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Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”

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Re: Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”

#91
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If both partners work then: - many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch - transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting - childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them - the choice of housing now has the add…

and your second income is taxed at your marginal rate, to pay for a $1 of child care you need around $1.33 to $1.50 in income. Put another way, avoiding $1 in expenses is like earning up to $1.5 at work. But the real issue is what the article points out, that this often leaves the stay at home parent “trapped” and dependent on the working spouse. What do you do when you’ve been out of the workforce 20+ years, kids ou…

If the earner dies: life insurance

If the earner leaves: alimony

It's not like we haven't solved these problems before. Yes, we could improve legislation around this but the basic idea is that if you have a contract with a partner where one of you earns the income and the other does the work at home then part of that contract is to recompense the person who is not working if the one who is fails to live up to their side of the bargain for whatever reason.

Re: Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”

#92
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If both partners work then: - many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch - transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting - childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them - the choice of housing now has the add…

> Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible. I agree. It would be absolutely crazy to split the workforce down the middle (housewife vs. everything else). It would be like if half the workforce was bakers or dentists.

The point is that a stay at home parent has more value than a single profession because two "labour units", if we must think of things this way to make it clear, are made less effective by having to practice their profession as well as maintain their home and raise their children. The argument in favour of a stay at home parent is that two working parents are made so ineffective that they are <50% capable as they were before forming a household so instead of 2 you now have less than 1 and in order to fix this one of them takes on all of the work of maintaining a household and raising the children while the other focuses their energies on their profession outside the home. This results in at least 1 full unit of labour but it may actually be greater than the average since the individual working outside the home may now be performing at a higher level since they don't even have to maintain the homemaking that a single person does. On top of that they gain the benefits of being in a stable relationship with a spouse and children and on top of that their relationship to both may be even better than other couples where both work. The person managing the household may even have a small participation in the labour force as mentioned in the article so you can add that to the total.
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