9 ms·

Yeah, my mom always rebelled at the feminist push to have women do men's work as the goal (without valuing work women already did). Join the military, kill peop

Yeah, my mom always rebelled at the feminist push to have women do men's work as the goal (without valuing work women already did). Join the military, kill people etc. I'm 100% for that, but it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids, perhaps the most important thing for society and with INCREDIBLE costs (if done badly) and benefits (if done well) to everyone. What's even more interesting, upvalue work that is traditionally female, and you may see more men drawn to it, staying home, teaching etc. Instead, those can be thankless jobs from a money standpoint, and only folks who sell their souls into a male centric hellhole of work environments (PhD life is silly, medical residencies are nuts etc) are rewarded and women are told to lean in.

klipt 6y ago
> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. Outside a marriage, mothers get child support. The fact it's not taxed as "pay" is a bonus for mothers, not a downside! It's weird how the myth persists that mothers "not getting paid" a taxable wage is some kind of negative.
- csa 6y ago
  > In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. ... and half of asset appreciation, and in some cases (it varies) half of pension. I will also add that it’s not just mothers. It’s any spouse. I’ve seen successful women come out on the raw end of this deal during divorce. I mention this not as a grievance, rather just an observation that people who are married, both male and female, are sometimes surprised at asset allocation during a divorce with regards to “passive” investments and business ownership (e.g, a self-owned business that has grown).
- i_haz_rabies 6y ago
  That's a weird contortion of logic. Your point is still that raising children isn't an economically valuable activity, unless you also think that men should be paid somewhere around 2x if they are supporting a stay-at-home mom...
  - klipt 6y ago
    The existence of daycares is proof that people are willing to pay for raising children. What you're hitting on is that staying home to raise 1-2 kids is economically inefficient compared to working and sending the kids to a daycare, because the daycare can benefit from efficiencies of scale.
- ramzyo 6y ago
  > Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. That’s some creative logic. Being a stay at home parent is a full-time job. If the stay at home parent were being paid, they’d...well...be paid. “Effective” payment isn’t helpful to a full time parent raising a child and losing out on wages they would otherwise get at a job that the economy values with a taxable wage.
  - klipt 6y ago
    So you want the husband to explicitly pay his wife a W2 wage to raise their kids, which just means as a couple they pay more taxes and have less money than before? I don't see the upside.
    - ramzyo 6y ago
      No, you’re right that doesn’t make sense, and I wouldn’t be for that. I think government should expand paid time off for family leave, especially in the US.
      - bradleyjg 6y ago
        So if corporate attorney is taking time off to raise a child society should value, and pay, more for that then if a public defender is?
        ramzyo 6y ago
        This is a loaded question. "society should value" and "pay more" are separate arguments. By agreeing to the first I'm not agreeing to the second. I think society should value taking time off to raise children, yes. However, I don't think that society should value a corporate attorney doing this more than a public defender doing it. To do so would value raising children unequally. A universal basic income with an additional stipend for child care would be one solution that captures this difference.
        6y ago
- drfuchs 6y ago
  Child support is intended to cover the expenses of the child - food, clothing, education, medical, etc. It's not meant to pay for the time spent by the custodial parent in actually doing the parenting, nor any sort of "opportunity cost" of not being otherwise engaged in a paying job. Translated to HN-world: "I'm going work on a FOSS project full-time!" World: "Great; we'll pay for your server! You won't lose a dime!" Me: "Uh, what about the income from the job I gave up?"
  - klipt 6y ago
    You can always choose to work and send the child to daycare. Providing your own daycare instead of working is a lifestyle choice, why does the opportunity cost of that choice have to be shouldered by someone else?
    - drfuchs 6y ago
      You said "[custodial parents] do get paid ... child support" and I was simply pointing out that this isn't "pay" to said parent in the sense of "compensation for services rendered".
seneca 6y ago
> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Why would women get paid to raise their own kids? You suggest it's because when done well, it has incredible value to society. What is that value to society? It's having functional, productive members. Women already reap the benefits of that by sharing society with other peoples' well raised children. What I mean to say is that it's a web of mutual benefit. The gap is actually in all the people who don't have children, who are essentially free riders in this scheme, but that is offset by the fact that they pay taxes for things like schools, which they don't themselves consume, and lack of tax breaks that parents receive.
- petr25102018 6y ago
  Also, the world is already overpopulated as it is in my opinion. So not having a kid can be or will be seen as a benefit to society...
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    The world is not overpopulated - it's that just some (large) corners of it are seemingly incapable of living sustainably (outsized consumption that goes with outsized waste and pollution)
Digory 6y ago
Every human being can value traditional female work (or, more broadly, human obligations to each other) more than money. But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation. This seems like the kind of thinking that eventually requires payments to give up the thrill of killing each other.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation. It's not that we _want_ to be paid. It's that we _need_ to be paid, because in order to raise a child you need a stable source of critical things for many years: - food & water - shelter (and heat) - clothing - waste disposal If I wanted to take several years entirely away from work to raise a child, I would still have to have those things. How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid? It's not about valuing _being paid_, it's about valuing the things that are necessary to raise a child. You tell me how to acquire those things without being paid, and then we can analyze while people value being paid more than the social obligations.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    > How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid? From savings or by having another family member work? Combinations of that worked for a very long time in human history.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      Sure, but that's just shifting who is getting paid or when. The person I was responding to said that people were obsessed with getting paid versus the social obligations. I was explaining why people who would want to stay at home might be obsessed about payment. It's a question that must be answered. You provide some potential answers, but for the vast majority of young Americans these days having enough savings to raise a child by themselves without working is not in any way realistic. Even for the "have another family work" plan, for many a single income isn't enough to support 2 adults and raising a child. The economy just doesn't make that viable for a large swath of the country.
centimeter 6y ago
> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play. A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".
- seneca 6y ago
  > This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage". Well said. The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.
  - frenchy 6y ago
    There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate. The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.
    - seneca 6y ago
      > There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate. Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up. Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).
young_unixer 6y ago
> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid) Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not sure if that's what you're suggesting.
- jedberg 6y ago
  I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.
  - klipt 6y ago
    Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes? Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      There are lots of studies showing that being raised by your own parents is far more beneficial than a day care. But as you point out, that's a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1
      - iends 6y ago
        Please share those studies.
    - sbierwagen 6y ago
      >which benefit from economies of scale The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle. Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.
frenchy 6y ago
> Join the military, kill people etc I don't think we should push women into these job, but I don't think we should push men into those jobs either. > it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Actually, my kid's day-care provider does exactly this! In a few years, he'll have teachers doing the same. Valuing work is complicated. Personally, I'd be happy to be a stay-at-home parent if finances made that easy, even if seemed a little thankless. It's not like I feel that the webshit I build all day long is really valuable. If someone feels undervalued as a stay-at-home parent, it's probably because they feel stuck in that job, either because of lack of education, lack of available child care, or otherwise lack of jobs.

klipt 6y ago

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. Outside a marriage, mothers get child support. The fact it's not taxed as "pay" is a bonus for mothers, not a downside! It's weird how the myth persists that mothers "not getting paid" a taxable wage is some kind of negative.

csa 6y ago
> In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. ... and half of asset appreciation, and in some cases (it varies) half of pension. I will also add that it’s not just mothers. It’s any spouse. I’ve seen successful women come out on the raw end of this deal during divorce. I mention this not as a grievance, rather just an observation that people who are married, both male and female, are sometimes surprised at asset allocation during a divorce with regards to “passive” investments and business ownership (e.g, a self-owned business that has grown).
i_haz_rabies 6y ago
That's a weird contortion of logic. Your point is still that raising children isn't an economically valuable activity, unless you also think that men should be paid somewhere around 2x if they are supporting a stay-at-home mom...
- klipt 6y ago
  The existence of daycares is proof that people are willing to pay for raising children. What you're hitting on is that staying home to raise 1-2 kids is economically inefficient compared to working and sending the kids to a daycare, because the daycare can benefit from efficiencies of scale.
ramzyo 6y ago
> Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. That’s some creative logic. Being a stay at home parent is a full-time job. If the stay at home parent were being paid, they’d...well...be paid. “Effective” payment isn’t helpful to a full time parent raising a child and losing out on wages they would otherwise get at a job that the economy values with a taxable wage.
- klipt 6y ago
  So you want the husband to explicitly pay his wife a W2 wage to raise their kids, which just means as a couple they pay more taxes and have less money than before? I don't see the upside.
  - ramzyo 6y ago
    No, you’re right that doesn’t make sense, and I wouldn’t be for that. I think government should expand paid time off for family leave, especially in the US.
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      So if corporate attorney is taking time off to raise a child society should value, and pay, more for that then if a public defender is?
      - ramzyo 6y ago
        This is a loaded question. "society should value" and "pay more" are separate arguments. By agreeing to the first I'm not agreeing to the second. I think society should value taking time off to raise children, yes. However, I don't think that society should value a corporate attorney doing this more than a public defender doing it. To do so would value raising children unequally. A universal basic income with an additional stipend for child care would be one solution that captures this difference.
        6y ago
drfuchs 6y ago
Child support is intended to cover the expenses of the child - food, clothing, education, medical, etc. It's not meant to pay for the time spent by the custodial parent in actually doing the parenting, nor any sort of "opportunity cost" of not being otherwise engaged in a paying job. Translated to HN-world: "I'm going work on a FOSS project full-time!" World: "Great; we'll pay for your server! You won't lose a dime!" Me: "Uh, what about the income from the job I gave up?"
- klipt 6y ago
  You can always choose to work and send the child to daycare. Providing your own daycare instead of working is a lifestyle choice, why does the opportunity cost of that choice have to be shouldered by someone else?
  - drfuchs 6y ago
    You said "[custodial parents] do get paid ... child support" and I was simply pointing out that this isn't "pay" to said parent in the sense of "compensation for services rendered".

seneca 6y ago

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Why would women get paid to raise their own kids? You suggest it's because when done well, it has incredible value to society. What is that value to society? It's having functional, productive members. Women already reap the benefits of that by sharing society with other peoples' well raised children. What I mean to say is that it's a web of mutual benefit. The gap is actually in all the people who don't have children, who are essentially free riders in this scheme, but that is offset by the fact that they pay taxes for things like schools, which they don't themselves consume, and lack of tax breaks that parents receive.

petr25102018 6y ago
Also, the world is already overpopulated as it is in my opinion. So not having a kid can be or will be seen as a benefit to society...
- sangnoir 6y ago
  The world is not overpopulated - it's that just some (large) corners of it are seemingly incapable of living sustainably (outsized consumption that goes with outsized waste and pollution)

Digory 6y ago

Every human being can value traditional female work (or, more broadly, human obligations to each other) more than money. But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation. This seems like the kind of thinking that eventually requires payments to give up the thrill of killing each other.

ncallaway 6y ago
> But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation. It's not that we _want_ to be paid. It's that we _need_ to be paid, because in order to raise a child you need a stable source of critical things for many years: - food & water - shelter (and heat) - clothing - waste disposal If I wanted to take several years entirely away from work to raise a child, I would still have to have those things. How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid? It's not about valuing _being paid_, it's about valuing the things that are necessary to raise a child. You tell me how to acquire those things without being paid, and then we can analyze while people value being paid more than the social obligations.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  > How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid? From savings or by having another family member work? Combinations of that worked for a very long time in human history.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    Sure, but that's just shifting who is getting paid or when. The person I was responding to said that people were obsessed with getting paid versus the social obligations. I was explaining why people who would want to stay at home might be obsessed about payment. It's a question that must be answered. You provide some potential answers, but for the vast majority of young Americans these days having enough savings to raise a child by themselves without working is not in any way realistic. Even for the "have another family work" plan, for many a single income isn't enough to support 2 adults and raising a child. The economy just doesn't make that viable for a large swath of the country.

centimeter 6y ago

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play. A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

seneca 6y ago
> This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage". Well said. The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.
- frenchy 6y ago
  There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate. The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.
  - seneca 6y ago
    > There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate. Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up. Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).

young_unixer 6y ago

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid) Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not sure if that's what you're suggesting.

jedberg 6y ago
I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.
- klipt 6y ago
  Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes? Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    There are lots of studies showing that being raised by your own parents is far more beneficial than a day care. But as you point out, that's a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1
    - iends 6y ago
      Please share those studies.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    >which benefit from economies of scale The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle. Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.

frenchy 6y ago

> Join the military, kill people etc I don't think we should push women into these job, but I don't think we should push men into those jobs either. > it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Actually, my kid's day-care provider does exactly this! In a few years, he'll have teachers doing the same. Valuing work is complicated. Personally, I'd be happy to be a stay-at-home parent if finances made that easy, even if seemed a little thankless. It's not like I feel that the webshit I build all day long is really valuable. If someone feels undervalued as a stay-at-home parent, it's probably because they feel stuck in that job, either because of lack of education, lack of available child care, or otherwise lack of jobs.