On my worst days, I think the economy will roll forward with stagnant wages, a general lack of care for women, re-training programs that don’t work, and a continued burying of heads in sand piles about automation for roughly another 70 years, and then the whole thing will collapse, and there will be no jobs unless you were already affluent, and we’re in a Mad Max type situation where people are getting killed over milk. Hopefully it’s not that drastic, but I’m 40 now and I’d be 110 in 70 years, and since I’m not a very healthy person as is, I doubt 110 is in my cards, so I shall likely never know.
This morning I was checking out the Numlock News newsletter and came across this:
The economy relies on the ability of workers to find affordable childcare, and right now that does not really exist. While restaurant staff shortages have been stubborn, a line cook doesn’t need certifications or to sustain a mandatory child-to-adult ratio, so the shortage is bad and not getting better. The obvious solution — public funding of child care worker wages — isn’t done in most places, despite the clear advantages. A Louisiana study found that 44 percent of teachers in private child care programs leave every year and mostly exit the profession, vastly higher than the 16 percent K-12 teacher turnover (with half just moving schools). That turnover was considerably lower at better-paying public preschools and Head Start programs.
That makes sense. I don’t have children (as of yet, here’s eventually hoping in some form or fashion), but I’m in a lot of Facebook threads now and again where people say “I had to stop at 2 because child care is so egregious” (that’s inherently a privileged statement) or “Child care is a second mortgage, but higher!” (ditto on privilege, although a bit better).
COVID laid bare some of this stuff. It’s easier to manage your life with periodic in-home/child help, in a 4-3 house with land, than it is in an apartment in Brooklyn where four people are trying to use the same janky WiFi all day for streaming video calls. You might say that’s a disconnect of age, and perhaps it is, but a lot of these divisions cut across age — we just make them into generational discussions because we’re lazy, and those are easier to have than talking about real data and situations.
The other argument that comes up here is “Well, anyone can be affluent.” That’s not really true, and I won’t link all the research on it, but in general affluence is tied to a bunch of pre-determined factors and some personal elements i.e. hard work, notions of success, etc. I think it’s possible for anyone to make a good life for themselves, within reason — addiction comes to mind as a concern, for one — but affluence and keeping up with the rising cost of goods and services is tougher. Only a few professions are big money these days, and not everyone can get into developing multi-family complexes, ya know? Also, if you believe “anyone can do it” (the “bootstraps argument,” if you will), then how would you expect to ever be served at a fast food restaurant? Everyone can do it, right? So why would anyone, even a HS kid, work in a chicken joint?
The fact is that we need some type of safety nets around childcare, or else the economy essentially only exists for the affluent, which maybe is already true and we’re just ignoring the reality. We also could use some safety nets around the role of women at work. These aren’t socialist pipe dreams; I think they would actually underpin a more robust economy that’s not ultimately the same 77 white guys reinvesting in different companies and periodically appearing on CNBC about their “positions.”
Takes?
