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Why Child Care Is So Expensive

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Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#201

Post by mrfredward »

kelnos wrote: post #177
ng12 wrote: post #49

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.

>That assumes that the number of available jobs is perfectly-sized and fixed, and that there's no other work that could be done

No it assumes the exact opposite of a fixed number of jobs-- it assumes the other work wasn't being done because wages were too high to make it profitable, but as the workforce grew the price of labor dropped until employers wanted to hire into those jobs. That's the whole idea behind supply and demand.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#202

Post by kelnos »

zeveb wrote: post #40

> While it’s admirable for companies to fill the day-care vacuum, the absence of a national solution is an indictment of American policy. California is very different from Vermont which is very different from Mississippi. It doesn't make any more sense for the three to have identical child-care systems than it does for Denmark, Italy and Lithuania. I don't find his argument that only the federal government is large e…

> While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often.

I wouldn't expect that to necessarily be true at all.

Regardless, it's irrelevant: with more and more families opting to go dual-income, childcare services will continue to become more and more necessary. This problem isn't going away; it's only going to get worse.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#203

Post by ben7799 »

ouid wrote: post #71

>"In Massachusetts, which requires one caregiver for every three infants, the average annual cost is more than $16,000. In Mississippi, which allows a one-to-five ratio, the cost is less than $5,000." Even if the workers were making 100% of the costs of childcare, This means that the Mississippi employee is being paid half as much as the Massachusetts employee. Mississippi's economy is clearly not comparable to Massa…

On top of that the MA regulations are different in other ways. Any day care center in MA that is $16k+ you will find that 90%+ of the staff have at least a Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education. Probably not the case in a place where the average cost is less than $5000.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#204

Post by chris5745 »

jperras wrote: post #7

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…

How does the program affect the third factor- childhood development and social skills? Also, making money is fine, but are people happier? Healthier? Thanks for sharing.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#205

Post by darawk »

klipt wrote: post #197
darawk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more money going to work and sending your kid to daycare than being a stay at home parent. 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…

So, I think the argument would be that many mother's could go back to school and increase their skill-value to Y if they weren't stuck caring for children, maybe. I'm not sure. It's not clear to me that subsidized child-care is necessary, but I think if I were to make the argument, it'd look like that.

EDIT: Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care. Such that caring for the marginal child is substantially cheaper than almost anyone's potential income in the traditional labor force.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#206

Post by tharne »

pfortuny wrote: post #57
jperras wrote: post #7

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…

Agreed. There are very few things in life as important as raising one's children well. To say that we should incentivize or otherwise coerce people into outsourcing the upbringing of their own children so they can punch a time-clock is beyond misguided. We've elevated "careers" to an almost god-like status where we end up engineering our lives to serve our careers instead of the other way around.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#207

Post by strbean »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #77

Goodhart: When the metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure... (paraphrase) Seems like we've been moving all domestic productivity into the realm of Taxable GDP. Some say it's a conspiracy, for me it's just an observation. Home cooked meals has become meal prep kits, home delivery. ChildCare has been outsourced (out of the home or a small community of cooperating parents). Household cleaning to cleanin…

On the other hand, there are huge advantages to specialization. Professional cooks are less likely to cause food-borne illness, and can generally cook tastier, more varied meals.

Same goes for any other domestic work. Someone who cleans professionally can clean a house faster and better than someone who works in an office 8 hours a day. In fact, I'd bet a professional cleaner typically is faster and does a better job than a stay-at-home spouse who divides their time between every conceivable domestic task.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#208

Post by watwut »

ChaosDegenerate wrote: post #141
watwut wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social mores have dictated the man be the provider for centuries, if not millenia. That is kind of not true. 1.) That is what happens when there is no war, country is rich and when industrial revolutions take people to factories. When they worked on small family farm, both genders had to tend animals, do crafts and so on. Most of things had to be made. The work was gendered, physical strength mattered, but it was n…

I'm totally ignorant in all of that, but for me it just looks like out of sudden (historically) we have way too many males. They used to be killed during hunting, wars, competition with other males. Since 1945 we haven't had that. Men became not as hot commodity. This is the motor of the current social changes, isn't it? For example: only 40% of all Homo Sapiens Sapiens males that have ever lived were able to have of…

Your statistics would have 2 women to 1 male making the "norm is one male one female in marriage with children" completely impossible absurd standard.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#209

Post by tharne »

klipt wrote: post #197
darawk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more money going to work and sending your kid to daycare than being a stay at home parent. 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…

100%. We shouldn't be creating perverse incentives. Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone. For taxpayers, it's just more money out of their pocket and for the parents, you're being encouraged to leave your children with strangers so you can go and work a job that doesn't pay enough to cover the cost of paying those strangers.

We need to get past the ridiculous idea that staying home with one's children while their young is some sort of failure. It's not. It's valuable work, which coincidentally is why childcare is as expensive as it is. Frankly, given the importance of the work, I'm surprised childcare doesn't cost more.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#210

Post by zajio1am »

cortesoft wrote: post #100
ng12 wrote: post #49

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 is pretty well accepted fact in economics that a growing workforce is a good thing for economic growth. > it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. You are leaving out a crucial factor - the wages that the 'new' workers earn are going to be spent in the economy, growing the economy as a whole. This is increasing the 'demand' side of that supply and demand curve.…

It is more complicated - there is workforce and capital. In order to have higher labor productivity (or GDP per capita), you need higher rate of capital to labor, so you need that capital growth be larger than workforce growth.

If you increase workforce but not increase capital (or increase workforce more than capital), then it is true that economy as a whole (GDP) will grow, but GDP per worker will go down, there would be downward pressure to wages and upward pressure for capital yield.

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