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- Hacker News
- So from a fiscal perspective, it more or less pays for itself through greater career taxable earnings of the women, according to the study.
(EDIT: unless of course these extra earnings were mostly transfers so-to-speak from non-mothers to mothers)
From a societal and human perspective, unclear that it’s worth it.
by Tycho - This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself. It doesn't consider the familial impacts of outsourcing the raising of ones own offspring to another party.by black6
- > This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself.
I think it's more about whether the investment pays back and defrays the costs.
by LanceH - That is correct. While I too would like to see what it looks like if one parent staying home is subsidized, this still shows that subsidizing child care is a net benefit for everyone, and as such it's a good idea to keep the program going.by bigbuppo
- It also assumes having fathers in the work force earning taxable income is a benefit, but you seem totally fine with that assumption.
- You are taking things to the extreme.
I live in Québec.
I have children that both went in a province subsidized kindergarten.
By the way, there are different types of such kindergarten. «Milieu familial» which is literally sending your children to a private house of someone to have them babysit your children during the day. They can have a maximum of 6 children with them.
And there are the CPE or «Centre de la petite enfance». There you have highly qualified personnel, way more resources than a "family environment" can provide. They have many more children. The children can socialize much more.
But, being able to have a place for your child in a CPE is akin to winning the lottery. I wouldn’t be surprised some families have paid bribes to get a place.
by LeBit - You have to pick what you want to measure. I think that is a different study; measuring the mental and emotional impact of two working parents.
Both are interesting and useful, but I think they need to be separate studies.
by cortesoft - Women entering the workforce eroded the ability to maintain a household on one income because of depressed wages and housing competition. There's no absolute cost to housing, people will pay what they afford and making more money means the housing cost rises, it doesn't make people "richer" just everything else more expensive.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
- Yes, this was the same thought I had. What about investing in children by making it easier for their own mother to actually care for them, instead of working outside the home and dumping the kid in an institution.by SoftTalker
- The same authors saw some evidence of development problems among the children in the same cohort. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571
- This study was limited to the program in Quebec, but this discovery is alarming
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
by Aurornis - So is the takeaway that universal child care has a positive impact on GDP of the parents, but a negative impact on the overall life of the child?