81–90 of 172 posts
Ask the men, however, and it is almost always the wife.
And none of these folks were married or had kids yet. It is something ingrained from before that occurs.
> child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home. there are couples like this because the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. after ten years of this, you don't actually know your spouse any…
> the way they made kids + 2 careers work on middle class salaries is by dividing the day in half and each parent spends one half the day with the children and the other works. Who sets up their schedules like that in the middle class? Middle class jobs don't (typically) allow that one parent could work from 7-4 and another from 4-1am.
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I highly recommend the book "The Two Income Trap". It basically tries to prove that the transition to dual income households damaged the financial security of many families A great book. It can also be read profitably in conjunction with Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High . School districts are weirdly tied to real estate in the U.S.; many places with good districts also have severe land-use control laws that…
> but two-earner households are often also more economically fragile Can you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. When we were on a single income in my family, it felt a lot more fragile than now that we have two incomes.
It is more fragile because 1) it encourages living well beyond your means and 2) the odds of job loss/income reduction is now doubled and the stakes are higher as the second partner can't get a job to pick of the slack in the event of job loss.
It goes back to the old observation that people living paycheck to paycheck on $30,000 tend to also live paycheck to paycheck if their income increases to $60,000.
So if there is a hypothetical one income family making $40,000/year is unable to pay bills instead of reducing spending (who wants to do that?) the other partner starts working. Their lifestyle tends to rise with income and now they are just getting by with $60,000/year and put themselves in a more fragile place. This is how people tend to behave.
Instead they could have reigned in on their expenses a bit and perhaps taken on a second income to save for a rainy day.
The way to do two incomes (if at all possible) is to base your standard of living on just one. Use the other income to invest, save, or fuck around (travel, dinner, etc.). This type of two income house is much less fragile as savings and investments can accumulate, emergencies are easily taken care of, and spending can be reeled in in case of financial heartship. Either way with two incomes savings should be a very high priority to reduce fragility.
So two income households certainly can be less fragile but often aren't in practice.
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Babies are full of potential. Fresh college graduates...let's be honest...are less so.
Well, most babies will become fresh college graduates (or not even that), so I'm not sure I really follow your line of thought.
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> fresh college graduates are most valuable to society This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
I strongly agree that we need a healthy mix. However, for fresh college graduates there is more time left to pay off the investment we made in them as a society. In fact I believe they will be at their most productive a little later than that. But they get there as they get older. Edit: Typos
I guess from an economical sense college is expensive but... I don't know... how many college grads actually use their degree?
I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced. I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually peo…
Life is not limited to economics.
I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced. I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually peo…
> fresh college graduates are most valuable to society This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced. I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually peo…
> fresh college graduates are most valuable to society This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, most babies will become fresh college graduates (or not even that), so I'm not sure I really follow your line of thought.
Yeah, but a baby hasn't chosen a major, developed any mental illnesses, experienced any crippling trauma, or really done anything at all yet. A fresh college graduate is very often set for life when it comes to their career, brand preferences, political beliefs, religious beliefs, socioeconomic status, etc. but babies have a lot more variability in terms of possible outcome.
Well, they will or they will die trying.
I never understood the sentiment of valuing babies over all else. To me it always seemed obvious that fresh college graduates are most valuable to society, since we just finished investing a ton of money into them. Babies on the other hand are easily replaced. I get this is mainly an emotional argument, but it's still startling to me how opposite it is to the purely economic argument I made above. In fact usually peo…
> fresh college graduates are most valuable to society This seems to be a popular opinion on here and I really don't understand that. In fact its kinda fucked up. I can only guess there's a lot of fresh college grads on HN. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. I certainly don't want a society made up of fresh college grads who think they know it all.