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KaiserPro

I really cant understand the logic of forcing women back into work after 2-4 weeks.

Its just not beneficial for anyone.

The mum is utterly frazzled.

The employer gets half an employee back

Society is conditioned to think that the only practical way to raise a baby is to give up on work/get live in care.

now, to look at it from a "my mum managed, I don't want to undermine the american nuclear family" point of view:

Yes, mums working is an anathema, but given that exceedingly difficult to own a good house, have good health insurance and have an economically inactive partner at home, I suspect the problem here isn't the mum. I suspect its the salami slicing of wages to the average joe/joelle.

Even if it undermines the american nuclear family, having such a big obstacle to the "correct"[1] type of family having babies is going to undermine the "correct" family having babies. Which means one's chosen view of family dies out with inflation.

Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.

[1]I'm not going to define what correct is, its divisive and allows people to project what they think is wrong with "the other side" who ever they might be, rather than engage with the specifics at hand.

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I think the core of the problem has a few basic parts:

* the average person/family is trying to live a little beyond their means

* “work needed to do” is like a gas, it expands to fit the hours worked

* rent seeking elements expand to keep #1 true

The takeaway is that there is a lot of “work” being done in the economy that doesn’t need to be done because prices will always rise a little past what people can pay comfortably so… people work too much and think that they need to.

If you cut the lifetime hours worked by half, the standard of living probably wouldn’t change much.

The solution to this is radical modification of the markets which leech away extra income.

One such method would be to control real estate prices by enacting huge taxes on rental property and profits simultaneously making it extremely difficult or impossible to acquire large loans for real estate (owned or rented out). Making owning s home that isn’t your primary residence a huge financial liability and removing the ability to sell it for high prices would crash the market and remove the rent paid to landlords or “rent” paid to banks for mortgages. Both betting industries that take far more value than they give back.

Regulations must be altered to encourage building sufficient housing where it's wanted.

After the prerequisite step is taken, then the tax code should be changed to fix that rent seeking, in houses yes, but generally too. Seeking rent is not an overall economic good, but a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.

This was attempted in New York City and failed miserably.

Property values rise in locations that are highly desirable regardless of government or market intervention. It has more do to with the surface area of the earth than any particular policy.

A government system will result in similar issues - Look at the retirees and trust funder tenants living in mostly-empty 4 bedroom rent controlled apartments in NYC.

You have to allocate the limited space somehow. You cannot fit more people into one square meter of land without building higher or denser, and building higher is not always a simple option.

Governments can:

-cease preventing density by legal fiat

-support density with infrastructure

-cease encouraging home cost inflation via the tax code, socialized lending institutions, and bank capital regulation

-put in place a property tax systems that encourages the most valuable use of land

-eliminate parking mandates and free parking

-broaden the commutable footprint by building excellent mass transit systems

That’s not perfect but if it’s far from nothing.

One house per person seems like a fairly simple way to control rent seeking.

Renters are paying all the costs imposed upon landlords. Many people have perfectly valid reasons to want to rent housing rather than being coerced to buy by bearing the impact of huge taxes on rental property.

I’m not a landlord, but I rented 6 different places for a total of about 13 years after college plus my time during college. I’m glad those places were available at prices I could afford.

> Its just not beneficial for anyone.

I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point.

"Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...

I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing.

And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.

Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.

----

[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.

Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.)

Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.

Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.

We can follow the tactic used in other gender equality initiatives and creates targeted incentives to raise participation levels.

As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.

They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows.

I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.

Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.

There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.

There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect.

> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.

The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.

> forcing men to spend less time at work

I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.

The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.

I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.

Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree. Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).

Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people at all.

> It's a privilege not available to single people at all.

And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.

I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported.

I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through.

There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.

Yes, it is a privilege that won't be available to me (since I don't plan on having any kids), but I believe these benefits are good for the children, which is ultimately good for society.

And sure, as a non-parent I can't take a multi-month long vacation every year, but even as a recent graduate I get 25 paid vacation days per year (5 of which can be saved for a few years). So long vacations aren't a pipe dream for non-parents.

And with the way the economy currently works and the gradually increasing life expectancy, increasing the birth rate is a good thing, and generous parental benefits are a way to encourage that. I personally think it would be best if society/the economy wasn't dependant on an increasing population, but that's a separate conversation.

All social programs will be abused at the tail. That is not a reason to avoid those social programs.

Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children.

In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.

That's the case in Spain since 2021. Both parents get 19 weeks paid leave.

My employer privately gave me tons of paid parental leave. I took a portion of it at the beginning and ended up using the rest of it to work every other day for the remaining year - and my partner used the chance to work on her stuff.

It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.

I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.

She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.

Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.

> Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal.

All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?

* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).

Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" A passing familiarity with mammal biology is required. FYI, babies do not subsist on hamburgers and fries.

Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.

PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.

> Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?"

Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked.

> Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable.

Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion.

Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.

Let's recap:

1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children.

2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm

3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers.

Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable.

I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere".

Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

> don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from

You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.)

> Men and women are not fully interchangeable.

And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.

We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?

Pumping exists. Formula exists. And it isn't like we see balanced childcare responsibilities once children are weaned. The disparity in expectations for men and women in childcare roles extend far beyond the biological realities of childrearing.

Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.

This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?

Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

If I were trying to argue that my ideas were not sexist I probably would not appeal to "the ancients," who also had ideas about, for instance, the unwisdom of letting your wife leave the house on her own.

Preferences are not identical between men and women. 72% of fathers say they would ideally work full time, only 20% of mothers do [1]. 50% of mothers say they would ideally want to work part time, 29% not work at all. Furthermore, mothers that work full time are less satisfied with their parenting than part-time and non-working mothers. Crucially, 70% of mothers that currently work full time would rather work part time or not at all. Most mothers with full-time careers don't want to be working full time, and this disparity is more than a 2:1 margin.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m...

I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?

This is an orthogonal point. I don't see any provision mandating wages or promotions for periods when people are on leave, abled or disabled.

The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.

BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...

> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases

There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.

To whatever extent time out of the workforce is a driver of future wage discrepancy, it seems like at least some women would make an entirely economically rational choice to minimize that time out of the workforce. (I’m not claiming it’s a good or bad thing, just that there exists a strong force that would motivate people in this direction.)

I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.

The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:

As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?

As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?

Ah makes sense.

> The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.

Strongly agree with the above.

> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.

Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)

I'm not a parent, yet have never made even 90% of what my male peers were paid.

https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-...

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-...

https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/wor...

As a parent who got 6 months that barely fucking scratches the surface of the time it take to raise a human.

Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.

I would argue we just need to bring public school earlier.

We don’t need this tied to an employer like health insurance as this is something that benefits us all.

My word choices might not have been the best here.

But consider if everyone was able to take the first year at some percentage less of regular salary. Then public funded care available with learning included?

My wife would have preferred this to having exhausted fmla just before giving birth because of early complications.

Returning to work was not an option for her, 6 years later returning to work was one of the most emotionally draining experiences for her.

Plato suggested that the state should have communal rearing of children.

We could have a society were children goes to public school as soon they can take formula.

I would suggest a compromise of "until they have all of their primary teeth". There is no sleep until all those **** are in.

> Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.

I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years.

I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.

Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change? Childcare can be paid for at rates under minimum wage in aggregate. Look at our school system and daycare businesses. Just because you think your child deserves only the best does not make it economical, and lots of people make this work. Thousands of years of child rearing has happened in suboptimal conditions.

Raising children has been an incredible chore more often than not throughout history. It's only been briefly punctuated by moments of ease, and even then, it wasn't evenly distributed. Children are not easy.

I think modern parents are seeing their childfree peers and remarking on the delta in quality of life.

I honestly don't mean this as an attack. I'm just interested in the varying perspectives on this.

> offloads the entire burden onto those without children

Are you including "people with children over the age of five to six years" in this group? Because it seems like they would be helping to raise others people's children (in your words) but would also have benefitted.

According to the first Google result I found it looks like in 2018 only 15% of women age 50 were childless. A first-order approximation assuming younger generations have kids at the same rate and it's the same for both genders (neither of these are guaranteed but it's a starting point) would lead me to believe that more than most people have children and would benefit from a policy like this over the course of their lives. People without cars help pay for roads, people without children pay for public schools...I'm not really seeing much here to suggest there's an undue burden on those without children.

What has changed is that due to labour mobility and contemporary society generally the extended family has become a non-thing for so many of us.

If we're expected to move wherever for work, then that wherever needs to provide support. Because right now I'm hours from my sole remaining inlaw and a whole country apart from my own parents and brother, and it's been hell raising children like this. And not just young children; my teenagers' mental health would be much better if they were to have their uncle and grandma nearby.

> But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children.

True, but on a long enough timeframe one could also view it as a repayment from the people who (with or without children) were once children-being-subsidized themselves.

That's a great point, actually. Inverse social security.

The taxes of people without children already subsidise schooling, healthcare and social welfare (benefits for parents).

The point stated was that there needs to be a threshold. You have introduced another topic entirely, and the person you are answering implied nothing about your topic.

> This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children

This is exactly how society works for ages 5-18 and we call it 'school', how is 0-4 different?

It was my impression that the OP wanted subsidized parental leave until age 5 so that they could spend 1:1 time with their child and family needs.

Public school is typically less than $50/day per student. I vaguely suggested minimum wage stipends for an extended parental leave (1 year+), and this would be more than we spend on public schooling.

Lots of poor families make childcare work on shoestring budgets and have done so all throughout history. My parents did.

How much money is enough? How much is too much?

> How much money is enough? How much is too much?

Depends on who is paying

You're comparing very different levels of welfare/wealth transfer.

It sounds totally bonkers if you’re not used to it but this is actually the norm in other countries. Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids. Both kids went into really nice state kindergarten before they were 18 months. Before that if we were poorer we’d have our childcare subsidised. Both kids get things like a sports club grant each year, free dental care and free healthcare. There are state run after school clubs and so on.

The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.

Big difference between providing a free/affordable childcare center vs. paying the parent to not work for 5 years.

Yes but I didn’t take the OP as wanting not to work or needing all their expenses covered. Subsidise doesn’t necessarily mean that.

I'm trying to find reasonable thresholds and weigh the societal pros and cons.

> The amazing thing to me is you think the OP was asking for something unbelievable.

The five years that OP alluded to is a really long time to not be working. That's 5/40 years for any given career (for a single child), meaning one eighth of a childfree person's productivity has to cover for it. At least at this extreme scale.

> Both of us had comparatively long parental leave for both kids.

How long was it? I'm genuinely curious.

Again, I'm not against subsidizing childcare and supporting children. Some of the expectations of parents seem to be really high, especially to someone whose parents both worked throughout my early childhood.

The current costs of childcare in my area are $80-$250/wk for infants unless you're going for something super Bougie for your baby.

Three months each with six months shared.

My friends and coworkers who’ve lived in the US describe pre-school childcare as dystopian. Even when expensive.

If you think of it as 5/(40 * 2) or if you had two kids relatively close together 7/(40 * 3) the math is significantly better. It’s also very telling that caring for kids is not seen as being productive.

Where does the 40*3 term come from? I'm assuming the 5/(40*2) is 5 years of subsidy out of two 40-year careers. I can't figure where the 3 term is coming from unless it's 2 children from 3 total people or something else that I'm missing.

Yes it’s three careers. I say just before it if you have two kids close together. Two years is a normal gap. So seven years of subsidy out of three forty year careers. The mother and two children each have forty years of “productivity”.

(I think) That only works if neither child is eligible for this leave during their career.

If you imagine Adam and Betty have two kids Charlie and Debbie who have two kids Earl and Felicia who have Gary and Helen… each generation receives N years of leave income from (2M - N) years of work income. You can’t take Betty, Charlie, and Debbie’s work income (or total productivity) against just Betty’s leave income.

I think you take Adam and Betty’s combined leave against their combined M years and M years minus N years of leave, C&D’s N against their 2M-N, etc. (you can time-shift it however you like if you want to think of some generation paying for a different generation, but the long-run math doesn’t change for replacement rate births)

In your example, this seems like 7 years of 73 years (9.6%) is going to this program, not 7/120 (5.8%)

It’s quite hard to follow what you mean there so I’ll assume the extra detail is correct. If you wanted to model more detail think about the growth of the effect if those children have children. That really starts to drive down that percentage.

My point was to show roughly that worrying about the cost of productivity loss when having children is the only way to sustain human productivity doesn’t add up.

> This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children

We can obviously unpack all the ways that this is abused, but generally speaking children are necessary for the continuation of the species. Children are also absolutely a burden on the parents, physically, emotionally, and financially.

So yes, broadly speaking, I would expect the childfree to disproportionately contribute into a societal pool to offset for the fact that they are existing in human society but not contributing their part to it's ongoing propagation.

Ultimately though, you're right - no parent should expect to have the same lifestyle as their childfree counterpart. Not with free time, disposable income, or even day-to-day "happiness".

> Both of my parents had jobs when I was growing up. Why are we suddenly expecting this to change?

Mine too. Here's what I think has changed: in that era (and for much of human history), it was assumed/expected that it "took a village" to raise children. Families stayed closer together - the previous generation was around to help with childrearing. And in general, communities took care of everyone's children in a pool that would be considered completely outlandish today. Heck, the concept of a Wet Nurse [1] is something that would probably explode most people's minds today. I bet at least one person will read this comment and not realize that this was something that was completely ubiquitous and standard for much of human history. Can you imagine that existing today? It would be inconceivable. Not that we need it since the advent of formula, but the point is simply that societies helped take care of children more in the past than they do now.

Today, people move further from home from work (losing direct family access), have children later in life (less energy to contribute/harder to tradeoff career responsibilities), and build fewer local community social bonds (online relationships may be meaningful but they don't help babysit).

I don't think we have adjusted accordingly yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse

> people move further from home from work (losing direct family access),

Sounds like personal choices to me

This is more than a personal choice, it's a reality of our economy and the social / economic mobility is a net positive. maybe some of this will change with wfh movement

what do you mean by that? the most common jobs (retail, food, medicine, construction, etc.) exist pretty much everywhere there's a critical mass of people living. you don't need to relocate to get the kinds of work most people do. the people that benefit most from relocating are specialists who already get paid above the median and/or want to follow their niche passion. good for them! but I'm not sure it's something that deserves to be subsidized further.

+1 My wife and I both moved away from our families long before we had kids. I think the age of having kids also plays into the moving away for work as it's something that's just not on your mind.

Anyways, the difference between our family unit and our friends who have local family & ties is night and day different.

There are many children where you have a choice:

* Subsidize them with 15 years of child care for a relatively small amount now, and they will become productive members of society.

* Do nothing now, and in 15 years be forced to subsidize them via crime, the justice system, and outreach programs for the remainder of their life.

You are asking for an incredibly high amount of welfare, essentially "everyone else in society should pay me for 5 years because I chose to have a kid". I'm choosing to have a kid too, but I'm taking the personal responsibility path of saving and paying for it on my own. Perhaps there is some middleground, but 5 years is absolutely absurd.

This actually highlights a major misunderstanding in parental leave discussions: Most government-sponsored paid parental leave programs in other countries aren't paying 100% salary during the leave.

Sweden has one of the more generous programs that pays up to $41K/year (USD equivalent) or 80% of your income, whichever is lower. That amount is actually quite good if you're living modestly, but it may not be what people earning $100-150K have in mind when they see "paid parental leave".

Definitely better than nothing, though!

Uhh, it's 3 years where I live (though the welfare money for the last one and half year is very low and lots of mother go back to work before that)

I would say 3 year is pretty good as kids starts to gain a lot from socializing after that age.

Why would this be absurd? It's perfectly normal. Looking after a toddler is hard 7/24 work with little time to spare. Of course you can go to work and instead pay for a house cleaner and a baby sitter to look after your house and your kid because.. work is more important? Or what is your argument here?

I believe in taking time away from work to raise kids. In fact, I am taking several years away from work now for that purpose. What I disagree with is who should pay for it. I'm paying for my living expenses and raising my child from my savings that I earned at my generous paying job. I think the government should pay for up to perhaps 3 months for raising kids (and it shouldn't be based on your salary, but tied to some universally agreed upon basic living wage), but any more than that should be self-financed. There is a set amount of handouts society can give out before it implodes, and there are far better uses for that money than giving you the privilege of a plush lifestyle while you choose to stay at home with your toddler.

Yeah this makes perfect sense. Paid parental leave is just a welfare system like any other, and has the same drawbacks as always. People act as if it's some invention to create free time out of thin air.

I see your point but it smells like kids should be a privilege of the generously paid and financially intelligent.

In Europe the baby boomer generation reached retirement and in the meantime the number of kids per household decreased. There is not enough people to pay the pension of the old and many governments are motivated to increase the number of kids by any means - like making it a financially acceptable or even desired to have 3+ children.

I mean it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. If we decoupled health insurance from FTE, then maybe there would be more part-time options that would allow for some flexibility. Hire a biweekly housekeeper and a nanny for 4 hours a day 4 days a week, still get to spend lots of time with your kid AND have some meaningful engagement with other adults and contribute to society according to your skill level.

That's basically my plan, but running a business/contracting/freelancing is not for everyone. Sooo thankful I have my own insurance though.

I see what you're saying there, but perhaps look at it this way:

our comfortable retirement is dependent on a good crop of reasonably successful children being born now, or in the previous 5 years.

It benefits us that those children are brought up to be balanced, rational pragmatic people. Perhaps extended child care might be the thing that does it?

I suspect that five years is indeed too much.

However perhaps the answer is one year "off" plus cheap, good quality child care from 1 year plus?

I think parent asked for subsidy, not total compensation of expenses.

I have two kids, 2.5 years apart, and there was one year in NYC where a small family daycare was running us ~$5k per month in childcare. We'd been aiming for the kids to be a bit further apart, partly for financial reasons, but shrug, it didn't happen that way (first kid took a lot longer of trying than the second). We're fortunate in that we can afford that, but it did impact our long-term savings and eventual home ownership.

I honestly don't know what the working poor do. I guess you're not aloud to move away from extended family.

Is there anyone who wouldn’t high five someone who pays them for five years without needing to go into work?

Maybe we should look at why three sectors of the economy have had insane cost growth for three plus decades (housing, healthcare, education) and fix that instead of trying to band aid the negative consequences?

Even if you fix those three, no parental leave is barbaric.

Is this kind of thing supposed to persuasive? You’ve presented no argument whatsoever. Is the idea that if use an emotionally laden term like “barbaric” you think it will browbeat people into falling into line with your opinion?

It was meant to illustrate that we're talking about separate things. "Fixing" three things getting more expensive doesn't in any way negate the barbarism that is no parental leave. Even if you think that them getting cheaper will mean the return of a stay at home parent (assuming they actually want it), it's still barbaric not to give the other parent an opportunity to spend time and help with the infant.

This is one of those things that shouldn't need to be explained, even to 20-something tech bros who've never had a child themselves.

Of course not. Nothing needs to be explained or justified anymore. We have an entire generation so fully confident in the absolute correctness and obviousness of every single iota of their many strongly held moral opinions that even asking for an explanation offends them.

And they can’t understand why they keep on failing to achieve their policy goals.

PS: I don’t think there were too many <= 19 year olds signing up for hacker news in 2011.

> Of course not. Nothing needs to be explained or justified anymore. We have an entire generation so fully confident in the absolute correctness and obviousness of every single iota of their many strongly held moral opinions that even asking for an explanation offends them.

Just to be clear hear, we're talking about parents being able to take care of their newborns and not being forced back to work after "2-4 weeks" as the OP stated.

OK, please explain how fixing housing, healthcare, education will remove the need for parental leave. It's your argument, motivate it.

I think the request is fair.

Be time-idempotent; imagine if you were talking to someone from the 15th century and they were SURE they were right about their crazy opinions.

The meta-stable way to be reasonable is that as long as someone seems to be honestly asking the reasoning for your beliefs, and your principles, you should try to explain yourself, rather than just shut them down by repeating your assertion of correctness.

Otherwise, how will you find out about the likely beliefs you hold right now, which our descendants will consider insane and evil? Forcing yourself to self-introspection is a good practice. I don't expect anyone to change their mind about this, but being able to explain to others your reasoning can also clear up your own views, and help convince your adversary much more effectively than the "just repeat your position" argument style.

You mean there's a choice?! Cool, I'd be happy if we simply just fixed all the massive, complex problems of the entire economy over just having parental leave.

Of course there's a choice, there's a singular reason for the rising cost of all those things. Government intervention and injecting money into those markets. Costs will rise to absorb availability of funds. Give people virtually unlimited finding for higher education?? Expect costs to rise at a similar rate. Force everyone to buy insurance through a rigid process and heavily subsidize the worst possible coverage. Makes perfect sense that prices rise and quality deteriorates.

Have the government lend trillions of dollars at low interest with minimal qualifications for housing. Expected outcome is realized.

Same is happening with childcare. Government increases child care credit. No surprise that daycare has raised the rate $30 per week.

> No surprise that daycare has raised the rate $30 per week.

It cannot possibly be riding expenses for daycare operators.

We haven’t even tried.

For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration.

For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs.

For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national emergency.

Why is it that progressives’ solution to everything is to dump money out of the air? Are there no structural improvements to be made anywhere?

Free Money is popular with voters; be that in the form of cut / "no new taxes" or handouts.

Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politicians first and could then fall back to those who represent other types of interest focus.

Similarly the relative representation power of each voter in a body such as the senate should be resolved by merging similarly leaning smaller bodies until each voter is within relatively the same representation strength as other voters.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_pop...

This is an issue for E.G. California (~20M/senator) and Texas (~15M/senator) compared to Vermont (~310K/senator) and Wyoming (~240K/senator).

In the past the senate started out FAR more balanced by state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

For example in 1820 the top three most populace states were all around 1 million each. A core belle-curve hump ranges from around 600K down to 150K, and about 5 states have less than 100K. Senators representing roughly ~500K, ~250K, and 50K respectively, a weight difference of only a factor of 10 rather than a number approaching almost a factor of 100.

You're correct except IRV is hardly better than FPTP. Please endorse any ranked voting system except IRV.

I'm using IRV as a shorthand for ANY of the instant runoff voting (ranked voting) systems.

I happen to prefer (Path Vote) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method as a method of performing an election with instant runoffs for one round of ranked ballots.

For the later proposal (where districts are replaced by a mixed bag of candidates and issues) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV might be a good way of determining the membership of a body.

It looks like research into proportional voter representation is still ongoing, with important new papers released even this year.

Glad to hear! I think RCV is the more general term, but the IRV people have worked to try to make it synonymous with IRV.

Who is forcing women back to work?

Reality. Way too many people only can make ends meet by both partners being full-time employed - and in some cases (such as shown by a recent Last Week Tonight episode) even that is not enough to prevent being homeless.

Rents are too high, and wages are too low.

People don’t have to have children. And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.

Yeah and also, most (upper) middle class families in the US are making a lot more money so can actually afford much more time home with their children, compared to the paid leave that Europe has. So that's actually better from one point of view, the only "downside" then is traditional gender roles. Who cares about 1 year maternal leave, when you can already afford 10 years maternal leave?

Would be very interesting to see actual time spent not working, and caring for children at home, in relation to amount of paid leave. And across income brackets. Would not be surprised if it comes out to more time with children in many cases even though paid leave is less..

> People don’t have to have children.

Ah, here we go. This is a veiled "only people who have enough money should have children" argument.

> And people can and do stay at home with their children at all income levels.

I am sure that disproportionately favors certain income levels.

Poor people have more children than rich both per capita and in aggregate

Also, I never said only rich people should be able to have children. However at the end of the day raising children requires money. Hence the newly introduced children tax credit.

Birthrates among poor people are way down:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

There may be some effect of the very poorest people having children for the purposes of benefits, but the vast majority of women will have fewer kids once they get access to birth control and financial independence.

Birthrate isn't my point. Per your chart birth rates are down for everyone. The fact remains that poor people have more children. And more to the original point, people aren't being forced to leave their children.

My point is lack of access to contraceptives and lack of women’s financial independence might be the reason poorer women have more children. My conjecture is their higher birth rates have little to do with them being poorer.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with the original comment which is to say that women don't have to go to work. Nor do men.

I am "poor" by choice because my wife takes care of the children in our household. Our lives are richer than those of countless lonely $ millionaires.

This is the real answer. Nothing else is going to change that. A basic lifestyle isn't that expensive and it's exponentially better than 99% of people's lives 50 years ago. Just making smart shopping decisions can literally double or more your buying power.

I really don't get the point of doing something you don't enjoy for 8-12 hours a day just so you can have expensive things.

> The fact remains that poor people have more children.

Not quite. $ rich people can't afford time with children.

It doesn't need to be veiled, that's already the official policy: people are responsible for providing for their children. You have to have money to have kids. It's just a little less.

On some level you have to encourage people to somehow try to support themselves and their children, and to adapt their footprint to match their contributions.

Didn’t you hear? Children are a consumer good now.

What’s wrong with “only people who have enough money should have children”?

I mean, that’s just being a responsible parent.

as a society we should not allow people to get paid so little that even a full-time salary is not enough for them to have children.

that is what's wrong.

if we want a balanced society then we need to enable everyone to have children, not just those who are able to get well paying jobs.

in austria and germany this is solved with giving parents tax breaks and unconditional extra money for each child to offset the higher cost of raising children.

So if I choose a career as a not so good artist the government should subsidize me so I can have kids?

to follow the existing examples, every child gets government money regardless of income. it's like UBI for minors.

and if you get a minimum wage job as an animation assistant doing inbetweening work, then the laws should make sure that the minimum wage is high enough that you can afford your living costs.

combined both measures will allow you to have children.

if you are self-employed and you are not earning enough money from your art you need to apply for unemployment benefits with all the conditions related to that.

Most people being unable to afford taking even a moderate amount of time off is the deeper problem. The sustainable answer is to fix the underlying economic problems - end this trickle up financial treadmill that has caused the majority to become so poor and disempowered [0], rather than creating a patchwork of allowances for specific system-legible purposes. For example bringing it back into the emotional realm - even if there were a comfortable 12 weeks of guaranteed parental leave, that itself wouldn't help a family who had lost their baby. Nor would it help someone who had to care for a terminally ill parent, nor after losing them and needing to deal with their estate. Nevermind the myriad of unenumerable reasons someone might need months off.

[0] If you cannot afford to unilaterally walk away from employment for several months, you have no economic power regardless of your churn rate. Sorry to break it to you.

Society actually needs all of what you mentioned:

- specific allowances (paid parental leave, paid sick leave) for obvious reasons

- "blanket" paid time off outside of federal holidays for recreation and stuff like parents dying

- extra PTO or working hours reduction to take care of sick/terminally ill relatives

- wages big enough to allow everyone working full time to save a meaningful amount of money

Most developed countries outside of the US have realized this. All countries in Europe have the first two points already covered (paid parental, sick and general time off), Germany has the third one covered since 2012 ("Familienpflegezeit").

The only thing we all seem to be lacking after decades of wage starvation and neoliberalism is the last one - but COVID-related disruption is likely to incite a massive paradigm shift as the market goes from an employer market to an employee market and companies are pulling production back on-shore for a myriad of reasons.

So yeah, the nuance to my comment is that the first things you list are important for social reasons - keeping your same position in the face of these additional burdens. I admit that my above comment is addressing the social problem purely through economic means (if an employer doesn't engage with your needs, walk away and find a new employer when you're available again). Unfortunately what we're offered in the US is mainly this economic lens, both policy and politically.

I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.

IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.

> Who is forcing women back to work?

A modern Western lifestyle. Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle.

The working-dad stay-at-home mum has long gone.

That's not true. A comfortable lifestyle perhaps, but "basic" can be had on just a single average salary.

I think your frame of reference may be a bit warped. What is an 'average' salary?

The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.

And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?

edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad

That looks like it counts everyone over 14 including students and retirees. And it's the highest it has ever been in real terms.

That's $2983 per month.

Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).

This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.

> That's $2983 per month.

Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.

My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#nNffey40fm

And of course, this is the median salary. 50% of people make less.

Do you make less than 35k a year ?

ACA has subsidies for lower income households

Generally subsidies don’t apply if you’re getting an employer subsidy, and they drop off quickly as you rise over the poverty line.

I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.

On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen.

3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.

>" On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen."

If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.

Medicaid is for low-income earners.

The parent described the median-income earner.

In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.

That's just insane. The US healthcare system is absolute shit. Yes, I'm an American.

That leaves 0 margin for error. If your kid breaks a bone and you have to pay for $X000 ambulance ride to an out of network hospital you're screwed for years.

> That's $2983 per month.

Gross. More like $2200 after tax.

Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.

And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.

So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.

[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...

A single family member earning a wage as a low income worker is not making enough to pay for the health insurance for a family with newborns, on top of rent, food, transportation, clothing, all the costs of having a child, saving for emergencies/future/education, and some semblance of entertainment and having a life.

> Almost every Western country without fail requires dual incomes to afford a basic lifestyle

It will be remiss not to mention that America stands alone among western countries in not providing livable subsidies/incomes to recent parents, and expects them to be back in the workforce after a couple of weeks. The rest of the western world is far less aggressive in "forcing" women back to work.

This is correct, and something that needs to be said. Having both parents work is not an inevitable state of affairs. As little as 50 years ago, it was not unusual for one parent to stay at home and raise children. In contrast, the Soviet Union had long since moved to a two working-parents model because of financial pressure, and Soviet women regarded the American housewife with astonishment[1]. Whatever the merits and tradeoffs may be, we need to recognise that significant change has taken place.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...

"forcing women back into work" - I think it is simply a matter of money, not forcing. If you can afford it, you take the time off, if not, you go back to work.

> forcing women back into work

This is not what happens. No one is being "forced" to do anything. Rather, free individuals (speaking from a U.S. centric viewpoint) make a choice to become pregnant and birth a child. It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others. Note that FMLA (again, U.S.-centric) grants unpaid leave. In other words, you can't be fired for certain finite length absences resulting from certain medical occurrences. But you're not entitled to payment for non-work.

So, when Mom gives birth, she absolutely has the right to say, "You know what, I can't/don't want to work." She just isn't entitled to force a company to pay her for the privilege of her non-work.

I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else. The entitlement is really hard to stomach. This idea seems to be coalescing with a belief that "stuff just happens". But the reality is, the economy–any economy–is powered by labor.

People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.

> The employer gets half an employee back

This is a self defeating claim. Under your (implied) proposal, the employer would just not get any employee back for an even longer period of time. Or, worse, they have to hire a temporary employee to fill in, and are now paying two sets of wages, all as a result of decisions over which they have absolutely influence!

>>I may be in the minority on this, but I find it really weird how people, more and more nowadays, believe the consequences private, personal choices should be borne by everyone else

Starting or not starting a company is a completely private decision, yet we as a society have recognized that having entrepreneurs and a functional business culture is very important and actually profitable. So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up. Even though again, they are the consequence of someone's personal choice - yet the taxpayer bears the burden. Sounds familiar?

Bearing children is a benefit to the society as a whole - someone has to work, someone has to pay taxes, etc etc. So as a society we support mothers by allowing them to take maternal leave, even if having a child is very much a personal choice.

Also I don't see anyone advocating that companies pay mothers through entirety of maternity pay - in most countries it's the public budget that does after some short initial time period.

>>People need to work. If enough people don't, we go back to the default state of reality: poverty, starvation, etc etc.

And within reason, people need to have children or the country you are part of won't have enough citizens to support it within few decades - that's the reality of life.

> So most governments, even the American ones, give grants and support to new companies to prop them up

To what grants, specifically, are you referring? As someone who is active in the business formation space in the U.S., I’d absolutely love to get some free capital.

Humans have been giving birth since the very beginning. The phenomenon of insisting companies fund child birth is a brand new idea. As in, only the last 30 or so years. Societies have arisen and persisted since long, long before then. How is it that all of humanity managed this long without paid family leave?

Well for one thing contraception methods were less effective and the wage labor relation didn't exist or was wildly different for most of that time.

> It seems reasonable to me that the result of this private choice should not be the burden of others.

Wow, clearly you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society. You know, parenting isn't a past time hobby of the privileged, but activity via which all of us came to existence. If we stop it, society, states and whole human civilization will collapse in 1 generation.

Nobody paying for social/medical/police etc services old ass xibalba would enjoy when retired.

But sure, lets maximize profits, lets raise a messed up generation with lack of strong parental touch in first years, child psychologists all agree there is no harm in that, right. I am sure that... 3%? 4%? extra income will make up for that.

As much as I admire the positive aspects what makes US so great, the negative aspects are such a horrible fucked up mess I politely say 'No, thank you' anytime offer comes from across the pond. Can't imagine raising family and growing old in such system, not once I've experienced what many western Europe countries offer.

Side info - recently Swiss improved paid paternal leave to 2 weeks. Just about take it off for my daughter. My company counted it into our social security dues. The added 0.05% of extra costs from each salary mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for anybody. It means the world to me. Thank you, Swiss.

How long have human societies existed? How long has the concept of paid parental leave been around? Compare those two numbers.

> you are not a parent, and probably thats good for society

> old ass xibalba

You really undermine your credibility when you go ad hominem.

With compassion, may I say the following:

Some pregnancies are not planned. Some sex is not consensual. Unless we have free abortions available, people with uteruses are sometimes not free to decide not to be pregnant.

The decision to support pregnant people is a decision to support the baby. At some point, everyone reading this was a pregnancy, everyone reading this was helpless. One of the core functions of society is to protect helpless, young humans. Full stop.

If you are under the impression society exists for a purpose other than pooling resources to protect the citizens from outside threats of hunger, violence, or famine, I urge you to reconsider.

Moralizing about how better decisions should have been made is Monday-night-quarterbacking at best. The reality is there is now a small human. The small, helpless human should get the best shot we can give them, because otherwise, what the fuck are we doing.

Name something we should spend money on that's more worthwhile than a helpless baby not suffering.

You’ve really bent over backwards to make this about rape, unplanned pregnancies, and abortion.

I don’t disagree about abortion, per se, but it’s a separate issue.

I respectfully disagree.

For policies like the ones being discussed, assumptions are being made that everyone involved is making their own decisions. I’m refuting the claim that every pregnancy is the result of informed decisions.

Other gray zones include things like “either my marriage is over or I’m going to try to get pregnant”, or even “I was told I was infertile”, because those are going to truly muddy the issue.

You're free to move to Europe, earn 3x less, and get 1-2 years parental leave (actually not just for mothers in some countries!)

This isn't practical advice for most people and a significant fraction of the people affected are not looking at anything like a 3x pay cut, especially when you factor in the significantly greater amount we pay for healthcare, which parents will likely use more than they previously did.

An extremely impractical solution for majority of Americans who don’t want to uproot their life.

Surely we can show some empathy and demand better benefits for all. You know youre included in that pool too! I’m sure most folks on their deathbed will be glad they spent more time with their children then at their desk.

I think lumping together all European countries like that is not really helpful: not many european countries have a median income one third of the american one, and some are even higher than the US one.

wrt duration of maternity leave, western europe is pretty much at 3-6 months, while some of the eastern countries go longer. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave)

Also, immigrating to european countries for americans is not so easy, especially if you are not in a high paying in demand field.

Are you actually proposing that as a solution? Are you against paid parental leave?

I'm against it. Why give people less responsibility and less freedom, as they get smarter and more educated. And why revert to a more costly and inefficient public sector to achieve this. Seems like moving in the absolute wrong direction to me. Socialism and "free stuff" is something that I'm absolutely against in every way. And people have full control over having children. I see no point whatsoever in having paid parental leave, what's the reason why? "it's nice"?

Do you think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint? Are you aware of how callous you are?

To educate people to take responsibility for their lives? Yes, I think that's the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. People deserve freedom and deserve empowerment. I think it's morally wrong to have forced guardianship of adults.

It’s callous to not give people free money, that you took from other people?

Is it callous to throw criminals in jail? Is it callous to expect people to save money?

Maybe principles, morality, and justice are callous.

What a pointless comment. It's much more nuanced than giving people free money. Next you'd be saying it's not callous to not help someone out of a burning building unless they paid their taxes for the fire fighters.

The parent comment is an equally pointless call for sympathy with no substance.

> people have full control over having children

I disagree. There are plenty of people without access to birth control, abortion, or even proper sexual education in the US.

I've spoken with so many people who are at once against sex ed, abortion, contraception and parental benefits. That is wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. Without the first three you're going to need the last one. Not everyone has a good familial or social safety net. Not everyone is independently wealthy. Exceedingly few can live completely pastorally.

It's like asking for a software product fast, cheap and high quality. Pick two.

Same with society: you can have a healthy, free and educated populace, able to fulfill personal/social obligations (ie child rearing, taking care of aging parents, building lasting friendships), and/or working at peak economic production/efficiency. But I doubt you can have all three at the same time without massive subsidization or regulation. An individual's time and resources spent on one are the opportunity cost of the others. I'd be interested to know counterexamples of societies that were able to achieve all three.

By your logic the state shouldn't pay for school for children either. It does though because it's an investment, the country is better off for having an educated and literate population. I suspect that one day free childcare will be viewed similarly as free education—something that may cost money but is widely accepted as "worth it" for the sake of society. Anyway I always struggle to understand the all-to-frequent hyper-American hyper-individualistic opinions that are often found on this website. Always seem utterly detached from reality and lacking in basic empathy.

Tbh if you really want to be logically coherent then I encourage you to try to defend ending free education for kids.

The country would be even better off with a financially literate, empowered population that could be responsible for their own lives, and could come to these conclusions themselves.

Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america? And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?

I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.

> and could come to these conclusions themselves

People already have. That is what the state is. Society has come together to solve problems through the state. Just like with free education for all children (which sadly you didn't have the balls to argue should be outright abolished, and just ignored the point entirely).

> Why are you surprised that an american centered website have just the opinions that are current de-facto policies in america?

I mean the hyper-libertarianism you espouse is of course popular in the US but it's clearly not dominant judging by how much both Trump and Biden love to blow up the deficit.

>And why are you surprised that highly educated people that work in for-profit organisations prefer to be independent and manage their own lives?

Because not everyone thinks "fuck you I've got mine"? Is there any proof that going hyper-libertarian actually improves things? It's like the magical thinking surrounding "if we cut taxes, tax revenues will magically increase". Or in this case it's "if we cut the state so it doesn't help anyone who is in need, those people will magically be better off". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so where is it? Where's the proof that leaving vulnerable people to rot is good for them?

>I'm rather more surprised at the opposite, to discover that american programmers are actually communists and want to be cared for by the state in every way, and live uniform, identical, slow and inefficient lives. That seems to me like you would be in constant conflict with your surroundings and contradict your own life choices.

I can't think of anything more uniform, identical and slow than a society which exists entirely to optimise GDP or individual earnings. Hardly distinguishable from communism's obsession with 5 year plans at that point is it? It's an equally mad obsession with wealth and economic growth that is utterly degenerate and uncivilised.

No, using force from the state is a last resort when people really can't use their own judgement, and is avoided as much as possible, this is consensus all over the political spectrum.

And being against parental leave is in no way hyper-libertarisnism and you know it, your argumentation is not made any better by using hyperbole.

Education is only free to the small extent that it's determined to be absolutely necessary. The majority of education that actually benefits society the most is not free at all.

"fuck you, I've got mine" is a funny expression, but in reality everyone always puts themselves first, and only has a limited amount of help for others, which they are very selective with. Nobody lives up the opposite of "fuck me, help everyone else" in reality, and the more you push that, the less effort you get from people. Fuck you, I've got mine gets things done. "why try" doesn't get anything done.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that Europe has not opened its borders.

> Given that _every_ other "civilised" country has some sort of rudimentary care for new parents, which doesn't acutally cost that much, I can't see any reasonable objection to not having it.

Giving a special benefit that will for the most part only be exercised by women discourages hiring women. You can still think its worth it, but don't pretend like you're baffled by anyone who would object or question how this impacts women.

This graph shows the gender pay gap trending down in the UK since they implemented parental leave:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

This graph shows women's employment rate trending up in the UK:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

Policy changes don't exist in a vacuum. I'm not interested in studies that show something. I'm interested in a mental model that results in employers being indifferent to hiring men or women when statistically women are much more likely to take a considerable amount of paid time off with restrictions set on replacing them.

The model could be that employers are altruistic. Or that employers are dumb and don't realize this. Or they're sufficiently compelled by the law and the penalties and enforcement are strict enough.

And your model also has to account for the system not being a closed system. For instance, its not enough that all employers are altruistic, but any prospective employers that could enter the market would similarly be altruistic.

Again, it could be worth it, but don't pretend that there's no disincentive by this policy.

>I'm not interested in studies that show something.

An interesting way to think, to say the least.

This isn't a model. its not a study, its a metric collected from the UK for the last 20 years.

The arguments for "not hiring women because they'll just go and get pregnant" have largely been settled in the UK.

shared parental leave is a thing, its just what happens. Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.

> This isn't a model. its not a study, its a metric collected from the UK for the last 20 years.

And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number? Logic would tell you the disincentive exists. Looking at aggregate country data over 20 years doesn't tell you anything about a single policy.

> Employers that don't facilitate it are punished, either by employment tribunal, or people leaving to join somewhere that does.

That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave. If someone does not wish to have children, she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.

Hmmm, so it seems like the signal we'd expect to see in the time series data is either (1) tiny, and completely buried in the noise, or (2) as you suggest, is large but more than completely canceled out by some other, unnamed, contemporaneous signal(s).

Either way, seems like a net win for women!

> And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number?

Explain why this matters? The data demonstrates that you can increase parental leave while also reducing employment discrimination and improving conditions. That's the real world outcome.

> Logic would tell you the disincentive exists.

Surely logic would tell you to give more weight to real world outcomes than to imagined mental models about how others "should" behave?

I'd question why you think people should think that way in the first place.

> And absolutely nothing else changed in the UK in the last 20 years that may affect this number? Logic would tell you the disincentive exists. Looking at aggregate country data over 20 years doesn't tell you anything about a single policy.

The main argument against paid parental leave is that is will cause wage gap to grow. I don't see the data backing that up.

Yes, there have been other landmark cases in the courts about equal pay.

> That's a lot of employers to keep track of. In terms of people leaving for jobs that do offer paid parental leave only works for those wishing to take parental leave.

You see this is where I think we differ. Here in the UK parental leave is part of a few measures that are aimed at flexibility. There is the right to flexible working (ie working non standard hours) Working from home (which is implied rather than a legal obligation) All of these in 2019 were part of a movement to make work a bit less shit. I had a number of employees who were childless that we enabled hybrid working. So that they could avoid coming in hungover, or work non standard times from abroad. Or just not come in with a cold and get everyone ill.

When a company advertises its "benefits" (this was pre covid) they used to use parental leave as a signal that they had a more relaxed working atmosphere.

For me, I've found that happy employees are loyal, more productive and willing to forgive mistakes. I have tried to make sure that those I manage feel like they have some level of work security, which rewards me as a manager with better productivity and lower staff turnover.

I used to try and be a bit like malcom tucker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjKHPv7b3fQ) it doesnt work as well as just being reasonably caring.

> she would be willing to take a higher salary in lieu of a company that provides generous parental leave.

again this is not a british thing to do. A right is a right, opting out of a right to get more money undermines everyone. I mean sure you can come back two weeks after giving birth, (I know someone who came back after a month) but you're not going to get more money for it.

> I'm not interested in studies that show something.

The study doesn't agree with how I believe the world works so therefore they must be wrong.

> The model could be that employers are altruistic. Or that employers are dumb and don't realize this.

It's telling that your only conclusion for why companies could possibly continue to hire women is that they must be stupid or chivalrous.

> I'm not interested in studies that show something. I'm interested in a mental model [...]

So you're interested in theory, not reality?

So we're just throwing out random graphs and assuming causality? How about stork population vs birthrate?

I am not assuming causality.

See this comment for explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29230197

Agreed, this sounds like a very good reason to ensure parental leave is available for both men and women.

It's like that here in Germany. It's a little more complicated but in the end mom and dad can split up to 14 months of paid parental leave time where no one can take more than 12 months.

Now the pay does not replace a full salary of course. It is a percentage of your pay up to a maximum of 1800€.

I know many dads (myself included) that have used this program.

It’s one of my favorite things about Germany. Here in (relatively) socially conservative greater Nuremberg, the split tends to be 12 months Mom, two months Dad, with Dad taking a month right after birth, and another when Mom goes back to work, but that “max 12 months of 14” pushes a lot of dads to take those two months.

Since the pay is capped at 1800, I know a few fathers who didn’t take even their two months because they were living at the edge of their paychecks (yes, it’s possible to live a little too large anywhere, and Germans aren’t immune), and one mother who went back to work at the end of the eight weeks post-birth that we’re absolutely forbidden to work (but are paid quite close to our pre-maternal net pay) because she was the primary earner. It’s also rougher on single mothers than partnered ones, of course, but at least isn’t as harsh for them here as it is back in the US, and for low earners, 2/3 of your previous net + 200 child benefit is not much less than net + child care (subsidized for big earners, highly subsidized for lower earners) + general costs of working.

“But you could have saved even more than that over the past few years if you didn’t have to pay really high German income taxes!” Yes, we certainly could have, and would have, given our behavior even with taxes the way they are.

However…

Most people wouldn’t/couldn’t, and because the benefit is so widespread, employers expect you’ll take it and have policies in place to accommodate it. The fact that a maternity year is normal makes it less of a career risk, and the same with several months away for fathers.

It’s an even better reason to make it compulsory. (!?)

Give the benefits to dads too. 4 weeks for the first kid is challenging. It could be different for 2+ kids, but remember that every child has a few complications when they are born, that. Fade away after a while.

It is in the UK, or rather it's given to both, and up to them how they split it.

Yeah, sure. Only the american libertarian knows how things really work. All those other countries are stupid, and because of their stupidity, look at them, all the women are out of the labor market.

So UK maternity leave is shared. Its a year with 6 months "pay"

How its taken is up to the parents. The people that I know who've taken it have split it fairly evenly. (I know I know sample size.)

I did not take any, as I was not eligible at the time.

As someone who does a lot of recruiting, I don't think "hmm I'm going to have to pay this woman for mat leave" because frankly that's bollocks, who knows who's going to be here for six months, 1 year or 8?

From a purely business point of view, the women that have come back from maternity are normally bargains. They don't ask for more pay, they are flexible and are loyal, assuming we have made the correct allowances for being parents.

also being a parent in tech allows people to deal much better with the toddler tantrums/playground fights that seem to be common in this industry.

> also being a parent in tech allows people to deal much better with the toddler tantrums/playground fights that seem to be common in this industry.

An insight that comes from a place of being forced to be more mature yourself. Well said!

Solid parenting advice, or a consulting technique: the “wish list” from “How to talk so kids will listen, how to listen so kids will talk”, or putting something that seems ridiculous into the backlog to keep the meeting moving.

Wonderful comment that brought this book and idea to my attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468582

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?view=...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#/media/File:OEC...

Seems like countries with paid leave have comparable or higher rates of labor participation and (on average) lower gender pay gap.

Maternity/parental leave is typically paid by the state, not by the employers. If both parents can take a leave, then it does not discourage hiring women.

I keep saying it: the ERA was a (successful) ruse by the elite class to further dilute and weaken the middle class dressed up with a feminist guise.

You might not have to "keep saying it" if you gave a little more context and detail as to what you're on about. That, and explain the acronym for those that are under, oh, about sixty years old.

You know the ERA hasn't been ratified, right?

Yes? You also know that something as momentous as a constitutional amendment doesn't happen in a vacuum either, right? It still had the effect of nearly doubling the size of the workforce, and now ~50 years later we're now seeing what it means to have a dual-earner family income.

The middle class is rapidly shrinking and the dream of owning a house for many newlyweds is fast receding in the rear view mirror, but hey, equality! Right?

> It still had the effect of nearly doubling the size of the workforce

No, it didn't.

That ship had already sailed before ERA was proposed, and was a major driver for it.

It is interesting to think about the societal changes that drive or are driven by a constitutional amendment. If the ERA was a 1920s progressivist goal [1] then maybe one could say that it was part of a broader change to formalize work effort that existed in informal household economies. If the ERA reference is to the early 1970s effort [1] then it was a lagging indicator since the economic integration of women into the formal economy was well underway and would arrive at an equilibrium by the 1990s [0].

Exploring the counterfactual numbers: If the workforce gender share remained at the 4:6 F:M ratio of 1972, then a male workforce of 85m would mean a female workforce of 34m instead of the actual 75m. This would lead to a total workforce of 119m instead of 160m, a decrease of 41m or 25%.

Would the USSR have won the cold war if the US had 25% less economic growth over the last 50 years?

0. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/lfp/civilianlfbysex

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment

What is ERA?

A proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution called the Equal Rights Amendment, giving equal legal rights to all regardless of gender:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment

There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law. If company wants to offer it, good for them. It may help retaining senior employees who reached the phase in their life when they want to have children.

I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history.

If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children. If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready.

In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved. We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it.

Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies.

There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues.

The last time the government meddled with families, it didn't end up well for the black community: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline...

And nowadays the stats for broken families, across all ethnicities, is higher than ever.

I don't think companies should be involved in people's personal lives at all, it's out of scope. The state is the only one that can subsidise a particular constellation of family life. You would open up to all kind of different excuses for why people should get special treatment in the work place because of their private life.

Not all women are equal. I have seen women who gave birth just a couple of weeks before, thriving & bursting of energy in the workplace.

Sucks to be the kid of these bursting energy balls though. Hope the kid has a nanny or a grandmother who isn't like that.

Or a father.

True.

I think a child would benefit the most from an involved male and a female figure in their lives, but even one is better than none.

In other words, ideally that should read "and a father" ;)

Even better! :)

Old family wisdom: There is no "normal" for normal (meaning non-C-section) childbirth. A mother's physical and mental recovery timelines will vary (possibly widely) with each birth, and assumptions that it'll just keep getting easier tend to end badly.

(C-sections are somewhat more predictable on the physical recovery side...but do not lack for issues of their own.)

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