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>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proporti

>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay. A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income. Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?

jjk166 1y ago
It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care. It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker. You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).
      - jjk166 1y ago
        Would you mind providing a link to one of these studies?
        somenameforme 1y ago
        Again, I think if you simply searched for studies on these things - you'd find a million results. Here [1] is one with volunteer tutors improving student performance on the order of about 0.3 standard deviations relative to their peers. I don't entirely understand the fetishism of expertise among a certain segment of society. Don't you realize that most of all teachers and other educational institutions are staffed by those who would be considered nominally experts? And this has even been taken to the next level by widespread adherence to a national curriculum (common core), again composed by even greater ostensible experts. And all of this has been complimented by the 5th highest spending per student in the world. And the result? Educational outcomes are falling off a cliff. Obviously this isn't to say that anti-expertise is the answer, but rather that motivated people of reasonable intelligence and objectivity, regardless of expertise, are a [measurably] excellent source of value in just about everything. And, by contrast, expertise itself does not guarantee good results nor effective performance, especially in the context of other issues that might otherwise impair performance like large class sizes, minimal motivation, poor work environment, etc. [1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effectiveness_of_Volunteer_Tutoring_Programs_A_Systematic_Review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effec...
        ndriscoll 1y ago
        https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf

jjk166 1y ago

It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.

somenameforme 1y ago
In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care. It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
- jjk166 1y ago
  Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker. You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).
    - jjk166 1y ago
      Would you mind providing a link to one of these studies?
      - somenameforme 1y ago
        Again, I think if you simply searched for studies on these things - you'd find a million results. Here [1] is one with volunteer tutors improving student performance on the order of about 0.3 standard deviations relative to their peers. I don't entirely understand the fetishism of expertise among a certain segment of society. Don't you realize that most of all teachers and other educational institutions are staffed by those who would be considered nominally experts? And this has even been taken to the next level by widespread adherence to a national curriculum (common core), again composed by even greater ostensible experts. And all of this has been complimented by the 5th highest spending per student in the world. And the result? Educational outcomes are falling off a cliff. Obviously this isn't to say that anti-expertise is the answer, but rather that motivated people of reasonable intelligence and objectivity, regardless of expertise, are a [measurably] excellent source of value in just about everything. And, by contrast, expertise itself does not guarantee good results nor effective performance, especially in the context of other issues that might otherwise impair performance like large class sizes, minimal motivation, poor work environment, etc. [1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effectiveness_of_Volunteer_Tutoring_Programs_A_Systematic_Review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effec...
      - ndriscoll 1y ago
        https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf