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Comment by guidoism | Hacker News Reader

Families these days can still do it but they don’t because they are led to believe in paying for convenience and get into a cycle that turns everything in their life into something the market provides. The insidious thing is that once you get into debt it is very difficult to break this cycle.

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This is very true. I know families where one parent stays home and others where both parents work. What surprised me is that there is no correlation between household income and whether or not one parent stays home (at least not in my admittedly small sample).

It’s hard to do unless one parent is comfortable with, capable of, and willing to spend years facilitating homeschooling (property near good schools is expensive). Then it’s still incredibly expensive in lost wages (and greater income insecurity/risk, which is even worse in the US due to how healthcare and retirement works, plus it probably ties the other partner to secure corporate jobs for healthcare if nothing else, and so limits upside available from riskier moves) compared with other options, unless you have several kids and the stay-at-home parent had fairly low earning potential.

I have to disagree with you on several points:

1. Schools are ranked by test scores mostly, which is 99% dependent on the education and income of the parents. Even then housing near schools with excellent test scores isn't expensive except in the most expensive cities in the US.

2. I totally agree about the healthcare system though it has become a lot better since ACA. Healthcare is still disgustingly expensive but at least you can still get it and if you have a normal middle income in a family with a couple kids then healthcare is essentially free.

3. Requiring two incomes is much riskier than just one. Of course living from one income and saving the other is the best, but most people don't do that, and it's harder to do if you are both working since it costs so much money to work. Not working is cheaper. Take a look at Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap. It explains this paradox much better than I could.

1. Unless all the stuff about how important peers are to future success is BS then it’s still a very good thing to have your kid in good schools, even if the schools are mostly good because of who’s there rather than instruction quality.

2. Yeah ACA definitely helps, but it certainly seems like yet another program with aid cutoffs far too low, leading to a largish doldrums income zone of paying a lot for “coverage” with no subsidy, but still having enormous risk exposure and high copays discouraging normal care. Maybe some day our HC system will not suck.

3. A society with normalized single-worker households might spend less, but one operates on the norms and market(s) one finds oneself in. And anyway even income covering 90% of expenses (with things like savings and retirement temporarily cut to zero) is better than income covering 0% of expenses, so I still think two incomes is more secure even if earnings are very unequal or expenses are higher than they would be with one income.

[edit] oh I should add to #1 that in my cheap city if you use bad schools as the baseline, OK-school areas are about 1.5-2x the price for a similar house, and good-school areas are another 25-30% above the OK-schools price. Not considering the city proper, since housing prices there are weird and anyone with money and a house there doesn’t send their kids to those public schools, ever.

One parent staying at home is not synonymous with homeschooling, and there are certainly parts of the country where affordable housing and reasonably average public schools coexist.

While this is true, it's also true that significantly fewer families can do it now than could in 1970.

It's also true that the most predictable factor when it comes to student performance in school is household income.

Isn't IQ a significantly more predictive factor than income?

Eh, there are a lot of legitimate questions around the validity of IQ tests in general

Sure, but if they're predictive then by definition they're locally valid.

> It's also true that the most predictable factor when it comes to student performance in school is household income.

Assuming you mean predictive rather than predictable, the most predictive factor from what I've seen is parental educational attainment, not income or (to respond to a sibling comment) IQ.

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