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Setting aside the philosophical free market questions, additional government subsidy childcare seems fine. There’s a positive externality of readily available c

• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > couldn’t we come up with a subsidy with less market distortion? Yes. Universal childcare. Alternatively, payment for children (as a refundable tax credit or e.g. social security payment for one's first N years).
  • nickff 3y ago
    How is universal childcare less market distorting? It seems to me that the larger the subsidy (or tariff for that matter), the more the distortion.
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    • steven-xu 3y ago
      Universal childcare seems to me significantly less distorting than universal childcare for childcare workers. It’s larger subsidy yes but it corrects for an existing distortion (parents pay full price for childcare to raise children who then end up paying taxes to the state), and it does so in a way that it doesn’t break one specific labor market. We do not do parents who aren’t already childcare workers a favor by skewing the market for their labor. For some parents, working in childcare is the right choice, but for many it won’t be, and when you artificially inflate short term wages only if they go into childcare, everyone loses.
      • kulahan 3y ago
        But the entire childcare market is run on such tight margins that they all require a model of having a waiting list for children, meaning the market is massively underserved by design. It would seem to me that this is only likely to result in more childcare workers, making it more accessible to all, no?
        • westurner 3y ago
          After how much time would the nonlinear effects of the subsidy be expected to be apparent? What hypothetical effect would discontinuation of the subsidy have: while it's initially resulting in labor shortage reduction and then after time t? Are counterfactuals helpful for this problem?
    • kdmccormick 3y ago
      Not an economist, but I imagine that the job market for child care workers would be less distorted, even if the general service market for child care is more distorted.
    • bobsmooth 3y ago
      Distortion is the desired effect, no?
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  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > Universal childcare. Alternatively, payment for children These are the same, just different execution. A slot for your child or children if you want to go to work, a payment if you want to stay at home to provide childcare. The care is universal, the delta being who logistically is providing the care. Edit: Agree with y'all it is both a marketing and execution story.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > are the same, just different execution Sure. But the branding matters. The former seems to provoke a vitriolic reaction in some people that, if widespread, could tank it in a way that the identical effect under the second's branding doesn't provoke.
      • jonny_eh 3y ago
        I'd also argue that execution matters.
      • phreack 3y ago
        Don't worry, from experience I can assure you people will have the same reaction to the latter as well. The typical argument is that "the poors" will have tons children just to cash out and we can't have that can we. I believe (anecdotally) that the rate of unwanted pregnancies are not impacted significantly by economic measures, only by ease of access to free birth control measures and widespread sex education, but it's an unpopular opinion. Welfare from the state is always a hard sell unless it benefits a vocal, influential segment.
    • anonporridge 3y ago
      Similar to managed welfare vs UBI. One is creating defined resources and using bureaucracy to divvy them out and force people into buckets they might not be happy with. e.g. here's your government cheese. The other empowers individuals to make their own decisions with cash and lets the free market figure out how best to mine those dollars from the individuals receiving them. I suspect which option a person thinks is right largely depends on how they view humanity. Either you want to trust people to make their own decisions as adults, suffering the consequences of their decisions, or you want to extend childhood deep into "adulthood" making sure they can't make the wrong choice, because the nanny state makes the choice for them. I supposed in the case of managed welfare, only those who manage become independently wealthy get the privilege of making their own decisions.
  • nuancebydefault 3y ago
    Is payment for children not a world-wide established thing (except 3rd world I suppose)?
    • KMag 3y ago
      In the US, it's a $2,000 tax credit per kid, so you effectively only get paid if your household income is high enough to owe federal income tax, and low enough that the 5% phase-out doesn't eat up the whole benefit. Also, it comes off of your taxable income, so the net benefit to your pocket is (1.0 - marginal_tax_rate) * benefit.
• bradleyjg 3y ago
  Sounds lovely At this point in the political universe these are the only measures that get through. We are living in a post policy era of governance. Hopefully the wonks can find some way to get the upper hand again, but I’m not optimistic.
  • Racing0461 3y ago
    >>> We are living in a post policy era of governance What do you mean by this?
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      It's not my claim, but I'll take a stab at it. The increasingly accessible and increasingly rapid outrage/feedback loop brought to us by 24/7 cable news, social media, etc. has made it harder to push forward on meaningful complicated legislation. Something like the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Social Security, or interstate highways would, I suspect, be strangled in the crib today by vested interests spreading misinformation about them.
    • bradleyjg 3y ago
      No one in power is trying to design and put in place comprehensive plans to solve any particular problem. It’s all isolated one-offs, mostly involving dumping money instead of regulation, intended to improve a politician’s or party’s political standing. The ACA and Dodd-Frank, whatever you think of them, were the last counter examples. That was more than a dozen years ago.
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• chrisbrandow 3y ago
  While technically a market distortion, it is incredibly well-aligned with the human considerations. The people most likely to need childcare, are in many ways those well situated to be involved with providing childcare. The early child-rearing years are hard, and trying to work during this time is hard. The incentives to just add some extra childcare to your life is possibly less difficult than lots of options for a lot of people.
• mrits 3y ago
  I'm a bit bias since I don't pay for childcare but I don't have an issue with childcare being expensive as long as the profit is going directly to the workers. I have a hard time understanding why we don't want talented and ambitious people to raise our children.
  • lotsoweiners 3y ago
    > I have a hard time understanding why we don't want talented and ambitious people to raise our children. I’ve had my kids in some of the best childcare centers in an expensive area so this made me spit up my drink.
    • mrits 3y ago
      If you educated yourself about the problem you'd understand that childcare workers are usually making very little money while the businesses are taking the profit. Clean up your drink
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  You know you've lost the plot when even child care is looked at through the lense of capitalistic markets. Maybe fuck the markets and lets do what is best for the children and the parents. Or is that a radical idea nowadays?
  • readthenotes1 3y ago
    When would that not have been a radical ideal?
  • fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    The best for children and parents would probably be that none of the parents have to work at all until the child is some age when they should go to school. But if we implemented that system, there would be a labor shortage, which would reduce the number of teachers, plumbers, mechanics, accountants, software engineers, etc, so the rest of society would suffer. There is no magic wand we can wave to solve all our problems without any tradeoffs. Money distributes resources in a capitalist system, and there are many problems and distortions. If you built a command economy with no money you would still have to make choices about these tradeoffs.
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      > without any tradeoffs. why did you interpret my comment as being extreme?
  • cpach 3y ago
    What does that mean in practice though? That both parents should stay at home until the kids are 10?
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      Well if we can't have that then we the line definitely should be drawn at the other extreme where we just don't give a shit about parents spending time with children.
    • 3y ago
• MattGaiser 3y ago
  > only people with high childcare costs will work in the field. I imagine that is kind of the point, as those people are often stay at home moms. How do you increase the workforce without really increasing wages? Pay in a currency only valuable to a group currently not in the workforce.
• Ericson2314 3y ago
  Childcare is always going to be pushing up or near pushing up against Baumol's cost disease constraints. The only way to make it at all "productive" is cheap dense housing, something that America currently sucks terribly at. Additionally, the fact that it is a gazillion private providers rather than a simple public service like schools makes it messier. My prediction is that eventually the housing stuff will be figured out, and also this stuff will be increasingly rolled into the public school system, and both of those will relieve the pressure.
  • Ericson2314 3y ago
    Just be clear, the rise of childcare and restaurants are very clear evidence of the shifting boundary between the private and public spheres. But that shift cannot continue if it just hits more and more commute time constraints. It is like trying to do a faster integrated circuit without shrinking the scale. Just as we bring the compute to the data, so we bring production closer to the home with mixed things, etc. And in generally, people don't get what density can offer. For a silly example example, I've bought the clothes I will wear at an event while traveling to that event. Our suburban culture is not keeping up the material possibilities.
• User23 3y ago
  On the plus side that marketing clearing will result in those with the most child care experience working in child care, which sounds nice. That said it’s somewhat amusing to me to pay for someone’s kids to be watched so others can pay said someone to watch their kids instead. Single income families are considerably more efficient in real terms, but child care only shows up as GDP and taxable economic activity if a stranger does it. It reminds me of that joke about the two economists in the woods.
• werdogpnweq5rio 3y ago
  This is America. It doesn't matter whether a policy if objectively good or bad. It has to have some farcical fig leaf justification beyond making the world better. Making childcare free for all people would pay for itself in increased productivity, improve the financial security of poor families, and would lead to massive improvements in the wellbeing of poor children. But the effects in the real world don't matter, because in La-La Land it's communist and that means it's Stalinist and that means it's Satanist and that means they're going to give your gas stove a sex change and put 5G in your hydroxychloroquine. American politics are stupid. This shouldn't be a surprise to you.
• lq9AJ8yrfs 3y ago
  > There’s a positive externality of readily available childcare: one adult to many children is more efficient than home care, An externality [1] happens when there is some additional uncaptured aspect of a transaction, a "missing market". It seems implausible that there is a missing market in child care-- there are plenty of choices out there, different service levels and pricing. And when you put your child into child care and are now freed of child care responsibility for working hours, you can directly participate in the labor market, right? Instead of externality maybe you could support intervention instead by arguing that there are facets of the child-care market that you don't like, resulting in the observed market outcome, such as capital overheads, barriers to entry, transportation barriers, or regulation. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
• nuancebydefault 3y ago
  When reading expressions like "market distortion" in the context of a topic like child care, I am a bit astonished. Children are our future, they will work when we retire. Investment pays off. In relation, I find the balance of how the subsidy is spread across the labour market is of a secondary order. Please don't take this personally. I fairly wonder if the way of looking at these topics is a cultural or political thing.