Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off. There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency Substituting others (or

Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off. There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time. Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric. Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved. We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options! But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed) And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.