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Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

National income is correlated with percent of population in workforce. Poorer countries are correlated with lower levels of total employment. Assuming all else being equal then parents with less time involved in employment will have more time for other activities, including spending time with children. Is this right?

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> National income is correlated with percent of population in workforce. Poorer countries are correlated with lower levels of total employment.

How did you draw that conclusion? Do you have any data for this?

Intuitively I'd expect poor people to work more since they still need a baseline amount of money (food, rent, etc.) and it takes them longer to get it.

Two parents working have more income counted in GDP than one parent. Higher GDP is thus correlated with more parents working. More parents working means less parent hours available. In the table the bottom countries have highest number of parents working and the top countries, lowest.

please don't think about it in terms of first world problems of time management. it is more like, they are poor and they want kids to get a solid education and get good jobs and lead a happier, fulfilling life compared to them. fyi: username is a function of yours'.

please don't think about it in terms of "the virtues of unfortunate". Everyone wants "kids to get a solid education and get good jobs and lead a happier, fulfilling life".

please, rather, try to think about it in terms of what best-explains the difference.

this data seems highly inversely correlated with productivity, in countries with lower productivity, people spend more time with their child. Time available seems to be the best explanatory factor.

Does reduced productivity at work correlate with more available time though? Take subsistence agriculture, which is very common in poor countries - it is usually done inefficiently, and yet it is very time consuming. In my experience, it's more the leisure time that gets sacrificed - parents have almost no social life while their child is growing up.

> Everyone wants "kids to get a solid education..."

No, this is not universal. There are parents who had a bad experience of education and think that is universal, and those who fear that their children will move away if they become educated. It's one of the challenges of teaching in particular areas.

Do you mean "a bad experience of education" or do you mean "a bad experience of school"?

If its the former could you expand on that, like they learnt to read and it messed their life up?

I understand the selfish desire to keep children near, no need to go in to that.

By poor I mean lower GDP rather than poverty. The countries up top have lower cost of living and the bottom ones higher, the countries at the top of the table have less parents working, and the bottom, more. Therefore the countries at the top can afford to spend time with children, and the countries at the bottom, can’t afford it.

“Rich countries” are time poor that’s why they produce time related articles like these. :)

What does your FYI line mean - very cryptic.

In poorer countries, getting an education is the easiest way out of poverty.

All else is not equal here.

But India - the top on the list is not a poor country and I suspect that the really poor in India are not doing this but the growing middle class are.

Wow, bold claim. India's GDP per capita for 2017 is $7,200, ranked 156th in the world. I'd say they're not far away from being poor. Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

By poorer I mean less income counted in GDP. The lower cost of living make it more viable for parents spend more time with children. I could also argue India is rich compared to, say, Japan, who don’t have much resources to spend on having children.

It's 156 in the world by GDP per capita PPP (purchase power parity) with under USD 8000 (USD 2200 nominal), so cost of living is taken into account, and a HDI of 0.624 (131st in the world).

Many positive things might be said about India, but the notion that it is not a poor country is objectively quite mistaken.

India is not Sub Saharan Africa poor but has ~20% of their population living in poverty which they define as something like 50 cents a day.

This is a bit of a numbers/definition game.

I don't know if there's an official definition of poor but if over half of the population lacks indoor plumbing and makes only a few dollars a day, I'd say most people in the 1st world would call it a poor country.

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