Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The authors don't appear to be directly arguing that (at least not in the conclusion, i didn't read the body of the paper)

The authors seem to be arguing that development of non-cognitive skills is important for long-term health, life satisfaction, etc, and that childcare programs that do not measure and attempt to support development of non-cognitive skills may therefore be somewhat harmful. It is possible that some childcare programs may support development of non-cognitive skills, but the Quebec childcare program that they analysed did not.

  > We find that the Quebec policy [of making non-parental child care much more affordable]
  > had a lasting negative impact on the non-cognitive skills of exposed children, but no consistent 
  > impact on their cognitive skills.  At older ages, program exposure is associated with worsened 
  > health and life satisfaction, and increased rates of criminal activity.  Increases in aggression and 
  > hyperactivity are concentrated in boys, as is the rise in the crime rates. 

  > [these findings] provide strong support for the argument that non-cognitive development is a
  > crucial determinant of the long-term success of child care programs. This suggests that
  > measuring the impact of child care programs on the non-cognitive development is important.
  > When a child care program fails to improve non-cognitive development, it may have no
  > long-standing positive effects on children.  

  > [...] An important outstanding question is whether universally provided child care can have
  > widespread positive impacts on non-cognitive development, which our results together with
  > evidence such as Heckman et al. (2013) suggest should lead to long run positive outcomes.

Yes I think they are saying the lack of non-cognitive skills appears to be what is lacking. But there does seem to be some evidence that those who are in parental care better develop these skills and have better outcomes.

I think the tricky part will be demonstrating how to provide these non-cognitive skills outside of parental care. Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force but this may not pay off in the long term if future generations fail to perform in life.

> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force

Any data to support that? Given that there is a deadweight economic loss due to taxes, if both parents work and the income from the second parent doesn’t exceed the cost of child care + taxes, it would seem that in many cases, two parents working could actually be a net loss for the economy as the family might have less disposable income than if just one parent worked. A family with two kids could very easily spend $50k per year on child care. So the other parent would have to make $50k just to break even before the taxes. The second parent could very easily have to make $80k just to cover child care plus the loss from taxes since that second income is taxed as part of the overall household income. Kids with stay at home parents have higher school performance, which has an economic impact as well.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-sta...

You're correct, I should have phased that something along the lines of.

It is assumed that having both parents in the workforce should produce better economic outcomes.

I also agree that there may be a negative net effect on the economy. But I have no idea if there is evidence for this and think it would be very hard to accurately research this given the number of other variables you'd have to account for.

There is some evidence that there are economic benefits to women entering the workforce. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336

There are economic benefits to women and families. I think it’s fairly sensible to propose that the doubling of the supply of workforce has impacted the price paid for labor.

The old fashioned troops and notions that hurt women in the workforce hurt men outside of the workforce. Guys with wives who make more get a lot of grief. When problems happen, it’s nearly impossible for working age men or couples to get safety net benefits.

Take away the dollar figures and it makes sense, 1 person caring for 8 or so children (child care) should be much more efficient than 1 person looking after 1/2/3 children (normal for home care).

That this efficiency ends up lining someone else's pockets would be a separate issue.

This ignores a large number of factors. To look at it like an economist, if your hypothesis is true, what is the market failure that requires subsidies for child care in order to obtain this hypothesised greater efficiency?

> what is the market failure that requires subsidies for child care in order to obtain this hypothesised greater efficiency?

I'm guessing that varies, but around here the main ones seem to be demand outstripping supply due to setup costs (expensive real estate), lack of trained workers, rapidly growing population (child care doesn't get much lead time from census data) and regulation (parents can't operate their own systems).

There are plenty of market failures here when it comes to childcare.

The price of something being higher than you'd prefer does not mean there is a market failure. Child care is not a public good and there are not obvious externalities. Excessive regulation might be a factor but that is not market failure.

The fact that the unsubsidized cost of child care is higher than some parents are willing to pay may just be evidence that there are no efficiencies to be gained for those parents. Perhaps the economies of scale for child care are less than you assume.

You're computing the value of a parent's career as a single point in time salary value, and not as a integration under the curve of salary earned over time. A parent may not have the cash reserves at that single point in time to pay for childcare out of pocket, that doesn't mean that the value they get from staying employed over time does not exceed that cost.

Leaving the workforce starts you over at zero.

Universal childcare, especially in the earliest stages of life, provides societal externalities that vastly outweigh the cost of providing it. It ought to be a public good.

>Leaving the workforce starts you over at zero.

This is less and less true the further from tech you get. An accountant can take a couple years off without having to start near entry level.

> Leaving the workforce starts you over at zero.

My personal evidence where that did not occur: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjasonharrison/

> The price of something being higher than you'd prefer does not mean there is a market failure.

The price of something being much higher than the cost of production is a market failure, in this case the market has failed to produce enough supply.

If the cost of wheat production remained constant but the cheapest you could get a loaf for was $50 would you not consider that a market failure?

No, these are not necessarily examples of market failure. I'd suggest reading up on the concept. A large and long lived discrepancy between the price of something and its cost of production might be an example of market failure, perhaps due to a monopoly. It might also be due to government failure (excessive regulation, subsidies, tax policies, etc.). A temporary discrepancy is not market failure at all, it's how markets work.

In the case of child care it is not even clear this situation exists, most of the reasons you listed earlier were reasons why it is expensive to supply child care and not evidence of excess profits.

For most families, the efficiency gained is a few thousand dollars a year max.

The real motivator is that leaving the workforce these days for any length of time is a death sentence for future employment.

This is not true. You can do it! I did:https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjasonharrison/

Taking time off from your career puts you behind your peers. That's no surprise. If women take time off to raise young children that hurts their long-term earnings. Again, no surprise.

If we want to frame it in purely economic terms vis-a-vis government:

Does the long-term increase in taxes paid by working mothers cover or exceed government outlays to provide childcare, especially in the early pre-K4 years?

Secondarily is there any negative effect on the children and if so can those effects be mitigated?

The study seems to indicate it is a net-win for the government because high-cost childcare only happens for 1-3 years but the earning power increase lasts the rest of a woman's career. I presume rational government policy would attempt to make free childcare tax neutral in this case.

In alternative terms you could see this as the government making a short-term (3 year) loan to cover childcare while being paid back in the form of higher taxes paid by the beneficiaries over the next 20-30 years.

Whether this makes sense for an individual couple is another matter. Whether the government should encourage new daycares or people to train as childcare providers is also another matter that bears some similarities to the universal healthcare arguments (eg that the government would want to encourage more people to train as doctors and nurses since the expected demand for services would increase, though true believers in the free market should expect the market to take care of such problems).

> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force but this may not pay off in the long term if future generations fail to perform in life.

Who is "we" in this statement? The parents? Society? I think whether it makes sense varies from family to family. When my daughter was born, my wife and I did the math and it made zero sense for her to go back to work and for us to pay for child care. The cost of child care was far more than she could possibly bring home. Plus, we have the (apparently old fashioned) belief that an attentive and caring parent would do a better job raising her than some rando child care worker who's trying to corral 10 other kids all day.

Sorry, that point has generated more heat than I expected. What I was meaning here (and said poorly) is that for society specialisation seems to work out with a net overall increase in productivity. If some specialise in childcare it should free others up to specialise in other fields and allow those specialised in childcare to look after more children than stay at home parents would.

I also should have stated that this is an assumption I was basing my next statements on, not a statement of fact. This was also just a generalisation used to reason from. I'm not trying to speak for anyone's individual situation.

I share your belief that a caring parent is going to be better at raising children than a care worker. I would choose this option myself if I were to have children regardless of the economics (here in New Zealand childcare is heavily subsidised by the government, so the numbers would be a little different).

If you work outside the home and put your kids in child care you pay taxes and help billionaires get rich, two things you don't do if you take care of your own.

20 years ago there was a comic in Z magazine that showed two day care workers talking about how paradoxical it was that they couldn't afford to put their own kids in day care. Of course they blamed "capitalism" but in other industries "capitalism" works differently. What was revolutionary about the Ford motor car was that auto workers were productive enough that they could afford the cars that they made, not something that is true about childcare workers.

Some kids are in family situations that are worse than the average day care. For instance, I know a lady who raised a crop of five children, four of which were spectacularly unsuccessful, and then she took care of their children, most of whom turned out to be white people with black problems. Somebody might look at this situation and see "love", but that love is obviously toxic.

In the case of our family we had our son in day care part time, which gave my wife a break sometimes and let him get some socialization, but didn't have a huge cost. As he spent most of his time growing up with adults he wound up with great verbal skills.

> [these findings] provide strong support for the argument that non-cognitive development is a crucial determinant of the long-term success of child care programs.

Okay so non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care. I think the more interesting question is: Why is there such a difference between government supported child-care and parental care?

Not all stay-at-home parents are positive influences. And there are some great government child-care workers. Is it the parent-to-child ratio? Is it counter-productive programming? Is it oversocialization? And why don't these things affect the cognitive skill development just as badly?

"non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care."

I really doubt this.

FYI I live in Quebec, and on my Highstreet there are a handful of daycares where normal businesses/stores/restaurants would be.

Because they are small and common, it seems everyone is only a few hundred meters from their childcare around here.

There are so, so many correlating factors that I'm going to say it's really difficult to measure these things.

+ The amount of marijuana that people smoke has skyrocketed in recent years, and they smoke young here. I know that smoking pot in early years i.e. 13-14 is bad news.

+ The number of children born to non-married and cohabitation parents is very high these days.

+ Quebec has a very different culture than the rest of N. America. They are chill here these days. For a lot of complex cultural and political reasons, I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. They don't seem to care about much at all.

I'm just throwing up some examples, I have no idea what it is, but I suggest that the issues in later education are due to a bunch of factors and that prevalence of childcare isn't really the big one. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Also I should add that this 'universal childcare' thing is a huge deal. It really changes things. In the ROC ('Rest of Canada') or the US, it's getting stupid expensive to have children. Here in Quebec ... it seems 'normal' to have kids. Just a few dollars a day. My sister in BC is a Finance Director with 3 kids and she only breaks even on daycare (!!!) essentially doing her job so she still has it when the kids are out. That's insane.

All political issues and massive costs/taxes aside ... having cheap, really local daycare is a hugely relevant thing to communities and parents.

I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young.

I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care.

The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)

> I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude.

If you and pretty much everyone around you believed X and the rest of the country just did Y anyway every time you can't blame them. If you're not in control of your own destiny why bother since what you do won't matter?

Quebecers have more 'control over their destiny' than at any time in history, so if that were the case this were an issue, it would have been evident generations ago.

There's a 'laissez faire' in this generation that is not there in the previous.

Admittedly it's a pretty unscientific observation though :)

>Is it the parent-to-child ratio?

That's probably most of it. Studies show that siblings born too close together have reduced intelligence compared to siblings born further apart.

Studies also show that the number of words per day spoken to a child has a direct impact on intelligence.

A small child will completely monopolize all of your attention for huge chunks of the day. It's just not possible for one person to provide that much interaction to multiple children.

Studies probably show the opposite is true too.

Social science has proved itself not to be trustworthy enough that we can just bandy about the terms "studies show" like it means something. It doesn't mean anything anymore and we need to start holding people to higher standards of proof and competency.

As a rule I would suggest it's no longer viable to say studies show, you must provide the details of which studies have shown that.

I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more.

>I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more.

Studies show never "cut it" depending on what your definition of cut it is. I just assume that anyone that cares to look further into it can Google it if they want to.

If it's a particularly contraversial, or unbelievable study I tend to take the time to link to it.

But time a child spends interacting with adults correlates positively with intelligence, is very widely accepted/supported, so a Google search should be easy.

On the one hand I agree that it sort of did never really cut it, but on the other hand, culturally, it really felt like that before the whole reproducibility crisis went mainstream that science, while not infallible, was at least good and it worked and so could be trusted to some degree. And I think in that case yeah, if you wanted to poke further into things then you could just go hunt for the information.

There really has been a three-pronged breakdown in trust over "studies" over the last few decades. First we learned to distrust the phrase "studies show" after we learned Big Tobacco paid for studies to show what they wanted to show. Next we learned to be more skeptical of studies show after the whole anti-vaxxer crowd latched onto fraudulent research. Finally after the reproducibility crisis went mainstream we are now facing the reality that the economics of the industry is bust and is driven it into a pathological state and there are massive systemic failures.

This is a huge problem. Science is a really important part of our sense-making apparatus. It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore?

To quote Nietzsche "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."

Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that. We need to shine a light on the claims being made so that bad and/or incompetent actors can't hide in the shadows. It's one small step on the journey to mend our most important sense-making apparatus.

Mark Twain popularized the phrase "lies, damn lies, and statistics" over a hundred years ago.

There's never been a time when you could just trust someone saying "studies show", or "experts agree". If you read something like that, you don't already know it to be true, and you have the time and inclination, look it up.

This has nothing to do with a reproducibility crisis, or a societal shift and everything to do with me not having the time to to include footnotes with every 2 paragraph comment I make on the internet.

>Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that.

We haven't turned a corner. You're explicitly arguing that we should. Your argument is that society can only be saved if we change our society to enforce your preferred taboos.

>It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore?

Tossing out the last century of social science research probably isn't the best solution to the problem. But hey what do I know.

Time enough to write a reply...

"Didn't have time" is a colloquialism for didn't feel like making time. Which was true in this case.

I'm glad we're on the same page.

> Okay so non-cognitive development is ... clearly lacking in government supported child-care

[citation needed]

The study did not make any such claim; it only claimed that non-cognitive development is important. One would need to study the non-cognitive development across various child-care providers, measuring by price, caregiver education level, curriculum, and a wide variety of other factors to determine which (if any) affect non-cognitive development.

The problem could be as simple as improving the toys, games, and learning materials provided to the kids or as intractable as kids requiring a 1:1 caregiver (aka a stay-at-home parent). Or anywhere in-between.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com