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Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, my mom always rebelled at the feminist push to have women do men's work as the goal (without valuing work women already did). Join the military, kill people etc. I'm 100% for that, but it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids, perhaps the most important thing for society and with INCREDIBLE costs (if done badly) and benefits (if done well) to everyone.

What's even more interesting, upvalue work that is traditionally female, and you may see more men drawn to it, staying home, teaching etc.

Instead, those can be thankless jobs from a money standpoint, and only folks who sell their souls into a male centric hellhole of work environments (PhD life is silly, medical residencies are nuts etc) are rewarded and women are told to lean in.

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> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income. Outside a marriage, mothers get child support.

The fact it's not taxed as "pay" is a bonus for mothers, not a downside!

It's weird how the myth persists that mothers "not getting paid" a taxable wage is some kind of negative.

> Effectively they do get paid. In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income.

That’s some creative logic. Being a stay at home parent is a full-time job. If the stay at home parent were being paid, they’d...well...be paid. “Effective” payment isn’t helpful to a full time parent raising a child and losing out on wages they would otherwise get at a job that the economy values with a taxable wage.

So you want the husband to explicitly pay his wife a W2 wage to raise their kids, which just means as a couple they pay more taxes and have less money than before?

I don't see the upside.

No, you’re right that doesn’t make sense, and I wouldn’t be for that. I think government should expand paid time off for family leave, especially in the US.

So if corporate attorney is taking time off to raise a child society should value, and pay, more for that then if a public defender is?

This is a loaded question. "society should value" and "pay more" are separate arguments. By agreeing to the first I'm not agreeing to the second. I think society should value taking time off to raise children, yes. However, I don't think that society should value a corporate attorney doing this more than a public defender doing it. To do so would value raising children unequally. A universal basic income with an additional stipend for child care would be one solution that captures this difference.

Okay, then we are no longer talking about paid time off and we are no longer addressing the trade-offs involved in taking time away from a lucrative career in SV.

Which is fine with me, I don’t think that’s a problem that needs solving but you and others in this thread had implied otherwise.

> “Effective” payment isn’t helpful to a full time parent raising a child

? Having room and board for yourself and your child is nothing if not helpful.

Yes, I agree. I don’t see how that ties to the original argument in the thread, though. Presumably a full time parent with a spouse who can provide for both parent and child and who gave up a taxable wage to be a caregiver already had room and board. The room and board comment seems irrelevant to the argument given the context of the preceding comments around forfeiting a taxable wage for the full time job of parenthood.

Child support is intended to cover the expenses of the child - food, clothing, education, medical, etc. It's not meant to pay for the time spent by the custodial parent in actually doing the parenting, nor any sort of "opportunity cost" of not being otherwise engaged in a paying job.

Translated to HN-world: "I'm going work on a FOSS project full-time!" World: "Great; we'll pay for your server! You won't lose a dime!" Me: "Uh, what about the income from the job I gave up?"

You can always choose to work and send the child to daycare.

Providing your own daycare instead of working is a lifestyle choice, why does the opportunity cost of that choice have to be shouldered by someone else?

You said "[custodial parents] do get paid ... child support" and I was simply pointing out that this isn't "pay" to said parent in the sense of "compensation for services rendered".

> In a marriage, mothers own half their husband's income.

... and half of asset appreciation, and in some cases (it varies) half of pension.

I will also add that it’s not just mothers. It’s any spouse. I’ve seen successful women come out on the raw end of this deal during divorce.

I mention this not as a grievance, rather just an observation that people who are married, both male and female, are sometimes surprised at asset allocation during a divorce with regards to “passive” investments and business ownership (e.g, a self-owned business that has grown).

That's a weird contortion of logic. Your point is still that raising children isn't an economically valuable activity, unless you also think that men should be paid somewhere around 2x if they are supporting a stay-at-home mom...

The existence of daycares is proof that people are willing to pay for raising children.

What you're hitting on is that staying home to raise 1-2 kids is economically inefficient compared to working and sending the kids to a daycare, because the daycare can benefit from efficiencies of scale.

> Join the military, kill people etc

I don't think we should push women into these job, but I don't think we should push men into those jobs either.

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Actually, my kid's day-care provider does exactly this! In a few years, he'll have teachers doing the same.

Valuing work is complicated. Personally, I'd be happy to be a stay-at-home parent if finances made that easy, even if seemed a little thankless. It's not like I feel that the webshit I build all day long is really valuable.

If someone feels undervalued as a stay-at-home parent, it's probably because they feel stuck in that job, either because of lack of education, lack of available child care, or otherwise lack of jobs.

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid)

Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not sure if that's what you're suggesting.

I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.

Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes?

Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.

There are lots of studies showing that being raised by your own parents is far more beneficial than a day care. But as you point out, that's a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1

Please share those studies.

>which benefit from economies of scale

The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle.

Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.

Yeah. Lets become drones and all live in a giant hive. Good plan.

That proposal runs into issues. In particular, the income replacement flavor implicitly suggests that the positive externality of a stay at home parent is exactly equal to the market rate pay in a wholly unrelated profession. That seems very unlikely to be true.

Presumably it would be a fixed amount for everyone, and not based on the job you've left.

In that case I’m tentatively for it. But I don’t think it will be useful in the kinds of situations being discussed in the blog post and comments.

The ARPA past today does have child allowances in it. They're projected to end half of child poverty in the US (because it turns out you can unironically end poverty by giving people money.)

Well, until they run out anyway.

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play.

A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

> This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

Well said.

The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.

There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate.

The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.

> There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate.

Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up.

Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).

Hell raising kids in the 60s & 70s is a lot less work. You could send the kids off into the neighborhood to play with all the other kids and only interact with them when they had issues. Otherwise they would rather be out exploring the local woods or streets with all the other kids, and family being around to help out.

Now with the legal necessity of 24/7 adult supervision before they are 12, that is gone and as a result you have helicopter parenting making it a shit ton more work to do.

The preponderance of research suggests that modern humans in high-IQ societies are substantially K-overselected. That is, we are investing an irrational amount of resources into a small number of average children when by basically any rational analysis, we should be having more children and putting in much less effort. As you say, part of this is distortion from the legal system.

That’s a pretty narrow interpretation of “marriage” and doesn’t track my experience at all.

Obviously it's an oversimplification, but the point is that marriage nicely handles (among other things) the allocation of child-rearing externalities.

Can you explain to me the utility I get from raising my kid? I'm not really a kid person, you should know up front.

The utility is your kids being raised. For example, it doesn't make sense to pay you to clean your own room. People get pay because they provide value to another person, not because they provide value to themselves.

> Can you explain to me the utility I get from raising my kid

This is deeply instinctive - if you don't feel this, most likely you have been deeply mindfucked by modern society. Evolution, obviously, ensures that you get rewarded with lots of utils for doing the single most important thing you can do from an evolutionary perspective.

I'm not saying you've done anything wrong; this isn't your fault. But just try to imagine someone from a healthy society (in the sense of "the society is not at risk of collapse") asking a question like "what, exactly, do I get out of having children?"

Even in unhealthy societies like ours, if you can convince people to raise children, they almost uniformly report higher life satisfaction (both vs people who don't have children and vs themselves before having children).

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Why would women get paid to raise their own kids? You suggest it's because when done well, it has incredible value to society. What is that value to society? It's having functional, productive members. Women already reap the benefits of that by sharing society with other peoples' well raised children.

What I mean to say is that it's a web of mutual benefit. The gap is actually in all the people who don't have children, who are essentially free riders in this scheme, but that is offset by the fact that they pay taxes for things like schools, which they don't themselves consume, and lack of tax breaks that parents receive.

Also, the world is already overpopulated as it is in my opinion. So not having a kid can be or will be seen as a benefit to society...

The world is not overpopulated - it's that just some (large) corners of it are seemingly incapable of living sustainably (outsized consumption that goes with outsized waste and pollution)

Every human being can value traditional female work (or, more broadly, human obligations to each other) more than money.

But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation.

This seems like the kind of thinking that eventually requires payments to give up the thrill of killing each other.

> But we seem to want to be paid. It's interesting that socializing the payments seems to strike people as more freeing than just social obligation.

It's not that we _want_ to be paid. It's that we _need_ to be paid, because in order to raise a child you need a stable source of critical things for many years:

- food & water

- shelter (and heat)

- clothing

- waste disposal

If I wanted to take several years entirely away from work to raise a child, I would still have to have those things. How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid?

It's not about valuing _being paid_, it's about valuing the things that are necessary to raise a child.

You tell me how to acquire those things without being paid, and then we can analyze while people value being paid more than the social obligations.

> How can I afford those things if I am not getting paid?

From savings or by having another family member work? Combinations of that worked for a very long time in human history.

Sure, but that's just shifting who is getting paid or when.

The person I was responding to said that people were obsessed with getting paid versus the social obligations.

I was explaining why people who would want to stay at home might be obsessed about payment. It's a question that must be answered.

You provide some potential answers, but for the vast majority of young Americans these days having enough savings to raise a child by themselves without working is not in any way realistic.

Even for the "have another family work" plan, for many a single income isn't enough to support 2 adults and raising a child. The economy just doesn't make that viable for a large swath of the country.

If you’re in the latter situation, find work that can done entirely compatibly with raising your family. Open a family daycare for other nearby 2-income households to use. It helps them and helps you. If that violates the premise of “without being paid”, so be it; I’m trying to be pragmatic not pedantic.

The traditional way of solving this problem is to assume stronger social obligations -- to a spouse, and to family, and sometimes community.

I realize some people won't do that. But we're talking about tech CEOs, so these are people who have some control over their lives. If we re-normalized those social obligations, I think it would be better than transactionalizing it.

And it's not all-or-nothing. I've tried to arrange my life so that I can make enough money, but also spend a lot more of my time doing the things I value more than money.

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