This is an incredibly important topic that is hugely underserved because it can be seen as sexist, as well as because it deviates from the narrative that non-commercially exploitative work is not valuable to society.
To be clear, being a homemaker is a gender-agnostic career, and there is even data that implies than men may be more ideal homemakers, with statistically superior social outcomes.
Especially when children are involved, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that homemakers perform one of the most important and critical jobs in society, with a social value on par with or higher than firefighters, police, doctors, and the like.
It is a tragic poverty that homemakers have been systematically and in many cases intentionally undervalued for their critical and life changing work.
I agree that homemaking has strong direct benefits for the people involved, but reduced criminality, better education, and better socioeconomic outcomes for children raised with parents as primary caregivers is not a nebulous attribution to societal benefit.
> All the throat clearing you feel the need to do is sexist.
This reply seems unnecessarily hostile, especially since you both agree that taking care of children is socially necessary and valuable.
According to the poll, 50% of women with children under 18 prefer a homemaker role, while 29% of men with children under 18 would prefer a homemaker role. That's a significant difference, to be sure, but 29% is far from 0%. It shouldn't be dismissed, and neither should the 45% of women with children under 18 who prefer to work outside the home.
I’m not trying to be hostile to OP. I’m addressing the fact that he feels the need to engage in a bunch of throat clearing just to say that it’s bad to devalue work that women disproportionately do and want to do.
You called the OP sexist, or at least the OP's so-called "throat clearing". An accusation of sexism is hostile, regardless of whether the accusation is warranted, and to be clear, I don't think it was warranted.
Please note the context. OP stated that the discussion is difficult because “it can be seen as sexist.” In other words, he feels the need to engage in throat clearing because others will perceive his point as sexist. My response is that it’s those other people—the ones creating the circumstances which make OP feel the need to engage in all the preliminaries—are being sexist.
Being a mother is very important to most women. Most women will have kids, most women who do consider it important work, and a majority of women would prefer not to work while their kids are under 18. We can just go ahead and say that it’s bad to devalue their work in home making without dancing around the point.
I wouldn't presume to psychoanalyze people I don't know. Perhaps you're right, or perhaps you're wrong, but in any case you wouldn't know unless you asked why and the OP answered.
> those other people—the ones creating the circumstances which make OP feel the need to engage in all the preliminaries—are being sexist.
Imaginary people, at this point.
> a majority of women would prefer not to work while their kids are under 18
It's 50% to 45%, presumably with 5% undecided, so I think you're overstating the situation a bit. You also appear to be ignoring or erasing men.
> We can just go ahead and say that it’s bad to devalue their work in home making without dancing around the point.
It depends on what you mean by value. The article argues in favor of paying stay-at-home parents, which means economic value. Speaking for myself, I value freedom of choice, in the moral sense of value, but I don't think there's much if any relation between moral value and economic value. Our economy values many things that I find morally abhorrent and devalues many things that I find morally commendable. Capitalism is simply economic supply and demand. I support the personal choice to have children, in the same way that I support the personal choice to play video games, but I don't think the government should finance the playing of video games, even if the majority of women, or the majority of men for that matter, considered it very important. In other words, the personal preferences of women are not specifically relevant with regard to what the government ought to finance. On the other hand, you could argue plausibly that the raising and education of children is crucial for a healthy and functioning society and thus ought to be financed by the government, regardless of how individual women or men feel about staying at home vs. working outside the home. It's an open question, though, whether such an argument would entail direct government payments to stay-at-home parents.
I agree with you here, but I’ve been shouted down before for saying that homemaking is valuable work. Perhaps I should not have couched my comment, but the reflex to do so didn’t appear in a vacuum.
No, I would do the same thing in your situation. I apologize if it came across as critical to you. I was trying to criticize the situation.
My wife’s a lawyer, and she did a trial nine months pregnant with our second. When we had our third, something clicked and she wanted nothing more than to stay home with him. My mom has a master’s degree in chemistry back in old country, then stayed home to raise us when we were young, then after we were teenagers was very successful selling furniture. Many women in my wife’s extended family, where most folks aren’t college graduates and don’t have exciting career options, would love to be able to quit their jobs.
If you’re trying to do everything you can’t do anything. It shouldn’t be taboo to recognize that raising children is a socially valuable function. Nor should it be taboo to recognize that society’s devaluation of that social rule particularly hurts women.
I think there is a huge and completely rational gap between social valuation and family valuation.
Homemakers provide most of the direct value to the household. Your firefighter, doctor, ect provide their value directly to those outside their household.
My neighbor might be a great cook and parent for their child, but I am much more thankful to plumber, who benifits me directly.
Sure, but someone still needs to raise the firefighters and doctors and plumbers. One's success at age 50 is directly tied to their family dynamic and financial situation at age 0-18. Saying you value a doctor but not the circumstances that made them a doctor isn't quite rational.
Here I’m talking primarily about effects in society in the form of child rearing outcomes.
The gap between outcomes where there is a stable division of a full time breadwinner and homemaker during formative years vs those where there is heavy involvement of daycare services is a very stark chasm.
But the economic stability has to be there as well, as this breaks down significantly in poverty.
Moving both partners in a domestic life into the workforce also creates strong downward pressure on wages, since it supplies an extra 30% or so employees into the workforce.
All in all the breakdown of a stable domestic workforce has been good for corporations but bad for children, employees, and stable home relationships. And if we look at the current state of affairs of partnering, it’s been bad for just about everyone.
> Moving both partners in a domestic life into the workforce also creates strong downward pressure on wages, since it supplies an extra 30% or so employees into the workforce.
By this argument, wouldn't having children and thereby increasing the population also supply extra employees and drive down wages?
Population increases consumption increasing demand for production in proportion to the expansion of the workforce - so no, that analogy does not follow.
No, population increases don't automatically increase consumption or demand, because those require money. Babies have no money. Economic consumption can occur only if someone gives you money, in most cases either an employer or a relative (such as a parent or spouse).
However, an expanded workforce is more productive and thus can allow for more overall consumption (as long as money is distributed somehow to consumers), which is why the addition of women to the workforce is not a negative. And there's actually no limit to an individual person's consumption, as long as they keep acquiring the money for it. Thus, a working parent may end up spending more money than a nonworking parent, which increases economic demand.
Of course, the compensation for specific jobs can vary dramatically, depending on localized supply and demand. In some cases there's an oversupply of labor, but in other cases there's an undersupply. Filling an undersupply of labor can certainly be a net positive. The devil is in the details. Theoretically, roughly speaking, more labor is always good overall, but needless to say, the distribution of income is not even close to equal, which can create localized situations where more labor available in a specific area is not beneficial to the existing labor in that area.
I'm ignoring the negative environmental consequences of increases population, which I normally wouldn't do. I just think it's very odd to argue that the addition of parents to the workforce is a negative while the addition of their children to the workforce is a positive.
Babies absolutely increase consumption. I can see you’ve never had one? Or maybe you just are way better at it than me lol.
Saving and investing etc are deprioritized during child rearing.
But my assertion is that population increases enable
Economic growth… and I don’t honestly think that is a debatable point. It’s hard to have a giant economy if you just have 100 people. But perhaps I should have said enabled growth rather than driving growth. More people are going to consume more, leading to more production. I think this is generally true in a healthy economy.
We shall see how the more workers = better pans out with the addition of general purpose anthropoid robots. I suspect we are going to find out what labor oversupply looks like in the next few decades.
>To be clear, being a homemaker is a gender-agnostic career, and there is even data that implies than men may be more ideal homemakers, with statistically superior social outcomes.
Source? Without proper controls this could easily be a case of "households who are in a situation where the man can be homemaker are better for kids", rather than "men being better homemakers".
“data that may imply” is very clearly speculative, I think, but the data I am referring to concerns single parent outcomes. It is difficult to say how that would translate to partnered men, and there is probably selection bias built in to this kind of study, but still, it supports the idea that men can be proficient homemakers. This isn’t an assertion of a conclusive study in any way, but I encourage you to look into it and share what you find.
IMO a government subsidy for homemakers will in reality be a subsidy for corporations who can now pay the working parent even less. What needs to be normalized is a single salary being enough to support a family of four, like it used to be.
I was thinking about this the other day. What we need is a tax on businesses that don't pay the area's single-income, livable wage. If companies pay more, they get out of the tax. If they pay less, they pay the tax. That tax then goes into making things like childcare more affordable. It's a way of forcing companies to internalize the externalities of paying below-livable wages.
There’s some subtle differences. The minimum wage is a hard floor, bumping it to 10$/hour isn’t going to destroy a significant number of jobs, but 25$/hour might.
If you set the minimum wage at say 10$/hour and the livable wage at say 20$/hour then you might tax the company 30% of the difference between your livable wage and the actual wage. (Effectively minimum wage becomes 13$/h, but that doesn’t all go to the worker.)
It’s still adds upward wage pressure because higher pay attracts better workers and your out a significant percentage of the difference either way but it reduces the risk of a big spike in unemployment when you raise the livable wage. It also means systemic wage theft more strongly attracts the attention of the IRS.
So then raise the minimum wage by 30%. I can't see how adding the government as an expensive middleman only to transfer the same amount of money from a company to a worker makes any sense.
Because 13$/hour isn’t a livable wage and there’s little incentive to increase it beyond exactly what you set the minimum wage to.
We’ve decided it’s ok to pay low enough wages that the government is subsidizing low wage workers working a full time job. 40 * 52 * 7.25$/hour is well below the threshold for 100% free health insurance for single people and families get major subsidies well past 13$/hour. Effectively forcing you to set it at ~20$ or subsidize companies.
I don't see any meaningful difference between compelling to employer to pay $3/hr in extra taxes (ie. the living wage tax as described by the OP), compared $3/hr in extra salary (ie. a minimum wage bump). Is this purely a branding exercise?
I don’t think it’s branding when you’d need several other changes to achieve similar effects.
Currently the government is effectively boosting workers past the minimum wage, because we’ve set the acceptable standard of living above minimum wage. However, we reduce benefits as wages increase which means workers have reduced incentive to seek minor changes in wages.
This system partially reverses that effect. A company paying an extra 1$ out of pocket increases the wages of a worker by 1.3$/hour so when they lose 0.3$/h in benefits they still see 1$/hour in higher wages. (Numbers are illustrative not necessarily how it would be implemented.)
PS: Think of it like having both a minimum wage and universal healthcare, in such a system there’s no penalty to higher wages.
>However, we reduce benefits as wages increase which means workers have reduced incentive to seek minor changes in wages.
>This system partially reverses that effect. A company paying an extra 1$ out of pocket increases the wages of a worker by 1.3$/hour so when they lose 0.3$/h in benefits they still see 1$/hour in higher wages.
This still feels like you're playing shell games. The only reason your example works is that prior to that marginal dollar, you added a 30% premium to the cost of labor, so you could return some of that 30% when wages go above some arbitrary amount. There's no free money. For people earning exactly the minimum wage, the effect to employers is exactly the same as hiking the minimum wage by an equivalent amount. Moreover, this is arguably a tax on the employee as much as the employer. For people earning exactly minimum wage, employers are forced to pay $3/hr (or whatever) in employee costs, but none of that went to the employee. Had the minimum wage simply been bumped, the employee would be free to spend the money however he sees fit, but with your scheme he gets nothing. Sounds a lot like a minimum wage bump to $3/hr, and then the government immediately clawing it back. In other words, a tax.
> Sounds a lot like a minimum wage bump to $3/hr, and then the government immediately clawing it back. In other words, a tax.
Sure it’s a shell game, but reducing benefits when workers now make the new minimum wage is just as much a shell game.
Reducing benefits sounds like government savings not a Tax, but at the end of the day money is money and this money isn’t ending up in the workers pockets either way.
>Sure it’s a shell game, but reducing benefits when workers now make the new minimum wage is just as much a shell game.
It's not a shell game when it's doing what it says on the tin. Considering the fact that minimum wage predates welfare programs such as food stamps, it'd be difficult to argue that the reduction in benefits was some sneaky loophole. It was always the intended effect.
>Reducing benefits sounds like government savings not a Tax, but at the end of the day money is money.
"government savings" is cold comfort to all the people earning near minimum wage, who are at the greatest risk of getting laid off (or their hours cut) from such a change, and stand to gain nothing from such a law. At least with the minimum wage you could say the risk of losing their job is justified by higher wages.
> At least with minimum wage you could say the risk of losing their job is justified by higher wages.
Slightly increasing minimum wage mostly just saves the government money. After taxes it’s close to 1:1 with reducing benefits until well past current minimum wages. Larger jumps are seen as risky.
Theoretically there’s a number large enough for significant impact that’s still safe, but nobody wants to risk trying to find what it is. So how do you find a good number that does more than just save the government money?
It's an impossible problem to solve. If you want welfare programs to have means-testing, then almost by definition you'd have the welfare trap. Getting rid of means testing (ie. UBI) theoretically fixes the issue, but practically is a non-starter because that would increase the size of the program by several times.
Possibly, but I feel the welfare trap is more a coordination problem.
It’s easy enough mathematically to say for every dollar earned someone is entitled to keeps at least 40% of it or whatever arbitrary number is chosen. However when you have multiple means testing programs overlapping it’s easy for the combination to go so low as to become meaningless or worse negative. Especially with things like rent control or tuition.
Similarly, the welfare trap people makes lower annual pay jobs more appealing, which effectively subsidizes companies. I was looking at this as a means of patching over that issue, but yea fixing subsidies is a more direct solution.
>It's a way of forcing companies to internalize the externalities of paying below-livable wages.
How is paying someone under the minimum wage an "externality"? If the employment relationship is canceled, does that magically make the past employee not poor?
> What needs to be normalized is a single salary being enough to support a family of four, like it used to be
Is this an American thing or just a rich people thing? I can’t think of a single generation in my family going back to pre-ww2 where this was true. Everyone always worked. At least on the family farm.
The farm generations even put their kids to work. Our school system (Slovenia) has certain school vacations timed so kids can help with the harvest.
I think it’s a 20th century middle-class thing, and possibly mostly a USA thing. Before then, the mother usually had help, either paid or relatives. With the advent of home appliances and the impact of WW2, suddenly middle-class families were nuclear only and the wife was supposed to operate the house alone, like a factory worker punching buttons on machines.
FWIW, school being organized around harvest season was definitely a thing in the agricultural parts of the US when I was growing up. In fact, there were driving permits specifically for children in agricultural communities so that they could legally drive farming vehicles on the roads. During peak harvest season they needed every able body they could get.
The farmers would pay the kids a bit of money, which seemed like a lot of money to someone in elementary school.
Maybe they have different rules in other states but in mine the child of a farmer needs no license to drive vehicles on farm business. A 12 year old could be hauling 10 tons of grains behind them on a clapped out 50 year old truck and be legally okay. Or driving a tractors and such down the road.
Similar by my vague recollection. You could start driving for farm-related stuff at 12 years old but you needed a some type of paper indicating you were authorized by your parents to be driving around without an adult. You could get a more proper early driver’s license at 14.
It a US-centric dumbass nostaligia bullshit thing. I don't know where all these "good jobs that easily supported a family on a single wage earner" existed but I sure as hell didn't know anybody who had one.
Yeah, my grandfather worked in the mill. He was one of those "good jobs" everybody blathers about (overhead welder). Our family still grew a garden and raised fowl, and it wasn't because we were "healthy". It was because we were poor.
My other grandfather worked in the mines. Also one of those "good jobs"--until he got into an accident, and it shattered his arm. Still needed a garden to make the budget work even before the accident. Yeah, still poor.
My Dad was the first generation of college grads in the family and worked as a schoolteacher. He had to work the mill in summers to make ends meet until mandatory minimum salary came online in the state for teachers. He was constantly worred about how he was going to send me to a decent college--especially after the mills went down. Yeah, still poor.
Farms are an exception where everybody in the family always got worked like hell. There is a reason why all the farms in the US are dependent upon illegal immigrant labor--the work super sucks shit and you have to pay a lot of money before a legal citizen will take the job. Yeah, super poor.
Money quote: "Mike Connolly had a dream: an eight-hour day. A Pennsylvania steel worker for 41 years, he toiled for 12 or more hours a day behind the locked doors of a steel mill with no days off and little hope for the future.
If he worked eight hours a day, he imagined, “I could have a garden, a couple of hundred chickens and know my family…This way one doesn’t want to live long. What is the use of living, since one doesn’t enjoy life?”"
I desperately wish I could send people from this time back to work one of those "good jobs" they so extol. We'll see how long it takes you before you become a functional alcoholic like the rest of the men working those "good jobs".
Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher.
Why? Because drastically increasing the labor force drove down wages. We need a lot of childcare, restaurant workers, delivery drivers etc to support dual income households which obviously don’t pay very well. Worse households are paying a large fraction of that 20k on things like childcare and meals that used to be done by the stay at home parent.
"almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant.
>Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher.
"number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%.
Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better.
In my first link “In terms of constant (1960) dollars, the median family income increased from $4,000 in 1947 to $5,600 in 1960, or by 40 percent.”
That’s 40% in 13 years vs a 33% in 64 years and a great deal of “productivity improvement” from all those computers, etc.
And I’ll reiterate because you seemed to skipped that bit “productivity is vastly higher” and people are paying for stuff that was otherwise done by homemakers. I know many dual income households that pay for childcare, housecleaning, food prep, shopping, etc which should be subtracted from any income differential. Eating fast food isn’t necessarily a net positive over a home cooked meal even if it “boosts” GDP.
PS: There’s also other subtle differences, like commuting costs, but to a reasonable approximation none of our increases in standard of living comes from an increase in dual income households.
But a lot of those 40% simply didn't live lifestyles like today.
Everyone until my generation in my family lived in a single-income household. At least full-time income.
They also gardened - enough where canning skills were widely known and utilized. And picked up odd jobs - everyone, the wife and the kids as soon as they were able. Every single kid was working a part time job by age 15 and contributing to the household in some manner or another. Every kid did a serious chunk of daily chores to help out. Extended family assisting in basic child care, home repair, car maintenance, and other duties was the norm.
McDonalds and the like were absolute luxuries for special occasions like birthdays. Not the whole family. The parents and the one kid who's birthday it was. Your menu selection was strictly limited. Anniversaries for the parents were celebrated by the once a year "fancy dinner" at a place like Olive Garden.
The stay at home parent home cooked all the meals from basic (read: cheap but labor intensive) ingredients.
Kids invariably shared bedrooms, sometimes even 3 to a room. A single used car for a family of 6 was the norm. Every kid got two sets of clothing to start the school year, and if you ruined them you were out of luck or learning how to sew patches onto things. Hand-me-downs were the norm.
Houses were about half the size on average in my area.
These were folks everyone likes to wax nostalgic about as "solidly middle class" and lived in the "rich" suburbs.
From where I stand, most of what the dual income household did was simply increase lifestyle and asset inflation. It first started with some folks just "getting ahead" and choosing that life. It then turned into those folks bidding against anyone who wanted to keep costs down and turned a voluntary game into a mandatory one. The market is going to serve the majority and most profitable segment. If you wanted to buy a home, you were bidding against that dual income household willing to take on a 30 year mortgage and max out their finances. You were forced into it - 30% income rule be damned as there were no other choices with so many folks bidding homes and rentals upwards. Now we're at a point where all the fixed expenses have met the median dual income budget - there is nothing left to give. Things will get interesting.
That is certainly not the whole story, but it's a decent part of it very few talk about.
This ignores the fact that the number one expense in most households is housing, and housing is a positional good. There are only so many homes in places with good jobs, so everyone bids up the price up to the max they're willing to afford. "a single salary being enough to support a family of four, like it used to be" was only possible because the average household didn't have two earners. There was never a time where the average household had 2 earners AND you could support a family of 4.
Outside of economics, raising children is in society's interest. We need the next generation to grow up, become productive, and pay taxes. If a family elects to have one parent stay home, that parent is doing valuable work for society and should be compensated. At the very least they should be eligible for unemployment for the first two years of a child's life. I don't care about the externalities.
> We need the next generation to grow up, become productive, and pay taxes.
I think it would be even better if the next generation grew up, became productive, and learned to contribute to society in new ways outside of just the obvious monetary one. Overall, we need more non-monetary contributions to be recognized.
I don't really have an opinion on that one way or another, but in modern society the current working generation pays for the last generation's retirement. We literally need the next generation to be productive and pay taxes. If they're too busy doing economically unproductive work, taxes on everyone who does work will go up and retirement benefits will go down.
I think one of the biggest disasters of modern society is to relegate almost every sort of community task such as homemaking, assisting neighbors, etc. to the economic system. The immediate effect of such a relegation is the breaking apart of communities for the sake of economic efficiency: the person who takes care of the children is no longer the parent, the person who helps you fix your porch is no longer your neighbour, and the person you ask for a ride is now an Uber.
Yes, it may make for a more convenient society in some ways but I wonder if the cumulative effect is worth it? I don't think so. Economists hail efficiency and comparative advantage as a good thing, but it is also a reduction of true value to a single variable (money) which is a dimensional collapse that strips humanity from human beings.
The short-term results seem good, but because in the long-term, the process never stops, the END result is a transformation of human beings from people into cogs in an economic machine that has no soul.
> I think one of the biggest disasters of modern society is to relegate almost every sort of community task such as homemaking, assisting neighbors, etc. to the economic system
That's... capitalism.
Every aspect of your life needs to be financialized and exploited to generate profits for somebody who isn't you. Paid childcare is a profit opportunity. Community childcare is not.
The whole point of hyperindividualism is to destroy community because class consciousness, community, unions and class solidarity are an unacceptable threat to the economic order.
There is a price for everything. I think there are plenty communes that people can join if they want to retire from the typical modern life and have a simpler existence.
In capitalism, society gets what it rewards. If it wants more children it must pay the market price, just like everything else.
If it wants educated, productive children, it must also pay the market price and that price is exorbitant.
At some point, US tech companies will (maybe have already outspent) the US education system k-12 and at some point surpassing all the ivy colleges just for training some ai models.
This was a strange sentence: “Two such expenditures — Social Security and Medicare — are directed towards the care of the elderly.”
Erhm no? They are directed toward living expenses and medical expenses, both of which are huge. Some % may be elderly care taking but likely a relatively small % in any given year vs all seniors drawing benefits.
That’s what “taking care of the elderly” means to me at a societal level. It’s not literally just old folks’ homes and hospice care, it’s how we provide for people who have aged out of the workforce in general.
This either fetishizes the 1950s and "traditional" values or will be used to people who do. What never gets mentioned is:
1. The existence of a permanent underclass of low paid help that made this existence possible;
2. The postwar "traditional" existence was actually a very short period in history;
3. The "traditional" homemaker role was largely because people had no choice; and
4. The top marginal tax rate in the 1950s was 91%.
The author is correct that the capitalists want us working so they can take our surplus labor value as profits. Additionally, if we have to work, even better. Coercion is a necessary and desirable condition for capitalism.
However, fetishizing "traditional" values is a common Trojan horse for radicalizing people into fascism. Hitler sold himself as a moral crusader. He told German women their role was to create more Germans. German women would get medals from the state if they had enough children. The public had to be sold on the fear of "moral decay".
Does that sound familiar? It should if you've been paying attention.
This sort of thing has infected spaces inhabited by young men too. Julius Evola, the philosopher to Mussolini before graduating to the major leagues of Hitler, extols the virtues of traditional values and gender roles. He is a darling of the 4chan suburban latch key kids.
The government doesn't need to subsidize homemakers specifically. We simply need to pay people enough so that 2 people don't need 5 jobs between them to make ends meet. As wealthy inequality worsens, population growth stagnates. South Korea is really the poster child for that now (~0.7 children per woman, the lowest of any nation).
What we do now is subsidize corporations. Walmart employees are huge recipients of food stamps. Walmart has a grossannual profit of ~$150B. Why are they being subsidized by the government instead of, you know, just paying their workers a fair and living wage?
All of these problems come down to economics, specifically capitalism. This is capitalism working as intended. I'm amazed how often I see pieces like this that recognize the problems created by capitalism without capitalism ever being blamed.
By staying at home, my children receive a bespoke education and my family bespoke consumer products (e.g. food and entertainment) that far exceed anything my family can access through the market economy.
Just because I don't directly participate in the entrepreneurial system through taxable wages doesn't mean that I only marginally participate in it. My role is simply that of competing with business (in terms of efficiency and quality)--I find areas where I can do it better and more efficiently, then acquire capital and raw materials, use the capital to add value to the raw resources, provide those resources to the singular market that is my family, and then pocket the profit, which will inevitably be reintroduced back to the broader economy as investment and additional outlays, all of which are taxable.
The ultra-wealthy are afforded the right and ability to have exclusive access to personal assistants, au-pairs, tutors, professional chefs, gardeners, housecleaners, etc. I do all of these and more for my family (at well below market rate), using the same methods, tools, and products that they do, but the wages I receive and any profit (or losses) generated remain within my household such that it can be used for further consumption and investment. I still pay sales taxes on the capital and raw materials, but try to lower my tax burden and vertically integrate like any other business.
That I am free to choose to engage in this mutual exchange with my wife is the bedrock foundation of liberal capitalism and a free society. Frank Hyneman Knight, one of the forgotten architects of the Chicago School of Economics and the teacher of Milton Friedman frequently stated in his works that the individualism of liberalism should be more accurately called familism, because the basic effective economic unit is not the individual, but the family.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadTo be clear, being a homemaker is a gender-agnostic career, and there is even data that implies than men may be more ideal homemakers, with statistically superior social outcomes.
Especially when children are involved, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that homemakers perform one of the most important and critical jobs in society, with a social value on par with or higher than firefighters, police, doctors, and the like.
It is a tragic poverty that homemakers have been systematically and in many cases intentionally undervalued for their critical and life changing work.
Homemaking is self serving in a way that working in a factory (for example) is not.
This reply seems unnecessarily hostile, especially since you both agree that taking care of children is socially necessary and valuable.
According to the poll, 50% of women with children under 18 prefer a homemaker role, while 29% of men with children under 18 would prefer a homemaker role. That's a significant difference, to be sure, but 29% is far from 0%. It shouldn't be dismissed, and neither should the 45% of women with children under 18 who prefer to work outside the home.
You called the OP sexist, or at least the OP's so-called "throat clearing". An accusation of sexism is hostile, regardless of whether the accusation is warranted, and to be clear, I don't think it was warranted.
Being a mother is very important to most women. Most women will have kids, most women who do consider it important work, and a majority of women would prefer not to work while their kids are under 18. We can just go ahead and say that it’s bad to devalue their work in home making without dancing around the point.
I wouldn't presume to psychoanalyze people I don't know. Perhaps you're right, or perhaps you're wrong, but in any case you wouldn't know unless you asked why and the OP answered.
> those other people—the ones creating the circumstances which make OP feel the need to engage in all the preliminaries—are being sexist.
Imaginary people, at this point.
> a majority of women would prefer not to work while their kids are under 18
It's 50% to 45%, presumably with 5% undecided, so I think you're overstating the situation a bit. You also appear to be ignoring or erasing men.
> We can just go ahead and say that it’s bad to devalue their work in home making without dancing around the point.
It depends on what you mean by value. The article argues in favor of paying stay-at-home parents, which means economic value. Speaking for myself, I value freedom of choice, in the moral sense of value, but I don't think there's much if any relation between moral value and economic value. Our economy values many things that I find morally abhorrent and devalues many things that I find morally commendable. Capitalism is simply economic supply and demand. I support the personal choice to have children, in the same way that I support the personal choice to play video games, but I don't think the government should finance the playing of video games, even if the majority of women, or the majority of men for that matter, considered it very important. In other words, the personal preferences of women are not specifically relevant with regard to what the government ought to finance. On the other hand, you could argue plausibly that the raising and education of children is crucial for a healthy and functioning society and thus ought to be financed by the government, regardless of how individual women or men feel about staying at home vs. working outside the home. It's an open question, though, whether such an argument would entail direct government payments to stay-at-home parents.
My wife’s a lawyer, and she did a trial nine months pregnant with our second. When we had our third, something clicked and she wanted nothing more than to stay home with him. My mom has a master’s degree in chemistry back in old country, then stayed home to raise us when we were young, then after we were teenagers was very successful selling furniture. Many women in my wife’s extended family, where most folks aren’t college graduates and don’t have exciting career options, would love to be able to quit their jobs.
If you’re trying to do everything you can’t do anything. It shouldn’t be taboo to recognize that raising children is a socially valuable function. Nor should it be taboo to recognize that society’s devaluation of that social rule particularly hurts women.
Homemakers provide most of the direct value to the household. Your firefighter, doctor, ect provide their value directly to those outside their household.
My neighbor might be a great cook and parent for their child, but I am much more thankful to plumber, who benifits me directly.
The gap between outcomes where there is a stable division of a full time breadwinner and homemaker during formative years vs those where there is heavy involvement of daycare services is a very stark chasm.
But the economic stability has to be there as well, as this breaks down significantly in poverty.
Moving both partners in a domestic life into the workforce also creates strong downward pressure on wages, since it supplies an extra 30% or so employees into the workforce.
All in all the breakdown of a stable domestic workforce has been good for corporations but bad for children, employees, and stable home relationships. And if we look at the current state of affairs of partnering, it’s been bad for just about everyone.
By this argument, wouldn't having children and thereby increasing the population also supply extra employees and drive down wages?
However, an expanded workforce is more productive and thus can allow for more overall consumption (as long as money is distributed somehow to consumers), which is why the addition of women to the workforce is not a negative. And there's actually no limit to an individual person's consumption, as long as they keep acquiring the money for it. Thus, a working parent may end up spending more money than a nonworking parent, which increases economic demand.
Of course, the compensation for specific jobs can vary dramatically, depending on localized supply and demand. In some cases there's an oversupply of labor, but in other cases there's an undersupply. Filling an undersupply of labor can certainly be a net positive. The devil is in the details. Theoretically, roughly speaking, more labor is always good overall, but needless to say, the distribution of income is not even close to equal, which can create localized situations where more labor available in a specific area is not beneficial to the existing labor in that area.
I'm ignoring the negative environmental consequences of increases population, which I normally wouldn't do. I just think it's very odd to argue that the addition of parents to the workforce is a negative while the addition of their children to the workforce is a positive.
Saving and investing etc are deprioritized during child rearing.
But my assertion is that population increases enable Economic growth… and I don’t honestly think that is a debatable point. It’s hard to have a giant economy if you just have 100 people. But perhaps I should have said enabled growth rather than driving growth. More people are going to consume more, leading to more production. I think this is generally true in a healthy economy.
We shall see how the more workers = better pans out with the addition of general purpose anthropoid robots. I suspect we are going to find out what labor oversupply looks like in the next few decades.
Source? Without proper controls this could easily be a case of "households who are in a situation where the man can be homemaker are better for kids", rather than "men being better homemakers".
The post links to a article that ends with this summary:
> God created the family to excel by taking advantage of specialization of labor between husband and wife.
> The Trumpet explains the real meaning behind world events. We are a news organization that connects world events with biblical prophecies.
Just because household labor is not taxed, does not mean it does not happen.
If you set the minimum wage at say 10$/hour and the livable wage at say 20$/hour then you might tax the company 30% of the difference between your livable wage and the actual wage. (Effectively minimum wage becomes 13$/h, but that doesn’t all go to the worker.)
It’s still adds upward wage pressure because higher pay attracts better workers and your out a significant percentage of the difference either way but it reduces the risk of a big spike in unemployment when you raise the livable wage. It also means systemic wage theft more strongly attracts the attention of the IRS.
We’ve decided it’s ok to pay low enough wages that the government is subsidizing low wage workers working a full time job. 40 * 52 * 7.25$/hour is well below the threshold for 100% free health insurance for single people and families get major subsidies well past 13$/hour. Effectively forcing you to set it at ~20$ or subsidize companies.
Currently the government is effectively boosting workers past the minimum wage, because we’ve set the acceptable standard of living above minimum wage. However, we reduce benefits as wages increase which means workers have reduced incentive to seek minor changes in wages.
This system partially reverses that effect. A company paying an extra 1$ out of pocket increases the wages of a worker by 1.3$/hour so when they lose 0.3$/h in benefits they still see 1$/hour in higher wages. (Numbers are illustrative not necessarily how it would be implemented.)
PS: Think of it like having both a minimum wage and universal healthcare, in such a system there’s no penalty to higher wages.
>This system partially reverses that effect. A company paying an extra 1$ out of pocket increases the wages of a worker by 1.3$/hour so when they lose 0.3$/h in benefits they still see 1$/hour in higher wages.
This still feels like you're playing shell games. The only reason your example works is that prior to that marginal dollar, you added a 30% premium to the cost of labor, so you could return some of that 30% when wages go above some arbitrary amount. There's no free money. For people earning exactly the minimum wage, the effect to employers is exactly the same as hiking the minimum wage by an equivalent amount. Moreover, this is arguably a tax on the employee as much as the employer. For people earning exactly minimum wage, employers are forced to pay $3/hr (or whatever) in employee costs, but none of that went to the employee. Had the minimum wage simply been bumped, the employee would be free to spend the money however he sees fit, but with your scheme he gets nothing. Sounds a lot like a minimum wage bump to $3/hr, and then the government immediately clawing it back. In other words, a tax.
Sure it’s a shell game, but reducing benefits when workers now make the new minimum wage is just as much a shell game.
Reducing benefits sounds like government savings not a Tax, but at the end of the day money is money and this money isn’t ending up in the workers pockets either way.
It's not a shell game when it's doing what it says on the tin. Considering the fact that minimum wage predates welfare programs such as food stamps, it'd be difficult to argue that the reduction in benefits was some sneaky loophole. It was always the intended effect.
>Reducing benefits sounds like government savings not a Tax, but at the end of the day money is money.
"government savings" is cold comfort to all the people earning near minimum wage, who are at the greatest risk of getting laid off (or their hours cut) from such a change, and stand to gain nothing from such a law. At least with the minimum wage you could say the risk of losing their job is justified by higher wages.
Slightly increasing minimum wage mostly just saves the government money. After taxes it’s close to 1:1 with reducing benefits until well past current minimum wages. Larger jumps are seen as risky.
Theoretically there’s a number large enough for significant impact that’s still safe, but nobody wants to risk trying to find what it is. So how do you find a good number that does more than just save the government money?
It’s easy enough mathematically to say for every dollar earned someone is entitled to keeps at least 40% of it or whatever arbitrary number is chosen. However when you have multiple means testing programs overlapping it’s easy for the combination to go so low as to become meaningless or worse negative. Especially with things like rent control or tuition.
Similarly, the welfare trap people makes lower annual pay jobs more appealing, which effectively subsidizes companies. I was looking at this as a means of patching over that issue, but yea fixing subsidies is a more direct solution.
How is paying someone under the minimum wage an "externality"? If the employment relationship is canceled, does that magically make the past employee not poor?
Is this an American thing or just a rich people thing? I can’t think of a single generation in my family going back to pre-ww2 where this was true. Everyone always worked. At least on the family farm.
The farm generations even put their kids to work. Our school system (Slovenia) has certain school vacations timed so kids can help with the harvest.
The farmers would pay the kids a bit of money, which seemed like a lot of money to someone in elementary school.
Yeah, my grandfather worked in the mill. He was one of those "good jobs" everybody blathers about (overhead welder). Our family still grew a garden and raised fowl, and it wasn't because we were "healthy". It was because we were poor.
My other grandfather worked in the mines. Also one of those "good jobs"--until he got into an accident, and it shattered his arm. Still needed a garden to make the budget work even before the accident. Yeah, still poor.
My Dad was the first generation of college grads in the family and worked as a schoolteacher. He had to work the mill in summers to make ends meet until mandatory minimum salary came online in the state for teachers. He was constantly worred about how he was going to send me to a decent college--especially after the mills went down. Yeah, still poor.
Farms are an exception where everybody in the family always got worked like hell. There is a reason why all the farms in the US are dependent upon illegal immigrant labor--the work super sucks shit and you have to pay a lot of money before a legal citizen will take the job. Yeah, super poor.
TV wasn't reality. Here's reality: https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/Rs8AAOSw4URhO9dk/s-l50...
Men striking in the early 1950s, Truman seizing the mills, and the Supreme Court ruling that unconstitutional. Very "Leave It To Beaver", no?
Here's probably one of the better jobs in the mill, a set of machinists. Still a crappy job: https://www.google.com/imgres?q=image%20us%20steel%20mill%20...
Steel Strike of 1919: https://www.history.com/news/steel-strike-of-1919-defeat
Money quote: "Mike Connolly had a dream: an eight-hour day. A Pennsylvania steel worker for 41 years, he toiled for 12 or more hours a day behind the locked doors of a steel mill with no days off and little hope for the future.
If he worked eight hours a day, he imagined, “I could have a garden, a couple of hundred chickens and know my family…This way one doesn’t want to live long. What is the use of living, since one doesn’t enjoy life?”"
I desperately wish I could send people from this time back to work one of those "good jobs" they so extol. We'll see how long it takes you before you become a functional alcoholic like the rest of the men working those "good jobs".
Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher.
Why? Because drastically increasing the labor force drove down wages. We need a lot of childcare, restaurant workers, delivery drivers etc to support dual income households which obviously don’t pay very well. Worse households are paying a large fraction of that 20k on things like childcare and meals that used to be done by the stay at home parent.
"almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant.
>Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher.
"number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%.
Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
That’s 40% in 13 years vs a 33% in 64 years and a great deal of “productivity improvement” from all those computers, etc.
And I’ll reiterate because you seemed to skipped that bit “productivity is vastly higher” and people are paying for stuff that was otherwise done by homemakers. I know many dual income households that pay for childcare, housecleaning, food prep, shopping, etc which should be subtracted from any income differential. Eating fast food isn’t necessarily a net positive over a home cooked meal even if it “boosts” GDP.
PS: There’s also other subtle differences, like commuting costs, but to a reasonable approximation none of our increases in standard of living comes from an increase in dual income households.
Everyone until my generation in my family lived in a single-income household. At least full-time income.
They also gardened - enough where canning skills were widely known and utilized. And picked up odd jobs - everyone, the wife and the kids as soon as they were able. Every single kid was working a part time job by age 15 and contributing to the household in some manner or another. Every kid did a serious chunk of daily chores to help out. Extended family assisting in basic child care, home repair, car maintenance, and other duties was the norm.
McDonalds and the like were absolute luxuries for special occasions like birthdays. Not the whole family. The parents and the one kid who's birthday it was. Your menu selection was strictly limited. Anniversaries for the parents were celebrated by the once a year "fancy dinner" at a place like Olive Garden.
The stay at home parent home cooked all the meals from basic (read: cheap but labor intensive) ingredients.
Kids invariably shared bedrooms, sometimes even 3 to a room. A single used car for a family of 6 was the norm. Every kid got two sets of clothing to start the school year, and if you ruined them you were out of luck or learning how to sew patches onto things. Hand-me-downs were the norm.
Houses were about half the size on average in my area.
These were folks everyone likes to wax nostalgic about as "solidly middle class" and lived in the "rich" suburbs.
From where I stand, most of what the dual income household did was simply increase lifestyle and asset inflation. It first started with some folks just "getting ahead" and choosing that life. It then turned into those folks bidding against anyone who wanted to keep costs down and turned a voluntary game into a mandatory one. The market is going to serve the majority and most profitable segment. If you wanted to buy a home, you were bidding against that dual income household willing to take on a 30 year mortgage and max out their finances. You were forced into it - 30% income rule be damned as there were no other choices with so many folks bidding homes and rentals upwards. Now we're at a point where all the fixed expenses have met the median dual income budget - there is nothing left to give. Things will get interesting.
That is certainly not the whole story, but it's a decent part of it very few talk about.
A subsidy for homemakers would shrink the labor force, driving up demand and pay for the remaining workers (the working parent).
I think it would be even better if the next generation grew up, became productive, and learned to contribute to society in new ways outside of just the obvious monetary one. Overall, we need more non-monetary contributions to be recognized.
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-state-declares-fis...
Yes, it may make for a more convenient society in some ways but I wonder if the cumulative effect is worth it? I don't think so. Economists hail efficiency and comparative advantage as a good thing, but it is also a reduction of true value to a single variable (money) which is a dimensional collapse that strips humanity from human beings.
The short-term results seem good, but because in the long-term, the process never stops, the END result is a transformation of human beings from people into cogs in an economic machine that has no soul.
Perhaps efficient, but the ultimate result is fewer children.
That's... capitalism.
Every aspect of your life needs to be financialized and exploited to generate profits for somebody who isn't you. Paid childcare is a profit opportunity. Community childcare is not.
The whole point of hyperindividualism is to destroy community because class consciousness, community, unions and class solidarity are an unacceptable threat to the economic order.
If it wants educated, productive children, it must also pay the market price and that price is exorbitant.
At some point, US tech companies will (maybe have already outspent) the US education system k-12 and at some point surpassing all the ivy colleges just for training some ai models.
Erhm no? They are directed toward living expenses and medical expenses, both of which are huge. Some % may be elderly care taking but likely a relatively small % in any given year vs all seniors drawing benefits.
1. The existence of a permanent underclass of low paid help that made this existence possible;
2. The postwar "traditional" existence was actually a very short period in history;
3. The "traditional" homemaker role was largely because people had no choice; and
4. The top marginal tax rate in the 1950s was 91%.
The author is correct that the capitalists want us working so they can take our surplus labor value as profits. Additionally, if we have to work, even better. Coercion is a necessary and desirable condition for capitalism.
However, fetishizing "traditional" values is a common Trojan horse for radicalizing people into fascism. Hitler sold himself as a moral crusader. He told German women their role was to create more Germans. German women would get medals from the state if they had enough children. The public had to be sold on the fear of "moral decay".
Does that sound familiar? It should if you've been paying attention.
This sort of thing has infected spaces inhabited by young men too. Julius Evola, the philosopher to Mussolini before graduating to the major leagues of Hitler, extols the virtues of traditional values and gender roles. He is a darling of the 4chan suburban latch key kids.
The government doesn't need to subsidize homemakers specifically. We simply need to pay people enough so that 2 people don't need 5 jobs between them to make ends meet. As wealthy inequality worsens, population growth stagnates. South Korea is really the poster child for that now (~0.7 children per woman, the lowest of any nation).
What we do now is subsidize corporations. Walmart employees are huge recipients of food stamps. Walmart has a grossannual profit of ~$150B. Why are they being subsidized by the government instead of, you know, just paying their workers a fair and living wage?
All of these problems come down to economics, specifically capitalism. This is capitalism working as intended. I'm amazed how often I see pieces like this that recognize the problems created by capitalism without capitalism ever being blamed.
By staying at home, my children receive a bespoke education and my family bespoke consumer products (e.g. food and entertainment) that far exceed anything my family can access through the market economy.
Just because I don't directly participate in the entrepreneurial system through taxable wages doesn't mean that I only marginally participate in it. My role is simply that of competing with business (in terms of efficiency and quality)--I find areas where I can do it better and more efficiently, then acquire capital and raw materials, use the capital to add value to the raw resources, provide those resources to the singular market that is my family, and then pocket the profit, which will inevitably be reintroduced back to the broader economy as investment and additional outlays, all of which are taxable.
The ultra-wealthy are afforded the right and ability to have exclusive access to personal assistants, au-pairs, tutors, professional chefs, gardeners, housecleaners, etc. I do all of these and more for my family (at well below market rate), using the same methods, tools, and products that they do, but the wages I receive and any profit (or losses) generated remain within my household such that it can be used for further consumption and investment. I still pay sales taxes on the capital and raw materials, but try to lower my tax burden and vertically integrate like any other business.
That I am free to choose to engage in this mutual exchange with my wife is the bedrock foundation of liberal capitalism and a free society. Frank Hyneman Knight, one of the forgotten architects of the Chicago School of Economics and the teacher of Milton Friedman frequently stated in his works that the individualism of liberalism should be more accurately called familism, because the basic effective economic unit is not the individual, but the family.
And he's absolutely right.
I think that quote tells you all you need to know, to judge how much economists should influence the way we live.