In the middle class where women graduate college at twice the rate as men, move to big cities for a lucrative career, and delay childbirth until their 30s, women are easily outpacing men in earnings.
Which is pretty heavily at odds with the “easily outpacing” statement.
The article shows men earning more than women. But the discussion is all based on the interpretation that women are now outearning men.
It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time. It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
Scandinavian countries do everything you are advocating for and have the same fertility trends as everyone else.
Advocate for those policies anyway, if you want to, but don’t claim they are going to move the needle when we have evidence they won’t.
In Quebec/Canada, when state-spondored affordable daycare was introduced, it made a notable difference both for the number of women in the workforce, and also an increase in childbirth.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-queb...
Far from perfect, it was defunded in recent years, and it again made the birthrate and workforce go down. As a parent, I can anecdotally say that this system, when it worked, made a huge difference for our family.
There’s arguments on all sides about whether sub replacement fertility among woman with successful white collar careers is or isn’t a problem. But what I haven’t seen is any country that’s managed to reverse it. So we don’t in fact know if it is possible.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Can't be a good mother and a good worker. You can't be at home taking care of your baby and at work being productive for your company/boss/etc. Not rocket science.
> It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
The most egalitarian societies with the most women-friendly workplaces have some of the lowest birth rates. Your assertion, which has been around for decades, has been well tested and well debunked. For decades, wealthy western societies have increased benefits for working mothers. Birth rates continued to decline.
If you want higher birth rates, you want women to spend less time in school/work and have children in their prime birthing years ( 18-29 ). That's simple biological fact. The question for society is whether we want women at home with their babies for the benefit of their families or we want women at work for the benefit of corporations/shareholders. The elites have spoken and it's the latter. It's why the elites want more immigration. We need to maintain the population somehow.
The issue isn't complex unless you want it to be complex because you don't like the simple truth.
Of course you can.
Wait, are you expecting the mother to be doing all the child-rearing?
Is this a pressure applied to women, or to people in general?
Is it easier for men or for women to return to work after spending a few years taking care of their kids?
Perhaps discrimination goes the other way.
Perhaps society shouldn't make men choose between a career and jerking off all day
Society does not. You do.
So encouraging smart women to procreate would in reality simply unbias our society and make things fair again.
No need to invoke "eugenics" or something
It may seem like that if you’re living in a super high cost of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents.
This whole “lol parents are dumb” meme really needs to die.
Daycare isn’t prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids entire school isn’t doing it because it’s the optimal financial decision.
You don’t stop having a career or earning money or having career advancement when you have kids.
I wonder if young adults making 120k are hearing “kids are crazy expensive” from families living on 60k, and developing a somewhat warped perception.
I know the daycare in SF is crazy, and I sympathize (it’s not cheap for me either) but as others noted it’s only a few years, and you only pay for full time daycare in the first place if you have dual incomes.
A bigger problem is after school care. All the programs at SFUSD along with all the independent ones have long waitlists.
Those of us in tech are fortunate: work hours are flexible so it isn't as much of a problem as it would be for many others.
(For our part I aim to be ambitious at work which has paid off so far and my partner stays at home, but that is not easy or even possible for everyone in tech let alone those outside it)
However, given the way taxes on two earner families work it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first blush.
Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax dollars.
https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-pen...
1) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $150,000 a year, $40,000 in childcare costs.
and
2) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing $0 a year, $0 in childcare costs?
Also, that is ignoring the far higher probability of being able to earn $150k and more for the woman in the years agree her kids are out of daycare, plus the benefit of the woman maintaining financial independence.
In reality that's just pure cash. You'd be ahead even more in terms of saving for retirement which can also lower your tax basis. Benefits might also be better - some employers cover a greater percentage of the employee's premium so having the 150k spouse covered under a different plan could save money. There may be other benefits worth considering.
Also childcare at 40k is overpriced even for SF. All day preschool is 20-30k unless you're trying to get them into a super exclusive preschool as a status thing. Once they start real school you only need to cover after school care for 10-15k. So net take home would be more like 50-90k depending.
Because it is?
Seriously, everything now revolves around your child--as it should.
You can't "just stay jobless" for a year anymore. You won't take that project that makes you skip your children's play, sports, etc. You probably won't move very far (or at all) if you change jobs because your children are in school somewhere. You will stay in a job that may be suboptimal because uprooting your family is lots of effort. etc.
And, this is doubly so for women. Women, in spite of everything, are still expected to be the primary child caretaker.
How is this not the "end of your life"--especially if you are female?
Same with school later. You can't have kids 12 hours a day there.
The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the century), so I’m hard pressed to argue for more children (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we, in aggregate, already don’t take care of the ones here (no subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120 million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc). Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very generous leave policies, and “baby bonuses”), the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs, life choices, etc).
The grocery stores are already full of food, why do we still need farms? If you ever plan to stop working you need young people to buy your 401k stocks from you and pay for your Social Security.
The problem with low fertility rates is not (primarily) population decline, it's demographic collapse. As long as fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly increases _forever_.
What about immigration?
The US is in a much better position wrt to this than many other nations because of our high rates of immigration but low fertility is a global phenomenon outside of a handful of places like Nigeria and Afghanistan.
> the fertility rate continues to decline regardless.
You're right. Nobody has figured out how to raise fertility rates once they start dropping.
Parent here. You don’t need $1mm to raise a kid. You don’t need anywhere close to that, actually.
Kids aren’t free, obviously, but this internet meme that they’ll bankrupt you is getting out of control.
Honestly, how do you think people making the median US household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even? I hope it’s obvious that households with two kids earning <$100K per year (a common situation) aren’t spending $1mm on each of them.
Having been poor, you should have a good sense of just how little money it actually takes to leave the insecurity & want far behind (in my own experience & opinion)
If you’re at a median income, you’re barely getting by with kids.
/ducks
(Yes, terrible idea for a number of reasons, but the incentives would be aligned...)
Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much imagination that humans are also derived from female humans. Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated and the very thing it produces is labor.
It’s the small child that needs years of care that does that.
Edit: bc I forgot, we can't even replicate human breast milk fully well!
Edit: ADHD, dark though disclaimer.
I think the fact that we so naively try to paper over all of this with "it's cool we will just invent metal birthing pods to replace this" is part of why we have this problem in the first place. People didn't intentionally have children throughout history because it's logical, they did it because of emotions(99% of the time). We don't really emotionally appreciate the fact that women can CREATE LIFE. Like it's actually an amazing unbelievable thing. But it's rarely viewed as that
Can you explain your perspective to me?
COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities, where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing, rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their best option, rich people go to college and get a draft deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over, the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way.
Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans living today are descended from the nobility of the High Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's war.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...