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This is a pretty good distillation of the math. Child care has often been done on the backs of underpaid lower-class workers. Unlike most businesses, childcar

This is a pretty good distillation of the math. Child care has often been done on the backs of underpaid lower-class workers. Unlike most businesses, childcare doesn't scale well at all, and it's very hard to make the math work to pay the staff a living wage without it being prohibitively expensive. Even in the example given, the $22.50/hour rate is just the break-even rate with child-care workers at the minimum wage. If you push them up to a living wage of 75k/yr, the listed cost doubles. Add again people wanting child care costs to not just be break-even but to make working feel worth it, and it probably doubles again. It's just a very hard business with difficult scaling. It gets better after age 2, when you can increase your student/staff ratios, for what that's worth.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Which is precisely why government subsidies for child-care are necessary if we're going to structure society around nuclear families with both parents working. The cost of labour alone is enough to explain eye watering child-care costs, which means you either a) push that cost back on the consumer, b) somehow drive down the cost of labour, or c) have the government subsidize the cost of labour to make the price affordable and the businesses sustainable. We're doing (a) now and it's not sustainable, hence articles like these. To achieve (b) you'd need government intervention, anyway, as the market is already optimizing for minimizing labour cost. And thus you're left with (c), which is the path Canada has started going down recently: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campaigns/child-care.html https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campa...
- xvaier 4y ago
  You'll notice that Québec is not on the map when they compare potential savings because we've had government subsidized daycare for over 25 years. The results have been increased participation of mothers in the workforce and increased GDP[1]. The same article explains that the ROI is about 47%, meaning that for every 100$ spent, the federal and provincial governments get 147$ back in increased productivity. 1. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/557405/garderie-subventionnees-rentables https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/557405/garderie-subvent...
- deleted 4y ago
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BaseballPhysics 4y ago

Which is precisely why government subsidies for child-care are necessary if we're going to structure society around nuclear families with both parents working. The cost of labour alone is enough to explain eye watering child-care costs, which means you either a) push that cost back on the consumer, b) somehow drive down the cost of labour, or c) have the government subsidize the cost of labour to make the price affordable and the businesses sustainable. We're doing (a) now and it's not sustainable, hence articles like these. To achieve (b) you'd need government intervention, anyway, as the market is already optimizing for minimizing labour cost. And thus you're left with (c), which is the path Canada has started going down recently: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campaigns/child-care.html https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campa...

xvaier 4y ago
You'll notice that Québec is not on the map when they compare potential savings because we've had government subsidized daycare for over 25 years. The results have been increased participation of mothers in the workforce and increased GDP[1]. The same article explains that the ROI is about 47%, meaning that for every 100$ spent, the federal and provincial governments get 147$ back in increased productivity. 1. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/557405/garderie-subventionnees-rentables https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/557405/garderie-subvent...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]