"There has also been a norm shift in high-socioeconomic-status households toward the idea that teenagers should do things that burnish their resumes for college applications."
AND College admissions officer who think a hour of Lacrosse is a better predictor of elite college-ness than an hour at American Eagle. :)
I’ve brought this up before but I think we underrate that USC scandal that involved Hollywood celebrities. I think unfortunately because the scandal involved “Aunt Becky” the salacious Hollywood angle overshadowed the real story; that a lot of”rich people” sports are really a back door way of doing rich white people affirmative action. Because that scandal involved way more people than Hollywood celebrities.
I remember reading an article years back that noted that college athletes on average have higher median incomes than college graduates generally. And I think (if I remember correctly) it was spun a a way of showing that college basketball and college football were good for the athletes futures. When the real story is that college athletics includes the water polo team, golf team and sailing team as well. The real story is the latter sports disproportionately include kids from very privileged backgrounds.
I’ve sort of had a take brewing for a few years that college basketball and college football teams should almost be adjunct semi pro teams attached the university (they basically already are) and that we should eliminate all other college sports. It’s a bit of a half baked take but I really do think we need to look harder at the fact a lot of sports are kind of a scam to get rich fail children into colleges they shouldn’t be attending.
It's not that your conclusion is incorrect - it clearly isn't, these sports do function (with whatever degree of intentionality) as 'rich white people affirmative action' (good name!). But it seems hard to imagine that you wouldn't just get some other activity being interpreted as a class signifier in their absence, and they do at least serve the function of helping the country win lots of gold medals every four years, which lots of people get some vicarious joy out of.
Yeah the Olympics angle is clearly a monkey wrench to my plan. I'd say the bigger one is women's sports. I feel pretty confident in saying that Title IX is one of the best cultural outcomes as a direct result of actual government policy in the last 50 years. The rise and popularity of the US women's soccer team, women's college basketball and WNBA with the surge in interest Caitlin Clark has brought I think is downstream of Title IX. Not sure how many medals Katy Ledecky is winning if Title IX doesn't happen.
Yeah so again "half baked" idea. But I'll say I do think the criticism of "legacy" admissions has had an affect on college admissions process. Think some sort of pressure on colleges to deemphasize sports as part of admissions criteria is not a bad thing (Again, I would advocate making college basketball and college football almost their entities. I say this as someone who watches March Madness every year and enjoys the hell out of college football, but both are essentially a way for pro basketball and pro football to pawn of the costs of player developments on other entities and probably shouldn't exist in their current form. But I'm also not dumb. If I ran for President on a platform of getting rid of college basketball and college football, I think I might the first major party candidate in history to literally not win one electoral vote)
Interesting analogue to this: If a naval aviator* wants to fly for the Blue Angels, the best aircraft for them to fly is not the F/A-18 jets the Blue Angels are famous for. It's the C-130 four-engine cargo plane. The Blue Angels have a C-130 in their fleet, and apparently there just aren't that many C-130 pilots trying out.
*Both Navy and Marine Corps pilots are naval aviators.
There may be other class signifiers that can be used, but if you want to minimize the total effect of all class signifiers in use, then eliminating some of the more egregious ones might help.
There’s a large aspect that organized athletics are genuinely good for individual development through fostering teamwork, work ethic, and time management. Get rid of college sports is probably the wrong take, but they should have a chance in emphasis
There are diminishing returns to this when the sport crowds out study time. I went to an elite college that also had major sports programs and it was well understood that the athletes in major sports were getting a second tier education due to the intense time demands of their sports, and coaches would encourage their players to take easy classes and opt into undemanding majors. This was so expected that it would be treated as an impressive feat just for a football or basketball player to major in science, because how could anyone possibly have enough time to take real classes *and* make twice a day practices??
For football and basketball at some schools, it's not just due to the time demands. I remember tutoring a star freshman player on my Big 10 alma mater's football team back in 2005. It quickly became evident to me that he wasn't able to read at a college level. Those tutoring sessions were excruciating for both of us, and it was heartbreaking to me to realize what was going on. I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him. After a couple of sessions I raised the issue with my supervisor. A day or 2 later they told me I'd no longer be working with him. Since then, I find myself asking why we put student athletes and teaching faculty through this dog and pony show.
I don't doubt it for the revenue sports. Fun semi-dueling anecdote time--I had a big time Big Ten wrestler in one of my mechanical engineering recitation sections and he 100% kept up.
The question is why specifically universities should be the organizations pseudo-amateur sports should revolve around. Universities can have intramural sports that achieve the same goals you describe, but without the NCAA baggage to them.
I think that may be a reversal of cause and effect. College athletics grew into what they are because they are fun and (in some cases very) popular. The NCAA I think was originally founded to set safety standards.
I think that sports participation is a valuable mechanic to get a segment of the american public to lead a healthier lifestyle than they otherwise would, and it would be a shame to get rid of that. One of the things I missed most after moving to europe was the OSU athletics complex and the lack of obstacles to accessing it. Same (on a smaller scale) for the small university town where my parents live. Signing up for a private gym was a big hassle and discouragment.
But the gym and sports equipment are very different from the teams that compete against other universities - a large fraction of students use the former, and only a small fraction do the latter. I don’t know how much the existence of the competitive sports subsidize the gym and sports equipment for other students, or tie it up so they can’t use it.
College is all about signaling and sorting future employees for Corporate America. A lot of companies want to hire the fit, attractive, outgoing confident rich kids and colleges happily provide that service.
I remember my dad said years ago that one of the reasons he dressed well for work is that he's short and it was important for him to physically stand out in some way because of the advantage tall people had.
I sort of "eye rolled" at this as a kid. But as I got older I came to realize he was right that there is absolutely a "premium" you get if you're a man and tall (not just in the workforce but in dating too). But where it really struck home for me visually was when I started working on Wall Street (job was located in Battery Park, but my subway stop was literally Wall Street). Specifically, when I would go out to lunch and stand in line. It was striking how "short" I felt. I'm basically an average height man (5' 9") and I can't emphasize how much it seemed like everyone around me was taller than me, including women.
It’s always really interesting to me when I visit New York and am wandering around Central Park and see how tall people on average, according to an eye test, are.
Disproportionately is not the same as mainly rich kids, and many non-scholarship programs have those sports, too. Most of the kids on my Division 3 water polo team were not rich by any stretch, and none of us got scholarships.
> and that we should eliminate all other college sports.
I’ve had an opinion like that for many years at the other universities I’ve been affiliated with. But two years ago, at my new faculty welcome at UC Irvine, the chancellor Howard Gilman said something that made me start to change my mind. He described the university as a place where excellence of all forms can be fostered by communities of peer review, separate from market forces. He was emphasizing that this includes things like engineering and the arts, where faculty are often practitioners rather than (or as well as) researchers, as well as the more academically focused humanities and sciences. But it struck me that this also makes sense of having sports teams too.
"There has also been a norm shift in high-socioeconomic-status households toward the idea that teenagers should do things that burnish their resumes for college applications."
I think it's even more that the idea of a 16 year old with a job and a car and their own money out doing what they want as an independent actor is just inconceivable. Even the idea of it is very dangerous. A 16 year old is a kid who needs constant control and can't be expected to make any decisions about his time or activities without intense parental involvement. And then kids end up crippled by anxiety as they have had no opportunity to make decisions on their own .
I’m pretty on board with the idea that smartphones do damage to us mentally but especially young people and that stuff like smartphone bans in schools are a good thing.
But I really think we underestimate the impact of smartphones allowing parents to be the worst kind of helicopter parents literally monitoring every movement their kid makes and how much damage that can do to a teens ability to have an independent self.
Was shocked when I discovered my wife's younger siblings were (in college!) still having their speed while driving sent to their mother by a phone app. Not that speeding is good, but just the idea of one's parents having that level of panoptic surveillance as you're trying to grow up and be a real adult for the first time seems like it surely must be very bad for one's development.
It was amazing for me to learn how many parents are tracking their kids movements in college. Like I'm sorry, if you're kid is over 18, it's actually pretty ok that you're kid is having sex with another college kid (assuming it's all consensual) and no you don't need to know about it.
The other "social media" angle I've learned about as to why kids maybe don't have sex as much or party as much is the fear of being caught on camera doing something they shouldn't.
I'll say I'm at an interesting age as far as this stuff goes. I'll never forget going into my computer lab at dorm, seeing my friend there and him looking up at me and saying "have you heard of this site called The Facebook?". Funny time capsule for sure (including the fact him and later I actually made our profiles when it was still "The Facebook"). But it was the next line that maybe sticks with me more "Dude, all these cute girls in our classes and are posting everything about themselves. It's awesome!" I truly don't think he meant this in any sort of stalker kind of way, but more just amazed at how "revealing" people were willing to be on social media. I remember later the first photo of me posted on "The Facebook" was me smoking a cigarette. To be clear, I don't smoke now, I only had a handful in college, but there it was, the first picture you saw of me and I look like some chain smoker.
But what really made me paranoid was reading an article about young people having job offers revoked because HR did a search of the Facebook page and found photos of candidates doing drugs, even if it was just a joint. Myself (and thankfully my friends) started taking down photos of us say drinking a beer; like not even anything illegal but just anything that might look bad.
To this day I haven't posted any new photos on Facebook for over 10 years (There's more back story as to why, post for another day). But I think now today, how many kids are just absolutely worried that some decision they made with friends at 17 to maybe have joint will somehow result in not getting a job 10 years later.
All you had to say to reveal your age was “computer lab” lol. I think our generation was the last where some people went off to college without their own laptop
Lot of memories of trying to download music from Kazaa and hoping the album I was downloading in the morning would be complete by the time I got back to my dorm room later that afternoon. The "kids" will never know how amazing it was that you could do this instead of paying $17.99 (?!?) for a CD.
Speaking of which, there's a lot to dislike about how the music industry is today and how much harder it is for any artist to gain mainstream traction today, but man on man those CD prices in the late 90s tell me this industry was absolutely ripe for some sort of disruption. A certain degree of "market correction" really was needed.
My usual spiel on these comments; don't over romanticize "the good ole days".
I don’t know anyone else of my year did this, but I didn’t have my own computer for my freshman year and actually brought a word processor to college that I wrote some papers on. Most of the time I went to the computer lab, though.
Hmm, I'm a bit younger than you and I'm not totally sure I agree -- I think the 'post everything on facebook including a 200 photo album of people smoking joints at last night's house party' was a very particular era in social media and only curated selections of photos ever actually get posted anymore anyway, especially to walls as now most casual photos go to ephemeral stories, so there's not as much fear of that coming back to bite them (and maybe more fear of people you know back home seeing it and somehow it getting back to your parents!) I do think the reduction in risky behavior is mostly just genuine internalization of norms against doing it, though, as well as the increase in non-risky opportunities for entertainment.
All fair points. And agree that "sit on you're butt and look up the 7 bajillion streaming options is easier than making plans" is a big part of the story here.
I will say though the "curated selections of photos" is part of the story here. There is actually evidence that one reason Facebook usage could make people depressed is that it presented this very "curated" view of what all of your friends, high school classmates and family were up to. https://www.vickibotnick.com/blog/why-facebook-is-making-you-sad
That guy/girl you sat next to in high school physics class posts some photo titled "out with my best friends and my awesome boyfriend/girlfriend at the club. Best time ever!". What they not posting is a picture the next day of a broken lamp next to the wall from upteenth fight they've had with their (in reality) extremely toxic boyfriend/girlfriend.
That's part of it but, as an example, by modern standards a "teen car" in 1985 was some late 70's Cutlass or Nova or whatever was hideously unreliable. It would break down all the time and the kid would need to figure it out. Sure you had pay phones and such but maybe no one was home.
And that's just one example of teens being essentially on their own in the world and needing to figure things out. These days they might not even have their license and certainly the first call when they break down is to mom or dad to have them solve the problem.
But knowing you can competently solve your own problems makes for a far less anxious life.
If my mother could have tracked my every movement, she would have. I'm forever grateful that in the 1970s when I left the house, I left her control. My God, the horror.
Weren’t most employed 16 year olds back in the day required to give many of their wages to their parents? To the extent these were material, they would confer status and bargaining power within the household, but I don’t think 16 year olds were ever really independent. Pre Vietnam, parietal norms let colleges exercise authority over 18 and 19 year olds that had withered by the mid seventies and remained at a low ebb for decades.
Hell no that money went to beer and weed as God intended. And road trips. I was always going on road trips with friends at 16-17 with no parental supervision. Though this was the golden years of 98-2000
I would love to see data on this exact phenomenon. Entirely anecdotally, I feel the rate of teenagers being forced to give up wages is possibly more prevalent as a percentage now, as the sort of financially secure households that don't do this are much less likely to have their teenagers working in the first place. Most people I knew growing up in the 2010s who worked year-round did in fact give their wages to their parents, though as always there's a strange gray area between being 'required to' and doing it voluntarily to help out (this latter one seems very altruistic on the surface but I expect there are a variety of social mechanisms by which parents create the expectation that they must do this). My friends in *my* social class, which is to say median income with parents who didn't attend college, mostly only worked over the summer and they kept their pay. And the kids who were better off than us generally never worked at all, usually they were busy with family vacations and sports and such over the summer.
Then no, most working 16 year olds in 1972 were spending their earnings on themselves - their car, gas, booze, clothes, records, hanging out at the mall, etc.
Yes. But some of that was just paying for things their parents had previously paid for, or maybe replacing an allowance. That's effectively turning at least part of your pay over to your parents.
Your pushback inspired some research and you appear to be correct. However, don’t forget that, as recently as the 1920s, it was typical for working class wives to take in borders if they wanted to avoid working outside the home. Basically, the only way to make ends meet as a SAHM with a blue collar husband was to marry the foreman or run a mini bed and breakfast.
The idea of teenagers (and indeed minors in general) being independent and autonomous, while remaining in their parents' household, is indeed pretty new. Autonomy was largely an all or nothing thing. Either you were an extension of your parents or on your own.
The postwar era of youth liberation was an aberration, much like the economic leveling. That's not to say the old (and possibly new) status quo are great, but if we want to go back to it in some form, we have to realize that it was not the natural state of things.
I graduated from high school in 2012 and other than myself hardly anyone had a job. You'd hear from both the parents and the kids that exact justification that they needed the time for college resume building. It made no sense - writing an essay on what I learned by working at Starbucks was such good college application material that it got me into Georgetown. Your explanation is likely closer to the truth: the parents wanted to helicopter but weren't honest to themselves or their kids that that was their true motivation.
The Post article looks pretty spot on. Remote work makes it easier for women to fully participate in the work force, both because of childcare duties and elder care duties - and, not uncommonly, both. That seems obvious and to agree both with the women interviewed in the article and the women I know in real life. It reduces stress, improves quality of life, and allows women to choose to work. Key word, choose.
I do not see how raising taxes on couples, which is what the tax change Matt suggested would do, would make it easier to pay for childcare, eldercare, or both. It seems like a triple whammy of more stress and less money, as well as putting a heavy hand on the scale for something that IMHO should be a personal choice.
If remote work is appealing and womens’ labor supply is elastic, then female labor supply will reflect remote work availability. The fact that employers feel free to require employees to spend time in their cars and incur commuting costs suggests the terms of trade are shifting in favor of employers, possibly sharply.
Everything we know about labor supply is that, even for women, it's pretty inelastic, even if it's more elastic for women than men. The amount of fiddling with the tax code would have to be pretty large, especially given the number of people in these high-earning, high-disparity households. Women often seem to be willing to trade off large amounts of money for a bit of time and flexibility, that they can use for other things. Hybrid and remote work probably offer better returns to that than a tax charge.
I was with you up to the "heavy hand for what should be a personal choice". Surely Married File Joint is the heavy hand, not its absence. Why should a couple pay different taxes just because they decide to get legally married? The IRS should abolish MFJ and stop putting a heavy hand on the scales.
For what it is worth, I live in Australia and there is no notion of MFJ. Nor was there in Vietnam where I used to live. I'd guess America is the global outlier in having a weird tax deduction for being married. (A quick search says China doesn't have MFJ so that alone almost guarantees the US is a global minority on the issue.)
Per a quick bit of digging - MFJ was created to equalize taxation between community property and non community property states. Essentially, community property states considered income from either spouse to be jointly owned, which often resulted in lower taxes.
MFJ was created in 1948 to equalize that to all couples, treating income from both spouses as jointly owned by the couple.
Spouses who earn wages get separate W-2s and pay payroll taxes separately and that’s the biggest source of income for most people. The community property issue seems to only be an issue for very rich people whose primary source of income is capital gains on jointly owned property. You could have a rule where this is split 50/50 for tax purposes.
The community property issue in question was that, up to 1948, many states treated marital income as community property split 50/50 between the spouses. Not just for capital gains but for income.
Exactly this. Now, Congress could have done this by adopting a W-2 rule as Nikuruga suggested and attributed income from jointly held property on a 50/50 basis. This may even have been the simpler way. But Congress in its infinite wisdom decided to adopt the joint rate instead—which I should note disadvantages couples whose earnings are roughly equal to each other’s.
All of the tax brackets except the top 37% one are exactly double for married couples what they are for singles so marriage doesn’t disadvantage anyone except the tiny number in the 37% bracket and even then the jump from 35% to 37% is pretty small. There was a bigger marriage penalty before the Trump I tax reform.
Marriage is good. Joint tax filings are one of the major reasons why many couples choose to get married instead of perpetually living together and raising children without marriage, which is already enough of a problem now in the world where we *do* have major tax benefits to marriage. It is bad for the state to have to adjudicate messy, informal relationship structures in family law.
Not to say that there's no way to improve the law, I'm certain there is, but whatever the outcome is should ensure that the benefits to getting married are preserved, not (as the progressives want) to eliminate those benefits entirely due to skepticism about the state encouraging marriage at all.
Idk. We would have been married by now I’m sure, but my husband and I eloped to DC within a couple of months after the Obama administration decided the federal government would recognize gay marriages performed in the states that recognized them. The impetus for doing it *right then* was because I did back of the napkin math of our taxes. It was my second year working as a pharmacist making good money while he was in nursing school making no money and getting the nonrefundable lifetime learning credit. In those circumstances, where there’s a huge income disparity between spouses plus large nonrefundable credits, MFJ is a windfall. We got $14k back on our taxes that year, I think. I doubt that kind of calculation is super common but I can attest that it happens!
My partner and I recently observed our 20th anniversary but still haven’t gotten married. I suppose it’s possible that during the two years that I was an assistant professor and he was still a PhD student there might have been a tax benefit - but we definitely weren’t ready for marriage yet back then, and I also spent half of each of those years as a postdoc in Australia, so that would have made taxes even more complex.
I think france has a weird system that gives taxbreaks to people in cohabitating situations even if there is no partnership involved, but don't remember the details.
The issue with taxes is that if your wages are modest and you get taxed a high rates due to filing jointly then the relative opportunity cost of alternative uses of time becomes more acute.
In Denmark wage compression and high marginal taxes results in people turning down promotions or pursuing more demanding careers. You might move up the chain as a manager but your workload increases more than your compensation.
But in most households, the important number is total household income, not which spouse makes what. This suggested change would reduce total household income after taxes, which makes paid care more difficult, not less.
Denmark has 52 weeks of paid parental leave. We don’t.
Whether a mother chooses to work or not is her business. Not ours. As a woman, it really makes me extremely uncomfortable to see efforts to push her into something she might not want. Remote work offers options - not a push. Deciding that women in general should not stay home is every bit as wrong as deciding for them that they should. Not our choice to make.
You can see it as pushing people to work, or you can see the current system, where we provide a tax benefit for people who have a marriage with a big salary imbalance, as pushing people out of work. There's not some natural neutral policy here.
The current system essentially divides income for married couples as jointly shared, which is relatively consistent with how most couples handle finances. I don’t see how it pushes people out of the workforce - anyone working is still an increase in household income.
It pushes people out because it feels like you’re working for nothing when the household’s taxes are more than your income. People might continue working then if they have a real passion for their job or if their job is a stepping stone to a higher-paying future job. But if you’re not in one of those boats it’s pretty demoralizing to work and a lot would quit.
I am talking about incentives. In MattY’s example one partner has a high marginal wage and the other has a low marginal wage. Due to high marginal tax rates, it makes the value of an hour of low wage work seem less attractive and thus that person might opt to use their time elsewhere.
Denmark has generous maternal/paternity leave. Paternity leave in academia can benefit men professional especially if the time is used for work other than childcare (there are papers on this.) Generous maternity leave can cause women to lose job skills and knowledge (part time remote work keeps them engaged with what is happening professionally in skills based jobs.) Another sad aspect I have had friends face in Europe is gender discrimination. Women of a certain age don’t get interviews and are asked if they are married or engaged. Employers see them as a potential liability and higher either older or younger women outside of a “fertility age band.” Of course these tend to be for jobs lower down on the job ladder too.
I’m part of many hiring teams in Canada where most women take 12-18 months of leave and I’ve never gotten the slightest whiff of this discrimination at any workplace over 20 years
Canada also has 12-18 months of partially paid mat leave. I took a year and it was lovely. Most of my friends take the full 18 months. These are well education, well paid, feminist women who enjoy their careers and we’ve loved the time with our babies. Not sure why in the US we frame the concept of moms wanting time with their babies as somehow anti-progress and a sign of failure to push them back to work
Let's say you're a manager and you need to assign a task to an employee - if this task can't be completed within 18 months you're fired. Do you give it to the 28 year old woman who just got married or the 28 year old guy that just got married?
When woman are routinely taking the full 12-18 months it severely limits their career progress - as you see in Canada and Europe.
I’m saying I live and work in Canada and don’t see this. I have 2 kids and don’t feel I’ve been limited in my career progress and all. And don’t think my peers do either. Industry: tech, so many different in more traditional industries
Would you be less likely to assign a project to a woman who is likely to become pregnant if the failure of the project could derail or end your career? It seems unlikely it wouldn't be a concern.
I just happened to be in Sweden for a week and caught up with a friend (working mom of two), you’re definitely right about the higher marginal taxation but the quality of life, especially for parents, seems undoubtedly higher
They do a lot to support families as a social policy. That is one of the good things about living there. My friend is being required to RTO full time to Maersk. I feel bad for her.
It really is a low pressure society. The food is not great and prices are high for all consumer goods other than beer though.
This is the issue with remote work, and I don’t mean to be rude about it, but I feel like every parent knows it’s true: you can’t work and take care of kids (or elders) at the same time.
In addition to my personal experience as a parent who has had to do this occasionally (and a lot during the pandemic), I also had employees do this. And their performance was every bit as poor as you would think when you’re comparing someone working part time to others working full time. Worse, then gradually other people started working part time, because why shouldn’t they?
The issue, as always, is childcare. Even women who would like to work and enjoy it struggle to rationalize paying to do it, or getting paid very little (after childcare costs).
My long commute says otherwise. That's just time and energy lost, and my dirty kitchen (I don't have kids yet) since I had RTO attests to this. Different employment situations are different, but the idea that hybrid or remote work can't be a positive sum gain for workers and employers is outdated. The flexibility is also helpful. I could do an appointment and then work late, if need be.
This seems right to me. I think the situation is best understood as navigating constraints and/or static responsibilities than aesthetics or even responding to theoretical incentives in the tax code. The primary driver of women working is the need, and beyond a certain point extra benefits, of making money and the constraints are tradeoffs with competing responsibilities.
I'm the primary breadwinner in our household but my wife's pretty good income is what makes our lifestyle possible. Her company forcing people back into the office 4 days a week has been an (at times major) annoyance but we've dealt with it. The only thing that would drive a change in behavior would be if we couldn't afford full time child care. I assume those considerations are what women whose income is a good bit lower have been hit with more than anything else.
Regarding why Matt brought up eliminating joint filing I suspect the part he's leaving out of this post is the deficit problem. He's had a number of posts in the last few years noting that while deficit fearmongering in 2011 was just that, fearmongering, the deficit really is a problem in the wake of rising interest rates. And now it's even more of a problem in the wake of this wildly irresponsible BBB that passed in the summer.
We live in a world where basically both parties have taken income tax increases on the bottom 95% of earners off the table. And for 30 years this paradigm has been sustainable because of extremely low borrowing costs. But we're now entering a period where even if interest rates do come down from their current high levels we're unlikely to be going back to any sort of ZIRP environment any time soon (in fact that would probably be a bad thing since that likely would only occur if we have another 2008 style crash or another COVID like disease outbreak). So this means we're going to need to find new sources of revenue if don't want early 90s style "crowding out" to come back due excessive debt service payments on government debt. And ideally you'd like to raise taxes in a manner that's least disruptive to economic growth and least harmful to regular Americans (unlike tariffs which do actually raise revenue but at tremendous cost to average Americans for a variety of reasons). So if eliminating "joint filing" can raise revenue while not actually causing too much "deadweight" loss or negative economic consequences generally I see why he brought it up.
My suspicion is Matt would (and has) advocated for other ways to raise taxes. Carbon tax is one he's brought up. I personally would eliminate payroll tax cap tomorrow if I could. I actually agree with all of the reasons you just brought up as to why eliminating joint filing is probably not a great thing to do. Especially in this current moment where these Project 2025 nutjobs seem determined to try to turn back the clock on women's rights and freedoms, why would we implement tax changes that only helps serve the goals of the worst conservative reactionaries. But again, just trying to maybe fill in the gaps of why Matt brought this up as an idea.
If you get rid of the marriage bonus you could then reduce tax rates overall.
When I got married I was making 5 times more than my wife, and so suddenly got a five-figure tax cut that did not seem very deserved because our expenses didn’t go up until we had kids. If you want to give a tax cut to account for care responsibilities it should be based on having kids not just being married.
My wife also resented having to pay a high tax rate compared to her coworkers even though I explained that joint filing was reducing our overall household tax rate by a lot.
I've always considered the tax cut for married people to be a recognition that society is better off with more marriages and fewer single people (especially single men). More stability, less violence, better communities.
I don’t think this tax cut can really incentivize marriage because marriage requires the cooperation of two people.
The marriage tax cut is also only significant for situations where one partner is a high-earning professional and the other makes a very low income—usually they are still academically and socially equal to the high-earning person but have chosen a lower-paying field—these people are going to be stable and nonviolent even when single.
>I don’t think this tax cut can really incentivize marriage because marriage requires the cooperation of two people.
? If you're a high-earning man, your non-working or low-earning girlfriend/wife obviously benefits from you getting a de facto tax cut. I am not sure how your claim makes sense. It seems obvious that if you are living together as a couple, raising kids, sharing expenses, etc., the fact that you can get extra money for getting married would be a key consideration in favor of formalizing your partnership.
I also think your latter paragraph is even wilder, and I think reveals a serious gap in our upbringings lol. It's still very common for men to outearn their wives even in blue collar families! Stay at home mothers are still a thing, as are part time mothers -- as one example, many nurses continue to pick up occasional PRN shifts after having children, but only work ~20-30 hours a month, obviously making much less than their husbands.
The theory around that tax cut and the corresponding tax rate is that household income is split between two people when they are married, and they are taxed accordingly.
I do not expect any revenue gain from this would be put to lowering tax rates.
They could adjust the brackets like how they were pre-Trump I to make them more equitable then. Right now the really high brackets kick in at $400-500k for married couples which is a lot of income and the point at which most people feel like they have enough but only $200-250k for singles which hits a lot more people.
Slightly orthogonal to this piece but my advice to married mothers is ‘don’t quit working’. You don’t have to lean-in but don’t opt-out. Coast, tread water, whatever you need during the early insane years but pay for the childcare, even if it sucks up your whole income. Those years are at most 5 years (slightly longer if you have more kids) but in a 30-40 year working lifespan, a minority of time. You will ride economic cycles, win some, lose some, but you’ll have money and hopefully some retirement income. Husbands die, divorces happen, just keep those plates spinning for your own security. Until the world changes and starts paying us a market wage for having children and staying home with them, this is the only game in town.
As for ‘but I want to be with my babies’…sure, but it’s also good for them to see they have a whole world of caretakers who will love them besides just their parents.
To support this some (admitted left wing) think tank put out a paper a few years back saying daycare needs to cost approximately 3x your nominal salary for it to be worth dropping out of the workforce.
From recollection is broke down into basically 1x was the actual foregone salary. But another 2x were things like lost Social Security credits, lost employer 401k contributions, lost growth (over 40 years) of those contributions, lost promotions and pay raises (which also compounds over 40 years).
Obviously lots of assumptions go into a calculation like that. But every real world discussion I've seen with people ignore all those other factors instead of considering them and saying they don't apply in their situation.
I don’t understand your take on the sources of inflation.
1. Prices are still rising at high rates across different classes of goods. This isn’t just a relative price adjustment you’d expect to see with tariffs.
2. As you showed, wage growth is down, so despite deportations, wage pressure on prices is clearly easing. (I also find it funny that in this case, and this case only, some people are willing to countenance the idea that immigration is inversely related to wages. I generally don’t think this is the case in the long run, but in the short run I’m more skeptical.)
3. Inflation never reached target after the pandemic. Why would you think we’d be back on target absent tariffs/deportations? Expectations may have de-anchored, perhaps due to fiscal profligacy.
1. Tariffs also raise prices on non-tariffed goods by reducing the amount of competition.
2. Deportations could simultaneously reduce wage growth and increase prices by reducing the supply of complementary labor and comparative advantage, e.g. imagine a lawyer who loses his secretary, the lawyer will be making less money because he’s spending more time on secretarial work while simultaneously both secretarial and legal services increase in price due to less supply.
3. Inflation was headed down before Trump. Now it is heading back up. Fiscal profligacy does not necessarily lead to inflation—the US had very low deficits during our last major bout of inflation in the late 70s, and China and Japan are struggling with deflation despite larger government deficits and debt than us.
Arguably, the Trump admin is currently trying to offset non-transitory supply shocks *that it induced itself* with expansionary fiscal policy— while very aggressively pressuring the Fed to cut rates or at least not tighten. That’s quite likely to be a pretty inflationary setup!
One of the theories as to why inflation in the 70s went from mildly high but manageable to clearly getting out of control was the wage/price spiral. Many more jobs in the 70s were either unionized or had contracts that called for wage increases that automatically kept pace with inflation. Today very few jobs have this component which means in theory this aspect of 70s inflation that helped make inflation expectations "imbedded" shouldn't apply today. In other words, the fact that wages are indeed falling is an indication the Fed could actually cut rates.
I should also mention another reason CPI is unlikely to look nearly as bad as 2022 is shelter inflation. A huge component of the CPI increases from 2021-2023 was the big rise in shelter inflation. I can tell you from what I do for a living that shelter is likely to be a downward pressure on CPI the next 12 months as rents especially in the sunbelt have been either stagnant or dropping over the past 12 months. I personally think the Fed is correct to focus more on PCE which unfortunately should continue to increase, but CPI is what is most likely to be in WSJ headlines and reach the public generally. And if CPI inflation does remain muted than it makes it more likely that inflation expectations become muted.
Also, don't think we can discount how much gas prices feed into public perception of inflation and help make inflation expectations imbedded. The rise in goods inflation in 2021 coincided with the start of the Ukraine war which caused oil prices to skyrocket and I do think is underrated reason why regular Americans became aware of inflation generally even before prices rises on the shelves. End of the day, gas prices still really matter as to inflation expectations of regular Americans.
I should also note that someone with more expertise than both of us or Matt apparently is going to tackle this very question this week https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-stagflation-part. I don't take his writings as sacrosanct but he clearly knows what he's talking about so curious his take on this over the next week or two.
Tangentially related to the above, but one point this reminds me of is how the job market unnecessarily punishes parents, especially mothers, who take time off to have a child.
Consider a mom who leaves the workforce at 25 to start a family and then tries to reenter the workforce at age 40. Perhaps it’s because I worked at a ‘youth-centric’ company, but in my experience, that 40-year-old woman would essentially be unemployable. That’s even if they presented themselves as an entry-level hire, ready to start over.
Of course, excuses would be given about cultural fit, relevance of skills, commitment, and retirement horizon (cause youth-centric companies tend to think everyone retires at 45). But the reality is…they won’t hire her because it’s just not what companies like that are used to, so the phenomenon perpetuates itself.
My inner-economist finds this appalling. Women like this have a solid 25 years of work in them, plenty of time for a full carreer. However, few professionals follow this lifepath simply because it’s not what society is used to.
Isn't there a larger issue of why no one, including men or women without children, works there beyond age 45?
If the reasons for that age discrimination are solid, then there doesn't seem to be a big problem, but if not, then there's a problem for everyone, too.
I think you’re right. There is a problem for everyone. Guys who serve in the military also have this issue…many companies don’t want to hire a 20 year Army vet who is willing to start over and take an entry level job with a tech or finance firm. When they imagine a “junior associate” they want to see a 23yo…not someone older than their boss
As a pure data interpretation matter, the "Mom's are leaving the workforce because of tradwife influencers" hypothesis seems obviously dumb. The two earner household paradigm isn't the product of vibes. And clearly current trends are being driven by the labor market.
However, maybe my most trad aligned opinion is that it wouldn't be a bad thing if policy choices allowed more parents of young children to opt out of the labor force. Various ways we subsidize childcare and Pre-K and such should be structured in a way to be neutral on the daycare vs SAHM question. The left/feminist preoccupation with things like the "wage gap" has lead to policy fingers on the scale towards two earner households that are actually bad.
While the Ken-ergy lady comes off as a caricature internet poisoned "studies" professor she's probably not wrong that the drift back to full office is causing some marginal drop in labor participation. But, the convergence with Matt's point is that it's likely the point of return to office to accelerate attrition of employees rather than layoffs.
Hiring for hybrid jobs is much easier, particularly in large metropolitan areas with terrible commutes. But, if you are downsizing by stealth that's not much of a worry. And I can anecdotally say I know of two cases where this is happened at different companies where the shrinking was considered a feature not a bug.
If someone comes off as a caricature but is also providing accurate analysis, sometimes that means you should consider revising your views about the caricature.
Oh, no, I don't think she's accurate, other than by accident. She seems to think it's a businessmen who is enacting return to office as part of a culture war patriarchy move.
I think it's just a sign of a weakening labor market that employers are lessening a benefit and tightening control without concern about losing employees.
The last two paragraphs are not very convincing to me. It seems plausible to me that Trump and his supporters will mention things that support their position at the time. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and all that.
I was promised a raise/promotion 10 months ago and I still haven’t gotten it. The last conversation with my boss about it, he essentially said that the final approvers know they can already replace me with someone cheaper. Out of frustration, I started looking for other jobs, and there’s not much out there. Even when I’ve gotten to final interview rounds, I haven’t been selected. The winning candidate, when I am able to figure out who it is, is typically younger and/or male.
Now I’m thinking- what’s the point of grinding only to continue standing still? I’d rather spend more time with my kids before they are too old to want to hang out with me.
"what’s the point of grinding only to continue standing still?"
There are answers to that, and some people have mentioned them. Contributions to 401K, no gaps in your resume when hiring picks back up (as it usually does), less dependency on a husband who could leave or die, etc. But I can understand your frustration, for sure.
Sorry, but all gender-related policy discussions must now be viewed through the lens of the defining cultural work of the 21st Century: "Barbie" (2023). So, if you can't take the heat of the e-Ken-omy, you need to get out of the kitchen!
The confusing thing is, in said defining cultural work, Kenergy is:
"Barbie director Greta Gerwig and actor Ryan Gosling have been discussing the meaning of Kenergy, with Gerwig suggesting it represents men who support women with confidence and openness."
So the backsliding is incidental and not caused by this phenomenon, correct?
I was completely unfamiliar with the term before today, so I'm going to guess that the term has been societally redefined from how Gerwig and Gosling used it. (Death of the Director, as it were.)
Lots of competing narratives. Remote work makes it much easier to be a working mom. And RTO is rolling it back. It’s a dangerous game to not have your own income though
I see that Kate DID find a second job in response to the SALT and other tax cuts for high income families provisions of the One Boasted Budget Busting Bill. :)
Arguing that the Fed should cut rates in the face of a *persistent* negative labor supply shock is certainly a take, but not one I would make, or I think is supported by theory. If you think the Fed should be cutting rates right now, I would love to see your monetary policy reaction function, because I don't see how lowering real rates to maintain full employment is consistent with price stability.
Thinking about this further, since the restriction on labor supply growth is non-economic, it's not clear to me there is a meaningful short term nominal interest rate that will convince migrants to run this risk of being tossed in Miller's gulags to restore the previous labor supply growth rate. Under these circumstances, holding rates is prob about as "dovish" as you could expect, if the Fed is concerned about the inflationary impact of labor supply restrictions (they should be) and the impact on price stability, they would be justified in *raising* rates right now. This is what happens when the Fed's dual mandate is in tension. It's not a good place to be in, but once again the Trump Administration's policies run in the opposite direction of their states goals.
Now this is only tangentially related to a reference to Covid and women’s LFP rate.
One thing I recall is how much journalists focused on the disparate effects of COVID on women. Women’s employment stories and labor force participation was one story. The disparate health effects for women were others. Much less focus was made about men who saw great drops in employment, who worked more front facing jobs on average, and who died of covid at much higher rates.
Now I go to the data and see that men’s LFP rates have not recovered to the pre COVID levels while women’s LFP has recovered to precovid levels. And now we are trying to tease out trends from relatively fresh data.
"There has also been a norm shift in high-socioeconomic-status households toward the idea that teenagers should do things that burnish their resumes for college applications."
AND College admissions officer who think a hour of Lacrosse is a better predictor of elite college-ness than an hour at American Eagle. :)
I’ve brought this up before but I think we underrate that USC scandal that involved Hollywood celebrities. I think unfortunately because the scandal involved “Aunt Becky” the salacious Hollywood angle overshadowed the real story; that a lot of”rich people” sports are really a back door way of doing rich white people affirmative action. Because that scandal involved way more people than Hollywood celebrities.
I remember reading an article years back that noted that college athletes on average have higher median incomes than college graduates generally. And I think (if I remember correctly) it was spun a a way of showing that college basketball and college football were good for the athletes futures. When the real story is that college athletics includes the water polo team, golf team and sailing team as well. The real story is the latter sports disproportionately include kids from very privileged backgrounds.
I’ve sort of had a take brewing for a few years that college basketball and college football teams should almost be adjunct semi pro teams attached the university (they basically already are) and that we should eliminate all other college sports. It’s a bit of a half baked take but I really do think we need to look harder at the fact a lot of sports are kind of a scam to get rich fail children into colleges they shouldn’t be attending.
It's not that your conclusion is incorrect - it clearly isn't, these sports do function (with whatever degree of intentionality) as 'rich white people affirmative action' (good name!). But it seems hard to imagine that you wouldn't just get some other activity being interpreted as a class signifier in their absence, and they do at least serve the function of helping the country win lots of gold medals every four years, which lots of people get some vicarious joy out of.
Yeah the Olympics angle is clearly a monkey wrench to my plan. I'd say the bigger one is women's sports. I feel pretty confident in saying that Title IX is one of the best cultural outcomes as a direct result of actual government policy in the last 50 years. The rise and popularity of the US women's soccer team, women's college basketball and WNBA with the surge in interest Caitlin Clark has brought I think is downstream of Title IX. Not sure how many medals Katy Ledecky is winning if Title IX doesn't happen.
Yeah so again "half baked" idea. But I'll say I do think the criticism of "legacy" admissions has had an affect on college admissions process. Think some sort of pressure on colleges to deemphasize sports as part of admissions criteria is not a bad thing (Again, I would advocate making college basketball and college football almost their entities. I say this as someone who watches March Madness every year and enjoys the hell out of college football, but both are essentially a way for pro basketball and pro football to pawn of the costs of player developments on other entities and probably shouldn't exist in their current form. But I'm also not dumb. If I ran for President on a platform of getting rid of college basketball and college football, I think I might the first major party candidate in history to literally not win one electoral vote)
Somewhat related, here's college-admissions guidance saying to play an unusual instrument like the oboe in order to stand out: https://admint.substack.com/p/learning-the-oboe-is-a-good-idea
Interesting analogue to this: If a naval aviator* wants to fly for the Blue Angels, the best aircraft for them to fly is not the F/A-18 jets the Blue Angels are famous for. It's the C-130 four-engine cargo plane. The Blue Angels have a C-130 in their fleet, and apparently there just aren't that many C-130 pilots trying out.
*Both Navy and Marine Corps pilots are naval aviators.
There may be other class signifiers that can be used, but if you want to minimize the total effect of all class signifiers in use, then eliminating some of the more egregious ones might help.
There’s a large aspect that organized athletics are genuinely good for individual development through fostering teamwork, work ethic, and time management. Get rid of college sports is probably the wrong take, but they should have a chance in emphasis
There are diminishing returns to this when the sport crowds out study time. I went to an elite college that also had major sports programs and it was well understood that the athletes in major sports were getting a second tier education due to the intense time demands of their sports, and coaches would encourage their players to take easy classes and opt into undemanding majors. This was so expected that it would be treated as an impressive feat just for a football or basketball player to major in science, because how could anyone possibly have enough time to take real classes *and* make twice a day practices??
For football and basketball at some schools, it's not just due to the time demands. I remember tutoring a star freshman player on my Big 10 alma mater's football team back in 2005. It quickly became evident to me that he wasn't able to read at a college level. Those tutoring sessions were excruciating for both of us, and it was heartbreaking to me to realize what was going on. I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him. After a couple of sessions I raised the issue with my supervisor. A day or 2 later they told me I'd no longer be working with him. Since then, I find myself asking why we put student athletes and teaching faculty through this dog and pony show.
I don't doubt it for the revenue sports. Fun semi-dueling anecdote time--I had a big time Big Ten wrestler in one of my mechanical engineering recitation sections and he 100% kept up.
What's the long term career impact?
The question is why specifically universities should be the organizations pseudo-amateur sports should revolve around. Universities can have intramural sports that achieve the same goals you describe, but without the NCAA baggage to them.
I think that may be a reversal of cause and effect. College athletics grew into what they are because they are fun and (in some cases very) popular. The NCAA I think was originally founded to set safety standards.
Yeah again "half baked" idea. But yeah 100% agree that the emphasis placed on athletics in admissions is ridiculous vis a vis grades and test scores.
This is not really obvious
I think that sports participation is a valuable mechanic to get a segment of the american public to lead a healthier lifestyle than they otherwise would, and it would be a shame to get rid of that. One of the things I missed most after moving to europe was the OSU athletics complex and the lack of obstacles to accessing it. Same (on a smaller scale) for the small university town where my parents live. Signing up for a private gym was a big hassle and discouragment.
But the gym and sports equipment are very different from the teams that compete against other universities - a large fraction of students use the former, and only a small fraction do the latter. I don’t know how much the existence of the competitive sports subsidize the gym and sports equipment for other students, or tie it up so they can’t use it.
College is all about signaling and sorting future employees for Corporate America. A lot of companies want to hire the fit, attractive, outgoing confident rich kids and colleges happily provide that service.
I remember my dad said years ago that one of the reasons he dressed well for work is that he's short and it was important for him to physically stand out in some way because of the advantage tall people had.
I sort of "eye rolled" at this as a kid. But as I got older I came to realize he was right that there is absolutely a "premium" you get if you're a man and tall (not just in the workforce but in dating too). But where it really struck home for me visually was when I started working on Wall Street (job was located in Battery Park, but my subway stop was literally Wall Street). Specifically, when I would go out to lunch and stand in line. It was striking how "short" I felt. I'm basically an average height man (5' 9") and I can't emphasize how much it seemed like everyone around me was taller than me, including women.
It’s always really interesting to me when I visit New York and am wandering around Central Park and see how tall people on average, according to an eye test, are.
And thin.
Well, living in NYC will do that for you
Disproportionately is not the same as mainly rich kids, and many non-scholarship programs have those sports, too. Most of the kids on my Division 3 water polo team were not rich by any stretch, and none of us got scholarships.
> and that we should eliminate all other college sports.
I’ve had an opinion like that for many years at the other universities I’ve been affiliated with. But two years ago, at my new faculty welcome at UC Irvine, the chancellor Howard Gilman said something that made me start to change my mind. He described the university as a place where excellence of all forms can be fostered by communities of peer review, separate from market forces. He was emphasizing that this includes things like engineering and the arts, where faculty are often practitioners rather than (or as well as) researchers, as well as the more academically focused humanities and sciences. But it struck me that this also makes sense of having sports teams too.
Can you put Great Jeans on a resumé?
Incredible foresight by the Ivy League to forego offering athletic scholarships. They knew sports would crowd out academics and lo and behold it has.
"There has also been a norm shift in high-socioeconomic-status households toward the idea that teenagers should do things that burnish their resumes for college applications."
I think it's even more that the idea of a 16 year old with a job and a car and their own money out doing what they want as an independent actor is just inconceivable. Even the idea of it is very dangerous. A 16 year old is a kid who needs constant control and can't be expected to make any decisions about his time or activities without intense parental involvement. And then kids end up crippled by anxiety as they have had no opportunity to make decisions on their own .
I’m pretty on board with the idea that smartphones do damage to us mentally but especially young people and that stuff like smartphone bans in schools are a good thing.
But I really think we underestimate the impact of smartphones allowing parents to be the worst kind of helicopter parents literally monitoring every movement their kid makes and how much damage that can do to a teens ability to have an independent self.
Was shocked when I discovered my wife's younger siblings were (in college!) still having their speed while driving sent to their mother by a phone app. Not that speeding is good, but just the idea of one's parents having that level of panoptic surveillance as you're trying to grow up and be a real adult for the first time seems like it surely must be very bad for one's development.
It was amazing for me to learn how many parents are tracking their kids movements in college. Like I'm sorry, if you're kid is over 18, it's actually pretty ok that you're kid is having sex with another college kid (assuming it's all consensual) and no you don't need to know about it.
The other "social media" angle I've learned about as to why kids maybe don't have sex as much or party as much is the fear of being caught on camera doing something they shouldn't.
I'll say I'm at an interesting age as far as this stuff goes. I'll never forget going into my computer lab at dorm, seeing my friend there and him looking up at me and saying "have you heard of this site called The Facebook?". Funny time capsule for sure (including the fact him and later I actually made our profiles when it was still "The Facebook"). But it was the next line that maybe sticks with me more "Dude, all these cute girls in our classes and are posting everything about themselves. It's awesome!" I truly don't think he meant this in any sort of stalker kind of way, but more just amazed at how "revealing" people were willing to be on social media. I remember later the first photo of me posted on "The Facebook" was me smoking a cigarette. To be clear, I don't smoke now, I only had a handful in college, but there it was, the first picture you saw of me and I look like some chain smoker.
But what really made me paranoid was reading an article about young people having job offers revoked because HR did a search of the Facebook page and found photos of candidates doing drugs, even if it was just a joint. Myself (and thankfully my friends) started taking down photos of us say drinking a beer; like not even anything illegal but just anything that might look bad.
To this day I haven't posted any new photos on Facebook for over 10 years (There's more back story as to why, post for another day). But I think now today, how many kids are just absolutely worried that some decision they made with friends at 17 to maybe have joint will somehow result in not getting a job 10 years later.
All you had to say to reveal your age was “computer lab” lol. I think our generation was the last where some people went off to college without their own laptop
Lot of memories of trying to download music from Kazaa and hoping the album I was downloading in the morning would be complete by the time I got back to my dorm room later that afternoon. The "kids" will never know how amazing it was that you could do this instead of paying $17.99 (?!?) for a CD.
Speaking of which, there's a lot to dislike about how the music industry is today and how much harder it is for any artist to gain mainstream traction today, but man on man those CD prices in the late 90s tell me this industry was absolutely ripe for some sort of disruption. A certain degree of "market correction" really was needed.
My usual spiel on these comments; don't over romanticize "the good ole days".
If you want to hyper-date yourself, the generation where you brought a laptop but you also brought a land-line phone!
Ha that was me, too
I don’t know anyone else of my year did this, but I didn’t have my own computer for my freshman year and actually brought a word processor to college that I wrote some papers on. Most of the time I went to the computer lab, though.
Hmm, I'm a bit younger than you and I'm not totally sure I agree -- I think the 'post everything on facebook including a 200 photo album of people smoking joints at last night's house party' was a very particular era in social media and only curated selections of photos ever actually get posted anymore anyway, especially to walls as now most casual photos go to ephemeral stories, so there's not as much fear of that coming back to bite them (and maybe more fear of people you know back home seeing it and somehow it getting back to your parents!) I do think the reduction in risky behavior is mostly just genuine internalization of norms against doing it, though, as well as the increase in non-risky opportunities for entertainment.
All fair points. And agree that "sit on you're butt and look up the 7 bajillion streaming options is easier than making plans" is a big part of the story here.
I will say though the "curated selections of photos" is part of the story here. There is actually evidence that one reason Facebook usage could make people depressed is that it presented this very "curated" view of what all of your friends, high school classmates and family were up to. https://www.vickibotnick.com/blog/why-facebook-is-making-you-sad
That guy/girl you sat next to in high school physics class posts some photo titled "out with my best friends and my awesome boyfriend/girlfriend at the club. Best time ever!". What they not posting is a picture the next day of a broken lamp next to the wall from upteenth fight they've had with their (in reality) extremely toxic boyfriend/girlfriend.
It's also training the next generation of citizens that that type of surveillance is okay
That's part of it but, as an example, by modern standards a "teen car" in 1985 was some late 70's Cutlass or Nova or whatever was hideously unreliable. It would break down all the time and the kid would need to figure it out. Sure you had pay phones and such but maybe no one was home.
And that's just one example of teens being essentially on their own in the world and needing to figure things out. These days they might not even have their license and certainly the first call when they break down is to mom or dad to have them solve the problem.
But knowing you can competently solve your own problems makes for a far less anxious life.
People don't get LOST anymore. Many young adults have NEVER been lost. Noodle on that for a moment!
If my mother could have tracked my every movement, she would have. I'm forever grateful that in the 1970s when I left the house, I left her control. My God, the horror.
Weren’t most employed 16 year olds back in the day required to give many of their wages to their parents? To the extent these were material, they would confer status and bargaining power within the household, but I don’t think 16 year olds were ever really independent. Pre Vietnam, parietal norms let colleges exercise authority over 18 and 19 year olds that had withered by the mid seventies and remained at a low ebb for decades.
I can report that at 16 I did not give my part time wages to my parents, although they did mostly go into our meager savings for college.
Hell no that money went to beer and weed as God intended. And road trips. I was always going on road trips with friends at 16-17 with no parental supervision. Though this was the golden years of 98-2000
I would love to see data on this exact phenomenon. Entirely anecdotally, I feel the rate of teenagers being forced to give up wages is possibly more prevalent as a percentage now, as the sort of financially secure households that don't do this are much less likely to have their teenagers working in the first place. Most people I knew growing up in the 2010s who worked year-round did in fact give their wages to their parents, though as always there's a strange gray area between being 'required to' and doing it voluntarily to help out (this latter one seems very altruistic on the surface but I expect there are a variety of social mechanisms by which parents create the expectation that they must do this). My friends in *my* social class, which is to say median income with parents who didn't attend college, mostly only worked over the summer and they kept their pay. And the kids who were better off than us generally never worked at all, usually they were busy with family vacations and sports and such over the summer.
1985 was 40 years ago so I'm not sure what you mean by "back in the day."
Pre ‘75
Then no, most working 16 year olds in 1972 were spending their earnings on themselves - their car, gas, booze, clothes, records, hanging out at the mall, etc.
Can confirm.
Yes. But some of that was just paying for things their parents had previously paid for, or maybe replacing an allowance. That's effectively turning at least part of your pay over to your parents.
Yeh, no.
While movies aren't data, pretty much every movie aimed at teens from like the 1950s-1970s seemed to revolve around either cars or motorcycles.
Your pushback inspired some research and you appear to be correct. However, don’t forget that, as recently as the 1920s, it was typical for working class wives to take in borders if they wanted to avoid working outside the home. Basically, the only way to make ends meet as a SAHM with a blue collar husband was to marry the foreman or run a mini bed and breakfast.
"it was typical for working class wives to take in borders"
That was typical for widows.
'50's :)
The idea of teenagers (and indeed minors in general) being independent and autonomous, while remaining in their parents' household, is indeed pretty new. Autonomy was largely an all or nothing thing. Either you were an extension of your parents or on your own.
The postwar era of youth liberation was an aberration, much like the economic leveling. That's not to say the old (and possibly new) status quo are great, but if we want to go back to it in some form, we have to realize that it was not the natural state of things.
I needed a job in order to get my license so I could drive to the job in order to pay my parents for the car insurance necessary to drive to my job.
I graduated from high school in 2012 and other than myself hardly anyone had a job. You'd hear from both the parents and the kids that exact justification that they needed the time for college resume building. It made no sense - writing an essay on what I learned by working at Starbucks was such good college application material that it got me into Georgetown. Your explanation is likely closer to the truth: the parents wanted to helicopter but weren't honest to themselves or their kids that that was their true motivation.
The Post article looks pretty spot on. Remote work makes it easier for women to fully participate in the work force, both because of childcare duties and elder care duties - and, not uncommonly, both. That seems obvious and to agree both with the women interviewed in the article and the women I know in real life. It reduces stress, improves quality of life, and allows women to choose to work. Key word, choose.
I do not see how raising taxes on couples, which is what the tax change Matt suggested would do, would make it easier to pay for childcare, eldercare, or both. It seems like a triple whammy of more stress and less money, as well as putting a heavy hand on the scale for something that IMHO should be a personal choice.
And it doesn’t even seem likely to make a difference, except for raising taxes. Pew shows 45% of women making as much or more than their husbands. About 16% of US married couples have the wife as the higher earner, and another 29% have the wife earning about the same. See https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/
My suggestion, promote remote work, and let women decide what’s best for them.
If remote work is appealing and womens’ labor supply is elastic, then female labor supply will reflect remote work availability. The fact that employers feel free to require employees to spend time in their cars and incur commuting costs suggests the terms of trade are shifting in favor of employers, possibly sharply.
Everything we know about labor supply is that, even for women, it's pretty inelastic, even if it's more elastic for women than men. The amount of fiddling with the tax code would have to be pretty large, especially given the number of people in these high-earning, high-disparity households. Women often seem to be willing to trade off large amounts of money for a bit of time and flexibility, that they can use for other things. Hybrid and remote work probably offer better returns to that than a tax charge.
I was with you up to the "heavy hand for what should be a personal choice". Surely Married File Joint is the heavy hand, not its absence. Why should a couple pay different taxes just because they decide to get legally married? The IRS should abolish MFJ and stop putting a heavy hand on the scales.
For what it is worth, I live in Australia and there is no notion of MFJ. Nor was there in Vietnam where I used to live. I'd guess America is the global outlier in having a weird tax deduction for being married. (A quick search says China doesn't have MFJ so that alone almost guarantees the US is a global minority on the issue.)
Per a quick bit of digging - MFJ was created to equalize taxation between community property and non community property states. Essentially, community property states considered income from either spouse to be jointly owned, which often resulted in lower taxes.
MFJ was created in 1948 to equalize that to all couples, treating income from both spouses as jointly owned by the couple.
Spouses who earn wages get separate W-2s and pay payroll taxes separately and that’s the biggest source of income for most people. The community property issue seems to only be an issue for very rich people whose primary source of income is capital gains on jointly owned property. You could have a rule where this is split 50/50 for tax purposes.
The community property issue in question was that, up to 1948, many states treated marital income as community property split 50/50 between the spouses. Not just for capital gains but for income.
That meant there were discrepancies in how couples were taxed on their income depending on their state. Simple explanation at https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/filing/personal-tax-planning/how-filing-jointly-came-to-be/?srsltid=AfmBOoo24JExgp5f4uVcZo3z4Jc1XaBj2LSHuchYbXChdVcqxeCtKVV_
MFJ was an effort to equalize that taxation between states.
There’s no reason federal taxes today should be based on what states were doing in 1948.
Exactly this. Now, Congress could have done this by adopting a W-2 rule as Nikuruga suggested and attributed income from jointly held property on a 50/50 basis. This may even have been the simpler way. But Congress in its infinite wisdom decided to adopt the joint rate instead—which I should note disadvantages couples whose earnings are roughly equal to each other’s.
All of the tax brackets except the top 37% one are exactly double for married couples what they are for singles so marriage doesn’t disadvantage anyone except the tiny number in the 37% bracket and even then the jump from 35% to 37% is pretty small. There was a bigger marriage penalty before the Trump I tax reform.
Marriage is good. Joint tax filings are one of the major reasons why many couples choose to get married instead of perpetually living together and raising children without marriage, which is already enough of a problem now in the world where we *do* have major tax benefits to marriage. It is bad for the state to have to adjudicate messy, informal relationship structures in family law.
Not to say that there's no way to improve the law, I'm certain there is, but whatever the outcome is should ensure that the benefits to getting married are preserved, not (as the progressives want) to eliminate those benefits entirely due to skepticism about the state encouraging marriage at all.
Joint tax filings are not a major reason.
Marriage rates didn't go up after it passed in 1948.
Marriage rates aren't higher in the US than in countries that don't have it.
Idk. We would have been married by now I’m sure, but my husband and I eloped to DC within a couple of months after the Obama administration decided the federal government would recognize gay marriages performed in the states that recognized them. The impetus for doing it *right then* was because I did back of the napkin math of our taxes. It was my second year working as a pharmacist making good money while he was in nursing school making no money and getting the nonrefundable lifetime learning credit. In those circumstances, where there’s a huge income disparity between spouses plus large nonrefundable credits, MFJ is a windfall. We got $14k back on our taxes that year, I think. I doubt that kind of calculation is super common but I can attest that it happens!
My partner and I recently observed our 20th anniversary but still haven’t gotten married. I suppose it’s possible that during the two years that I was an assistant professor and he was still a PhD student there might have been a tax benefit - but we definitely weren’t ready for marriage yet back then, and I also spent half of each of those years as a postdoc in Australia, so that would have made taxes even more complex.
I think france has a weird system that gives taxbreaks to people in cohabitating situations even if there is no partnership involved, but don't remember the details.
The issue with taxes is that if your wages are modest and you get taxed a high rates due to filing jointly then the relative opportunity cost of alternative uses of time becomes more acute.
In Denmark wage compression and high marginal taxes results in people turning down promotions or pursuing more demanding careers. You might move up the chain as a manager but your workload increases more than your compensation.
But in most households, the important number is total household income, not which spouse makes what. This suggested change would reduce total household income after taxes, which makes paid care more difficult, not less.
Denmark has 52 weeks of paid parental leave. We don’t.
Whether a mother chooses to work or not is her business. Not ours. As a woman, it really makes me extremely uncomfortable to see efforts to push her into something she might not want. Remote work offers options - not a push. Deciding that women in general should not stay home is every bit as wrong as deciding for them that they should. Not our choice to make.
You can see it as pushing people to work, or you can see the current system, where we provide a tax benefit for people who have a marriage with a big salary imbalance, as pushing people out of work. There's not some natural neutral policy here.
The current system essentially divides income for married couples as jointly shared, which is relatively consistent with how most couples handle finances. I don’t see how it pushes people out of the workforce - anyone working is still an increase in household income.
It pushes people out because it feels like you’re working for nothing when the household’s taxes are more than your income. People might continue working then if they have a real passion for their job or if their job is a stepping stone to a higher-paying future job. But if you’re not in one of those boats it’s pretty demoralizing to work and a lot would quit.
I am talking about incentives. In MattY’s example one partner has a high marginal wage and the other has a low marginal wage. Due to high marginal tax rates, it makes the value of an hour of low wage work seem less attractive and thus that person might opt to use their time elsewhere.
Denmark has generous maternal/paternity leave. Paternity leave in academia can benefit men professional especially if the time is used for work other than childcare (there are papers on this.) Generous maternity leave can cause women to lose job skills and knowledge (part time remote work keeps them engaged with what is happening professionally in skills based jobs.) Another sad aspect I have had friends face in Europe is gender discrimination. Women of a certain age don’t get interviews and are asked if they are married or engaged. Employers see them as a potential liability and higher either older or younger women outside of a “fertility age band.” Of course these tend to be for jobs lower down on the job ladder too.
In short, it’s all complicated.
I’m part of many hiring teams in Canada where most women take 12-18 months of leave and I’ve never gotten the slightest whiff of this discrimination at any workplace over 20 years
Canada also has 12-18 months of partially paid mat leave. I took a year and it was lovely. Most of my friends take the full 18 months. These are well education, well paid, feminist women who enjoy their careers and we’ve loved the time with our babies. Not sure why in the US we frame the concept of moms wanting time with their babies as somehow anti-progress and a sign of failure to push them back to work
Let's say you're a manager and you need to assign a task to an employee - if this task can't be completed within 18 months you're fired. Do you give it to the 28 year old woman who just got married or the 28 year old guy that just got married?
When woman are routinely taking the full 12-18 months it severely limits their career progress - as you see in Canada and Europe.
I’m saying I live and work in Canada and don’t see this. I have 2 kids and don’t feel I’ve been limited in my career progress and all. And don’t think my peers do either. Industry: tech, so many different in more traditional industries
Would you be less likely to assign a project to a woman who is likely to become pregnant if the failure of the project could derail or end your career? It seems unlikely it wouldn't be a concern.
I just happened to be in Sweden for a week and caught up with a friend (working mom of two), you’re definitely right about the higher marginal taxation but the quality of life, especially for parents, seems undoubtedly higher
They do a lot to support families as a social policy. That is one of the good things about living there. My friend is being required to RTO full time to Maersk. I feel bad for her.
It really is a low pressure society. The food is not great and prices are high for all consumer goods other than beer though.
And that’s bad?
This is the issue with remote work, and I don’t mean to be rude about it, but I feel like every parent knows it’s true: you can’t work and take care of kids (or elders) at the same time.
In addition to my personal experience as a parent who has had to do this occasionally (and a lot during the pandemic), I also had employees do this. And their performance was every bit as poor as you would think when you’re comparing someone working part time to others working full time. Worse, then gradually other people started working part time, because why shouldn’t they?
The issue, as always, is childcare. Even women who would like to work and enjoy it struggle to rationalize paying to do it, or getting paid very little (after childcare costs).
My long commute says otherwise. That's just time and energy lost, and my dirty kitchen (I don't have kids yet) since I had RTO attests to this. Different employment situations are different, but the idea that hybrid or remote work can't be a positive sum gain for workers and employers is outdated. The flexibility is also helpful. I could do an appointment and then work late, if need be.
This seems right to me. I think the situation is best understood as navigating constraints and/or static responsibilities than aesthetics or even responding to theoretical incentives in the tax code. The primary driver of women working is the need, and beyond a certain point extra benefits, of making money and the constraints are tradeoffs with competing responsibilities.
I'm the primary breadwinner in our household but my wife's pretty good income is what makes our lifestyle possible. Her company forcing people back into the office 4 days a week has been an (at times major) annoyance but we've dealt with it. The only thing that would drive a change in behavior would be if we couldn't afford full time child care. I assume those considerations are what women whose income is a good bit lower have been hit with more than anything else.
Regarding why Matt brought up eliminating joint filing I suspect the part he's leaving out of this post is the deficit problem. He's had a number of posts in the last few years noting that while deficit fearmongering in 2011 was just that, fearmongering, the deficit really is a problem in the wake of rising interest rates. And now it's even more of a problem in the wake of this wildly irresponsible BBB that passed in the summer.
We live in a world where basically both parties have taken income tax increases on the bottom 95% of earners off the table. And for 30 years this paradigm has been sustainable because of extremely low borrowing costs. But we're now entering a period where even if interest rates do come down from their current high levels we're unlikely to be going back to any sort of ZIRP environment any time soon (in fact that would probably be a bad thing since that likely would only occur if we have another 2008 style crash or another COVID like disease outbreak). So this means we're going to need to find new sources of revenue if don't want early 90s style "crowding out" to come back due excessive debt service payments on government debt. And ideally you'd like to raise taxes in a manner that's least disruptive to economic growth and least harmful to regular Americans (unlike tariffs which do actually raise revenue but at tremendous cost to average Americans for a variety of reasons). So if eliminating "joint filing" can raise revenue while not actually causing too much "deadweight" loss or negative economic consequences generally I see why he brought it up.
My suspicion is Matt would (and has) advocated for other ways to raise taxes. Carbon tax is one he's brought up. I personally would eliminate payroll tax cap tomorrow if I could. I actually agree with all of the reasons you just brought up as to why eliminating joint filing is probably not a great thing to do. Especially in this current moment where these Project 2025 nutjobs seem determined to try to turn back the clock on women's rights and freedoms, why would we implement tax changes that only helps serve the goals of the worst conservative reactionaries. But again, just trying to maybe fill in the gaps of why Matt brought this up as an idea.
“promote remote work”
How?
Just don't give a shit about whether anybody gets anything done!
If you get rid of the marriage bonus you could then reduce tax rates overall.
When I got married I was making 5 times more than my wife, and so suddenly got a five-figure tax cut that did not seem very deserved because our expenses didn’t go up until we had kids. If you want to give a tax cut to account for care responsibilities it should be based on having kids not just being married.
My wife also resented having to pay a high tax rate compared to her coworkers even though I explained that joint filing was reducing our overall household tax rate by a lot.
I've always considered the tax cut for married people to be a recognition that society is better off with more marriages and fewer single people (especially single men). More stability, less violence, better communities.
I don’t think this tax cut can really incentivize marriage because marriage requires the cooperation of two people.
The marriage tax cut is also only significant for situations where one partner is a high-earning professional and the other makes a very low income—usually they are still academically and socially equal to the high-earning person but have chosen a lower-paying field—these people are going to be stable and nonviolent even when single.
>I don’t think this tax cut can really incentivize marriage because marriage requires the cooperation of two people.
? If you're a high-earning man, your non-working or low-earning girlfriend/wife obviously benefits from you getting a de facto tax cut. I am not sure how your claim makes sense. It seems obvious that if you are living together as a couple, raising kids, sharing expenses, etc., the fact that you can get extra money for getting married would be a key consideration in favor of formalizing your partnership.
I also think your latter paragraph is even wilder, and I think reveals a serious gap in our upbringings lol. It's still very common for men to outearn their wives even in blue collar families! Stay at home mothers are still a thing, as are part time mothers -- as one example, many nurses continue to pick up occasional PRN shifts after having children, but only work ~20-30 hours a month, obviously making much less than their husbands.
The theory around that tax cut and the corresponding tax rate is that household income is split between two people when they are married, and they are taxed accordingly.
I do not expect any revenue gain from this would be put to lowering tax rates.
They could adjust the brackets like how they were pre-Trump I to make them more equitable then. Right now the really high brackets kick in at $400-500k for married couples which is a lot of income and the point at which most people feel like they have enough but only $200-250k for singles which hits a lot more people.
Slightly orthogonal to this piece but my advice to married mothers is ‘don’t quit working’. You don’t have to lean-in but don’t opt-out. Coast, tread water, whatever you need during the early insane years but pay for the childcare, even if it sucks up your whole income. Those years are at most 5 years (slightly longer if you have more kids) but in a 30-40 year working lifespan, a minority of time. You will ride economic cycles, win some, lose some, but you’ll have money and hopefully some retirement income. Husbands die, divorces happen, just keep those plates spinning for your own security. Until the world changes and starts paying us a market wage for having children and staying home with them, this is the only game in town.
As for ‘but I want to be with my babies’…sure, but it’s also good for them to see they have a whole world of caretakers who will love them besides just their parents.
To support this some (admitted left wing) think tank put out a paper a few years back saying daycare needs to cost approximately 3x your nominal salary for it to be worth dropping out of the workforce.
From recollection is broke down into basically 1x was the actual foregone salary. But another 2x were things like lost Social Security credits, lost employer 401k contributions, lost growth (over 40 years) of those contributions, lost promotions and pay raises (which also compounds over 40 years).
Obviously lots of assumptions go into a calculation like that. But every real world discussion I've seen with people ignore all those other factors instead of considering them and saying they don't apply in their situation.
Your retirement income point is spot on. Keep making those contributions!
I don’t understand your take on the sources of inflation.
1. Prices are still rising at high rates across different classes of goods. This isn’t just a relative price adjustment you’d expect to see with tariffs.
2. As you showed, wage growth is down, so despite deportations, wage pressure on prices is clearly easing. (I also find it funny that in this case, and this case only, some people are willing to countenance the idea that immigration is inversely related to wages. I generally don’t think this is the case in the long run, but in the short run I’m more skeptical.)
3. Inflation never reached target after the pandemic. Why would you think we’d be back on target absent tariffs/deportations? Expectations may have de-anchored, perhaps due to fiscal profligacy.
1. Tariffs also raise prices on non-tariffed goods by reducing the amount of competition.
2. Deportations could simultaneously reduce wage growth and increase prices by reducing the supply of complementary labor and comparative advantage, e.g. imagine a lawyer who loses his secretary, the lawyer will be making less money because he’s spending more time on secretarial work while simultaneously both secretarial and legal services increase in price due to less supply.
3. Inflation was headed down before Trump. Now it is heading back up. Fiscal profligacy does not necessarily lead to inflation—the US had very low deficits during our last major bout of inflation in the late 70s, and China and Japan are struggling with deflation despite larger government deficits and debt than us.
Arguably, the Trump admin is currently trying to offset non-transitory supply shocks *that it induced itself* with expansionary fiscal policy— while very aggressively pressuring the Fed to cut rates or at least not tighten. That’s quite likely to be a pretty inflationary setup!
One of the theories as to why inflation in the 70s went from mildly high but manageable to clearly getting out of control was the wage/price spiral. Many more jobs in the 70s were either unionized or had contracts that called for wage increases that automatically kept pace with inflation. Today very few jobs have this component which means in theory this aspect of 70s inflation that helped make inflation expectations "imbedded" shouldn't apply today. In other words, the fact that wages are indeed falling is an indication the Fed could actually cut rates.
I should also mention another reason CPI is unlikely to look nearly as bad as 2022 is shelter inflation. A huge component of the CPI increases from 2021-2023 was the big rise in shelter inflation. I can tell you from what I do for a living that shelter is likely to be a downward pressure on CPI the next 12 months as rents especially in the sunbelt have been either stagnant or dropping over the past 12 months. I personally think the Fed is correct to focus more on PCE which unfortunately should continue to increase, but CPI is what is most likely to be in WSJ headlines and reach the public generally. And if CPI inflation does remain muted than it makes it more likely that inflation expectations become muted.
Also, don't think we can discount how much gas prices feed into public perception of inflation and help make inflation expectations imbedded. The rise in goods inflation in 2021 coincided with the start of the Ukraine war which caused oil prices to skyrocket and I do think is underrated reason why regular Americans became aware of inflation generally even before prices rises on the shelves. End of the day, gas prices still really matter as to inflation expectations of regular Americans.
I should also note that someone with more expertise than both of us or Matt apparently is going to tackle this very question this week https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-stagflation-part. I don't take his writings as sacrosanct but he clearly knows what he's talking about so curious his take on this over the next week or two.
Tangentially related to the above, but one point this reminds me of is how the job market unnecessarily punishes parents, especially mothers, who take time off to have a child.
Consider a mom who leaves the workforce at 25 to start a family and then tries to reenter the workforce at age 40. Perhaps it’s because I worked at a ‘youth-centric’ company, but in my experience, that 40-year-old woman would essentially be unemployable. That’s even if they presented themselves as an entry-level hire, ready to start over.
Of course, excuses would be given about cultural fit, relevance of skills, commitment, and retirement horizon (cause youth-centric companies tend to think everyone retires at 45). But the reality is…they won’t hire her because it’s just not what companies like that are used to, so the phenomenon perpetuates itself.
My inner-economist finds this appalling. Women like this have a solid 25 years of work in them, plenty of time for a full carreer. However, few professionals follow this lifepath simply because it’s not what society is used to.
Isn't there a larger issue of why no one, including men or women without children, works there beyond age 45?
If the reasons for that age discrimination are solid, then there doesn't seem to be a big problem, but if not, then there's a problem for everyone, too.
I think you’re right. There is a problem for everyone. Guys who serve in the military also have this issue…many companies don’t want to hire a 20 year Army vet who is willing to start over and take an entry level job with a tech or finance firm. When they imagine a “junior associate” they want to see a 23yo…not someone older than their boss
15 year introduces a lot to selection bias - is she going back to work because she wants too or was her husband like - enough is enough?
As a pure data interpretation matter, the "Mom's are leaving the workforce because of tradwife influencers" hypothesis seems obviously dumb. The two earner household paradigm isn't the product of vibes. And clearly current trends are being driven by the labor market.
However, maybe my most trad aligned opinion is that it wouldn't be a bad thing if policy choices allowed more parents of young children to opt out of the labor force. Various ways we subsidize childcare and Pre-K and such should be structured in a way to be neutral on the daycare vs SAHM question. The left/feminist preoccupation with things like the "wage gap" has lead to policy fingers on the scale towards two earner households that are actually bad.
While the Ken-ergy lady comes off as a caricature internet poisoned "studies" professor she's probably not wrong that the drift back to full office is causing some marginal drop in labor participation. But, the convergence with Matt's point is that it's likely the point of return to office to accelerate attrition of employees rather than layoffs.
Hiring for hybrid jobs is much easier, particularly in large metropolitan areas with terrible commutes. But, if you are downsizing by stealth that's not much of a worry. And I can anecdotally say I know of two cases where this is happened at different companies where the shrinking was considered a feature not a bug.
If someone comes off as a caricature but is also providing accurate analysis, sometimes that means you should consider revising your views about the caricature.
Oh, no, I don't think she's accurate, other than by accident. She seems to think it's a businessmen who is enacting return to office as part of a culture war patriarchy move.
I think it's just a sign of a weakening labor market that employers are lessening a benefit and tightening control without concern about losing employees.
“the drift back to full office”
You mean the, “return-to-office chest pounding”?
The Professor quoted is a Labor economist who has worked at the Department of Labor and the Census Bureau.
https://www.mistyheggeness.com/cv
The last two paragraphs are not very convincing to me. It seems plausible to me that Trump and his supporters will mention things that support their position at the time. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and all that.
I am the mom contemplating leaving the workforce.
This article hits the nail on the head.
I was promised a raise/promotion 10 months ago and I still haven’t gotten it. The last conversation with my boss about it, he essentially said that the final approvers know they can already replace me with someone cheaper. Out of frustration, I started looking for other jobs, and there’s not much out there. Even when I’ve gotten to final interview rounds, I haven’t been selected. The winning candidate, when I am able to figure out who it is, is typically younger and/or male.
Now I’m thinking- what’s the point of grinding only to continue standing still? I’d rather spend more time with my kids before they are too old to want to hang out with me.
"what’s the point of grinding only to continue standing still?"
There are answers to that, and some people have mentioned them. Contributions to 401K, no gaps in your resume when hiring picks back up (as it usually does), less dependency on a husband who could leave or die, etc. But I can understand your frustration, for sure.
I certainly recognize that having this choice is a privilege.
Have many interviews have you lined up?
Rough numbers: 50 applications, 8-10 first-round interviews, 4 jobs went all the way to final selection
Nice! Will be sweet when you give your notice.
I have daydreams about it 😊
Sounds soul crushing I’m sorry
There’s hardly anything worse than applying for jobs. At least you have a job already which hopefully will make it easier at some point
"It’s clear that we’re backsliding in the Ken-ergy economy"
ftlog, can people please stop talking like this?
Sorry, but all gender-related policy discussions must now be viewed through the lens of the defining cultural work of the 21st Century: "Barbie" (2023). So, if you can't take the heat of the e-Ken-omy, you need to get out of the kitchen!
The confusing thing is, in said defining cultural work, Kenergy is:
"Barbie director Greta Gerwig and actor Ryan Gosling have been discussing the meaning of Kenergy, with Gerwig suggesting it represents men who support women with confidence and openness."
So the backsliding is incidental and not caused by this phenomenon, correct?
is ken-ergy the new "woke" (original meaning misused - but new misused meaning is what everyone knows about)?
I had never even encountered the term before this morning.
Yes, the term was not within my ken before today either.
memes have a kenetic energy of their own
Aww you Ken do it!
Me too tho fr
I was completely unfamiliar with the term before today, so I'm going to guess that the term has been societally redefined from how Gerwig and Gosling used it. (Death of the Director, as it were.)
Yeah WTH is kenergy?
The need to go viral in order to get noticed creates such bad incentives.
Lots of competing narratives. Remote work makes it much easier to be a working mom. And RTO is rolling it back. It’s a dangerous game to not have your own income though
RTO and all the discussion of AI replacing workers is just cover for quiet workforce downsizing before a downturn.
I see that Kate DID find a second job in response to the SALT and other tax cuts for high income families provisions of the One Boasted Budget Busting Bill. :)
[Another plug for The Argument can't hurt! :)]
Arguing that the Fed should cut rates in the face of a *persistent* negative labor supply shock is certainly a take, but not one I would make, or I think is supported by theory. If you think the Fed should be cutting rates right now, I would love to see your monetary policy reaction function, because I don't see how lowering real rates to maintain full employment is consistent with price stability.
Thinking about this further, since the restriction on labor supply growth is non-economic, it's not clear to me there is a meaningful short term nominal interest rate that will convince migrants to run this risk of being tossed in Miller's gulags to restore the previous labor supply growth rate. Under these circumstances, holding rates is prob about as "dovish" as you could expect, if the Fed is concerned about the inflationary impact of labor supply restrictions (they should be) and the impact on price stability, they would be justified in *raising* rates right now. This is what happens when the Fed's dual mandate is in tension. It's not a good place to be in, but once again the Trump Administration's policies run in the opposite direction of their states goals.
Now this is only tangentially related to a reference to Covid and women’s LFP rate.
One thing I recall is how much journalists focused on the disparate effects of COVID on women. Women’s employment stories and labor force participation was one story. The disparate health effects for women were others. Much less focus was made about men who saw great drops in employment, who worked more front facing jobs on average, and who died of covid at much higher rates.
Now I go to the data and see that men’s LFP rates have not recovered to the pre COVID levels while women’s LFP has recovered to precovid levels. And now we are trying to tease out trends from relatively fresh data.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1LCEW
The supply side shocks from tariffs and immigration reductions reduce potential GDP. Rate cuts aren't going to help with that very much.