"Families have responded by relying more on a second working parent’s income, which economists have tended to celebrate. More people working more hours means higher household incomes and GDP. But that perspective suffers from an enormous blindspot: the value of the non-market labor that parents perform at home and in their communities."
I've now lived a bit over half of my life in the US, the first half having been Eastern Europe, 90s just after the collapse of communism and with all the attendant issues of conversion to (whatever abominable cleptocratic approximation of) free market economy my motherland now operates under. Even after all these years of exposure to a different ways of thinking, I find the notion of economists *celebrating* more people in a household working and, consequently, increasing household incomes and GDP, a completely bizarre one. Perhaps due to a (vastly?) different upbringing, I've always held that leisure time and time spent with family and friend's enjoying their company was the ultimate goal - not the economic value we create in and of itself. Economic value was, at most, the enabler for the quality leisure time, but really nothing more. Same goes for labor in general, market or non-market variety - merely an enabler for quality leisure time. To see human lives viewed exclusively through the lens of the economic or labor value they can provide feels - and always will feel - existentially depressing. It seems like people continue to conflate economic output and happiness as if the correlation was 1:1 and causation was undeniable beyond any possible scrutiny, which is offensively naive...
As a progressive I don't disagree with the solution Oren proposes. What I do object to is his continued distortions about who does what policy. Progressives support what he proposes. Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians have forced the help options to require workforce participation. That's absolute reality and arguing otherwise is simply lying. Oren's trying force a square peg into a round hole. It's tiresome and wrong. Just be an extreme economic progressive with a conservative social bent. That's fine and respectable.
100% agree. *Most* conservatives do not support cash benefit programs, and *most* progressives would happily sign on to one. Look if Hawley/Rubio/Romney can get the R's to pass a cash benefit for parents, fantastic. But I'm not holding my breath.
"B. This is not a big problem. It is how the economy is supposed to work. Parents are choosing to work more and consume more, and if they want they can also choose to work less and consume less."
Let me be completely clear. I'm so done with the mommy wars or telling anyone, family, woman particularly, how to organize their lives. The economy is not designed to make us consume more. It's a measurement of the sum total of our productive capacity and transactions that afford a way of life. If that's not the way it is designed it should be. Our children aren't consumers, my family wasn't created to be an anonymized number to promote national well being. Well being is an end in of itself. When women/men (secondary earner) like me say it's not worth it. That means there's a minimum threshold of traffic, missing events, missing your child first, bonding, exhaustion, organization, laundry, cleaning....that eats my time and our family's overall well being. I choose well being over money and that emphasis should be societal, especially when children are small and need the most care and parents are the most exhausted.
I'm happy to have women without children tell me I'm WRONG. Or someone else who hasn't actually done the labour.
My take on it is yes, direct cash to families to make raising your own kids easier. No to shoveling everyone off to subsidized commercial childcare as the only choice. I'll take it one step further. If the stay-at-home parent, whether single or married, gets subsidized to stay home and further subsidized to study parttime for a technical degree when the kids are little, then he or she can work parttime or fulltime - perhaps even from home - once the kids are in school most of the day and make breadwinner kind of money with their new degree rather than work a crappy job full time while the streets raise the kids.
Excellent piece. I would also argue that not only universal childcare but any additional massive entitlement expansion would require such increased taxation that it could force both parents to work.
I'm left-leaning on most social topics but here I don't see how cash to families isn't a better option than reduced childcare costs - IF the dollar impact to family was the same. I'd stop short of qualifying the decision to push for the latter over former as ideological, as I see no use in that, but I'd definitely like someone to explain why - again, provided that the dollar impact was identical - childcare cost reduction is a better choice than giving that money to families and letting them decide how to use it.
I think you underestimate the impact that tax and regulatory burdens have on the calculation of of adding a second income. Off the top comes, 15.3% for FICA as long as you earn less than $160k. Notionally, half of this is paid by the employer but that is a scam that just lowers wages. Then there is Federal income tax and state income tax in most places. I exclude sales tax and the various nuisance taxes as those are mostly driven by consumption. Children require a place to live and more require a bigger place so property tax is a factor. That impacts the decision to have children in the first place. You can have less property tax but there is a tradeoff with commuting costs and time which is potentially doubled with two incomes. The most obnoxious regulatory burden that affects this are the CAFE standards which forces Americans to have cars they don't want and don't fit their lifestyles if they have children. Try getting more than two car seats (I somehow survived to adulthood before they were invented.) into the mandated minicars. Even two impacts the amount of stuff you can haul around. Doing anything with children is like prepping for an expedition to the Himalayas.
I think you misplaced the golden years. It wasn't the 80s. With two kids and a non-working wife, I struggled financially during those years and I was distinctly above average in income. The 17% mortgage at the beginning of the decade was a killer. Judging by my parents, the golden years were the 50s and 60s. The wheels began to come off with LBJ's inflation which wasn't tamed for more than 20 years.
Can you elaborate a bit on the tax issues, I'm legitimately curious? I'm 40, and taxes have not impacted my decisions about kids at all (even moving to CO from NJ was about lifestyle, not property taxes, which are obviously much lower in CO).
I have never lived in NJ, thank God but I did raise my kids in CO during the good years. Overall tax burden in CO has dramatically increased since then. I haven't tracked the impact of the recent property tax relief but the fact that it was an issue tells you people did perceive it as a burden. Everything is at the margin and assumes all other things equal so your circumstances may vary from the norm. Mine did as my income was higher than average so I sucked it up and had the kids but it was far from easy financially.
Male (prime age) job participation has dramatically dropped since the 1970s. The emphasis on female work participation is intentional to plug this gap. (As is increased immigration.) Unfortunately, this only hides the the tragedy of a generation of young men lost to drugs, disability, and prison. Simultaneously, our population is rapidly aging, while lower birth rates only add to dwindling social security funds. The solution is to help young men get back into the job market. Not only would this give the economy some breathing room, lessening the need for more double income parents, it could also increase marriage and birth rates.
This argument leaves out one part of the story—stopping out of the labor market has an enormous impact on a woman’s ability to create wealth over her lifetime.
I'm single and don't feel it's fair to subsidize people who have chosen to have kids they can't afford. It's sad how the USA has deteriorated from the days of Ward and June Cleaver.
It's not uncommon for a society to subsidize things they believe important to the general welfare of the society. For example, public schools paid for by people with and without kids currently attending them, versus private schools paid only for having students currently enrolled. The rationale is that having an educated population has benefits for the overall society, not just for the students or their parents.
Some believe that it has likewise become rational for society to (somewhat) subsidize the raising of children, believing that doing so will result on an overall more functional and healthy future society (and others may disagree, obviously).
There is an underlying assumption beneath both examples - that people care about future society, that they feel vested in the future of humanity (or their country). That's not true of everybody; I met somebody who was clear that they did not care about future society, and did not want to be taxed today to head off, say, a climate catastrophe 30 years in the future when they would be dead. They had no emotional connection to the people they didnt' know, who would suffer from that, if it happened.
This is the underlying concept that I think Vance was gesturing at - postulating that "unmarried cat ladies" had less reason to sacrifice for future generations and were more often living just for today and for themselves, without concern about, say, whether social security would be available for their kids or bankrupt by then. I'm not saying I agree with him, I'm just trying to understand his point.
The idea that single people should not help subsidize the children of the society moves along similar lines. In this, I'm not talking about "fully supporting" as in paying for all the expenses of childraising, just a partial subsidy.
I'm not yet sure if I would support that, but this article gives me some perspective to reflect upon. It is better to subsidize child care so both parents can work, or to subsidize families so one parent can more often stay home? (Or, as you may prefer, subsidize neither). Is the social good that more people work full time rather than doing their own child care, or that society raise better and more competent/healthy children? Kind of depends on whether one is looking from a short term economic perspective or a sociological perspective looking at the future.
And you are suggesting that single people have a different set of priorities than people with kids, in regards to the future.
Interesting discussion. Just a quick reminder to not take JD’s views seriously, given his past very public displays of “intellectual honesty”. More importantly, he has thoroughly disqualified himself to hold federal office based on his election denialism. Committing to the peaceful transfer of power should be a prerequisite for support, no? Maybe he should spend less time at Lance Wallnau rallies and lying about Haitians if he wants to be taken seriously…
If we can begin to articulate a position in which we acknowledge a mutuality of child-rearing shared by fathers and mothers (the father as default breadwinner is a poor substitute for mutuality because of all of the other imbalances it presumes), then perhaps we can begin to speak meaningfully of working class security (a more inclusive category). I suspect that we will challenged to articulate such a position without the full range of voices that represent the complexity of our culture.
> "I suspect that we will challenged to articulate such a position without the full range of voices that represent the complexity of our culture."
Like including the voices who resonate with the default breadwinner model (specialization_ more than the mutual model (much less specialization), in the discussions? Yes, I agree that leaving them out would make it hard to come up with a realistic proposal.
"Families have responded by relying more on a second working parent’s income, which economists have tended to celebrate. More people working more hours means higher household incomes and GDP. But that perspective suffers from an enormous blindspot: the value of the non-market labor that parents perform at home and in their communities."
I've now lived a bit over half of my life in the US, the first half having been Eastern Europe, 90s just after the collapse of communism and with all the attendant issues of conversion to (whatever abominable cleptocratic approximation of) free market economy my motherland now operates under. Even after all these years of exposure to a different ways of thinking, I find the notion of economists *celebrating* more people in a household working and, consequently, increasing household incomes and GDP, a completely bizarre one. Perhaps due to a (vastly?) different upbringing, I've always held that leisure time and time spent with family and friend's enjoying their company was the ultimate goal - not the economic value we create in and of itself. Economic value was, at most, the enabler for the quality leisure time, but really nothing more. Same goes for labor in general, market or non-market variety - merely an enabler for quality leisure time. To see human lives viewed exclusively through the lens of the economic or labor value they can provide feels - and always will feel - existentially depressing. It seems like people continue to conflate economic output and happiness as if the correlation was 1:1 and causation was undeniable beyond any possible scrutiny, which is offensively naive...
As a progressive I don't disagree with the solution Oren proposes. What I do object to is his continued distortions about who does what policy. Progressives support what he proposes. Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians have forced the help options to require workforce participation. That's absolute reality and arguing otherwise is simply lying. Oren's trying force a square peg into a round hole. It's tiresome and wrong. Just be an extreme economic progressive with a conservative social bent. That's fine and respectable.
100% agree. *Most* conservatives do not support cash benefit programs, and *most* progressives would happily sign on to one. Look if Hawley/Rubio/Romney can get the R's to pass a cash benefit for parents, fantastic. But I'm not holding my breath.
The best cash-for-kids program isn't conservative at all, it's by socialist Matt Bruenig (https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pack/).
"B. This is not a big problem. It is how the economy is supposed to work. Parents are choosing to work more and consume more, and if they want they can also choose to work less and consume less."
Let me be completely clear. I'm so done with the mommy wars or telling anyone, family, woman particularly, how to organize their lives. The economy is not designed to make us consume more. It's a measurement of the sum total of our productive capacity and transactions that afford a way of life. If that's not the way it is designed it should be. Our children aren't consumers, my family wasn't created to be an anonymized number to promote national well being. Well being is an end in of itself. When women/men (secondary earner) like me say it's not worth it. That means there's a minimum threshold of traffic, missing events, missing your child first, bonding, exhaustion, organization, laundry, cleaning....that eats my time and our family's overall well being. I choose well being over money and that emphasis should be societal, especially when children are small and need the most care and parents are the most exhausted.
I'm happy to have women without children tell me I'm WRONG. Or someone else who hasn't actually done the labour.
My take on it is yes, direct cash to families to make raising your own kids easier. No to shoveling everyone off to subsidized commercial childcare as the only choice. I'll take it one step further. If the stay-at-home parent, whether single or married, gets subsidized to stay home and further subsidized to study parttime for a technical degree when the kids are little, then he or she can work parttime or fulltime - perhaps even from home - once the kids are in school most of the day and make breadwinner kind of money with their new degree rather than work a crappy job full time while the streets raise the kids.
Excellent piece. I would also argue that not only universal childcare but any additional massive entitlement expansion would require such increased taxation that it could force both parents to work.
I'm left-leaning on most social topics but here I don't see how cash to families isn't a better option than reduced childcare costs - IF the dollar impact to family was the same. I'd stop short of qualifying the decision to push for the latter over former as ideological, as I see no use in that, but I'd definitely like someone to explain why - again, provided that the dollar impact was identical - childcare cost reduction is a better choice than giving that money to families and letting them decide how to use it.
I think you underestimate the impact that tax and regulatory burdens have on the calculation of of adding a second income. Off the top comes, 15.3% for FICA as long as you earn less than $160k. Notionally, half of this is paid by the employer but that is a scam that just lowers wages. Then there is Federal income tax and state income tax in most places. I exclude sales tax and the various nuisance taxes as those are mostly driven by consumption. Children require a place to live and more require a bigger place so property tax is a factor. That impacts the decision to have children in the first place. You can have less property tax but there is a tradeoff with commuting costs and time which is potentially doubled with two incomes. The most obnoxious regulatory burden that affects this are the CAFE standards which forces Americans to have cars they don't want and don't fit their lifestyles if they have children. Try getting more than two car seats (I somehow survived to adulthood before they were invented.) into the mandated minicars. Even two impacts the amount of stuff you can haul around. Doing anything with children is like prepping for an expedition to the Himalayas.
I think you misplaced the golden years. It wasn't the 80s. With two kids and a non-working wife, I struggled financially during those years and I was distinctly above average in income. The 17% mortgage at the beginning of the decade was a killer. Judging by my parents, the golden years were the 50s and 60s. The wheels began to come off with LBJ's inflation which wasn't tamed for more than 20 years.
Can you elaborate a bit on the tax issues, I'm legitimately curious? I'm 40, and taxes have not impacted my decisions about kids at all (even moving to CO from NJ was about lifestyle, not property taxes, which are obviously much lower in CO).
I have never lived in NJ, thank God but I did raise my kids in CO during the good years. Overall tax burden in CO has dramatically increased since then. I haven't tracked the impact of the recent property tax relief but the fact that it was an issue tells you people did perceive it as a burden. Everything is at the margin and assumes all other things equal so your circumstances may vary from the norm. Mine did as my income was higher than average so I sucked it up and had the kids but it was far from easy financially.
Male (prime age) job participation has dramatically dropped since the 1970s. The emphasis on female work participation is intentional to plug this gap. (As is increased immigration.) Unfortunately, this only hides the the tragedy of a generation of young men lost to drugs, disability, and prison. Simultaneously, our population is rapidly aging, while lower birth rates only add to dwindling social security funds. The solution is to help young men get back into the job market. Not only would this give the economy some breathing room, lessening the need for more double income parents, it could also increase marriage and birth rates.
This argument leaves out one part of the story—stopping out of the labor market has an enormous impact on a woman’s ability to create wealth over her lifetime.
I'm single and don't feel it's fair to subsidize people who have chosen to have kids they can't afford. It's sad how the USA has deteriorated from the days of Ward and June Cleaver.
It's not uncommon for a society to subsidize things they believe important to the general welfare of the society. For example, public schools paid for by people with and without kids currently attending them, versus private schools paid only for having students currently enrolled. The rationale is that having an educated population has benefits for the overall society, not just for the students or their parents.
Some believe that it has likewise become rational for society to (somewhat) subsidize the raising of children, believing that doing so will result on an overall more functional and healthy future society (and others may disagree, obviously).
There is an underlying assumption beneath both examples - that people care about future society, that they feel vested in the future of humanity (or their country). That's not true of everybody; I met somebody who was clear that they did not care about future society, and did not want to be taxed today to head off, say, a climate catastrophe 30 years in the future when they would be dead. They had no emotional connection to the people they didnt' know, who would suffer from that, if it happened.
This is the underlying concept that I think Vance was gesturing at - postulating that "unmarried cat ladies" had less reason to sacrifice for future generations and were more often living just for today and for themselves, without concern about, say, whether social security would be available for their kids or bankrupt by then. I'm not saying I agree with him, I'm just trying to understand his point.
The idea that single people should not help subsidize the children of the society moves along similar lines. In this, I'm not talking about "fully supporting" as in paying for all the expenses of childraising, just a partial subsidy.
I'm not yet sure if I would support that, but this article gives me some perspective to reflect upon. It is better to subsidize child care so both parents can work, or to subsidize families so one parent can more often stay home? (Or, as you may prefer, subsidize neither). Is the social good that more people work full time rather than doing their own child care, or that society raise better and more competent/healthy children? Kind of depends on whether one is looking from a short term economic perspective or a sociological perspective looking at the future.
And you are suggesting that single people have a different set of priorities than people with kids, in regards to the future.
Interesting discussion. Just a quick reminder to not take JD’s views seriously, given his past very public displays of “intellectual honesty”. More importantly, he has thoroughly disqualified himself to hold federal office based on his election denialism. Committing to the peaceful transfer of power should be a prerequisite for support, no? Maybe he should spend less time at Lance Wallnau rallies and lying about Haitians if he wants to be taken seriously…
If we can begin to articulate a position in which we acknowledge a mutuality of child-rearing shared by fathers and mothers (the father as default breadwinner is a poor substitute for mutuality because of all of the other imbalances it presumes), then perhaps we can begin to speak meaningfully of working class security (a more inclusive category). I suspect that we will challenged to articulate such a position without the full range of voices that represent the complexity of our culture.
> "I suspect that we will challenged to articulate such a position without the full range of voices that represent the complexity of our culture."
Like including the voices who resonate with the default breadwinner model (specialization_ more than the mutual model (much less specialization), in the discussions? Yes, I agree that leaving them out would make it hard to come up with a realistic proposal.