The nuclear family isn't working

The most interesting piece here for me was that parents aren't having as many kids as they want: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates...

I also wonder at what salary level does it make more sense for a breadwinner household over a dual income household. Childcare is expensive, and likely scales with your standard of living. I net of increased tax rates, child care costs, and time spent navigating childcare costs, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of dual income households that might actually get more disposable income with one person staying home.

Something which my parents have a hard time grasping: we're at one of the first times in American history where children are doing less off financially then there parents. My parents met in the 70's where my dad was making a killing as a professional. He easily purchased a large house and got married and had two kids. Even with a FAANG job, I struggle to find any reasonable place to continue my career in a place where basements aren't $1M and I can continue my career. I know there are more affordable places to live but with by some estimates of 20% inflation I fear moving to somewhere in the midwest and never being able to return to my home state of California. Finding a wife has also proven to be very difficult, perhaps mildly attributable to not having a good starting place to begin a family, where they have good schools etc. My parents lived through the booming 70's and 80's and just won't get it.

Aren't we way past that? Yes, a nuclear family does worse than a full family (as in multiple generations living together). Can we stop diagnosing the problem ad nauseum? We get it.

The title of this article seems to have little to do with its contents.

There is commentary about the involvement of men and women in the workforce over time, but nothing about the outcomes for various family members on metrics that matter to them. There isn't even an obvious definition of "nuclear family" in the article.

What would "working" even mean to this author?

> We need new positive social roles, especially for men

Changing a culture's norms is pretty hard. When it's something "easy", like "give all people respect/human rights", that only takes around 120 years to take effect (or about 60 in the case of gay rights, a crazy fast timeline). But changing gender roles? That's so ingrained that it's foundational in many languages.

I think it will be a lot easier to tackle this economically than via social norms. Give women more money for work, child care, maternity, etc and give men a small stipend if they don't work. Give both a bonus if they work in a non-gender-traditional field. It won't flip the whole thing on its head, but the change will start immediately.

It's unfortunate that he mis-used the term "cohousing," which is a distinct type of neighborhood/community that can be very beneficial for raising a family. It's a neighborhood in which your neighbors are often a kind of extended family. It would have deserved its own examination in the article. Cohousing is not living with more people in one house as the author characterized it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohousing

In light of the housing crisis in California, I looked at the census information for my house in 1920. It had three married couples living in it spanning from the 60s to their twenties.

The nuclear family does work, in the sense that average outcomes for children raised by their married biological parents are better than for other children.

The main thing I'm seeing here is sky rocketing wealth inequality and that families are required to put more of their time into work/supporting themselves, than being a family.

Some good ideas in this article but you lost me at ... "Rising healthcare costs are due to misaligned incentives between patients, doctors, pharma companies, and insurance companies that make healthcare spending inefficient and often ineffective, as well as an overly burdensome FDA approval process that increases the cost of drug development, makes it easier for pharma companies to price-gouge, and encourages corruption."

Health insurance should be done at the Fed level, period. Thats how every other country does it. We can have our own version. It also saves money, instead of hording profits for some Insurance Companies CEO to buy a 2nd yacht.

There are no pricing regulations on any drugs and thats the problem. Also if you believe in capitalism so much then we should be able to buy our drugs from anywhere in the world. Just like we do our food.

The solution of families just doubling up is just dumb. Housing is expensive because real estate is artificially scarce. Real estate ghouls pay off local politicians to not expand zones or have zoning changed. Also some people just don't want to live with their parents. We want to raise our children our way without repeating the errors of the past. Also some grandparents can't help because of medical issues or just don't want to. This idea of forcing people into large families or groups to survive just sounds like trying to squeeze blood from a stone without fixing the problem thats causing this.

Also big surprise this article never mentions how the elites cause all of these problems. They control the zoning for housing, they control what gets passed in Congress to budget for Universal Healthcare, they control if prices should be regulated by paying off politicians, they control minimum wage rates, etc etc

It works for the ruling class. That it doesn't work for the ruled is of no concern to your masters.

The nuclear family used to contribute 5/14 person-days per week to the workforce. Now it contributes 10/14 person-days, which leaves only 4 person-days a week to raise kids, which isn't enough. Birth rate plummets -- who could have seen it coming?

We should use the hours-per-week overtime threshold to control the aggregate supply/demand for labor (this also will require removing exceptions, of course).

Proposal: the overtime threshold should be at 3 days per week. This leaves a nuclear family contributing ~6 days a week to the workforce -- more than it did in the 50s -- while still leaving 8 person-days a week for raising kids.

Objection: but China will catch us if we slack off!

Counter-Objection: China has the same problem but worse, and they have a government that loves big central plans more than ours does. Compromise would be possible if we wanted it.

Objection: but we are ruled by capitalists who will never allow it.

Counter-Objection: yeah, probably. If they do nothing, reduced birth rate will eventually reduce the aggregate supply of labor for them -- but automation will probably land by then, so I doubt they are too worried. We need to put an end to the situation where they profit enormously from mismanaging the situation.