopardizing her situation because she actually slightly undercharges in the current market and is otherwise extremely reliable.
Looking at my state’s requirements for in-home daycare, it actually doesn’t look terribly onerous. There appear to be no minimum square footage requirements and the time spent training and licensing sounds manageable.
I also think having a single caregiver has great benefits for my daughter as opposed to a revolving door of people working at a childcare center, but that feels more like personal preference.
This is all to say that I very much so agree with Matt on this one.
Making good childcare available to all should be considered together with universal pre-K. Many European countries seem to be able to do this, albeit under tax regimes far different than our own.
I don’t see how we can achieve this without immigrant help absent an increase in job market participation. Achieving the latter is a complex matter that I am not an expert in but I do feel that we can get more out of our existing domestic working age population (and by increasing the upper limits on that age by voluntary incentives).
Matt’s thoughts about immigrants and childcare prompt me to raise an even larger (and growing) issue -- the crisis in home healthcare (and in senior care facilities). Like childcare, these are not easy jobs yet are woefully underpaid. As boomers need more and more care, the crisis is going to become a major point of conflict that transcends ideological, age and income lines. Younger age cohorts will rightfully balk at shouldering the fantastic expense of providing care to the bulging boomer age bracket. Combining the childcare needs and senior care needs may yield a more persuasive argument for increasing immigration (along with the dearth of laborers for home construction, a significant factor in the rise in construction costs).
I don't really understand how immigration is going to fix the child care problem as (correctly) described here. After all, immigrants could work at a gas station too. So to really help, there would need to either be so many immigrants that we have a slack labor market (which is fundamentally a failure in a different way) or some restrictions that prevent the immigrants from leaving the child care profession, which has all kinds of other problems.
"U.S. to Third World: Give us all your women!"
Obviously some people are interested in child care apart from the wages, or there would be a much worse crisis. But there's no reason to think that immigrants are more likely to pick child care than native workers, so again this is the "create labor market slack" solution.