Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents With Hours of Chaos
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/jul/23/e...
Software is just a tool. Ultimately, managers are the ones who need to be educated on the impact of their decisions.
By those measures, the software does a lot better than humans. However, there's something to be said about the predictability of the old human schedules. The humans generally just figured out a 2 week schedule and repeated it; filling in holes created by scheduling conflicts with those workers they knew were usually eager to pick up more work.
IOW, you may previously have worked every 2nd Tuesday. If you couldn't work on a particular Tuesday, you just didn't work. Now you're much more likely to get a solid 2 shifts a month (presuming that's what you asked for), most will be on days you marked as preferred, some days may be on some you marked as available and none on days you marked as not available.
Now obviously I could have added a metric to guide the system towards more 'regular' schedules. But it would still compensate for those other considerations, and would still look somewhat random. It's usually pretty easy to tell the difference between a computer-generated and a human-generated schedule, and many people still prefer the human generated ones, even if it is less 'fair' by almost any measure.
Given how crazy a schedule generated solely by worker preferences is, I shudder to consider schedules driven solely by management preference...
Especially you shouldn't build in the ability to give monetary incentives for work. That'll cause a race to the bottom on part of the employees.
In retrospect, that's perhaps all I should have built. But the schedule optimization part was the "fun" part. The rest is pretty standard CRUD + email webapp.
I have family working for the german train company, which has highly fluctuating shifts too, but something like that would be straight-up illegal here.
The company has two reasonable choices - either have the time between shifts be at least 9 hours, so the people can eat,sleep and wash; or if they really want a single person to handle closing+opening, and that person is okay with that, then they're welcome to pay for the whole nightshift including the downtime.
There shouldn't be a third option, and in most of the civilized world workers actually have the right to demand that.
it's not like they can afford a lawyer, or even have time to find and/or meet with one.
that's an example of where unions are important.
Seems like a fair trade off? If you want ala carte hours, you should pay ala carte prices.
Only way I can think to do it though is by regulating time software... something like "if you use flexible hours, you must comply to these regulations" where in they specify custom pricing.
a business should produce three things, for three important customer segments: customers, investors, and workers, and all three are equally important.
too many businesses, most of the large ones esp, cater only to investors (or the interests of the owners) leaving both customers and workers by the wayside. i fully support exile for people who operate these businesses.
I realize that the real world adds a lot of complications, but in theory, supply and demand should just work itself out here. "In theory" isn't always useful by itself, but the remedy depends greatly on why the theory is breaking down.
That only works if the supply of workers is limited. And in this case, the low-wage bracket, it isn't. It's absolutely flooded with people, so you can't expect the workers to command any such bargaining power. It's simply supply and demand, and there simply isn't enough demand to satisfy the huge supply of low-wage workers.
My solution: Company towns. Give the workers daycare, food, accommodation, training/education and pay them peanuts... in the middle of nowhere. But that'll never fly, because the argument really isn't about "fair-wage", it's more about "entitlement" so people see it as some sort of loss instead of a huge gain in a market that really isn't favoring them at the moment.
...because its been done before, became widely and accurately recognized as de facto slavery, and the key components of such schemes outlawed.
You also assume that people have free choice; when you're near flat broke, it's easy to miss your other options.
Though, to be fair. We have "company towns" right now in Dubai and those oil-rich middle-east cities. Guess who's turning a blind eye? The government's where the cities are, and the governments of those immigrants being taken advantage of. They're ignored by both sides.
If you want to propose something that is distinct from the historical phenomenon labelled "company towns", I suggest you use a different name (though your description seems to fit exactly into the historical mold, so I'm not going to be convinced that there is a meaningful difference unless you have a concrete explanation as to how your model would avoid recurrence of those problems once the laws put in place that would prevent anything on that model in most US jurisdictions that were motivated by the experience of company towns, such as state and federal laws imposing minimum wages and requiring that such be paid in cash or equivalents, were repealed to allow your new-model company towns.)
> Do you honestly think a civilized country or informed internet would allow a company town to exist if it behaved like the historical company towns?
Well, no, absent compelling arguments otherwise, I'm rather convinced that a country that allowed "company towns" as you have described them, given the historical experience that demonstrates the problems with that model, would, in that respect at least, be, ipso facto, uncivilized.
The drill worked like this. You live in a poverty riden rural area, and an "enganchador" (lit. hooker, but its kind or a recruiter) comes town and offers you a job elsewhere. You sign up and leave with this guy.
Upon arrival, you learn that you have to pay for the recruiter fee, which is always more than whatever money managed you brought with you for the trip. So your options are either debtors prison or ask your new boss for a single early payment. It's day one and you start in the red.
You are new in town, nobody knows you and will not do business with you unless you bring money upfront. That is, nobody except for "la tienda de raya" your bosse's personal side business, that is happy to extend you a credit line with your paycheck ("la raya") as warranty. Everything is more expensive there, but they will give you everything you need because you are "one of the bosse's men".
So, you are down the hole and digging. An extremely unusual degree of self control over a lengthy period of time is required to cut down your consumption enough so that you will sometime pay your debt. If you manage to do that, you will be able to shop at the same stores as normal people does, and benefit from it. But you will always have the temptation of going to the tienda de raya again for special one of purchases (like that special dress for your daughters wedding), or if the inevitable event of life set you back (like if you need to have a tooth extracted and end up short of cash before the next pay check).
And if you ever try to quit, or loose your job, it is debtor's prison again.
Daycare, longings, travel, food, medical care, all free (or more accurately included in your paycheck).
The only things that cost are luxuries.
Seems to me that would solve the problem you outline.
Or, more accurately still, the amount of those things that the company decides that you should get without paying extra replaces the bulk of your paycheck. Anything more you want you have to buy with the pittance that remains (or on credit), from suppliers you have access to given the travel, communications, etc., that the company chooses allow you access to through the companies "free" and paid services -- which, usually, means through the company itself. Which, of course, gives the company incentive to ensure that what is provided in the "free" allowance is inadequate.
Company towns are near perfect walled gardens, and exhibit all the problems that walled gardens usually demonstrate.
Every thing I do, and every choice I make, has an implicit "do this, or you will suffer" rationality behind it. I choose (and other things) to work so I will not suffer, so I can provide for my loved ones and have them not suffer. But you don't see me complaining about being held captive, or being forced to agree to work under duress. Of course not.
"Sometimes I do what I want to. The rest of the time, I do what I have to."
In a company town, the real problem is that the company is simultaneously the authority and trying to make a profit. It's like making ExxonMobil an environmental protection agency; there's a conflict of interest. Sure, an inspired CEO or manager can make a difference for a while, but the lure of extra profits will win out eventually.
The way this works is through easy availability of credit and high interest. Since you have your workers in debt to you, you're effectively paying them less because they have to pay off the debt. Now, instead of paying them 8 bucks an hour, you're actually paying them 6 bucks an hour because a quarter of their income is going toward paying off their debts. As debts mount, you're now paying them 4 bucks an hour. You can further speed this process along by overcharging for goods and services. After all, you can do that because you're the only one in the region who offers them.
It doesn't have to be like this, but it's very easy for a manager to say, "Hey, we're leaving forty million dollars on the table here. You like money, right?"
In practice, many low-wage workers already get these resources, but via the government (i.e. your taxes) rather than the company.
it is a full time job to get aid.
However, as is so often the case when "welfare" or a social safety net comes up, especially in America, what is technically true by a parsimonious and context-free reading of the facts is, in practice, not fundamentally relevant (or even completely true).
Reminds me of the beginning of Marshall Brain's novella 'Manna':
>Manna was connected to the cash registers, so it knew how many people were flowing through the restaurant. The software could therefore predict with uncanny accuracy when the trash cans would fill up, the toilets would get dirty and the tables needed wiping down.
I haven't been effected by this sort of thing in years, but I've always felt that they should have to pay you for hours they schedule you, whether they use you or not.
What I think would make sense in a regime where minimum wage exists, given that people often work multiple jobs and such scheduled-but-canceled-at-the-last-minute hours effectively exclude other work is to include hours scheduled or where the employee is required to be "on call" for work that are not cancelled sufficiently far in advance -- obviously, one needs to decide where to set the bar here -- are counted as hours worked for minimum wage purposes (including for calculation of overtime pay due at minimum wage -- and for hours worked for related purposes like "full time" status as it relates to any benefit mandates, etc.), but not as hours worked at the actual wage for the position, or overtime entitlement based on the actual wage. So, you can't use schedule-and-cancel to drop the pay for the "reserved" time of an employee below minimum wage.
> http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The first two chapters are really good, but it goes downhill very quickly. Fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and I nearly burst out laughing at the dialog in the fifth chapter. It also fails to explore some of the more interesting aspects of robots-as-blind-managers.
For example, the robot asks workers in a store to report the shelf stock and asks a second to verify. What happens when typically-mischievous teenage workers lie to the computer (either individually or as a conspiracy)? Do they convince the computer that duct tape is a highly-shoplifted item? Is the software smart enough to correlate the misreporting with specific workers or groups of workers (and does it ever misidentify the perpetrator)? Do engineers spend untold hours figuring out why "Manna" keeps overstocking (or understocking) duct tape?
The computer manager in Manna is shown as a all-knowing with human intelligence and common sense. We all know that real software isn't like that.
Wouldn't this be farily easy to game ?
That is, I don't serve anyone at a register for a 10 minute period, so I quickly buy a small coke using my own money ... thus simulating a customer ... which would (I presume) throw off, or reset the whole algorithm.
Two assumptions - first, that the software really isn't that smart, and second, that it "fails safe" ... which is to say, if traffic patterns don't match up to existing models, just give up and keep people working and try again later.
So I would think this would be quite simple (and cheap) to game ... maybe four workers get together and chip in to simulate 2-3 meal purchases, thus gaining an hour or more of paid work ?
What the FUCK is that about? How can anyone justify that? "Oh, I see you're spiralling downward. Here's a fucking boot on your kid's head to make sure he gets right down to the bottom with you." That's a fucking disgrace.
However the underlying issue beyond that is one of simple business 'greed'. Workers shifts are another resource to be optimized, and this is the end result. As long as this kind of optimization yields tangible bottomline benefits, and there are enough people who need the job so they are willing to deal with the fluctuating schedules, this is going to continue.
Corporations have to care about their employees. You don't hear Costco employees complaining.
also, you do hear them complaining: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/overtime/inter...
As some say, "the companies that have a union are the ones that deserve it"
Still, with the massive unemployment, it's hard to push for things like this.
Your idea reminded me of a project someone built several years ago to give western audiences a taste of life in darfur...
It also threw in some points where the “character” made a bad decision, which led to really dire consequences. Someone could easily conclude “they are poor because they made bad decisions” but it doesn’t highlight how if you have the money bad decisions don’t compound the way they do when you don’t.
Found it: http://playspent.org/
The "Share Economy" (Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.) has the potential to make this both better and worse. At least if you're an independent uber driver, you can choose when you're going to be available and pick up jobs when it makes sense for your schedule. There are time periods that are higher/lower demand, but you're wage is reflected in that and its your choice to make.
Incidentally, while its a pleasant (for the industry) propaganda/marketing label, these things have nothing to do with sharing. They are routine sales-through-an-agent, and are no more about "sharing" than selling a house through a real estate agent is.
That's actually not a difference from their traditional competitors, in that (to the extent that the uses weren't actually illegal at the time) agent-intermediated rentals for already-owned assets weren't new things when these apps started doing it, and also because these apps aren't specific to "pre-owned" assets, and in fact drive asset purchases dedicated to rental through the apps. (And, in any case, rental-through-an-agent doesn't become "sharing" just because you owned the property you chose to rent out before you decided to rent it out.)
You can't say there's nothing new there.
People clearly did. I'm not sure what definition of "normal" you are trying to use here, but it seems likely circular...
> You can't say there's nothing new there.
Nor did I say that there's nothing new there. What I did say is that it has nothing to do with "sharing", each is just a new convenient web/mobile app for fairly normal agent-intermediated rentals (often with little attention to the legalities of the specific industry -- which in several cases of so-called 'sharing economy' companies is the main innovation offered over existing online agent-intermediated rental systems in otherwise similar markets.)
Sharing economy workers are 1099 contractors, so wages can be pushed below minimum wage. You may not be able to make enough to get by just by working when its convenient for you, and have to work during the high demand/wage hours or whenever jobs are being offered.
The market for sharing economy labor will probably be where demand is more unpredictable, because businesses that can predict demand will just hire employees. Workers will have short notification windows and feel more pressure to take higher paying work when it becomes available.
So if the mix "lower wages but consistent (and often overstaffed) schedules" is prohibited by the wage law, you may instead get the mix "slightly higher wages but hours aggressively trimmed and rearranged".
I understand the "prices will fall" mantra, but cost of living goes up with inflation. One would think that there would be no need for a minimum wage because as cost of living goes up, no one would be paying the 'bare minimum' anymore. The problem is that this is not what we see in practice.
Another consideration is that middle-/upper-class wages would (in my opinion) no fall as a result of minimum wage abolition. This does not have an insignificant impact on prices too (just because cost goes down does not necessarily translate into lower prices, maybe just higher profits).
This sort of knee-jerk reaction makes it really hard to discuss any sort of public policy in a rational way. The moment you point out any problem with anything, somebody will come along and "rebut" your statement by pretending that you just stated that everything would be better if you eliminated the thing you're discussing. It's really annoying!
Also, the process of proposal and rebuttal you describe has another name: Debate. And the constant rebutting is why it works so well. You attack the other side's idea while defending your own and the best ideas survive the process.
Seriously? It's possible to think that something causes a problem while still thinking that it's a net gain. Is that concept actually foreign to you? Do you truly think that you must either see no faults in something or you must think it should be changed?
Debate involves a mutual discussion. The process I describe, where a person "rebuts" something that was never said, is not debate, it's simple argument.
Debate and argumentation are essentially the same. Debate can imply something formal, and argument can carry a negative connotation. But both are, by definition, adversarial methods of arriving at the truth. They require people to take sides, if just for the sake of argument.
You've guessed right that I don't personally think the tradeoffs of price-controls on wages are worth it. (Among other problems, the very young & low-skilled, who get priced out of essential starter jobs, are hurt more than those who remain employed at the higher wages are helped.) But we don't have to agree on that to reach common understandings on other particulars of how employers and employees adjust to constraints.
The point above is that the system has many, many parameters in constant dynamic adjustment. Setting a minimum on one that's easy-to-observe (hourly wages) in law doesn't just cause that one value to change.
The adjustments happen all over. Marginal workers aren't hired or kept-on-staff. Hours of operation are trimmed. Outfits run on slimmer crews. It's harder to find someone to ask a question. Lines for check-out get longer. Facilities go a little longer between restocking/cleaning. (Minimum wages mean grosser store bathrooms.) Unregulated, harder-to measure benefits get trimmed. The topic of this article, schedule predictability or flexibility, is just such a benefit.
And it doesn't require conscious tit-for-tat book-balancing action by employers for these trade-offs to happen. As they notice they're making less, adjustments happen. (Or, smaller businesses that are slow to adjust simply become uneconomical and leave the market: minimum wages benefit Wal-Marts & McDonalds, with their expert formula operations, over intuitive "Mom-and-Pops".) Over time, since more people are now eager for extra hours at the legally-mandated higher salary, it's easier to place more informal demands on those people, like "you better take every shift when offered, or it won't be offered again".
There are likely some good workers who'd prefer steadier work, in predicable shifts, at a lower wage. That agreement is made illegal by minimum wage laws, and they are forced to compete with a larger group of people looking to scoop up shorter, more random, higher-paying shifts.
Assume there is no minimum wage, or a really low one, what's to stop them from both paying less, and aggressively trimming the hours?
People then get compensated for what they care most about, not what a legislature has decreed as the only acceptable wage rate. They'd also tend to sort into the workplaces that best fit their circumstances. Social surplus is maximized.
A wage floor prevents these sorts of adjustments, because it creates a surplus of hours-offered at the higher wage, while eliminating other hours-demanded. (For example, it's no longer economical to have 3 registers open, or to check on the restrooms hourly, or to bring customers their own orders as opposed to having them picked up, or to have someone wandering the store floor for issues/questions.) Thus the hours available can be rationed out as an inducement for other, harder-to-regulate concessions.
So while the wage floor makes employers (who continue to employ) pay more, in that one dimension, it strengthens their powers of control/coercion is most others.
The absolute best system for employees is tight labor markets, where if anything about the job is bad – wage, hours, respect – they can walk across the street for another job-on-offer at about the same wage with a better mix of everything. That best system is sabotaged by lots of well-intended restrictions on employment relationships, so we only see it occasionally, during transient booms and in boom regions (like, recently, North Dakota).
While being in this position sucks, I kind of think that this is a compromise she chose for herself. "I want to work as many hours possible" is obviously going to conflict with "I want to work a stable shift".
Software may magnify the problem but this is fundamentally about how management views employees.
No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
You can't be sure if you'll be okay, but if you already know that you definitely won't be okay - well, then you probably can't afford to have kids.
This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things.
The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
I assume you mean poverty? The parent having money is associated with kids having less money later in life, but it's not the cause of it.
If you want them to do things they enjoy give them skills and confidence. If you give them money instead you do them harm.
> I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
You can't. It's a reality of humanity that giving people things too easily leads to misery. People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them. If you are willing to learn from the replies you got then you'll do fine.
I would guess this is not true on average. If anything, I would guess the opposite: the Waltons, Kochs, Kennedys, etc., who inherited their money and are able to do whatever kind of bullshit they want with it, are happier.
When you have money, you can pursue anything you want indefinitely. Even if it takes you 20 years to become a great painter or writer or bass guitarist, there's no pressure along the way to quit and get a job as a barrista to pay rent.
>I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them.
You have good perception, that's definitely part of it :)
Honestly, I never remember caring whatsoever as a child whether or not my parents spent time with me. I didn't have anything in common with them anyways. A credit card and a new Benz on my 16th birthday, however, would have completely changed my memories of what could have been the best years of my life but which were instead wasted indoors on the internet because I couldn't afford to do anything else.
Other people having children is actually a vital service to the rest of society. Or at least those of us hoping to live for at least another 30-40 years, which will require a younger generation to provide the goods and services we will need to stay alive.
This point seems to be missed by a lot of libertarians (who are frequently childless single young men) in their anger about parents getting support from the government.
People really need to start getting married earlier. If you marry in your early twenties having a child at that time is not a problem, even if you don't have tons of savings yet.
And aside from the biology of having a child late, simply raising a child is much harder when you are older (late thirties), because your energy level really starts diverging from theirs. (Obviously you can make it work, I'm only saying it gets harder.)
My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
Sometimes, but sperm quality declines, leading to more birth defects and it takes longer to succeed. And a 70 year old is simply not a suitable father.
I assume you were planning a may/cecember marriage? Which is pretty cruel to the wife, and to the kids who will loose their father MUCH too early.
Kids need their father very much in their 30's. If you are waiting long enough that you are dead, or even just declined you are not doing well by them.
> I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
You don't even have kids and already you hate them?
> My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
OK, now you REALLY make no sense. A sentence before you want to give them a horrible childhood (using nannies too much leads to attachment issues, and various disorders).
And now you want to do better?
I have a feeling you have no idea whatsoever about what children actually need out of childhood. It's not money. It's love, attention, and approval. Having lots of money is detrimental to all of them.
And your standard is ridiculous anyway - if every generation refused to have kids until they could do it "better" no one at all would have kids.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?
No, it's inflicted by a broken society. In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living. This allows both a flexible economic system (entrepreneurship, job-changing, etc.) and family life to coexist: your company going bankrupt does not mean your kid can't attend school or eat. The American solution seems to be that people should have a corporate job for life with the old IBM or Amoco, which provides both ultra-stable employment and benefits (company-provided childcare, parental leave, health insurance, etc.) and only those people are "deserving" of having kids.
No, it's not. The broken society didn't make the woman pregnant and give birth. Also, 'broken' sounds really melodramatic.
"In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living."
Is having and maintaining a Ferrari a basic standard of living? No? Well, that's how expensive kids are, no, they're even more expensive. That is a very ambitious basic standard you're setting here. Obviously, this is going to cost uninvolved people heaps of money just because everyone thinks they are entitled to make as many children as they want regardless of their ability to support them. It's a huge burden on everyone else's back. The pinnacle of selfishness.
I didn't have children until my 40's (admittedly, that's probably kind of too late). Why? Because I wanted to have a stable marital and financial situation in place for them. If you have no husband and no job, you shouldn't be having children just barely out of your teenage years. Children don't happen by "accident".
And you're very right, nowadays people feel that they're entitled to a Ferrari just for being alive. Our society sure has changed in recent decades.
Bah. Watch me get voted down along with you. I don't care. It needs to be said.
If so, you grew up with enormous privilege. Lots of people are born into situations where none of that is true. Some truly exceptional folks are born without any of that privilege, make what we consider to be mistakes in family planning, before learning any of that, and still strive to make their lives better. I for one would like there to be resources available to help them escape that brutal cycle.
Saying that it is self-inflicted shows a gross myopia about how much of the world lives and implying that the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us can coerce us into doing anything is laughable.
Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job.
This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants.
Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care.
So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.
Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).
Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.
Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
Global fertility rate is dropping so depending on other countries sending new immigrants is risky.
US below replament rate: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-birt...
Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975.
PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.
And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
Modern US society expects you to study, work and save until you are 30 to 40 before having kids (internet boy moguls aside).
Soo... Why is autism on the rise?
I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right.
What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
I actually believe as a society we should be okay supporting them. But there's a caveat. The preventative measures in place we currently have in society are not working because, IMHO, we waste too much money in WarOnDrugs and questionable wars. If we could stop doing that and ramp up the education & availabilty of birthcontrol in lower income areas, I bet there wouldn't be that many of them falling through the cracks(canyons really) in the system and ending up appearing to us as being irresponsible burdens. It would be a nice small number of people that we could handle.
If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.
But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
It is indeed very tricky, better men than me have argued back and forth:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
It seems that I'll have to agree with you and smtddr, then, that it is a right.
Once the child is born, it should be accorded all the human rights... and that's where we run into trouble.
Some interpretations of the "right to life" include the "right to survival",
http://www.hrea.org/index.php?base_id=159
I'm probably missing the right bibliography, if someone can point me to which books I should read, I would be very grateful :)
The endless debate cycle between disaffected and disenfranchised libertarians covers the topic of human rights quite often. Most of us agree that the UN declaration is not a viable framework, because some of the enumerated rights imply that someone, somewhere, would necessarily be impressed into compulsory service to enforce them. For example, a right to adequate medical care implies that someone must become a physician and supply that care, possibly without pay. The right to food implies that someone must farm it, possibly without pay.
Even the experts can make mistakes.
So rather than read what others have said on the topic, it may be better for you to simply think it out for yourself and see what you come up with. Ideally, you will come up with a set of principles that are unambiguous, self-consistent, and able to serve as the foundation for a civilized society. It's much harder than it sounds. Good luck.
Life is unpredictable.
You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse).
In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)
Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"?
Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them.
Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.
The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff.
And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.