"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.
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.
I think the skill curve on an oboe or violin is different than (eg) clarinet, sax, or trombone, where a relatively bad musician can get *decent* sounds out of the latter but it'll be intolerably bad for months for anyone around a beginner oboe/violin player. A good oboe or violin player sounds wonderful though!
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)
The US being utterly dominant in women's sports, even in sports that our men suck at, is a huge credit to our society, and also a great example of ACTUAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM that 0% of us appreciate because we're too busy looking for and dwelling on our failures.
Is it though? If I remember correctly, the EU consistently gets more per capita golds at the Olympics than the US. US is just unique in being massively bigger than any other developed country.
I'm all for "US is a great country, actually", but I don't think this is an example of that.
The Olympics set up favors the European countries.
Europe can have a maximum of 54 potential athletes participate in the Olympics. The US can have 2.
Now in reality, the European countries get far fewer, but it’s still multiples of 2.
This means that the US ends up leaving their 3-10th place finishers out of the Olympics even though they might be on average stronger athletes than those from other countries. Once the Olympics start it only takes one performance to get or lose a medal.
Well, the EU has a higher population than the US (450 vs. 340 million.) But that is possible.
I guess when I think of the American exceptionalism in sports I'm thinking of traditionally-male team sports like basketball and soccer, as opposed to individual sports that have always had ultracompetitive women's events. I also think it's something that probably peaked in the 1990s and that the rest of the world has been catching up on.
Or I could be totally off-base, I dunno. The soccer team is certainly a striking standalone case. But I'm glad somebody else likes to think of this as a good country, when it gives them a chance.
edit: By the way, I JUST noticed earlier this week that the country's population is now best rounded to 340 million. Update your lexicons from 330! (And just 660 million to go, Matt!)
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.
To counter that, I went to a high school and had a neighboring rival high school that would send a handful of athletes a year to the Ivy League. The majority of these kids would not gotten in without sports, but they were generally 1300+ SATs and good grades - folks who did fine there. Funnily enough, the most marginal one academically made $20m doing some kind of options trading and basically retired by the age of 30.
Athletics are great but intramural or club sports are a much better complement to being a full-time student than official NCAA athletics. I follow volleyball and I think the Stanford volleyball team put in something like 17,000 miles last fall as a west coast team in the Atlantic Coast Conference - they basically spent the entire fall semester doing zoom school.
The odd thing to me is for men's volleyball they just ignore the whack football conferences and make volleyball-specific regional conferences instead. I don't know why they don't do the same thing for all sports that aren't football and men's basketball. There are no TV deals for women's volleyball outside the NCAA tournament, there's no need to put the students through all this.
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.
It's weird when people reach a conclusion like "I don't enjoy this thing, and it has negative externalities, so clearly it has no merit, even though millions of other people clearly enjoy it."
Like, come on, you want to get rid of "go [school]"? You want to get rid of rivals? Of mascots? This is something people CARE about.
Plenty of colleges and universities without meaningful athletics programs to choose from. And it doesn't really matter anyway. I earned bachelors degrees from one school with D3 athletics and one school that wins basketball championships constantly - it didn't really affect my academic experience in either case.
Nobody thinks we can or should completely eliminate college sports. But it's not beyond the pale to ruminate that perhaps, just perhaps, the US takes it to extremes. Is it really pure positive that no academic anywhere comes near the salary of an SEC football coach (Kirby Smart makes 13 million!)? I'd be surprised if there aren't already a few cases in America where big time, defacto professional team sports are a net *drag* on university academics, operations, and resources.
I'd be a bit more blasé about all of this, mind you, if many of our political elites had not decided to launch a war on the academy. But they have in fact launched such a war. America can no longer take its hitherto unrivaled perch in global academics for granted. So these issues bear reflection.
Calm down. I didn't say we need to ban intercollegiate sports. My point was that even if we want people to benefit from athletics, it doesn't follow that the NCAA is the only way to do that. Nobody is coming after you and the thing you like.
Yea I too enjoy college sports and enjoyed going to a D1 state flag ship at a time when the basketball team was good.
Which isn't to say I totally disagree with GIP's point. I just think it's wrapped up in a larger questions of what college is for. One could make a case to run them like monasteries with no more than minimal accomodations, but that would go well beyond getting rid of the athletics. And to your point there are schools out there that don't have athletics programs of any note.
Is it that large a factor? I feel like we are talking about 5% of the 5% where the vast majority of students (95%+) go to school without this being a thing at all.
Or am I completely wrong and this is actually a big thing?
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.
I think you are trying to disentangle things that are naturally tied together. The big state schools that care a lot about their athletic programs are also the ones that have more, better, and larger facilities.
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 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.
Definitely a half-baked idea. The vast, vast majority of college athletes almost exactly meet the classic image of a student-athlete combining studies and sports. Men's football and basketball (along with womens soccer and basketball, to a certain extent) get all the attention, but they aren't representative. There's also all the student athletes in the DIII schools, and a plethora of women playing sports that most folks, frankly, just don't give a damn about.
There's no reason why the typical student-athlete should have athletic opportunities taken away from them just because we as a society can't get a grip when it comes to college football and basketball. And it is OUR fault as spectators because we're the ones that feed the money beast.
If you can't tell, yeah, this is personal for me. I was a 4-year athlete at a DI school in track and XC. I got a modest scholarship and one free pair of shoes a season. We travelled exclusively by bus to meets that were no further than 3-4 hours away. We formed strong teammate bonds and studied in between the 4x800 and the 3200. The idea that this sort of experience is somehow WRONG, or should be ended just because mens basketball and football are obscene cesspools of money and fame rubs me the wrong way. If folks don't like what football and basketball do to college athletics, fix those sports, and leave the rest of us alone to quietly keep on doing what we've been doing all this time with no one noticing or caring.
One thing I don't worry about is anyone being able to get rid of college sports. If there was even a hint of this being about to occur we would see the Second American Revolution.
It just gets exhausting to constantly hear people crap all over college sports mostly because of men's football and basketball. I don't particularly care for how huge they are either, but I don't take it out on the women's diving team. I just don't watch SEC football!
See my follow up post about Title IX. I called it one of the best cultural outcomes based on government policy in the past 50 years for a reason partly for reasons you cite in your post.
I'll say too that it's a bit personal for me too. The emphasis on extracurriculars in college admissions basically started as a way to limit Jewish enrollment at top colleges. But nowadays, its more about keeping down the number of East Asian and South Asian students. Was directly told that even though I had a decent number of extracurriculars, if I had done a sport, my chances of enrollment at an Ivy would have increased immensely. https://journalistsresource.org/home/selective-colleges-asian-americans-students-legacy/
Key quote "The analysis shows Asian Americans participated less often in high school sports and other activities outside the classroom, compared with white Americans. Asian Americans also were less likely to attend high school in rural areas or in less populated states such as Montana, Wyoming and Vermont.
“It’s not affirmative action keeping Asian American students from these selective colleges — it’s things like legacy admissions and geography, sports,” Goel says. “By saying we’re going to value things like legacy status and geographic diversity, we are pretty directly giving a boost to white students. It’s a predictable boost.”"
So its obviously not just sports, but it's part of the story for sure.
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.
Wait, what? I'd say if anything spin off the semi-pro teams and keep the college athletics programs for things that are, you know, college athletics. And I don't think we should do that either.
It's not water polo's fault we have a high Gini coefficient in the US! This is looking for a solution in a radically wrong place.
I would blame both college admissions and people who watch college sports and elevate their status for this. The fact is that unless you are getting a degree in water polo or golf or sailing, your ability in sports should not factor into college admissions at all. Because college sports is such a huge deal in the US, there's an arms race among colleges to recruit students good at sports when their main product is education. College admissions should be based on academics and nothing else.
"The real story is the latter sports disproportionately include kids from very privileged backgrounds."
I think it's possible that being a rich kid who excels at a rich kid's sport is an indicator that you possess talents and character traits that make you likelier not only to succeed but also to "deserve" your success -- i.e. it isn't only that you succeed because your dad can give you a giant loan to get you started in business (that's an advantage that all rich kids have whether they excel in sports or not) but that athletic achievement is proof that you have drive, tenacity, leadership skills, self-confidence, and/or some form of innate intelligence that may not entirely show up on the SAT. That would indicate that the "rich white affirmative action" that these colleges practice with these athletes is rational, and possibly even praiseworthy. I wouldn't expect a lot of these kids to become brilliant scientists or whatever, but I could see the skills that help them excel at sports also helping them to genuinely be better at business and a few other fields than the kid with the higher SAT score whom they displaced would have been.
It would be interesting to compare these athletes' outcomes against the outcomes of kids who are equally rich and white, and who have the same level of academic credentials, but who are not athletic enough to make it in college sports, not even in one of these "white sports."
I would say the last point you made is a biggie. Colleges being able to increase their endowments substantially is a pretty big deal; especially in a world of falling admissions generally. It's not a mistake that the schools with high profile college football or college basketball programs are seeing increases in admissions lately.
Speaking of which, the "Flutie effect" seems to be very real based on recent examples provided in this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutie_effect. Michael Vick wasn't included in this article but pretty sure similar story happened with Virginia Tech after 1999.
I don't know if it's still this way, but a lot of this "good for your college application" turned out to be not so true when admissions were closely examined.
My favorite was when U of Michigan was originally sued for discrimination, they had to turn over all their admissions data. It turned out that while they told their prospective students all this stuff about well roundedness, they were using a strict point score system that so heavily weighted grades and test scores that nothing less than regional or national level achievement moved the needle. President of your student body, zero points, captain of the football team, zero points. Mind you this all applied to general admissions; sports, legacy donors, and of course minority groups were admitted differently.
I suspect this is still mostly true, and most of the admissions guidance, even from admissions officers, is unsupported by data.
What? The Ivies may not offer sports "scholarships", but they do offer admissions to students who would not otherwise be accepted, and because 1) they can offer need based scholarships, and more importantly 2) they can offer these acceptances to less qualified upper middle class kids who can afford to pay, their sports teams, except for basketball and football, are nationally competitive and just as unfocused on academics as every other school..
That's true, and if like me you think that diversity is in and of itself a good thing, than it's a positive development. I'm a little more troubled by what it says about the rest of their admissions.
My son's friend was a standout rower, heavily recruited by a couple of Ivies plus Georgetown and Berkely. When his parents were asking the coaches about whether he would struggle when he got there they assured them he'd be fine. He went to a private Catholic high school, so he had a decent educational foundation, but nothing about his grades or test scores would remotely have made him a candidate for admission absent being 6'9" and ripped with muscles. What that tells me is these schools could set a cutoff and just hold a lottery and lose nothing in the quality of their admittees or academics.
To his very conservative father's horror, the kid turned everybody down, went to Colorado State so he could spend all his free time rock climbing, got a bunch of piercings and tattoos, and has been living his best life for the decade since he graduated high school.
"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".
Not only were those CD's ridiculously expensive, the record companies were reselling back catalogs for the 3rd time to people like my parents who'd bought the same albums on vinyl in the 70's, cassettes in the 80's, and then CD's in the 90's. It was absolutely a racket and I felt zero qualms about Napstering every song I might ever want from my dorm room.
Ask me about the time I dropped all my punch cards and had to figure out how to put them back in order before I could feed them into the card reader to run my program.
Ha! Never used punch cards, but my first computer was a 286 that ran DOS and had like a 20 MB hard drive. FedEx was throwing my dad’s work computer away and I fell where it landed
A local business accidentally put my dorm landline phone in their directory, so a couple of times a month, people would call up the phone tree for this company, try to transfer to the VP of Sales or whatever, and get my saying I didn't know how to transfer them since I was in a dorm room.
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.
Wow, yeah. When I was a teen in the 90's my secondhand Honda broke down after school and I didn't spend a quarter to call my parents, I called AAA toll-free. The driver asked me where I wanted to be towed, and I said take me to the dealership two towns over. Rode over with this stranger, worked something out with the service department, and then booked it several long & sweaty suburban office park blocks to my dad's office so I could catch a ride home before he left for the day.
I'm glad you brought this up. It is now my goal that in 6 years my preteen be this capable.
The first time my car broke down in high school, I blew out both my front tires driving in the snow and had to pull into the nearest parking lot, which just happened to be my old middle school's, which was not a great way to feel like a maturing teen to be back there.
It's not good to BE lost, but it's also not good to have NEVER BEEN lost.
Or to put it differently, better to have first had that experience in a relatively low-stakes environment like a US city, rather than during a phone-killing power outage in a third world country or something.
Science fiction plot: GPS goes out permanently nationwide and the economy collapses because no one knows where anything is. Old copies of Thomas Bros. maps go for $10,000. Zombie-like hordes surround luckless pedestrians asking them if they know how to get to Maple and Vine.
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.
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.
I'm 20 years older and came of age in the latchkey kid era when 7 years older olds would wear their house key on a string around there neck and let themselves in and watch TV and wait for their parents to get home from work. And by high school teenagers were an entity unto themselves.
But things were changing and we noticed the only kid being helicopter patented went to Harvard. I think that really influenced a lot of early oughts parenting.
Probably more so that the only way they could ensure their kids got good grades was to make sure they dedicated tons of time. Having been a high end tutor, a lot of rich kids are pretty useless
I just had a kid and have been thinking about this a lot. I remember working during the school year and working a lot of overtime during summers doing fulfillment in a warehouse for minimum wage. Working overtime during the summer would be something like $3.5k or maybe $4k after taxes. I'm not sure I learned much from the experience, and honestly, the marginal value of $3k or whatever is basically zero for me at this point. I much rather have my kid just hang out with friends or whatever. I'm sure the other stuff you accomplished mattered much more than working at Starbucks.
One valuable lesson can come for those who are smart and live in a "nice" suburb and do well in school. They can end up spending precious little time with people with an IQ below 120. In almost every business you're going to be dealing with customers and employees with IQs below (sometimes far below) 120.
My first boss in high school bounced a bunch of my paychecks and then went to jail for fraud, which was an interesting learning experience, just not the way my parents hoped.
At least anecdotal kids are struggling when their first job is at 22 and they are fresh out of college. School and work are very different things and the learning curve can be quite steep.
I think this is true, but I also think this has always been true. There might be reasons to suspect this is getting worse, but I don't think I would attribute it to fewer kids having worked in a warehouse or fast food restaurant.
As an obvious example - getting and keeping a job, hearing about a better opportunity and switching jobs, getting a raise or promotion, being put in a management role - even if it's just being a "key holder" who opens or closes the shop.
At the time, Georgetown was one of the few schools to have a non-binding early acceptance cycle, and as a way to encourage us to commit each acceptance letter was followed up a couple weeks later by a handwritten note from someone on the admissions committee. Out of the three essays I had to submit with my application, the job essay was the one they called out specifically in that note.
I'm sure there were other things I could've done that would also have looked good on my application - few of my college classmates ever held a job until interning somewhere as a junior or senior. It's just the automatic assumption that a job is something to be traded off against resume-building, rather than a part of it, that I disagree with.
I think you're arguing that holding a job has value for college admissions, which is something that most people here would agree with. For the median student though, the opportunity cost of a job is probably less valuable than focusing on academics to improve class ranking or test scores. This is somewhat a straw man since the median student isn't competing for selective college admissions or necessarily time constrained regardless, but I don't think children should be forced to start optimizing their lives at 13-14 anyways.
Right, I'm agreeing with the top-level comment. Nobody here says that jobs have no value for college admissions, but that is the predominant belief amongst the parents of students competing for spots in selective colleges.
Have you heard of Mama Bear Legal Forms? At least once a week an 18-year-old posts with some variation of "My parents asked me to sign something so they can help me if I get sick while away at college, but I read the forms and it says full power of attorney for health, education, and finances. What does this mean?"
Oh my. That being said, I’d pull my kid out of college if I was paying for it and they were phoning it in, and you don’t know unless you see their report card. Or if they were majoring in something like sociology or English without a career double major
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 and no cell phone. Though this was the golden years of 98-2000
I remember going on a road trip at 16ish, and when I got back my parents realized that they had thought I was going to a different place entirely, 8 hours in the other direction from home. They chuckled and shrugged about it. Also around that era.
Shit I’d go on road trips sometimes without even telling my mom lol. Call from the road “hey we’re in Atlanta we decided to go to this concert/rave/music festival at the spur of the moment”
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.
This is very true. In a lot of ways the entire concept of a "teenager" was invented by ad men to sell a lot more shit to the average american household. It's worked wonderfully!
Right, but if you're talking about working class families kids still had to go work in the factories alone or before industrialization go work out the fields alone without supervision (if we're talking about kids as 10+ years old).
And upper class families? How many kids were sent off to some boarding school when they were of age.
You're right to say kids having "autonomy" is actually pretty new and largely a post World War II phenomenon, but there's just no equivalent of today's surveillance technology that allows parents to monitor their kids activities from literally hundreds of miles away.
I don't think that the Boomers are wrong that adolescent independence is probably good overall. I just think that it's important to note that this wasn't the norm.
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.
I grew up very lower working class. Everybody I knew worked as soon as they could. No one gave cash back to their parents, but they were responsible for pretty much any expenses they faced outside of the house. And you had to leave your house.
Weed and beer as mentioned, but also food, gas for a car, entertainment such as movies, and any stylish clothing beyond basics. If you had no money you simply didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything. But you didn't do that at home, because there was literally nothing to do there and no way to even talk to your peers. You just hung out in some public space --- street corner, school yard/basketball court, parking lot where you couldn't get into easy mischief, etc.
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.
I got a $15 a month clothing allowance starting at age 13, and any money I earned was extra. If I'd had to give up the clothing allowance, I wouldn't have done any babysitting or lifeguarding.
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.
You mean back in the day when people were poor and kids had to help support the family? Because that’s not how it was for middle class kids in the 50s/60s.
Poverty is kind of a relative measure…anyway we were talking about the phenomenon of kids taking summer jobs. Poor people didn’t do summer jobs, they dropped out after 8th grade to go to work in most cases.
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.
The idea of an ISA against both parents' incomes for a set period of time...seems perfectly reasonable to me if designed with protections in place and in such a way that doesn't preclude additional kids.
I'll push back on that. If you can afford for one spouse to stay home it's great. Instead of spending all your free time doing all those chores, they are already done. That way you actually get family time together.
Doesn't reduce the financial risk for the SAH spouse. And maybe, with two incomes, you can hire some outside help for certain chores. Another thing to consider, given that childcare is both physically exhausting and mind-numbingly dull at times, not having to do it 24 hours a day frees up some brainspace and physical capacity to do household chores without hating your life.
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.
This will accelerate if the job market softening reflected in recent statistics picks up speed.
It will be very interesting to see how the jobs trend proceeds as we await the BLS jobs reports over the next . . . oh who am I kidding. The job market will be booming! Greatest job market ever!
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.
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.
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
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.
You have to look at the margin -- if joint filing didn't exist, then the marginal dollar of income for a SAHM married to a well off man would be worth maybe 40 cents more. That obviously changes some people's incentives.
That’s not how normal people evaluate this, and not how the numbers actually fall out - the top tax bracket is 37%, the lowest 10%, for a 27% max difference, and most very rich men marry well educated women whether those women choose to work or not.
This has the same effect the other way, for husbands - 45% of women make as much or more than their husbands. And that percentage is steadily increasing.
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 don't think it makes a big difference because overall it's more likely that people will leave due to wanting another job than go on maternity leave. In the five years I've been on my team we've had three men leave and two women leave due to just regular promotions or churn, and one person go on maternity leave. Either way you're not going to assign a whole super important months-long project to one person without some kind of plan in place for what to do if they leave.
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.
EVERYTHING is a push, though. A state law changes some arcane regulation around depreciation schedules for commercial real estate or something? Great, you just (dis)incentivized RTO and therefore pushed women to (stay/not stay) in the workforce.
This is a shove, not a push, and strikes me as a bit condescending that women can’t figure out what works for them without Wise Policy Men leaning on the scales.
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.
I understand most workplaces have the rule that if you're working remotely and have young children at home, you *must* have a full-time caregiver for the children to cover your work hours (a hired babysitter/nanny, stay-at-home spouse, grandparent). You *cannot* simultaneously work remotely full-time and care for your children full-time. Not if you want to do more than a half-assed job.
" you can’t work and take care of kids (or elders) at the same time."
This assumes that you need to be taking care of people 100% of the time. But depending on the circumstances you might just need to be there in case of emergencies.
For example, our kids are 10 and 8. Too young to be left totally on their own, but they can do basically everything for themselves, and you just need someone their to make sure they don't burn down the house, and tell them to go play outside.
It is true that you can’t work from home and take care of your kids in the home at the same time. However, this discounts real quality of life reasons dedicated, hard-working people who prioritize work during work hours still prefer remote.
Most parents live closer to their child’s school than to their own workplace so there’s considerable time saved with commuting and fewer logistics with pick-ups and appointments. There’s also money saved by not eating out for lunch, needing fewer clothes for the office, gas, etc.
I lean pro-RTO for productivity reasons but we should be realistic about the reasons people prefer WFH.
I mean its grandma’s job to take care of the kids and clean your house, but we should be dramatically reducing work hours while keeping pay constant anyway
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.
Congratulations on twenty years! We’re at 15 here. Ha, we’ve felt like we were married since very early on. But we ended up buying a house together before we got married which is kinda the closest you could get pre-Obergefell. The things you could do when houses cost $100k!
Yep, same basic consideration between my wife and me (now over 10 years ago). We got engaged in shortly after she finished her master's program (while I'd already joined the workforce). Near the end of the year, as we were starting to plan out our wedding and costs, we did the math on how much more money I'd get back if we were married when I filed my taxes and eloped about two weeks later. Doing it that way, my tax return basically paid for the "wedding" we did the following year.
One of my biggest mistakes was getting married on December 30. (The December 30 part, not the getting married part.) Would have saved so much money had we delayed a couple days.
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.
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.
I am unsure if eliminating Joint taxes would be better or worse (unless we go for the punitive married filing separately brackets) as there is a large marriage penalty for high dual income families (E.g. two lawyers, two doctors, two engineer families) under the current system although it doesn't have as big an impact on disincentivizing work.
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.
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.
I think the idea would need to be coupled with offsets elsewhere - eg remove the joint filing, adjust the total scale of income taxes, and then also provide tax relief for parents in some other form.
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.
Why give notice? A company that has already broken promises AND openly admits they don't actually care if you quit deserves no courtesy. Better yet just stop giving a shit about the work, do the minimum or less, and above all work only 9-5. You may get lucky and they'll let you go with some reason to collect unemployment.
I don't usually feel this way, but the whole theory of capitalism is you reap what you sow. They've sown being a shitty employer, they should be reaping shitty performance.
Absolutely, this has been my approach to work for the last six months or so. However, other factors have made the organization dysfunctional and toxic, and the hit to my mental health is becoming too burdensome.
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.
I hate to see stay at home moms being coded as "tradwife." Liberals should own the concept as part of the freedom of choice. You are a SAHM because that's what you *choose* and you have an external career because that's what you want to do. You alternate between paths again because that's how you want to live your life.
Right wing philosophy about the role of women has nothing to do with it. Women, like men, have different values and should have the freedom to pursue their ambition, in or out of the home. Right wingers would like to limit their choices.
And it would be nice if our society and economy facilitated that freedom of choice more.
Everything seems like a choice until you've personally done the math on child care costs. I promise you that a lot of people would be making different choices if they had different options.
"if policy choices allowed more parents of young children to opt out of the labor force"
Matt Y made it clear that one spouse staying home with the children 1950s-style is perfectly doable IFF the family is willing to accept a 1950s lifestyle: a 1000 square foot house for a family of four in a reasonably LCOL area (say, a suburb in the Midwest, not one of the "blockbuster" high-demand coastal cities), one car per household, vacation means a camping trip to a local state park not flying to a resort in the Caribbean, no fancy/expensive extracurriculars for the kids, eating out is a rare treat for special occasions, etc. Because one spouse is staying home with the kids, you don't need to pay tons for childcare, except maybe pay a local teenager to babysit your kids so you can have the occasional date night. See: https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-its-harder-for-families-to-thrive?utm_source=publication-search
You don't need a change in policy; you need a change in people's expectations.
I don't think that's really true in most places anymore. The increase in housing costs has been a nationwide phenomenon (with of course some local exceptions). If you are a family just starting out trying to buy a house, even an old 1960's house, that's just out of reach for the vast majority of families on one income.
Shoot it's hard enough for me, living in a rural area with all of our cars 20+ years old, haven't taken a real vacation in 8 years, and head of finance at a mid sized company.
In the linked piece, Matt Y specifically listed the sale price of a home in Cleveland and said "the mortgage would work out to $n/month, which is affordable assuming the husband earns $x/year (a reasonable amount)."
Nonetheless, your point is well taken, and just because it works for that specific location in Cleveland doesn't mean it would work for many/most locations around the country. Abundance/MOAR HOUSING really ought to be a popular position across the ideological spectrum.
Zillow, 2 bedroom house, 750-1250 square feet, near Omaha, NE: 115 listings, average price around $150k. That is absolutely affordable on a single $45k income.
I think the biggest factor for LCOL areas are the expectations around housing size. Even a fairly low-end house is likely to be 1500+ square feet these days. Which is fine, but that's a lot bigger than where people lived in the 50's.
$600k is above the median sale price for a SFH in all but about 15% of metro areas (and a 1200 sq ft home should be cheaper than the median one). So you probably live in an atypically expensive area. Which doesn’t mean that the housing market in your area isn’t awful and bad for families! But it does support the original point that it’s perfectly possible to live a 1950s lifestyle on one salary if you’re willing to live at the level of comfort of the 1950s.
"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."
There is only one force that actually moves the needle in the United States, and that force is profit. Subsidized day care costs money (from taxpayers or businesses), and two-earner households are good for corporate profits. You can blame the left/feminist preoccupation for this, but they're not really in the driver's seat here.
Repeat this analysis for every other issue you care about.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
I guess my inner-economist is confused because we're at 4.2% unemployment. I've had a front-row seat to trying to hire across ~ 8 different functional areas within the past 5 years. The labor market has soften slightly from the insane 2021-2 peaks but it's still a really tough market to hire from. I'm sure there's individual stories where a mom is struggling to find a fit after a 15 year break but they can't be the norm. Every public co. I know is looking under every rock to find talent. If we're talking very narrowly about a start-up not wanting to hire from mid-career age bands for entry-level positions ... I think that's a very different situation and I don't even know if it's a problem -- the culture fit there is real.
Like many folks, my direct work experience is limited to a handful of companies so it’s good to hear from your vantage point that this wouldn’t happen in places you have worked
Indeed, I often say I worked in the “corporate world” only to mention 5 minutes later that each company is its own unique adventure
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
Do you think the reasoning has any legitimacy at your place of employment? I mean in the statistical sense, not in the sense that they should actually figure out if the individual will actually do the job well? Would on older person be less likely to perform in the role?
I’ve never seen objective evidence of this…and we did measure variables on candidate performance (degree, university for example) I’m open to it if you’ve see it.
I’ve heard from some (others disagree) that mid-career folks have trouble learning to code…but not every job I was hiring for required this. I’m also aware of fluid intelligence declining with age…although crystallized intelligence seems to increase, while neuroticism also decreases…but it’s not clear how that effect job performance
In my experience working at a small/mid-sized firm in a department where the average hire is under 30, the few people we've hired over 40 have basically all been underperformers, to the point where I know that we legally cannot discriminate, and I do not want to break the law, but I'm almost frustrated that we can't because there is such a strong correlation.
But it might be an "all else isn't equal" situation. The types of people looking for entry level jobs at 40 are occasionally that army vet mentioned above, but usually are much weaker candidates than that
If you have 3 kids with a couple years in between them it can take a long time for them all to be school-age and not need full-time daycare anymore. My mom had her first kid at 25 and her last kid enter first grade at 40.
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. :)
“Higher unemployment rates for recent college grads” is another recent shift that’s been getting a lot of speculative explanations (AI adoption etc), but is probably just caused by bad macro.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Technologies which are complements to human labor rather than pure substitutes for it (which is where AI tools are right now) have added plenty of economic value.
Historically, pretty much all technologies that are complements to human labor also let you get larger amounts of output from smaller numbers of workers, but as usual, increasing the marginal productivity of the input increased demand for it. Now, this breaks once you get to perfect superior substitutes (see: ICEs vs horses), but we’re not close to that yet.
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.
Companies also have a better idea about the downstream effects of widespread, long-term remote work than they did five years ago. It would be awfully weird if they didn't! So we ought to see some gradual shift in policies like that as the compromises they represent can be better-informed, unless the original policy decisions were just magically lucky.
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.
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.
First, I realize this is mostly a mom thing, but there are also dads in this position - I know, because I was one of them. While it’s still rare for men to be married to women who make a lot more and therefore fall into the situation described in the post, we do and have existed.
Secondly, in our personal experience, taxes were a consideration, but other factors were much more dominant - like childcare. We looked at the “total cost of employment” including the financial costs - taxes, commuting, wardrobe, childcare, etc. - and compared that to the income I could get at the time. But we also considered the intangibles and PITA factors involving having three kids and two full-time working parents. Who has the flexible work schedule and can take a day off when the kids get sick, for example? How are we going to manage home tasks, like cooking? How would that disrupt our kids lives?
Every family will be different, but for us, it would take a significant increase in net income to make it worth it, and the ballpark threshold for us was at least $25k a year net. And at many places (my wife was active duty military) there just weren’t great work opportunities for me.
And I can see if someone has a remote work situation and then loses that, the calculation fundamentally changes. The cost of employment for the family goes up substantially. The PITA factors as well.
Our kids are mostly grown (one still in high school), my wife is no longer in the military, and I’ve worked remote for the past eight years (long before Covid). I could, in theory, get a higher paying normal job, but I’m happy with my current situation and someone would need to offer me a lot more money and good work life balance. My wife is half retired and works part time and volunteers part time. Things change.
I also wonder about the effects of demography. I'm turning 36 this year, from what I understand I'm right in the "bulge" part of the graph of the millennial baby boom, and my partner and I had our first kid in 2021. We also know large numbers of peers who have kids about the same age as ours (let's say from 3-6 years old). Maybe we are just seeing the marginal workforce participation drop of millennial moms who all have daycare aged-kids. Our daycare costs were in the neighborhood of $3,000 a month- that's $36,000 a year! if a woman in a two earner household is making let's say, $50,000 a year with a take-home of $40,000, the question, "should I just stay at home and take care of my own kid instead of earning an outside income that is almost entirely absorbed by paying other people to take care of my kid?" becomes serious. If that is your situation and you like time with your kid more than you like time at your job, its a win-win. In our case my wife and I both make too much money for that to have made any sense, so we just paid for daycare.
What shits! It’s your parents’ job to take care of your kids and make snide comments about your parenting choices and it’s your job to take care of them when they’re old, frail, and senile. That’s how families work. If grandparents don’t take care of the grandkids then it’s off to substandard Bedsores ‘r’ Us nursing homes when the time comes. I can’t fathom that being the case though. Every day through high school my dad’s parents were at our house when my mom was at work.
I swear a lot of the “go no contact” advice you see online is Chinese bots trying to undermine American families.
That’s tragic. I think that’s part of this story, too. One of the worse things about later and later parenting is older grandparents. My mom is 74 and rather spry for that age and can take care of my sister’s kids, and I’m glad my their dad’s family tended to have kids in their early 20s, their greats are still around and paternal grandparents are under 65
This is exactly the problem in my case (I'm in my mid-thirties). I have no parents/grandparents left, but my dad was 40 when I was born. Now that I have a kid, I of course wish I had them younger so we could have more time together, but I don't see how I could have ever had a kid in my twenties.
"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.
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.
Let me add that learning the oboe is a good idea because oboes are cool as hell. Clarinets are for noobs.
(Okay I actually like clarinets too.)
I think the skill curve on an oboe or violin is different than (eg) clarinet, sax, or trombone, where a relatively bad musician can get *decent* sounds out of the latter but it'll be intolerably bad for months for anyone around a beginner oboe/violin player. A good oboe or violin player sounds wonderful though!
My niece played the bassoon for this reason. That was when I learned about the existence of this instrument.
Bassoon? How pedestrian! The *REAL* avantgarde plays the contrabassoon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrabassoon [/JK to be clear]
I think Ivy League schools would look more favorably at the Sandinistabassoon.
My god, that looks like an awkward accident waiting to happen.
Rain Wilson plays bassoon and he turned out ok!
I don’t think that was the point.
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)
The US being utterly dominant in women's sports, even in sports that our men suck at, is a huge credit to our society, and also a great example of ACTUAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM that 0% of us appreciate because we're too busy looking for and dwelling on our failures.
"The US being utterly dominant in women's sports"
Is it though? If I remember correctly, the EU consistently gets more per capita golds at the Olympics than the US. US is just unique in being massively bigger than any other developed country.
I'm all for "US is a great country, actually", but I don't think this is an example of that.
The Olympics set up favors the European countries.
Europe can have a maximum of 54 potential athletes participate in the Olympics. The US can have 2.
Now in reality, the European countries get far fewer, but it’s still multiples of 2.
This means that the US ends up leaving their 3-10th place finishers out of the Olympics even though they might be on average stronger athletes than those from other countries. Once the Olympics start it only takes one performance to get or lose a medal.
Well, the EU has a higher population than the US (450 vs. 340 million.) But that is possible.
I guess when I think of the American exceptionalism in sports I'm thinking of traditionally-male team sports like basketball and soccer, as opposed to individual sports that have always had ultracompetitive women's events. I also think it's something that probably peaked in the 1990s and that the rest of the world has been catching up on.
Or I could be totally off-base, I dunno. The soccer team is certainly a striking standalone case. But I'm glad somebody else likes to think of this as a good country, when it gives them a chance.
edit: By the way, I JUST noticed earlier this week that the country's population is now best rounded to 340 million. Update your lexicons from 330! (And just 660 million to go, Matt!)
We should not begrudge colleges for recruiting players for money-making sports or even to some extent forward looking donation-genic students.
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.
We must estimate class signifier elasticity
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.
I had a high school classmate who got into an Ivy for sports and he might have legitimately been the dumbest person in our class.
Should underrepresented groups (dumb people) not have access to elite education?
To counter that, I went to a high school and had a neighboring rival high school that would send a handful of athletes a year to the Ivy League. The majority of these kids would not gotten in without sports, but they were generally 1300+ SATs and good grades - folks who did fine there. Funnily enough, the most marginal one academically made $20m doing some kind of options trading and basically retired by the age of 30.
Athletics are great but intramural or club sports are a much better complement to being a full-time student than official NCAA athletics. I follow volleyball and I think the Stanford volleyball team put in something like 17,000 miles last fall as a west coast team in the Atlantic Coast Conference - they basically spent the entire fall semester doing zoom school.
The current big-time sports landscape is definitely extremely fucked. UCLA does not need to be playing at Rutgers every year.
I think the MAC has (or had) it right--pure coach bus league.
The odd thing to me is for men's volleyball they just ignore the whack football conferences and make volleyball-specific regional conferences instead. I don't know why they don't do the same thing for all sports that aren't football and men's basketball. There are no TV deals for women's volleyball outside the NCAA tournament, there's no need to put the students through all this.
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.
It's weird when people reach a conclusion like "I don't enjoy this thing, and it has negative externalities, so clearly it has no merit, even though millions of other people clearly enjoy it."
Like, come on, you want to get rid of "go [school]"? You want to get rid of rivals? Of mascots? This is something people CARE about.
Plenty of colleges and universities without meaningful athletics programs to choose from. And it doesn't really matter anyway. I earned bachelors degrees from one school with D3 athletics and one school that wins basketball championships constantly - it didn't really affect my academic experience in either case.
Nobody thinks we can or should completely eliminate college sports. But it's not beyond the pale to ruminate that perhaps, just perhaps, the US takes it to extremes. Is it really pure positive that no academic anywhere comes near the salary of an SEC football coach (Kirby Smart makes 13 million!)? I'd be surprised if there aren't already a few cases in America where big time, defacto professional team sports are a net *drag* on university academics, operations, and resources.
I'd be a bit more blasé about all of this, mind you, if many of our political elites had not decided to launch a war on the academy. But they have in fact launched such a war. America can no longer take its hitherto unrivaled perch in global academics for granted. So these issues bear reflection.
Calm down. I didn't say we need to ban intercollegiate sports. My point was that even if we want people to benefit from athletics, it doesn't follow that the NCAA is the only way to do that. Nobody is coming after you and the thing you like.
Yea I too enjoy college sports and enjoyed going to a D1 state flag ship at a time when the basketball team was good.
Which isn't to say I totally disagree with GIP's point. I just think it's wrapped up in a larger questions of what college is for. One could make a case to run them like monasteries with no more than minimal accomodations, but that would go well beyond getting rid of the athletics. And to your point there are schools out there that don't have athletics programs of any note.
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.
Is it that large a factor? I feel like we are talking about 5% of the 5% where the vast majority of students (95%+) go to school without this being a thing at all.
Or am I completely wrong and this is actually a big thing?
That's great, but such athletes shouldn't necessarily get scholarships or preferential admission.
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.
I think you are trying to disentangle things that are naturally tied together. The big state schools that care a lot about their athletic programs are also the ones that have more, better, and larger facilities.
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
> 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.
Definitely a half-baked idea. The vast, vast majority of college athletes almost exactly meet the classic image of a student-athlete combining studies and sports. Men's football and basketball (along with womens soccer and basketball, to a certain extent) get all the attention, but they aren't representative. There's also all the student athletes in the DIII schools, and a plethora of women playing sports that most folks, frankly, just don't give a damn about.
There's no reason why the typical student-athlete should have athletic opportunities taken away from them just because we as a society can't get a grip when it comes to college football and basketball. And it is OUR fault as spectators because we're the ones that feed the money beast.
If you can't tell, yeah, this is personal for me. I was a 4-year athlete at a DI school in track and XC. I got a modest scholarship and one free pair of shoes a season. We travelled exclusively by bus to meets that were no further than 3-4 hours away. We formed strong teammate bonds and studied in between the 4x800 and the 3200. The idea that this sort of experience is somehow WRONG, or should be ended just because mens basketball and football are obscene cesspools of money and fame rubs me the wrong way. If folks don't like what football and basketball do to college athletics, fix those sports, and leave the rest of us alone to quietly keep on doing what we've been doing all this time with no one noticing or caring.
One thing I don't worry about is anyone being able to get rid of college sports. If there was even a hint of this being about to occur we would see the Second American Revolution.
11 days to SEC football!
Lol, yeah, I agree!
It just gets exhausting to constantly hear people crap all over college sports mostly because of men's football and basketball. I don't particularly care for how huge they are either, but I don't take it out on the women's diving team. I just don't watch SEC football!
See my follow up post about Title IX. I called it one of the best cultural outcomes based on government policy in the past 50 years for a reason partly for reasons you cite in your post.
I do think its important to note that emphasis on sports from non-revenue generating sports has increased in last 20 years. For smaller colleges it is a way to boost flagging enrollment. But for even elite colleges it appears to be increasing emphasis. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwhite/2023/10/06/college-athletes-get-way-more-than-a-slice-of-the-admissions-pie/
I'll say too that it's a bit personal for me too. The emphasis on extracurriculars in college admissions basically started as a way to limit Jewish enrollment at top colleges. But nowadays, its more about keeping down the number of East Asian and South Asian students. Was directly told that even though I had a decent number of extracurriculars, if I had done a sport, my chances of enrollment at an Ivy would have increased immensely. https://journalistsresource.org/home/selective-colleges-asian-americans-students-legacy/
Key quote "The analysis shows Asian Americans participated less often in high school sports and other activities outside the classroom, compared with white Americans. Asian Americans also were less likely to attend high school in rural areas or in less populated states such as Montana, Wyoming and Vermont.
“It’s not affirmative action keeping Asian American students from these selective colleges — it’s things like legacy admissions and geography, sports,” Goel says. “By saying we’re going to value things like legacy status and geographic diversity, we are pretty directly giving a boost to white students. It’s a predictable boost.”"
So its obviously not just sports, but it's part of the story for sure.
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.
Wait, what? I'd say if anything spin off the semi-pro teams and keep the college athletics programs for things that are, you know, college athletics. And I don't think we should do that either.
It's not water polo's fault we have a high Gini coefficient in the US! This is looking for a solution in a radically wrong place.
I would blame both college admissions and people who watch college sports and elevate their status for this. The fact is that unless you are getting a degree in water polo or golf or sailing, your ability in sports should not factor into college admissions at all. Because college sports is such a huge deal in the US, there's an arms race among colleges to recruit students good at sports when their main product is education. College admissions should be based on academics and nothing else.
Make them all intramural, don’t screw over the rowers and gymnasts.
"The real story is the latter sports disproportionately include kids from very privileged backgrounds."
I think it's possible that being a rich kid who excels at a rich kid's sport is an indicator that you possess talents and character traits that make you likelier not only to succeed but also to "deserve" your success -- i.e. it isn't only that you succeed because your dad can give you a giant loan to get you started in business (that's an advantage that all rich kids have whether they excel in sports or not) but that athletic achievement is proof that you have drive, tenacity, leadership skills, self-confidence, and/or some form of innate intelligence that may not entirely show up on the SAT. That would indicate that the "rich white affirmative action" that these colleges practice with these athletes is rational, and possibly even praiseworthy. I wouldn't expect a lot of these kids to become brilliant scientists or whatever, but I could see the skills that help them excel at sports also helping them to genuinely be better at business and a few other fields than the kid with the higher SAT score whom they displaced would have been.
It would be interesting to compare these athletes' outcomes against the outcomes of kids who are equally rich and white, and who have the same level of academic credentials, but who are not athletic enough to make it in college sports, not even in one of these "white sports."
College sports (beyond the club level) is bad for schools' education mission at every level except for alumni donations.
I would say the last point you made is a biggie. Colleges being able to increase their endowments substantially is a pretty big deal; especially in a world of falling admissions generally. It's not a mistake that the schools with high profile college football or college basketball programs are seeing increases in admissions lately.
Speaking of which, the "Flutie effect" seems to be very real based on recent examples provided in this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutie_effect. Michael Vick wasn't included in this article but pretty sure similar story happened with Virginia Tech after 1999.
You're not wrong. It's just too bad that it does so much damage along the way.
"college basketball and college football teams should almost be adjunct semi pro teams attached the university (they basically already are)"
You can delete the word "basically."
You could probably delete the "semi" as well.
I don't know if it's still this way, but a lot of this "good for your college application" turned out to be not so true when admissions were closely examined.
My favorite was when U of Michigan was originally sued for discrimination, they had to turn over all their admissions data. It turned out that while they told their prospective students all this stuff about well roundedness, they were using a strict point score system that so heavily weighted grades and test scores that nothing less than regional or national level achievement moved the needle. President of your student body, zero points, captain of the football team, zero points. Mind you this all applied to general admissions; sports, legacy donors, and of course minority groups were admitted differently.
I suspect this is still mostly true, and most of the admissions guidance, even from admissions officers, is unsupported by data.
Can you put Great Jeans on a resumé?
I was gong to say, "The Gap" but realized that woud date my my comment, so I asked GPT5 for some current retailers. :)
Neither of them are. Just make standardized tests harder and you don't need these dog and pony shows.
Incredible foresight by the Ivy League to forego offering athletic scholarships. They knew sports would crowd out academics and lo and behold it has.
What? The Ivies may not offer sports "scholarships", but they do offer admissions to students who would not otherwise be accepted, and because 1) they can offer need based scholarships, and more importantly 2) they can offer these acceptances to less qualified upper middle class kids who can afford to pay, their sports teams, except for basketball and football, are nationally competitive and just as unfocused on academics as every other school..
I had a friend whose son got into Harvard and he told me point blank that that only happened because the kid was a pretty good offensive lineman.
Sports is much lower key at the Ivies. Students athletes are still very much students, not gods amongst mortals like at D1 schools.
At the Ivies, the sports teams (in aggregate) are more diverse -- racially and economically -- than the rest of the student population.
That's true, and if like me you think that diversity is in and of itself a good thing, than it's a positive development. I'm a little more troubled by what it says about the rest of their admissions.
My son's friend was a standout rower, heavily recruited by a couple of Ivies plus Georgetown and Berkely. When his parents were asking the coaches about whether he would struggle when he got there they assured them he'd be fine. He went to a private Catholic high school, so he had a decent educational foundation, but nothing about his grades or test scores would remotely have made him a candidate for admission absent being 6'9" and ripped with muscles. What that tells me is these schools could set a cutoff and just hold a lottery and lose nothing in the quality of their admittees or academics.
To his very conservative father's horror, the kid turned everybody down, went to Colorado State so he could spend all his free time rock climbing, got a bunch of piercings and tattoos, and has been living his best life for the decade since he graduated high school.
"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".
Not only were those CD's ridiculously expensive, the record companies were reselling back catalogs for the 3rd time to people like my parents who'd bought the same albums on vinyl in the 70's, cassettes in the 80's, and then CD's in the 90's. It was absolutely a racket and I felt zero qualms about Napstering every song I might ever want from my dorm room.
Ask me about the time I dropped all my punch cards and had to figure out how to put them back in order before I could feed them into the card reader to run my program.
Marc forgot his diagonal line. Sad! You only make that mistake once.
Ha! Never used punch cards, but my first computer was a 286 that ran DOS and had like a 20 MB hard drive. FedEx was throwing my dad’s work computer away and I fell where it landed
If you want to hyper-date yourself, the generation where you brought a laptop but you also brought a land-line phone!
A local business accidentally put my dorm landline phone in their directory, so a couple of times a month, people would call up the phone tree for this company, try to transfer to the VP of Sales or whatever, and get my saying I didn't know how to transfer them since I was in a dorm room.
Have you children ever heard of punch cards? My first computer course was Fortran typed into decks of punch cards.
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
Thanks, I hate it.
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!
Many teenagers these days have never even seen the TV show Lost!
Wow, yeah. When I was a teen in the 90's my secondhand Honda broke down after school and I didn't spend a quarter to call my parents, I called AAA toll-free. The driver asked me where I wanted to be towed, and I said take me to the dealership two towns over. Rode over with this stranger, worked something out with the service department, and then booked it several long & sweaty suburban office park blocks to my dad's office so I could catch a ride home before he left for the day.
I'm glad you brought this up. It is now my goal that in 6 years my preteen be this capable.
The first time my car broke down in high school, I blew out both my front tires driving in the snow and had to pull into the nearest parking lot, which just happened to be my old middle school's, which was not a great way to feel like a maturing teen to be back there.
Counterpoint: not getting lost and having a reliable car that doesn't break down is better than the life lessons you learn when neither applies.
It's not good to BE lost, but it's also not good to have NEVER BEEN lost.
Or to put it differently, better to have first had that experience in a relatively low-stakes environment like a US city, rather than during a phone-killing power outage in a third world country or something.
Good point.
Science fiction plot: GPS goes out permanently nationwide and the economy collapses because no one knows where anything is. Old copies of Thomas Bros. maps go for $10,000. Zombie-like hordes surround luckless pedestrians asking them if they know how to get to Maple and Vine.
That's just an example. The modern equivalent would be allowing the kids to be in a position to solve their own problems.
Agreed!
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.
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.
I'm 20 years older and came of age in the latchkey kid era when 7 years older olds would wear their house key on a string around there neck and let themselves in and watch TV and wait for their parents to get home from work. And by high school teenagers were an entity unto themselves.
But things were changing and we noticed the only kid being helicopter patented went to Harvard. I think that really influenced a lot of early oughts parenting.
Probably more so that the only way they could ensure their kids got good grades was to make sure they dedicated tons of time. Having been a high end tutor, a lot of rich kids are pretty useless
I just had a kid and have been thinking about this a lot. I remember working during the school year and working a lot of overtime during summers doing fulfillment in a warehouse for minimum wage. Working overtime during the summer would be something like $3.5k or maybe $4k after taxes. I'm not sure I learned much from the experience, and honestly, the marginal value of $3k or whatever is basically zero for me at this point. I much rather have my kid just hang out with friends or whatever. I'm sure the other stuff you accomplished mattered much more than working at Starbucks.
I did a job like that and learned a valuable lesson that I should do well in school to avoid manual labor jobs.
I don’t think you actually have to work in a warehouse to realize that working in a warehouse is probably not an ideal career path.
One valuable lesson can come for those who are smart and live in a "nice" suburb and do well in school. They can end up spending precious little time with people with an IQ below 120. In almost every business you're going to be dealing with customers and employees with IQs below (sometimes far below) 120.
My first boss in high school bounced a bunch of my paychecks and then went to jail for fraud, which was an interesting learning experience, just not the way my parents hoped.
At least anecdotal kids are struggling when their first job is at 22 and they are fresh out of college. School and work are very different things and the learning curve can be quite steep.
I think this is true, but I also think this has always been true. There might be reasons to suspect this is getting worse, but I don't think I would attribute it to fewer kids having worked in a warehouse or fast food restaurant.
As an obvious example - getting and keeping a job, hearing about a better opportunity and switching jobs, getting a raise or promotion, being put in a management role - even if it's just being a "key holder" who opens or closes the shop.
At the time, Georgetown was one of the few schools to have a non-binding early acceptance cycle, and as a way to encourage us to commit each acceptance letter was followed up a couple weeks later by a handwritten note from someone on the admissions committee. Out of the three essays I had to submit with my application, the job essay was the one they called out specifically in that note.
I'm sure there were other things I could've done that would also have looked good on my application - few of my college classmates ever held a job until interning somewhere as a junior or senior. It's just the automatic assumption that a job is something to be traded off against resume-building, rather than a part of it, that I disagree with.
I think you're arguing that holding a job has value for college admissions, which is something that most people here would agree with. For the median student though, the opportunity cost of a job is probably less valuable than focusing on academics to improve class ranking or test scores. This is somewhat a straw man since the median student isn't competing for selective college admissions or necessarily time constrained regardless, but I don't think children should be forced to start optimizing their lives at 13-14 anyways.
Right, I'm agreeing with the top-level comment. Nobody here says that jobs have no value for college admissions, but that is the predominant belief amongst the parents of students competing for spots in selective colleges.
Have you heard of Mama Bear Legal Forms? At least once a week an 18-year-old posts with some variation of "My parents asked me to sign something so they can help me if I get sick while away at college, but I read the forms and it says full power of attorney for health, education, and finances. What does this mean?"
Oh my. That being said, I’d pull my kid out of college if I was paying for it and they were phoning it in, and you don’t know unless you see their report card. Or if they were majoring in something like sociology or English without a career double major
is this weird though? Who else would an 18 year old have in an emergency if not their parents?
You don’t need Power of Attorney to be your kid’s emergency contact. That’s creepy AF.
Listing your parent as your emergency contact isn't going to help much when you're in a coma at the hospital and medical decisions need to be made.
Of course it will. They're still your next of kin
You're right; I was thinking this was more akin to having a will, but after reading about the Mama Bear thing it seems nuts.
Posts in r/legal advice, I mean
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 and no cell phone. Though this was the golden years of 98-2000
I remember going on a road trip at 16ish, and when I got back my parents realized that they had thought I was going to a different place entirely, 8 hours in the other direction from home. They chuckled and shrugged about it. Also around that era.
Shit I’d go on road trips sometimes without even telling my mom lol. Call from the road “hey we’re in Atlanta we decided to go to this concert/rave/music festival at the spur of the moment”
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.
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.
This is very true. In a lot of ways the entire concept of a "teenager" was invented by ad men to sell a lot more shit to the average american household. It's worked wonderfully!
Maybe the one real positive they gave us.
Latchkey kids were a thing, though? For a long time.
Sure, you weren't fully independent. You also had basically no support.
Right, but if you're talking about working class families kids still had to go work in the factories alone or before industrialization go work out the fields alone without supervision (if we're talking about kids as 10+ years old).
And upper class families? How many kids were sent off to some boarding school when they were of age.
You're right to say kids having "autonomy" is actually pretty new and largely a post World War II phenomenon, but there's just no equivalent of today's surveillance technology that allows parents to monitor their kids activities from literally hundreds of miles away.
I don't think that the Boomers are wrong that adolescent independence is probably good overall. I just think that it's important to note that this wasn't the norm.
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.
I grew up very lower working class. Everybody I knew worked as soon as they could. No one gave cash back to their parents, but they were responsible for pretty much any expenses they faced outside of the house. And you had to leave your house.
Weed and beer as mentioned, but also food, gas for a car, entertainment such as movies, and any stylish clothing beyond basics. If you had no money you simply didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything. But you didn't do that at home, because there was literally nothing to do there and no way to even talk to your peers. You just hung out in some public space --- street corner, school yard/basketball court, parking lot where you couldn't get into easy mischief, etc.
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.
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.
Me too.
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.
I got a $15 a month clothing allowance starting at age 13, and any money I earned was extra. If I'd had to give up the clothing allowance, I wouldn't have done any babysitting or lifeguarding.
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.
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.
'50's :)
You mean back in the day when people were poor and kids had to help support the family? Because that’s not how it was for middle class kids in the 50s/60s.
True enough, but I wonder if the median kid in the 50s qualified as “middle class.”. poverty was over 30% in the early 50s.
Poverty is kind of a relative measure…anyway we were talking about the phenomenon of kids taking summer jobs. Poor people didn’t do summer jobs, they dropped out after 8th grade to go to work in most cases.
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.
That probably ties out in a NPV sense. But it's hard to pay for daycare with a loan against your NPV.
(the financialization solution is "ISAs, except for daycare and linked to Mom's earnings," right? Oh god.)
The idea of an ISA against both parents' incomes for a set period of time...seems perfectly reasonable to me if designed with protections in place and in such a way that doesn't preclude additional kids.
Your retirement income point is spot on. Keep making those contributions!
I'll push back on that. If you can afford for one spouse to stay home it's great. Instead of spending all your free time doing all those chores, they are already done. That way you actually get family time together.
Doesn't reduce the financial risk for the SAH spouse. And maybe, with two incomes, you can hire some outside help for certain chores. Another thing to consider, given that childcare is both physically exhausting and mind-numbingly dull at times, not having to do it 24 hours a day frees up some brainspace and physical capacity to do household chores without hating your life.
"Doesn't reduce the financial risk for the SAH spouse"
Fair, of course most divorces are initiated by the wife. And that's less of a problem if people actually mean "till death do us part"
Yes, you have more money to pay for outside help. But it seems silly to go to work just to pay someone else to do your chores and childcare.
Of course if you are making REALLY good money, then the calculus is different.
But it's going to need to be a lot.
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.
This will accelerate if the job market softening reflected in recent statistics picks up speed.
It will be very interesting to see how the jobs trend proceeds as we await the BLS jobs reports over the next . . . oh who am I kidding. The job market will be booming! Greatest job market ever!
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.
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.
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
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.
You have to look at the margin -- if joint filing didn't exist, then the marginal dollar of income for a SAHM married to a well off man would be worth maybe 40 cents more. That obviously changes some people's incentives.
That’s not how normal people evaluate this, and not how the numbers actually fall out - the top tax bracket is 37%, the lowest 10%, for a 27% max difference, and most very rich men marry well educated women whether those women choose to work or not.
This has the same effect the other way, for husbands - 45% of women make as much or more than their husbands. And that percentage is steadily increasing.
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 don't think it makes a big difference because overall it's more likely that people will leave due to wanting another job than go on maternity leave. In the five years I've been on my team we've had three men leave and two women leave due to just regular promotions or churn, and one person go on maternity leave. Either way you're not going to assign a whole super important months-long project to one person without some kind of plan in place for what to do if they leave.
The woman looking to get pregnant is less likely to leave. All were similar ages at similar life stages?
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.
EVERYTHING is a push, though. A state law changes some arcane regulation around depreciation schedules for commercial real estate or something? Great, you just (dis)incentivized RTO and therefore pushed women to (stay/not stay) in the workforce.
This is a shove, not a push, and strikes me as a bit condescending that women can’t figure out what works for them without Wise Policy Men leaning on the scales.
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?
Just unintended consequences and we need to be aware of these things when people say “X is an unabashed good.” Tradeoffs exist.
I suppose it is a tradeoff, but one so clearly to the pro that it’s almost not one. Work shouldn’t be so hard
Hard work should be well compensated for the demands
Maybe there should just be less demands? Sounds like the Scandinavians do it right
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.
I understand most workplaces have the rule that if you're working remotely and have young children at home, you *must* have a full-time caregiver for the children to cover your work hours (a hired babysitter/nanny, stay-at-home spouse, grandparent). You *cannot* simultaneously work remotely full-time and care for your children full-time. Not if you want to do more than a half-assed job.
Don’t call out us lazy folks
" you can’t work and take care of kids (or elders) at the same time."
This assumes that you need to be taking care of people 100% of the time. But depending on the circumstances you might just need to be there in case of emergencies.
For example, our kids are 10 and 8. Too young to be left totally on their own, but they can do basically everything for themselves, and you just need someone their to make sure they don't burn down the house, and tell them to go play outside.
It is true that you can’t work from home and take care of your kids in the home at the same time. However, this discounts real quality of life reasons dedicated, hard-working people who prioritize work during work hours still prefer remote.
Most parents live closer to their child’s school than to their own workplace so there’s considerable time saved with commuting and fewer logistics with pick-ups and appointments. There’s also money saved by not eating out for lunch, needing fewer clothes for the office, gas, etc.
I lean pro-RTO for productivity reasons but we should be realistic about the reasons people prefer WFH.
I mean its grandma’s job to take care of the kids and clean your house, but we should be dramatically reducing work hours while keeping pay constant anyway
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.
Yep. This is a no brainer.
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.
Congratulations on twenty years! We’re at 15 here. Ha, we’ve felt like we were married since very early on. But we ended up buying a house together before we got married which is kinda the closest you could get pre-Obergefell. The things you could do when houses cost $100k!
These are very long times in gay years, it seems
Yep, same basic consideration between my wife and me (now over 10 years ago). We got engaged in shortly after she finished her master's program (while I'd already joined the workforce). Near the end of the year, as we were starting to plan out our wedding and costs, we did the math on how much more money I'd get back if we were married when I filed my taxes and eloped about two weeks later. Doing it that way, my tax return basically paid for the "wedding" we did the following year.
Given the many many many documented benefits of marriage for raising kids, hell yes we should be promoting people getting and staying married.
One of my biggest mistakes was getting married on December 30. (The December 30 part, not the getting married part.) Would have saved so much money had we delayed a couple days.
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.
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.
I am unsure if eliminating Joint taxes would be better or worse (unless we go for the punitive married filing separately brackets) as there is a large marriage penalty for high dual income families (E.g. two lawyers, two doctors, two engineer families) under the current system although it doesn't have as big an impact on disincentivizing work.
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.
“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.
There is only an incentive if the tax amounts shift, and small amounts are much more important at lower tax brackets.
I think the idea would need to be coupled with offsets elsewhere - eg remove the joint filing, adjust the total scale of income taxes, and then also provide tax relief for parents in some other form.
Very much agreed, we shouldn't be pushing them into one choice or another, we should be putting them in a position where they are free to choose.
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
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
Nice! Will be sweet when you give your notice.
I have daydreams about it 😊
Why give notice? A company that has already broken promises AND openly admits they don't actually care if you quit deserves no courtesy. Better yet just stop giving a shit about the work, do the minimum or less, and above all work only 9-5. You may get lucky and they'll let you go with some reason to collect unemployment.
I don't usually feel this way, but the whole theory of capitalism is you reap what you sow. They've sown being a shitty employer, they should be reaping shitty performance.
Absolutely, this has been my approach to work for the last six months or so. However, other factors have made the organization dysfunctional and toxic, and the hit to my mental health is becoming too burdensome.
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.
I hate to see stay at home moms being coded as "tradwife." Liberals should own the concept as part of the freedom of choice. You are a SAHM because that's what you *choose* and you have an external career because that's what you want to do. You alternate between paths again because that's how you want to live your life.
Right wing philosophy about the role of women has nothing to do with it. Women, like men, have different values and should have the freedom to pursue their ambition, in or out of the home. Right wingers would like to limit their choices.
And it would be nice if our society and economy facilitated that freedom of choice more.
Everything seems like a choice until you've personally done the math on child care costs. I promise you that a lot of people would be making different choices if they had different options.
Thus my last sentence.
"if policy choices allowed more parents of young children to opt out of the labor force"
Matt Y made it clear that one spouse staying home with the children 1950s-style is perfectly doable IFF the family is willing to accept a 1950s lifestyle: a 1000 square foot house for a family of four in a reasonably LCOL area (say, a suburb in the Midwest, not one of the "blockbuster" high-demand coastal cities), one car per household, vacation means a camping trip to a local state park not flying to a resort in the Caribbean, no fancy/expensive extracurriculars for the kids, eating out is a rare treat for special occasions, etc. Because one spouse is staying home with the kids, you don't need to pay tons for childcare, except maybe pay a local teenager to babysit your kids so you can have the occasional date night. See: https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-its-harder-for-families-to-thrive?utm_source=publication-search
You don't need a change in policy; you need a change in people's expectations.
I don't think that's really true in most places anymore. The increase in housing costs has been a nationwide phenomenon (with of course some local exceptions). If you are a family just starting out trying to buy a house, even an old 1960's house, that's just out of reach for the vast majority of families on one income.
Shoot it's hard enough for me, living in a rural area with all of our cars 20+ years old, haven't taken a real vacation in 8 years, and head of finance at a mid sized company.
In the linked piece, Matt Y specifically listed the sale price of a home in Cleveland and said "the mortgage would work out to $n/month, which is affordable assuming the husband earns $x/year (a reasonable amount)."
Nonetheless, your point is well taken, and just because it works for that specific location in Cleveland doesn't mean it would work for many/most locations around the country. Abundance/MOAR HOUSING really ought to be a popular position across the ideological spectrum.
Zillow, 2 bedroom house, 750-1250 square feet, near Omaha, NE: 115 listings, average price around $150k. That is absolutely affordable on a single $45k income.
I think the biggest factor for LCOL areas are the expectations around housing size. Even a fairly low-end house is likely to be 1500+ square feet these days. Which is fine, but that's a lot bigger than where people lived in the 50's.
I bought my 1960's starter track home in 2010 for $200k, 15 years later it's now going for $600k. needless to say my income didn't increase by 3x
this is a 1200 sq foot home on a small lot with no AC.
That's just not affordable for any of average home buyer just starting out.
$600k is above the median sale price for a SFH in all but about 15% of metro areas (and a 1200 sq ft home should be cheaper than the median one). So you probably live in an atypically expensive area. Which doesn’t mean that the housing market in your area isn’t awful and bad for families! But it does support the original point that it’s perfectly possible to live a 1950s lifestyle on one salary if you’re willing to live at the level of comfort of the 1950s.
I lived in a little shithole bedroom community in CA (population about 40k). It was the place people moved to because it WAS cheap.
And again, not to long ago it was pretty reasonable, but prices just went crazy.
Now I'm in Southern Oregon, and it's a bit better, but not much. Shit's still too expensive.
"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."
There is only one force that actually moves the needle in the United States, and that force is profit. Subsidized day care costs money (from taxpayers or businesses), and two-earner households are good for corporate profits. You can blame the left/feminist preoccupation for this, but they're not really in the driver's seat here.
Repeat this analysis for every other issue you care about.
"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?
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.)
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 definitely cringed at reading that too, and frankly have no idea what they mean by it even if I recognize it as a reference to the barbie movie.
But it also took me about 5 minutes to parse what ftlog meant, so maybe I'm just not cut out for the internet.
More and more #online, I feel the Abe Simpson walk-in-hang-hat-on-rack-walk-out scene.
ftlog is not commonly used, and thats on me.
Yeah WTH is kenergy?
I am Ken-ough whether I have Ken-ergy or not.
I opted for Oppenheimer that weekend, it’s a more interesting story and I’d rather look at Cillian Murphy anyway
I think I caught Oppenheimer at the end of opening weekend, and Barbie a week later. Both excellent.
They were both in theaters for like three months though . . . .
I Ken't get enough neologisms, myself!
The need to go viral in order to get noticed creates such bad incentives.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I guess my inner-economist is confused because we're at 4.2% unemployment. I've had a front-row seat to trying to hire across ~ 8 different functional areas within the past 5 years. The labor market has soften slightly from the insane 2021-2 peaks but it's still a really tough market to hire from. I'm sure there's individual stories where a mom is struggling to find a fit after a 15 year break but they can't be the norm. Every public co. I know is looking under every rock to find talent. If we're talking very narrowly about a start-up not wanting to hire from mid-career age bands for entry-level positions ... I think that's a very different situation and I don't even know if it's a problem -- the culture fit there is real.
Thanks Dave
Good to hear another perspective
Like many folks, my direct work experience is limited to a handful of companies so it’s good to hear from your vantage point that this wouldn’t happen in places you have worked
Indeed, I often say I worked in the “corporate world” only to mention 5 minutes later that each company is its own unique adventure
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
Do you think the reasoning has any legitimacy at your place of employment? I mean in the statistical sense, not in the sense that they should actually figure out if the individual will actually do the job well? Would on older person be less likely to perform in the role?
I’ve never seen objective evidence of this…and we did measure variables on candidate performance (degree, university for example) I’m open to it if you’ve see it.
I’ve heard from some (others disagree) that mid-career folks have trouble learning to code…but not every job I was hiring for required this. I’m also aware of fluid intelligence declining with age…although crystallized intelligence seems to increase, while neuroticism also decreases…but it’s not clear how that effect job performance
In my experience working at a small/mid-sized firm in a department where the average hire is under 30, the few people we've hired over 40 have basically all been underperformers, to the point where I know that we legally cannot discriminate, and I do not want to break the law, but I'm almost frustrated that we can't because there is such a strong correlation.
But it might be an "all else isn't equal" situation. The types of people looking for entry level jobs at 40 are occasionally that army vet mentioned above, but usually are much weaker candidates than that
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?
If you have 3 kids with a couple years in between them it can take a long time for them all to be school-age and not need full-time daycare anymore. My mom had her first kid at 25 and her last kid enter first grade at 40.
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! :)]
“Higher unemployment rates for recent college grads” is another recent shift that’s been getting a lot of speculative explanations (AI adoption etc), but is probably just caused by bad macro.
If GPT-6 is another incremental improvement, the lack of AI replacement in a downturn could be a pretty bearish sign given its massive adoption
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Technologies which are complements to human labor rather than pure substitutes for it (which is where AI tools are right now) have added plenty of economic value.
Even given current levels of AI, it can replace a LOT of labor.
Historically, pretty much all technologies that are complements to human labor also let you get larger amounts of output from smaller numbers of workers, but as usual, increasing the marginal productivity of the input increased demand for it. Now, this breaks once you get to perfect superior substitutes (see: ICEs vs horses), but we’re not close to that yet.
You’re right — I meant bearish for their current stock market valuations, not the technology overall
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.
Companies also have a better idea about the downstream effects of widespread, long-term remote work than they did five years ago. It would be awfully weird if they didn't! So we ought to see some gradual shift in policies like that as the compromises they represent can be better-informed, unless the original policy decisions were just magically lucky.
“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
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 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.
First, I realize this is mostly a mom thing, but there are also dads in this position - I know, because I was one of them. While it’s still rare for men to be married to women who make a lot more and therefore fall into the situation described in the post, we do and have existed.
Secondly, in our personal experience, taxes were a consideration, but other factors were much more dominant - like childcare. We looked at the “total cost of employment” including the financial costs - taxes, commuting, wardrobe, childcare, etc. - and compared that to the income I could get at the time. But we also considered the intangibles and PITA factors involving having three kids and two full-time working parents. Who has the flexible work schedule and can take a day off when the kids get sick, for example? How are we going to manage home tasks, like cooking? How would that disrupt our kids lives?
Every family will be different, but for us, it would take a significant increase in net income to make it worth it, and the ballpark threshold for us was at least $25k a year net. And at many places (my wife was active duty military) there just weren’t great work opportunities for me.
And I can see if someone has a remote work situation and then loses that, the calculation fundamentally changes. The cost of employment for the family goes up substantially. The PITA factors as well.
Our kids are mostly grown (one still in high school), my wife is no longer in the military, and I’ve worked remote for the past eight years (long before Covid). I could, in theory, get a higher paying normal job, but I’m happy with my current situation and someone would need to offer me a lot more money and good work life balance. My wife is half retired and works part time and volunteers part time. Things change.
I also wonder about the effects of demography. I'm turning 36 this year, from what I understand I'm right in the "bulge" part of the graph of the millennial baby boom, and my partner and I had our first kid in 2021. We also know large numbers of peers who have kids about the same age as ours (let's say from 3-6 years old). Maybe we are just seeing the marginal workforce participation drop of millennial moms who all have daycare aged-kids. Our daycare costs were in the neighborhood of $3,000 a month- that's $36,000 a year! if a woman in a two earner household is making let's say, $50,000 a year with a take-home of $40,000, the question, "should I just stay at home and take care of my own kid instead of earning an outside income that is almost entirely absorbed by paying other people to take care of my kid?" becomes serious. If that is your situation and you like time with your kid more than you like time at your job, its a win-win. In our case my wife and I both make too much money for that to have made any sense, so we just paid for daycare.
Where’s grandma? This is grandma’s job!
Plenty of grandparents aren't interested in caring for their grandchildren full-time. Recommended reading: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-grandparents-who-are-meh-on-grandkids?utm_source=publication-search
What shits! It’s your parents’ job to take care of your kids and make snide comments about your parenting choices and it’s your job to take care of them when they’re old, frail, and senile. That’s how families work. If grandparents don’t take care of the grandkids then it’s off to substandard Bedsores ‘r’ Us nursing homes when the time comes. I can’t fathom that being the case though. Every day through high school my dad’s parents were at our house when my mom was at work.
I swear a lot of the “go no contact” advice you see online is Chinese bots trying to undermine American families.
Grandparents aren't local is the short answer
Sounds like a fixable problem most of the time.
My grandkids are in Boston.
I don't want to move to Boston. I want them to move here. But their parents don't want to move here.
All the grandparents are based over an hour from us and none are retired. They visit, but we can't rely on them for regular weekday care.
Grandma 1 + 2 are in the ground.
That’s tragic. I think that’s part of this story, too. One of the worse things about later and later parenting is older grandparents. My mom is 74 and rather spry for that age and can take care of my sister’s kids, and I’m glad my their dad’s family tended to have kids in their early 20s, their greats are still around and paternal grandparents are under 65
This is exactly the problem in my case (I'm in my mid-thirties). I have no parents/grandparents left, but my dad was 40 when I was born. Now that I have a kid, I of course wish I had them younger so we could have more time together, but I don't see how I could have ever had a kid in my twenties.
We have to reduce the COL for young people and YIMBY is necessary but not sufficient