China’s two-child policy is having unintended consequences
economist.com
economist.com
Anyway... This is a policy area that (in my estimation) just doesn't lend well to philosophical theorizing. This (more contentiously, but also IMO) which means we need to watch out for the French and the Americans. They will want to solve the theory part of the problem in a theoretically ound way, without inelegant hacks or "this seems to work" solutions.
Just to state the obvious, the problem is: "How do we improve maternity benefits and (maybe) increase fertility, without undermining women in the workplace."
Theoretically) the problem is almost impossible to solve. In practice, there are all sorts of things that help or hurt, some of them surprising.
For example, it seems to be the case that "shift work" (anywhere from fast food to paediatrics) is way better for mothers. In a shift job, if you aren't in your seat, someone else is. Work doesn't pile into your backlog, waiting for you to come back. This means jobs are better defined, and can therefore be more easily parceled out.
Ironically, shift work turns out to be more flexible in ways that matter to working mothers. It doesn't lend to flextime and work from home, but it does lend to job sharing, flexible loading and such.
The trend is in the opposite direction though. A lot more modern jobs (especially good ones at technology companies) tend to be built around individuals. You might have 3 "sr developers" on a single team, but they generally can't step into eachothers' shoes flexibly. Each one plays a unique role.
It's almost impossible to reconcile such tidbits of specific, practical knowleedge with a wider abstract theory of labour, contracts, freedom and such. But, it is possible to make more maternity (and paternity) friendly policies by understanding them.
Obviously there's the associated job of changing perceptions around taking the leave, which will vary from country to country, but by making the risks associated by hiring a man no different from those associated by hiring a woman you move towards eliminating this gender imbalance.
As an additional benefit, both parents are more likely to have time to bond with their newborn or newly adopted child and share the burden of early parenting.
In Germany, there's the "parental leave" (not maternal or paternal leave) [0]. The time period is 12 months with parental allowance : 2/3rds of your income - 300 to 1800 €. If the mother and father share the parental leave, the leave extends until 14 months. Of course, there are other benefits like child care etc. [1] after the child has grown up.
[0] http://www.bamf.de/EN/Willkommen/KinderFamilie/Elterngeld/el...
[1] http://www.bamf.de/EN/Willkommen/KinderFamilie/Kinderbetreuu...
However, "sharing" in this case does not necessarily mean equal parts. The rule is "max. 14 months in total, but max. 12 months per parent". So a lot of couples end up doing 12 months maternal leave and 2 months paternal leave (not all though).
Best to just mandatory-castrate your employees.
> Best to just mandatory-castrate your employees.
Ok, it's clear you aren't interested in solutions, you're just morality-trolling.
No, I'm not. I'm just pointing out your "solution" isn't. Why do you think it is OK to just insult me?
You're back at the start: I'll just hire a male since they won't take maternity breaks. Or I'll hire a woman and build that risk into her salary by paying her less.
I believe the only way we can get past that is to make the leave mandatory for both parents, but I'm open to (reasonable) alternatives. You're yet to provide any.
> Decrease costs of daycare and create programs to re-introduce child-bearing women
Are those not solutions? With lower daycare costs, you don't need to take a long maternity leave, just enough for recovery. And the re-introduction programs don't have to come from the employing company, it can be driven by the government so companies don't feel they are impacted by pregnancies. Maybe a tax write-off for post-pregnancy job training?
No, they're not. Details below.
>With lower daycare costs, you don't need to take a long maternity leave
Sure, you can make it shorter by taking away the freedom of the parents to take care of their own child instead of leaving that to daycare. I believe that above you were strongly against taking away parents' freedom.
>just enough for recovery.
And while it's shorter, it's still there, so there's inequality, unless (again) both parents are forced to take the exact same leave.
>And the re-introduction programs don't have to come from the employing company, it can be driven by the government so companies don't feel they are impacted by pregnancies. Maybe a tax write-off for post-pregnancy job training?
This would never average out to equality, it'd just add an annoying layer of complexity. A company will just hire a male just to not have to deal with any of this.
One possible solution is to make the maternity/paternity leave mandatory "within a year" rather than immediately.
Also, keep in mind you're not, in any event, being forced. It's your choice whether to have kids or not.
I somewhat agree. If we want to level the playing field, we can’t have extra rights and priveleges for women because clearly they become a liability.
I think it is necessary but not sufficient though. I read here about github and the unlimited vacation policy which in practice is a no vacation policy. Just because men can take off doesn’t mean they will at least in the short term. We must keep this policy stable for decades to effect change.
> One way of handling this is making paternity and maternity leave nearly equal, and mandatory.
"mandatory" means making paternity leave compulsory for employees. I could be wrong, though.
Sometimes, a right or measure has to become mandatory to ensure people enjoy it.
If you get penalized for not voting all the modern democratic idealism which portraits voting as a right is pretty stale.
I completely get why the classic Greeks came up with it, though. They were obviously far more tribal in their culture.
The problem isn't that maternity leave disrupts companies individual companies. So does sleep, and they're both part of normal human life. The problem is that the system in effect has the effect of a) discriminating against woman and b) suppressing the birth rate. If you are planning at a national level, suppressing the birth rate for a tiny economic boost right now is a high road to nowhere.
And the birth rate will go up if men are forbidden to work for half a year when having a child? That seems highly doubtful, it might as well go further down because some people actually like their work.
You can frame it the way you have if you want to, but to some cultures, having the government tell people what they can and can't do is the only way to ensure true liberty for all.
...that is just to examplify that the freedom from/to distinction requires a very specific worldview to function as a robust differentiator.
I see how you can frame it as "freedom not to have reproduction affect your career". But for one thing that still won't work. Time off is time off and income correlates with total hours worked in your life. For another, I don't think all of society agrees that we should pay for your freedom to have children without incurring any costs. We don't need more children, the world population is still increasing. There's this strange train of logic now that because aging populations become poor (because we massively overpromised on pensions) we need native children. 1. We can use immigration. 2. If your system cannot support the decreasing population necessary for the world to get through the next centuries, you need to fix the system not encourage breeding.
Also what about incels, gay people, people who just don't want children? Why on earth are they paying for straight middle class peoples ability not to have their kids interfere with their law career.
In practice if you're young, junior or working for a jerk (or a high hours constant death march startup) the choice becomes work through and let partner do it alone, or get fired. For the rest it is a case of how confident you are in your tenure, seniority and perhaps number of years in the workplace how you will react to your employer hinting strongly to just take a couple of days.
What's needed is strong enough legislation such that anyone who wants to support their partner can, and the few who have to work can do also. I'd much prefer for it become an accepted norm, and for those who don't to be the unusual case. It has benefits for both the parents and the child.
Your last point immediately begs the question what about all the rest? Why on earth are they paying for straight middle class kid's education, healthcare, child allowance etc. Why on earth are they paying for pensions of those no longer working? That way lies the abolition of all social safety nets and ultimately pay yourself or sink. I don't want to live there thank you. :)
If you're poor/young bad boss/start up and have kids it's tough yes. It's also tough if you don't have kids, and they're a choice.
It's kind of pointless to argue left/right, dismiss me with a label if you want. This only exists in a few very left wing countries so I don't think opposing it puts me on a fringe somewhere.
The point is that maternity/paternity leave is the rest of society subsidising parents, who are not doing anything useful by adding to existing overpopulation. Not whether I'm left wing or right wing. If you want to make life easier then I'd go for basic income over selective welfare that disproportionately benefits the already privileged.
That's a very surprising claim. All the psychological consensus that I've seen says that the continuous presence of people of reference (preferably the parents) is a positive influence on the early development of children.
Giving birth ranges from "extremely exhausting" to "life-alteringly horrendous" (sometimes life-threateningly). Breastfeeding, something widely recognized as extremely beneficial to the infant, is incredibly demanding, and they will do it 10+ times a day when they're newborns. If nothing else, we're mammals - our infants really aren't ready to be dumped in to daycare when they're 2 weeks old.
As it stands, we do not have a way to take the burdens I named above and split them between fathers and mothers equally. In light of that, women will _always_ have to deal with employers worried about whether they'll have a kid. Making paternity leave equal levels the playing field.
Instead of making it "mandatory" you can make it "use it or lose it" and that might do the trick, unless you work for a horrible company (though many people do...). Nobody seems to mind mandated vacation days where I live. In fact, it's the only way to make sure vacation is actually taken (see also: BS "unlimited vacation")
Having children is a choice.
If you're about to say that women will be discriminated against on the basis that they might have children, it would be easy to allow them to be docked pay. This has an immediate "ugh" reaction because as a society we put mothers and bearing children on a pedestal. Having children is a bad thing for the world, and those who choose to have children are definitely the more privileged.
You do end up in a hole where "it is a choice but everyone who takes it is penalized" is the actual result.
(at least for some time)
If it is out beneficial, it is not a choice anyway or one only rich can afford. You said it yourself.
However, it's worth noting that countries with high gender equality (including shared parental leave) tend to have below-replacement birthrates. It kind of makes sense that letting people have a kid and stay in the workforce means fewer kids - being a working parent with 1 kid is hard enough (even with leave). Even with fully shared parental leave, having a kid is more expensive if you have a career. By contrast, if having a kid knocks you out of the workplace entirely it makes the cost of having another lower. My wife and I have a kid and we have indeed thought "well, if we have two kids the creche fees nearly double, and the math doesn't work out, so if we're going to stay a two-income family we really can only have one".
And we all end up paying for crap we don't want to. Buying a house is a choice but before I left the US my taxes subsidized the insanely stupid mortgage interest tax deduction. I HATE paying for roads through taxes. I think they should be completely tolled and made to support themselves, and that if the externalities were priced in most travel would be via bike/ebike/walking/public transport. But I don't get much choice; my taxes pay for them. We have sprawling roads _everywhere_, there's no peace and quiet _anywhere_, and civilisation (including today's children) may die a horrible death as a result.
That's oversimplified as there more options and scenarios but the fairly common situation. Like you say it takes away women being seen as such a liability from becoming mothers from what I saw in my little bubble while living there for a few years. Also as fathers have all this time off it encourages the mother back to the workforce. And for me it really helped in my day to day baby duties involvement.
I've brought this up many times to people pushing for better women's rights in the workforce as something they should fight for if they do want a more equal workplace vs more an egocentric position of leave/benefits for themself.
Speaking of obvious things: my child is no more precious than anyone else’s child.
I think the compromise will be some kind of a one child policy here as well. I think this is more humane alternative to what we have now. My proposed new one child policy is to incentivize people to have a child or to adopt one child with additional taxpayer money. The compromise is to limit it only to the first child. You’re on your own if you want more. I think it is worth considering.
In a globalized world with the ability to move for work, children might still be an economic net-positive for the parents (once you account for how much they’d be willing to pay to replicate their genes into the next generation) but they’re probably a net-negative for the community they’re raised in. What benefits does introducing a new human being, as a baby, into a community provide said community, these days?
Your community will only get net-negative returns when a human is raised through their teenage years in your community, and then leaves, gets enculturated by some other community, and never comes back. This usually breeds resentment—think lower-class urban youth who go on to university and enculturate to the upper-middle-class culture there. If they come back to visit their old family and friends, they will see them as “acting as if they’re too good for us.”
The resentment is usually for a good reason: once you’ve enculturated away from your home culture, you don’t tend to care much about it any more! So, unlike people who retain their home culture in another community, you won’t do things like sending money home to family, or coming back to help build or lead the community, once you have acquired the resources to do so.
The migration is mostly for economic reasons, and those are because businesses prefer centralized scale at all levels, including education.
To be clear, though, while moving to a new society will cause quite gradual, passive assimilation, I wasn’t really talking about that case. In such cases, you still tend to think of your old community as “your community”, and might e.g. seek out an association of expats from your old society to hang out with, since you still share their mores.
But moving to a university, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or going to prison, or marrying into money—these are communities, not societies. They actively “digest” you. In all these cases, you are given new connections who serve as both direct role-models for, and judges of, your current degree of assimilation; and, further, you are usually striving to assimilate as quickly as possible (whether you’re there voluntarily or not) because your lack of cultural awareness is one of the things keeping you back from having status and power in your new community.
Would you not call what any/all of these entities do—one of the major roles they perform for their members—enculturation? If not, then it seems that I have misunderstood the term.
(Tangent/side note: I didn’t make the connection of prison-as-community-that-assimilates until I was writing this. Isn’t the whole goal of reducing recidivism better expressed as “reducing the potential for prison to serve as an enculturating/assimilating force upon prisoners”?)
Prior societies understood that children are fundamental to society. If the children die, the community dies with it. Modern business thoery and economics see children as extraneous. That's cultural poison and it's everywhere now.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-addicts-paid-to-get-birth-...
You can't really be pro-economy, anti-immigration and anti-child support. It's not a position that makes any sense in the real world.
I've always thought that was much more logical, the current system in the UK just doesn't make sense at it's core => if you're an employer you can get saddled with an employee who you have to pay whilst they don't work for a period, who can then quit, but you're not allowed/expected to try to avoid this by not hiring women. Or taking it into account in promotions/salary.
If you really believe both of: 1: women should be paid to have children at their current salary. 2: women should not be discriminated against in any way. Then the only way to reconcile it is to have the government pay. And no, equal male leave wouldn't solve the problem because they don't take it. And no, mandatory male leave isn't a good solution. For a start it's unbelievably authoritarian to force someone to leave their work because they had a child. For a second you still have exactly the same discrimination problem it's just directed at potential parents instead of women. That would remove it as a feminist issue so it wouldn't get press but it would still be a problem.
Sure, and ideally through an additional corporate tax based on overall wage cost for a business. Seems like a daft expense not to mutualise against at a national level, rather than what is today essentially a corporate lottery.
In Spain. Also, it is still an objectively worse proposition for companies to hire women who are expected to have children soon than to hire other people. For several reasons (in Spain's current situation):
1) Even if you don't pay the employee's salary while on maternity leave, you still have to find a replacement and train them.
2) Paternity leave is shorter than maternity leave. And it can be transferred, something many couples do (usually in the paternity -> maternity direction). This translates to longer absence periods, and "rustier" comebacks after that.
3) In our society, mothers still carry a larger fraction of the burden of having children. That is, even after maternity leave is over, schools call the mother first if their child is ill, or gets injured, or whatever. Women are more prone to ask for flexible or reduced hours, etc. These are all inconveniences for the employer (w.r.t. employees in other situations).
I'm not saying I like it this way and I don't claim to have a workable solution, just describing reality...
In Poland for example. National Social Insurance pays you 80% of your salary for up to half a year of maternity/paternity leave. Additionally mothers often abuse the system and ask a doctor to say their pregnancy is threathened, so they are on a sick leave for months before birth.
It doesn't directly incur additional costs for the employer, but it's still making 20-35 y.o. women with less than 2 children slightly less attractive on the marketplace because training an employee just to have her disappear for a year or 2 is a big overhead.
Of course - employers can't officially discriminate basing on age/gender/number of children, but you can't prove they do, so whatever.
I care about your kid being raised properly, because I don't want to deal with a criminal 20 years from now. That's why I happily pay taxes for education, less problems for me later even if I don't have kids.
There is [0] plenty of research [1] on the subject [2]. Early infancy is when the sense of empathy and belonging develops the most, and this development improves with the participation of the father in child care [3]. Daycare is in general subpar in this regard until the children can go to preschool, 0-4 isn't optimal for socialization.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232438327_Empathic_...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282751496_Developme...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016363831...
[3] https://web.a.ebscohost.com/abstract?direct=true&profile=eho...
My point was that this only goes part of the way: even if the leave is publicly funded it can be very expensive for the employer when a parent leaves. Just because you don’t pay salary while the parent is away, doesn’t mean it’s free for the employer.
To mitigate that causing discrimination you’d need to go further. One example is a system that also compensated the employer (pays for the inconvenience and extra cost of finding a temp etc).
Another way that you mentioned is ensuring that men and women take equal amounts of leave, and that is happening in some places. Me and my wife got 400+ paid days to share but part of it is reserved for each parent and can’t be transferred. Currently that’s 60 of the days, but there have been voices calling for making the program individual, ie having ~200 non-transferable days for each parent. This is a tradeoff between families’ right to choose and gender equality, and so far the former has outweighed the latter, so it has not been split.
> equal male leave wouldn't solve the problem because they don't take it
That’s a chicken and egg problem. Once there is a large generous system in place, norms change. The most common case here is that the mother is home 8-12 months and the father then the following 4-6 months (because obviously breastfeeding is pretty convenient to do without bottling for the first months etc. so it’s nearly invariably the mother who goes first). If the program was individual/split I’m 100% sure that the leaves would also be very close to equal per parent. Both parents do take long leaves, as it’s not quite socially acceptable not to, and it’s accepted by employers (often encouraged) to do so, for both men and women. This is of course an effect of having the generous leave. If you can get paid leave, and your employer supports you leaving (or worst case at least can’t stop you) - then aren’t you a bad parent for choosing not to take the leave? That’s the status of it, more or less.
As much as I'm a libertarian and agree a lot of places overdo worker protection, they are needed.
If you want fewer policies, that is more of a libertarian vs authoritarian distinction.
E.g., try a program somewhere, and if it achieves the desired results, scale it up. If not, iterate until the end of a pre-agreed timebox, and if things still fail to deliver, that's how learning happens.
Sadly, I doubt that the public at large would be okay with this approach. :/
Generally central action ought to be taken to harmonize local development and fit to super national level norms, not just because - and only when necessary.
Anything else is dangerously authoritarian.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-02/24/c_1118142363.ht...
When you demand mother to be perfect (e.g. by being stay at home), you get less children, and nobody becomes happier. As opposed to laid back approach with society safety net.
Are there any counterexamples of countries where the state picks up the bill?
That seems to me to be a much better policy, you avoid obvious perverse incentives like a small company not wanting to hire a woman in her late 20s because she might get pregnant, and that's going to be a huge expense.
I think it makes sense as a social policy to have generous leave after people have children, but it seems ridiculous to implement it like this.
If the state paid for it you'd get other perverse incentives, since they'd be obligated to pay a salary determined by some private company, but fraud there should be easy to control for, e.g. you get paid the mean salary you earned for the last N years, not what you happened to be earning the day you had a child.
The state foots the bill in : France, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark
What do you mean by "extra money"? Also, are you against employer-mandated leave too?
> they have a hybrid system where the employer covers some significant percentage
In Germany, the employer doesn't cover any significant percentage - the money comes from the state.
> What do you mean by "extra money"?
This "Elterngeld" policy you've linked to describes something entirely different, at least in some countries. That Wikipedia article seems to conflate many different types of policies.
In e.g. France this just seems to be an allowance system unrelated to however the French handle paid paternity and maternity leave (I'm not familiar with if/how they do that). According to the news article on the BBC which Wikipedia links to the German system is something similar.
> Also, are you against employer-mandated leave too?
Yeah I can't see how that's a good idea, especially in the context of paternity or maternity leave. It should be up to the state to set that policy, and then you should have a right to make use of it. Your employer shouldn't be mandating anything.
But that topic is entirely unrelated to my original comment, which is how you fund the leave once it happens.
> In Germany, the employer doesn't cover
> any significant percentage.
But in in case, I was referring to Sweden and Norway which according to that article have some system based on a percentage of salary, although I see now that that could mean that 80% is all you're getting, instead of the employer paying the remaining 20%. I don't know which it is.
In any case, I feel all of this is getting lost in the weeds, and not at all discussing what I think is the interesting point I brought up, namely that if there's countries that run their policies as I was suggesting, have there been studies of how that impacted workplace discrimination when it comes to companies e.g. being more reluctant to hire women they think might get pregnant soon?
Anyway, the result is that most companies require women to sign a contract saying they won't get pregnant in the first year or two after signing a labor contract. If they do get pregnant then they are fired without benefits.
Naturally no one in European or Anglophone countries would countenance such a thing, but in Asia this can provide women with a means of self-determination that they didn't have before.
I remember reading a book about Britain's service class from the Edwardian era until the end of that culture after WW2. Service class culture replaced something far far worse. And the ugly labor regimes that replaced those were better than the service class. If you had an issue with the way one particular factory treated you, well, there was another one right down the road. If you had an issue with the way your masters treated you, your options for finding better employment were far more restricted. This dynamic caused women to leave the service industry in droves to go work in factories.
The classist society in Britain had been fighting a rearguard action to maintain the service legal regime for decades, until WW2 thoroughly annihilated any chance of it ever coming back.
Nowadays any time I hear about some crazy contract law, I immediately think about what human agency is being liberated here.
Amazon link for the interested: https://www.amazon.com/Servants-Downstairs-History-Britain-N...
China has basically just taken a shortcut to the "natural" reduction in family size that happens to every country as it develops and become richer.