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I don't know that book, but it's wrong on childcare being less affordable. Atleast in Denmark and Sweden child care is heavily subsidized, to the point of bein

• toxik 8y ago
  You still pay the opportunity cost, even if you are getting a monthly income. Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Forcing parents to have equal amounts of parental leave, as we do in Sweden (well, we incentivized it,) is a form of imposed equality of outcome. Equality of outcome is often said to be some disease of modern feminism, but really, what's the alternative? Going against our primal instincts is essential for a productive society. "Man strong - hunt food, woman caring - raise child" or some religious justification of similar dubiousness is _not_ enough. At the end of the day, it's going to be a balancing act of imposing on individual freedom such that individual freedom is at all possible. I personally am more inclined towards letting people be who they are, but that's what created gender inequality and racism in the first place.
  • avar 8y ago
    The alternative is equality of opportunity. If some people in society want to do some activity knowing they won't build job experience while doing so, let them, even if other people don't want to and become more employable as a result. That's freedom. Whether e.g. women on average tend to take more parental leave is only a small subset of those sorts of situations in society. I (a man) took a months-long parental leave fairly recently which surely hurt my job prospects, how could it not? But I chose to do it anyway. Should other men that didn't make that choice be forced to do the same to even things out?
    • LyndsySimon 8y ago
      A similar but slightly different anecdote - I'm a 34-year-old man, and my wife stays home with our two children. We're very aware that this has hurt her earning potential, which means that if I were to die suddenly she'd be in a real financial crisis. To offset that disparity in earning potential, we've had to purchase significant life and disability policies on me.
      • seagullz 8y ago
        This, addressed at the macro level, probably calls for the societies to function in ways that incorporate exercise of sufficient sense of solidarity and empathy. A relevant argument is made strongly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBSUkDXekMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBSUkDXekMM
        • LyndsySimon 8y ago
          I can't agree with much of anything in that video. The question is immediately reframed as a strawman ("childcare is not work"), but that's not at all what I'm saying. My household absolutely derives value from my wife's labor. What is impacted here is earning potential; if my wife were to need to seek employment outside the home in order to earn income, her income would be substantially less than it would have been if she had been gaining relevant experience during this time in our lives.
          • seagullz 8y ago
            The lecture and the Q&A where the points were made predates your comment here and is not necessarily about the pros and cons of an individual on the short term, assessed under rather unfair political-economic regulation. The analysis is at the macro level, with a view to why/how a society can pursue reforms towards fairer socioeconomic reality, instead of being submissive to the prevailing order. Slavery, for one, seemed unmovable too at one point in history.
      • kpil 8y ago
        Money isn't everything. If you can afford it spend as much time as you can with your kids if you have the chance. If you are a mere 'Salaryman' there's no way your loss of income is worth more than the experience and relationship you gain.
  • xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
    > Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave
    • Frondo 8y ago
      I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone. We're living in an era where, resource-wise, we could be post-scarcity, but politically, it's all locked up in a shitty, shitty system. I want to keep imagining a world in which people are truly free, and not just free to keep grinding away at a job because the alternative is starvation or privation.
      • trashtester 8y ago
        Scandinavian countries do not go that far. This privilege is only granted to parents. The goal is NOT to give people the right to go on un-paid leave for any reason, but rather to promote gender equality as well as encourage people to have children. (The latter to prevent birth rates to fall too far below the replacement rate.) The Scandinavian economic model relies heavily on high work life participation for funding, so encouraging people to take time off for other reasons would not make sense.
        • moorhosj 8y ago
          Also, maybe it’s good for the newborn to have a parent around during their most formative time.
      • jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
        > I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone. Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year? Your idea is fine utopian, fluffy unicorn, ideology. But practically it just won't work. This doesn't have anything to do with politics or a shitty system. It is just the facts of reality, if you are out of practice of your profession for year your skills won't be as sharp as someone who hasn't taken a year off.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • moorhosj 8y ago
    What is the opportunity cost of the mother going right back to work and spending no time with their newborn? Does society absorb that cost?
    • UncleMeat 8y ago
      The father could do that task.
      • moorhosj 8y ago
        Certainly could, I just finished doing that for my kid. Which still doesn't answer the question of how it benefits society to push parents back into the workforce after birth of a child. The entire "opportunity cost" argument here is focused on the parent's ability to maximize wages or skills, in reality there are other "costs".
  • jimbokun 8y ago
    "At the end of the day, it's going to be a balancing act of imposing on individual freedom such that individual freedom is at all possible." That's quite the rhetorical pretzel you are tying yourself into there.
    • nothrabannosir 8y ago
      The idea of freedoms being mutually exclusive is quite well established. To the point of being trite; imposing on individuals' freedom to reduce other people's freedoms, improves individual freedom. Hence laws against murder, etc.
  • DougN7 8y ago
    > Going against our primal instincts is essential for a productive society. I’m debating with myself about that statement. Is the goal of society a high amount of productivity, or stable, happy families and relationships? It seems means and ends are getting mixed up.
    • toxik 8y ago
      That's a very interesting question. I would say the point in society is to organize and through this organization improve overall prosperity and happiness in the society. A chaotic society will be outperformed in most metrics by an ordered society. Order is therefore beneficial to society, and to individuals by extension. Stable, happy families are those that don't need to worry about the necessities of life, don't need to worry about their income stream going up in smoke. This is where productivity enters the picture, because a given society can lose the productivity race, and therefore its prosperity. It results in negative impacts on the population of that society. This paints the financial crisis in new light, where a societal function has been so rotted from the inside that it is able to damage every globalized society on earth. These people should be made examples of, but sadly, the power is so indirect, and the nepotism so strong.
  • ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    Stop believing feminists when they say they want equality of outcome. They don't - they completely ignore how men die at work at ten times the rate of women, put in more hours, take more competitive roles, and generally tend to make more sacrifices in pursuit of well-paying jobs and careers. Feminists don't want equality of outcome. They want to point at the fact that women make less money as a group than men in order to demand concessions from society. And as was described elsewhere, when they get these concessions they use them to get what they actually want in practice, which makes the gross earnings gap even worse.
    • Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
      What if I don't stop believing them? Your comment is written in such an off putting manner that I wonder if it must be satire. You've dictated, generalized, and disparaged with every sentence. Even if I wanted to agree with the presentation is so ugly that I recoil.
    • aklemm 8y ago
      It's fair for dangerous jobs to pay more, and I've never heard a feminist argue otherwise. The feminism I support simply asks for equal opportunity to various industries and for "care work" to be valued appropriately. Taxing people to pay for family leave is not a "concession" from society, it's more like balancing values and one that pays dividends.
      • ThrustVectoring 8y ago
        You've heard feminists complain that women make something like 77 cents for every dollar men make and that that is unfair. If you hold all else constant and fix the gross pay ratio, men will be doing more dangerous work and not getting paid any extra for it.
      • AngryData 8y ago
        Some dangerous jobs pay more. Roofing and logging are incredibly dangerous, mostly male dominated, and still pay garbage. Oh sure you take home a decent amount of money, but most that is because they work a ton of overtime.
  • yks 8y ago
    The highest paying companies in the field don’t care about counting individual years of your experience and probably would hire a fresh grad over senior engineer any day, so as long as you crack the leetcoding interview, what difference does it make if you spent the last year on a parental leave?
  • fulafel 8y ago
    > Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? I think all the other answers to this have been arguing either yes/no, but it's really the wrong question. If you have 2 candidates, you should take into account their experience, but you shouldn't otherwise penalize the parental leave taker. So by taking parental year you put yourself one year back in the experience cohort. There is nothing discriminatory or gender specific about this. If it turns out that women take more parental years than men, we return to your question of incentives and equality of outcomes, to be decided separately.