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> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February st
by bcrosby95 3y ago
> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found.
There's something deranged about a metric when deciding to take care of your own children, rather than pay someone else to do so, results in a worse number.
- rottencupcakes 3y agoWhat? Deranged? A statistic can’t be deranged, only what actions one takes because of it. If a high earning person could take in more than the cost of child care, but chooses to stay home, it does impact GDP. It still might be a fine decision.
- rayiner 3y agoIt’s not just a values question, but a valid criticism of GDP as a measure. If you and I stay home and take care of our own kids, then that counts $0 to GDP. If we take care of each other’s kids and pay each other an amount that balances to $0, that contributes significantly to GDP.
- threeseed 3y agoIf you think about what you wrote it doesn't actually add up. If you're both staying at home and paying each other X then where did you get the money from to generate X. You would've had to do some economic producing activity.
- Forgeties79 3y agoTheir partners’ respective salaries
- aidenn0 3y agoI hand you $100 and you hand me $100. We can do that until the paper currency wears out and generate huge amounts of GDP!
- chii 3y agoIf you do this legitimately, you both slowly lose money to taxation.
- bachmeier 3y agoThe BEA has done some work to capture non-market activity: https://www.bea.gov/data/special-topics/household-production https://www.bea.gov/data/special-topics/household-production For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to have gotten much attention.
- rottencupcakes 3y agoThanks for the clarification. I guess everybody who stays home to look after a child should have their GDP contribution rated the same as a professional provider. I'm surprised this wasn't taken into account long ago? Are homemakers really excluded from any GDP calculation?
- hollerith 3y ago>Are homemakers really excluded from any GDP calculation? Yes.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoStatistics where ranges have been removed could be referred to as "de-ranged."
- renegade-otter 3y agoIt's a one-sided statistic, and it's completely pointless. What is it supposed to prove? That raising children costs money? Well, no shit. Let's just cut this useless expense loose and die off as a species, then. No species, no GDP, no problem.
- offices 3y agoThe people who want to take care of their children already feel strongly about it. Mentioning the impact on GDP influences the people who think it doesn't involve them and/or assume that touchy-feely policies mean higher taxes.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoEconomy is structured for extraction, not compassion. If this wasn't the case, we would prioritize people taking care of their children over GDP (just one example, lots of other examples; consider states recently allowing children to work in slaughterhouses and other dangerous workplaces [1] [2]). The purpose of the system is what it does. Line Goes Up Cult. Vote for people who support better policy, few alternative options that can lead to some amount of success. Good policy is not hard, just takes will (confirmed by a quick review of other OECD/developed countries). But at least we're at full/maximum employment amirite? [3] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/27/us-legislators-child-labor-corporate-profits https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/27/us-leg... ("A meat processer killed a 16-year-old. Yet US lawmakers want more child labor") [2] https://www.casey.senate.gov/news/releases/as-child-labor-violations-skyrocket-casey-murray-delauro-introduce-legislation-to-combat-child-labor-exploitation https://www.casey.senate.gov/news/releases/as-child-labor-vi... ("As Child Labor Violations Skyrocket, Casey, Murray, DeLauro Introduce Legislation to Combat Child Labor Exploitation") [3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20231101.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon... Bonus APM Marketplace episode: https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/01/gdp-measure-of-economic-growth/ https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/01/gdp-measure-of-econom... ("When it comes to measuring economic welfare, GDP doesn’t cut it") Wellbeing Economy Alliance (mentioned in above episode): https://weall.org/ https://weall.org/
- dfxm12 3y agoIf people can't work, they aren't earning income. If they don't have extra income, they aren't buying anything. So the state isn't getting tax income from these folks. In fact, they are probably paying them welfare. God forbid they can't make rent... It's almost impossible for children who grow up in this situation to escape it themselves. If the economy wanted to extract anything from these people, it would make sure they were working. On the subject of policy, things like the expanded child tax credit and school lunches pay the government back incredibly well, so support for stuff like that isn't just helping your neighbor, it's helping yourself, too.
- p1esk 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _3u10 3y agoIt’s formal vs informal. The “economy” is only the formal economy. When people stay home the economy loses 1+1/N incomes where N is the number of children a day care worker can take care of.
- kbelder 3y agoThere is a distinction there, but the real economy is the informal economy. The 'formal' economy is just an approximation, constrained by what can be easily measured.
- asynchronous 3y agoWait until you tell them that if no one has any more kids then the GDP will eventually go to zero.
- mcny 3y agoI'm putting my money where my mouth is by not having any children.
- vinyl7 3y agoWhy do you think the borders are open?
- Paul-Craft 3y agoWhere are you talking about? In the US, borders are very much not open. Getting an non-employment based immigrant visa without the sponsorship of a family member is nearly impossible, and getting an employment-based visa is complicated enough that only large companies will even offer visa sponsorship. Even assuming you have a good answer for that, what makes you think it matters? Birth rates are falling globally. Open borders only forestalls the inevitable.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago[flagged]
- Paul-Craft 3y agoYou're not trying hard enough. "Open borders" does not mean literally "people can physically cross the border." It's a statement about who is and isn't legally allowed to immigrate. Accusing me of denying the humanity of undocumented immigrants is extreme bad faith, and you should feel bad about it.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoI really don’t think you’re making your argument in good faith. Is the artificial outrage really that necessary in this case? > charitable interpretation of your post, but I simply can't find one Most reasonable people would find one.
- juunpp 3y ago[flagged]
- tmn 3y agoYou could make an argument that something like that is an externality. But capitalism’s goal is closer to incentivizing productivity by marrying needs and opportunity for mutual gain.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Gibbon1 3y agoHat tipping Keynes I like to distinguish rentier capitalists from all the other types. In short capitalists that collect rents on stuff. Different than say an industrial capitalist the in the business of manufacturing and selling stuff. The latter sort of understands that he needs workers to staff his factories. And consumers to buy. So he understands that children are tomorrows workers and consumers. The rentier capitalist is a financial parasite. He can't understand doesn't want to understand. Anything that reduces his rents like taxes to pay for school lunches pissed him off. In the last 50 years rentier capitalists have managed to completely suppress the power of industrial capitalists and labor. And have managed to convince most people to think like them. So people think a parent spending time taking care of a child instead of working is 'a loss to the economy'
- refurb 3y agoAhh yes, versus the magical system where your kids get taken care of generous people for free. What a low effort comment.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago> Ahh yes, versus the magical system where your kids get taken care of generous people for free. What an odd way to say 'family'.
- refurb 3y ago
- Barrin92 3y agoA metric isn't a value judgement and it's almost certainly true that childcare has enabled a vast amount of mostly women to enter the workforce and do highly productive work. You can have different opinions on whether that's good or bad, and I personally think you can make a strong case for it being a good thing, but there's nothing wrong with the metric itself.
- genmud 3y agoWhen the median household income is 75,000 and the average household size is 2.5, yes, a metric like this can be a value judgement of policies. I have another kid on the way and daycare for both kids (when the new one is about 8-9 months old) is going to be around $3,700/month, or $44,400 per year. For my family we will spend more than half the median household income just on child care. The story is almost the same with nearly every parent I talk to.
- pintxo 3y agoSo an average Kindergarden group of 10 would net the operation 220k annually? That must be some high cost of living area, where child care workers earn decidedly above the median income. Or someone is extracting massive profits.
- olau 3y agoAt that age span, you're looking at 3-5 children per adult.
- brightball 3y agoWhen we did the math on 2 kids in daycare, we hired a nanny. It was cheaper, more convenient and better for the kids. Plus, the nanny has become a lifelong family friend.
- lukego 3y agoWe did the same. And then did the math again and moved to Scandinavia...
- huytersd 3y agoWell it makes sense since you’re going from a 1:1 ratio to a 1:5 or 1:10.
- knallfrosch 3y agoAlso we lose the value difference if the woman had a higher-paying job than the person working at the day care.
- adw 3y agoThis is just, in an economic sense, another application of comparative advantage. If you can get paid more than your childcare costs, it's an economic loss not to do exactly that. You get what you measure.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoHow so? Positive economic and negative economic externalities are too complex to factor in, at least of what I've seen. So the net balance seems ambiguous.
- adw 3y agoWe're agreeing. The issue is that what I've said is true _as defined_ (the value of work is what you can get paid for it; if hiring someone to do something costs X, and you can earn Y>X doing something else, then it's a deadweight loss of Y-X in economic terms to do X yourself instead), and you're pointing out that the definition of the metric has holes (which is true for all metrics). The consequence of management-to-the-metric follows.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoAmen. American business has to stripmine something, anything. Past generations put the brakes on doing it to natural resources so the tide has turned to human resources.
- fzeroracer 3y agoIt's become particularly worse in the past 30 years or so as the cycle of stripmining has intensified. CEOs and execs and investors and private equity are quickly ransacking businesses and siphoning money. The idea of a sustainable business model has vanished as growth involves throwing billions of dollars into cornering and monopolizing a market so you can profit from the rent. It's even harder for new businesses to start up because costs are high enough that you NEED investment funds.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoI wish I could do more than agree. I am pushing 60. The alarm was raised about wealth concentration and inequity from the time I was in high school. My generation and I didn't do enough to stop it. I'm not sure I did anything except sign the odd petition and vote. For the past thirty years wealth concentration has become the central dogma of the American economy if not the culture as a whole. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and laissez-faire.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThere are hundreds of thousands of regulations per-state; I don't think that's "laissez-faire". That's why OP says the following: > It's even harder for new businesses to start up because costs are high enough that you NEED investment funds.
- lacrimacida 3y agoRegulations did nothing about wealth concentration though, lobbying made sure of that
- andrei_says_ 3y agoThe way the economy measures value is limited, manipulative, idiotic, and destructive. I’d argue that the teaching of modern economics spreads a mindset that is a major contributing force to indescribable amount of unnecessary suffering and the destruction of our biosphere. One of the healthier economic models is the Doughnut economics model. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
- smac__ 3y agoFocusing on the multiple goals and limits seems like a much better way to measure the health of economies (or large systems). Is there any country that uses this model, or a similar one, as their main basis for measurement?
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoNo country uses a single measurement.
- refurb 3y agoIt’s a number. It’s not good or bad it just is. It’s like seeing “$3B was saved by eliminating duplicate work” and saying “what a deranged statistic when it improves when people lose jobs”
- mihaic 3y agoWhy choose to explicitly mention that number? It becomes a focus point, which turns it into a metric to optimize.
- refurb 3y agoIt’s a new article that is desperate for clicks. <Insert large number> grabs people’s attention.
- offices 3y agoBecause some people who don't care about raising children do care about the economy.
- mihaic 3y agoI was answering to the post that it's just a number, which I don't really agree with. This topic seems to be quite emotionally loaded. > Because some people who don't care about raising children do care about the economy. This seems even worse for me than "it's just a number", since in the long-term is a contradiction that leads to collapse. The economy is a sum of human activity, and the future economy will be done by today's children. If you don't raise them well you're simply extracting value created by others that wasn't quantified just so you can pad your metrics. Not caring about children when you're thinking about the economy is like not training any new employees, but only extracting maximum value from your existing workforce, but done on a societal level.
- jowea 3y agoTell me with a straight face that politicians, the media and people in general don't obsess over GDP growth.
- 3y ago
- ericmcer 3y agoit makes sense. One adult can monitor many children. With childcare a single adult can watch 10+ kids. Makes more sense than having each adult watch only their own 1 - 2 children. I don't think there have been many societies in human history that don't have some kind of communal child care for that exact reason. It is actually pretty deranged that we have each parent raise their own kids in relative isolation (until school).
- plutoh28 3y agoIt’s not deranged for kids to be raised by their parents.
- closeparen 3y agoThe deranged part is the parent being the only person involved in raising their child / raising the child being the parent's only activity. This level of separation from extended family and community is a contingent feature a certain time, place, and social bubble, not something natural or inherent to the human condition. The commercial daycare center is hardly the ideal model, but it is at least something besides total individualism.
- yawboakye 3y ago> This level of separation from extended family and community is a contingent feature a certain time, place, and social bubble, not something natural or inherent to the human condition. in my experience, this is a feature of city dwelling. when people live in villages there’s a tendency to have the same neighbors for a lifetime, and so to form more lasting bonds, which allows the full expression of our humanity. i have lived in some french villages and the community i experienced there isn’t different from how anthropologists described community among primitive cultures.
- mcny 3y agoIt isn’t just city dwelling but the reality of trying to escape poverty. My parents did the “right thing” and delayed having children until they could feed us. I delayed getting married until I felt stable. In previous generations, I’d imagine my parents would look after my children while I was out tending goats or tilling a farm but it would be incredibly unfair for me to expect my aging parents to look after a child. I can’t make the math work no matter how I slice it. I had a very fortunate childhood considering the childhood my parents had. If I have children, I want to give them at least the same level of comfort and security which right now I can’t. I think people who are having multiple children without thinking it through are being extremely selfish.
- eesmith 3y agoAs Arthur Cecil Pigou observed in 1920: "If a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished." For more complete context, https://archive.org/details/ost-business-pigou_0316_ebk_v60/page/n25/mode/2up?q=%22If+a+man+marries+his+housekeeper+or+his+cook%2C+the+national+dividend+is+diminished.%22 https://archive.org/details/ost-business-pigou_0316_ebk_v60/... "Yet again, the services rendered by women enter into the dividend when they are rendered in exchange for wages, whether in the factory or in the home, but do not enter into it when they are rendered by mothers and wives gratuitously to their own families. Thus, if a man marries his housekeeper or his cook, the national dividend is diminished. These things are paradoxes. It is a paradox also that, when Poor Law or Factory Regulations divert women workers from factory work or paid home-work to unpaid home-work, in attendance on their children, preparation of the family meals, repair of the family clothes, thoughtful expenditure of housekeeping money, and so on, the national dividend, on our definition, suffers a loss against which there is to be set no compensating gain. It is a paradox, lastly, that the frequent desecration of natural beauty through the hunt for coal or gold, or through the more blatant forms of commercial advertisement, must, on our definition, leave the national dividend intact, though, if it had been practicable, as it is in some exceptional circumstances, to make a charge for viewing scenery, it would not have done so."
- csomar 3y agoIt is not taxable income. When a woman takes care of her own child, the government cannot levy taxes over that. The same when the parent fixes his own garage door. The government do not like these activities and that's why they'd prefer corporations which work people 8-6, so that the working potential of the population is fully available to them. The incentives are not aligned. That's all.
- carlosjobim 3y agoThis argument makes sense initially, but when you consider it more deeply it doesn't really. If it was only about getting tax revenue and considering no other factor, the government could just print money and let people stay at home. I say it's less about levying taxes and more about harnessing the productivity of these women working outside the home. It is also clear to me that industrial nation governments have a higher goal of limiting population and physically eradicating the people of their nations, since most of their policies add to that trend. This has always been going on through the history of civilization, but since nationalism became the strongest cultural force, the population no longer accepts being eliminated by foreign powers, so instead that work is being done by domestic rulers – focusing most of their efforts to exterminate the young to the benefit of the old.
- 0xParlay 3y ago> the government could just print money and let people stay at home. This is your understanding of economics and you’re going around telling people they’re wrong. It’s okay to just admit you have no idea and ask a question rather than make a statement.
- carlosjobim 3y agoYour comment has no substance.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoYou can tax the money folks get as part of a safety net. Norway does this.
- Tade0 3y agoIt's also completely backwards. It's giving children your undivided attention that is ultimately way more productive than outsourcing it. Or actually: life forces us to send them off, so every bit of additional parental attention is precious.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoI dunno, man. Other people help children too. Child care - especially pre-schools! - expose children to kids that are different than themselves, teaching them how to deal with others. They meet children that they would never meet through their parents. Other people also teach your children things that you might not consider or teach in a different way. Time away from one's caregivers is important. You can insert something here about independent play: You really shouldn't give your children attention all the time. Helicopter parenting is bad. Young children? Stay close enough, but not hovering. Not to mention that a stay-at-home parent is definitely not giving undivided attention. That adult still has to do adult things: Shower, make dinner, clean, etc and they will probably be expected to do a big share of it since they are home. Not to mention that most folks wind up socially isolated, especially if the other parent doesn't take the children and give the stay-at-home parent a break. Or if poverty prevents someone from spending time with others. Quality time is precious: Time itself simply isn't the same.
- offices 3y agoIt's an unavoidable result of the division of labour. If it's more valuable for those parents to be child carers, they should quit their jobs and become child carers. Any derangement is as a result of trying to link economic value with personal value. It doesn't mean the answer is to ignore the economic reality.
- zmgsabst 3y agoBut this isn’t about economic reality: we exclude from measurement the contribution of homemakers. To say they produce “more value” letting others care for their children is an effect of what we choose to measure — and emphatically not a measure of their actual economic contributions, as defined by what goods and services are provided. Case in point: Two housewives caring for each other’s children increases GDP since the salary is measured — even though both families are strictly worse off.
- Arnt 3y agoIs child care paid with before-tax or after-tax money?
- PopAlongKid 3y agoIn the U.S., some of each, especially depending on whether the state provides deductions or credits similar to federal.
- gmac 3y agoYes, GDP is famously crap. It wasn't developed as a number to be maximised, and we've known it makes no sense to maximise it ever since it was developed. Samuelson remarked along the lines that (old-fashioned gender roles alert) "if a man marries his maid, GDP falls". Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped politicians and journalists using it to keep score.
- jowea 3y agoDidn't know HN was so feminist! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_economics#Exclusion_of_non-market_activity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_economics#Exclusion_o...
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThe limitations of GDP were known since its inception. It has little to do with feminism.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWell, that quoted whereever-it-comes-from number probably has a hidden undercurrent. So "the economy" loses $122 billion from moms going home? WHO is "the economy"? Well it's not the parents, because they are making the individual economic decision. Who could it be? The government? A bit, indirectly.... you know, like 15% of it, maybe. Oh right, it's the rich/elites that rake in all the money, and set government policy. That phrase should actually be; "The ultra-wealthy who control all the money and corporations lose 122 billion per year when their underpaid wage-suppressed mothers stop working, maybe we should throw them some more crumbs to get them back to work so we can collect that money back" Where's the numbers about "overworking parents and denying childcare assistance so that people don't procreate, and 'costs' the US economy trillions?"
- kevmo 3y agoRelated: The death rate for American babies is rising - https://archive.ph/ksrra https://archive.ph/ksrra And America has a higher baby death rate than China, Russia, Japan, and the EU. I wonder what all those countries have in common that we don't.
- Qem 3y agoProbably universal healthcare, or at least one that's not so insane, with people avoiding treatment for simple problems fearing they will get slapped with a huge bill and go bankrupt.
- kardianos 3y agoI agree: The mindset behind this quoted thinking is disgusting. May our children be our joy, our responsibility, our honor. I don't know the mindset that produced this, some form of "progressive" thought or outright communism (which is famous for this), but this must be countered wherever found. It is not Good or healthy.
- kernelrain 3y agoYeah, everybody knows that darn communism that optimizes for... maximum national income? Your comment is ridiculous and outright embarrassing.
- timeagain 3y agoThis is a large part of why many economies of poorer countries look worse on paper than they really are. It isn’t that people aren’t doing the work, they just aren’t doing it for pay in a hyper-individualized way. The kids are taken care of, the food gets made, the sheep are herded, and no money gets transferred so GDP/capita languishes. In this way economic measurements, investment bankers, the spooky IMF, etc are an active assault on community living. The Coffee-Cola Song comes to mind.
- bandyaboot 3y agoHaving people to look after kids while parents are away is not some aberration in human history that’s it’s made out to be. “It takes a village” is simply a cliched description of how it’s always been and it’s not a negative thing in general.
- indymike 3y agoChild care results in GDP being created. From a certain point of view, government gets a cut of GDP to fund itself.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago"The us loses a trillion dollars a year when people decide to sleep on a regular basis"