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It's the same calculus, it's just the kids need to figure into it once you have them.

I made a number of choices differently once I had kids. I folded up a startup and took steady employment at a company with good work/life balance. I bought a house in a good school district rather than renting and taking the risk that rising rents would force them away from their grandparents. I make a choice to drop the work at 4:30 so I can go walk to pick the older one up from pre-school rather than get an extra 20 minutes of work in.

But all of these are still choices - they're weighing the things important to me and deciding that I'm going to allocate my labor and capital in different ways. Once you start getting into the economics of pricelessness, when you must do this for your kids or you're a bad parent, bad things often happen. You lose the ability to make rational trade-offs, and your kids often sense that and never learn the ability to make rational trade-offs.

It's metaphor about how to manage your career, nothing more.

The point of the metaphor is to not depend upon your current employer to manage your career for you. If you do, they will inevitably manage your career to suit their own interests, not yours.

I follow the parent poster's advice in part because I have kids. I manage my career to serve my personal success so that I can care for those who depend upon me.

Not all of life is one big spreadsheet of assets and liabilities; just those things that are relevant to my career growth.

> Do you have kids?

Yes.

> I sincerely hope that you don't actually conduct this thinking deep into your lifestyle

I think what I said holds true about your economic decisions (which the article I’m commenting on is about).

I don’t believe you have to (or even really can) view your entire life through an economic lens. I didn’t mean to imply you are ONLY a company and nothing else.

I did mean the last bit that nobody else is going to make sure you don’t have a bad outcome as applying to life generally.

completely off topic - user:adenozine replied to user:caffeine. What a coincidence lol. (Caffeine keeps us alert and awake because it blocks adenosine)

Having kids enhances his analogy, as it increases the need for your "company" to make good decisions. Ultimately the GP's message is an empowering one. You have value, you have agency, you can leverage these things to improve your situation (and by extension your family's situation). People are getting stuck on taking the post literally.

> I'd manage with anything that arose, if it meant something better for them.

You had me up until this one. It is not (in my view) necessary to optimize monotonically toward anything that makes life better for my children. All the stuff you said before that, I would certainly do if the alternative was deprivation for my children, but having secured their basic well-being, making things even better for them is only one consideration among others. As an extreme, if I had enough money in the bank to secure them shelter, food, education, and enjoyment, I would not then take or continue in a job I hate in order to pad out a big trust fund.

I fear this is a pedantic point I'm making as I suspect this sort of going above and beyond is not what you meant, but it was my reaction to the end of that first paragraph.

> I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children

Right, the main difference is that nepotism is bad in a regular company but in a personal company it is the opposite, not practicing nepotism makes you look bad.

Aside from this the difference isn't that big.

I don't see how changing the perspective of selling labor to ...selling labor really jumps the gap into psychosis.

Your children (they're human beings btw) are not extensions of your "inner company" is the point I was making. It's not rational to reduce children to that sort of algebra problem thinking. That's a huge red flag for someone's mental state. If you're not able to recognize that you can only solve human problems with human solutions that incorporate human needs and wants, then you start down the path of psychosis and anti-social behaviors. It's small animal torture, fire-setting, bed-wetting, and then it's full-blown serial killer.

I'm obviously exaggerating, but not THAT much.

You can't just paint over that with an analogy. Maybe I just treat my kids different, but there's literally nothing about work that I care about even remote as much as my childrens' well-being. I'd burn my inner company to the ground if it meant they get a chance at a decent life. I believe it's a biological imperative to remain willing to self-sacrifice to any necessary extent for the betterment of the offspring.

The etymology of economics is household management. Children are dependents of your household.

I'm not really sure what your objection to this analogy is.... Choosing to work more so you can send your kids to an elite private school is one action that somebody can take. Choosing to work less so that you can be more involved in your children's lives is another. All the analogy is asking is that you be intentional about how you are managing yourself and your household.

I wet the bed and played with fire as a child. I don't believe I've become a serial killer.

To expand the analogy further, your children are the shareholders of course and your partner is the board (:

I dare not imagine my wife's response if I were to say this to her.

"You're fired"