Comment by SoftTalker

The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial argument for leaving the workforce.

This analysis is incomplete for a couple of reasons:

1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.

2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.

> The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".

It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.

My SO spent a few months collecting the neighbour's daughter along with our own from kindergarten and in exchange the neighbour would make dinner for us. This arrangement started because the neighbours' shifts didn't align with kindergarten hours.

At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.

It’s not measured in GDP but it is measured. For example right now it’s estimated that household production is around 23% of GDP. So quite sizable.

Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.

I have a suspicion a lot of the “why did wages stop keeping pace with the growth of the economy?” problem is because real productivity hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as our measures of it. But the measures are tied to ways for capitalists to extract more money, so that fake-growth does make line go up for owners. But there’s not nearly as much more actual work getting done as one might think from the numbers.

I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!

But what if Avery has the skills and training to watch 5 kids at once in a group?

They are very different.

In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.

In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.

Interesting game engine:

1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars

2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars

It's not just about the economy, it is about freedom of choice. What does Max and Avery feel about their careers? Would they rather be working or watching kids? If one parent has to stay home, that might mean having to give up a good career.

No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.

In Scenario B the government gets to collect more tax revenues, and also has additional levers to influence certain behaviour (the government will tax you, but give you a tax break if you do Y). Also, the government can make your labor worth less by printing money and increasing inflation.

It reminds me of Bujold.

“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”

Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”

Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”

Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”

Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”

“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”

> Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do

This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.

Why?

We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.

The government can set up free child care as it has already set up other similar programs.

How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?

Raising children is basically a full time job. Why not compensate it as such?

I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.

The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.

This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.

Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.

It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.

Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.

I think it’s more likely that UBI discourages business creation than encourages it.

Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.

Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.

A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.

Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.

UBI is both a pipe dream and unnecessary.

n = 1, but if we get UBI, I will immediately start a precious metals brokerage business.

Why is the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services (aka, the economy) the highest priority?

Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.

It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.

The Canadian economy is not doing very well.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

So tired of the argument.

Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.

Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.

The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.

While in a low trust society, which you obviously already have, people are most productive when they're at perpetual risk of starvation.

Slovenia doesn’t have free healthcare, only subsidized.

Source: https://www.gov.si/teme/znizano-placilo-vrtca/

Russia and some other ex-Soviet states have it, as a leftover of the Soviet system. But it persists because people find it essential.

Berlin, Germany. Admission from 1.5 y.o.

> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?

Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.

See https://www.statsforvalteren.no/innlandet/barnehage-og-oppla...

> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?

France AFAICT

https://www.newsweek.com/us-mom-unpacks-costs-child-care-par...

https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/explainer-how-childcare...

My kids very rarely got sick in pre-school (1-5 years old) or in school. Make sure they sleep enough and you are usually good.