191–200 of 522 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If she did have a career she wanted to continue, the calculation is pretty strong on the 'riding it out until school'. You have to count ALL the salary you are going to make for the next 30-40 years of working, because sitting out for 5 years will have an effect on your income your entire career.
Unless she gets the job a the daycare - I hear they have money to pay well?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”. I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce. This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they hav…
I think you're missing the point of the "childcare is not part of the workforce" argument. It's not that it isn't work, and it's not that it isn't important. It's that, in many cases, the economic comparative advantage for the (often) female caretaker of those children is not being fully utilized. That is to say, caring for a child is a service that costs X. But it is being performed by a person who's skills are valu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes perfect economic sense: it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. The only confounding factor is whether the increase in workers increases the speed at which the economy grows/ I'd guess it probably does, but not enough to offset the downward pressure on wages.
> It makes perfect economic sense: it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. That assumes that the number of available jobs is perfectly-sized and fixed, and that there's no other work that could be done (or no under-employed, existing work that could be done better) if we had more workers. That would seem not to be true.
How would you explain the stagnant wages of the last 4+ decades compared to the massive economic growth? I don't think there's much evidence that the relationship between labor supply and economic growth is anywhere near one-to-one (e.g. one more person working means their wage is added to the volume of labor demand).
I have a child who stopped going to private day care a year and a half ago. For us it was more like $20-24k/yr for child care. There were centers near one of my workplaces that were more like $35-40k/yr/child. Anything near the trendy high tech office spaces in Boston/Cambridge is going to be in that > $30k/yr/child range.
I think there are nice profits being made because:
- The teachers/caretakers make 50% at best of what public school teachers make
- They just in time schedule the living daylights out of everything
- You can easily figure out the gross income of the "school" because the tuition figures are public and you can see the # of rooms in the school and calculate from regulation how many kids are there. They were always 95% full in my experience
- The expensive/fancy ones tend to be owned by big chains & franchises, those are not operations that exist without someone getting rich.
One of the biggest day care chains in the country is owned by Bain Capital.. they've made a lot of money on it. They don't get into stuff that isn't profitable.
My experience was even at the upper end of the market the product is pretty darn bad compared to public school systems in our area. The public school staff is amazing and incredibly professional compared to the private day care staff. Not even close. And the ratios for elementary school are better than pre-school/pre-K at expensive day cares in our area. And even if you took all our local & state taxes and gave 100% to the school it does not match what day care costs. And obviously the state & town do not give 100% of the money to the school system.
Sometimes I think childcare isn't expensive at all. There are these creatures I've nearly sacrificed my sanity for during their infant years, maybe got diminished mental capacity due to lack of sleep, given blood, sweat, tears, would risk life and limb for them...and here I go giving a total stranger $20/hour to (hopefully) do that in my stead for a short while.
I agree... we pay a dayhome (a licensed childcare in someone's home) $875/month which includes 9 hours of care per day and 3'ish meals per day. That's like $40/day or like $4/hour. Where else are you going to get that value?!
What value.
It doesn't have to be this way. Québec has had subsidized daycare for almost 25 years, and the program literally pays for itself (and more!) via increased income taxes from parents that would have otherwise chosen to stay at home. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/12/affordable-daycare-su... > In Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, a day of child care cost on average $10 in 2016 > Quebec’s program, which introduced lo…
“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”. I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce. This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they hav…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”. I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce. This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they hav…
I think you're missing the point of the "childcare is not part of the workforce" argument. It's not that it isn't work, and it's not that it isn't important. It's that, in many cases, the economic comparative advantage for the (often) female caretaker of those children is not being fully utilized. That is to say, caring for a child is a service that costs X. But it is being performed by a person who's skills are valu…
The people who choose to stay at home often either have multiple kids (higher X) or earn little enough (lower Y) that it's not an economic advantage for them to work. But those people would be a net loss (to the government) in the Quebec system too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's as if they read in "Brave New World" about the abolition of the family unit and they took that as an instruction guide.
That happened some time ago. In fact, one of the issues with so many women in the workforce is that in the 50's that same class of women were providing community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now. Frankly I am unsold on the benefit to society of women in the workforce. Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families? It's a taboo, now…
> community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now
What are you referring to in particular? Community booster orgs? The PTA?
> Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families?
Were families really that better off? I think back to the 50's and all I see is things like alcoholism, racism, parochialism, and insularity. I also see a world in the aftermath of WW2, where all other global-scale economies were devastated, save for the US, and could afford to pay husbands fantastic wages while mom stayed home and ran the house; those salaries aren't a reality now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you be more specific? What is the nature of this toil?
I've got two kids: 15 month old boy, 7 year old girl. With the boy, the toil is literally keeping him from killing himself. If you put him downstairs, he'll try to climb up the stairs. He'll climb on the couch and fall off the other side. He'll drop things in the toilet. He'll try to pull stuff off shelves. He'll climb up the chair onto the dining room table. He is not content to sit and eat. I gave him cornbread yes…