Traditionally raising children was a multi-generational effort with grandparents often living under the same roof. Not to mention women were less likely to work outside the home back then. Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption. It'll be interesting to see how we figure out how to adapt.
The US was settled by people leaving those old generations behind and moving west (be it from somewhere in Europe to the US or from somewhere in the US to somewhere less populated in the US) with their spouse and maybe young kids. You always had stay at home moms, because home was usually mom's workplace, often dad's too.
Multi-generational households in the US existed as the exception when early settlers brought their entire communities over or when first generation Americans moved West with their immigrant parents. Having multi-generational households was never the norm.
Tradition being up to the present, actually, in large parts of the world. (Repeating a comment to another article:) I suspect that people living with family until 20s/30s is likely to be much more common than people here expect, and that not doing so is an anomaly of the current age occurring in only certain cultures, with a possible return to norm in the future.
If you're discussing "protestant work ethic"-based communities, and "multigenerational housing"-based communities, they are generally mutually exclusive.
I suppose it depends on whether by "Protestant work ethic", you are referring to people who are actually in the Protestant/Calvinist faith, or if you are using it as a euphemism for general workaholism, as there are many non-Protestant communities which espouse hard work and frugality as main tenets to follow in life, which do have a higher rate of multigenerational-housing-based communities.
Also, it would be interesting to explore exactly how and why "protestant work ethic"-based communities and "multigenerational housing"-based communities became generally mutually exclusive, whether there is causation, or just a happenstance correlation.
The “two-income trap,” described
The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:
The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.
This last point is really the key to Warren’s specific argument about bankruptcy, though it’s the first two that would drive her larger interest in politics. Bad things have always happened to families from time to time. In a traditional two-parent, one-earner family, there was always the possibility that mom could step up and help out when trouble arose.
“If her husband was laid off, fired, or otherwise left without a paycheck,” Warren and Tyagi write, “the stay-at-home mother didn’t simply stand helplessly on the sidelines as her family toppled off an economic cliff; she looked for a job to make up some of that lost income.” Similarly, if a family member got sick, mom was available as an unpaid caregiver. “A stay-at-home mother served as the family’s ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability — insurance that had a very real economic value even when it wasn’t drawn on.”
A modern family where mom is already working has no “give” and is much more likely to be pushed into bankruptcy by job loss or family illness unless it builds up a big financial cushion.
First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.
This seems especially true during a bad economy when unemployment is high and people stay unemployed for long periods of time. With a dual-income family, the two often work in different fields. One might get laid off but the other's job is safe. You'll suffer, maybe even have to sell your house or something, but at least you can feed yourself.
Second, I've seen what happens when a spouse doesn't work outside the home for a long time. This happened to a relative of mine a long time ago. She had a short but perfectly fine career as a teacher for a while before getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Eventually she got divorced and found that, after being out of the job market for 20 years, the only job she could get was near minimum wage data entry. (She eventually got a better job, but it took many years as she was basically starting over.) Anyway, the point is I'm skeptical of Warren's reasoning that in a single-income family, the other spouse can just go out and get a job if needed. Over the long term, the single-income situation tends to damage the career path of the spouse who doesn't work outside the home.
> I'm really not following Warren's reasoning here.
First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.
The general crux of Warren's argument, is that the fixed costs incurred by the necessity of women working is so large that it basically made household income a zero sum game.
Previously, one person made income Y, and if the breadwinner became unable to work then they made some amount close to or smaller than Y.
Today, two people each make X, and also have to pay childcare and additional commuting or other expenses of Z every day.
Warren's assertion is that overall, today 2X-Z <= Y, because women increased the labor supply so much that wages were suppressed; so that Y for one person eventually became X for two people in a household. Depending on how bad the decline is, X may be a lot worse than a new, untrained wife making less than Y.
I think the idea is with 2 incomes, both partners need to remain employed in order to keep up, since people's expenses usually closely match their income. So if 1 of the 2 loses their job, that 1 of the 2 needs to find new employment to maintain their lives.
In the scenario of 1 working partner, if that 1 person loses their job, you can have 2 people looking for jobs in order to get back to normal.
To elaborate on the "no benefit" for the families, and Warren probably talks about this, but there is benefit for corporations. They get nearly double the supply of workers which drives down wages and gives them more productivity per dollar spent.
So in effect, a wealth transfer to equity holders.
Yep, it undermine's everything Peter Thiel said in his debate with Andresson and was amazing to me Andresson didn't bring it up. They were looking at wage stagnation over the period where women entered the workforce, but without ever mentioning it was the period where women entered the workforce en masse.
What makes a two-income household a "trap" is when both parents are forced to work in order to make ends meet. This creates a nominal rise in household income that masks the actual desperation of the household's financial situation.
The trap is: declining real household income for segments of the population. The "two income" part is a consequence of the trap, not a cause.
This matters because a lot of the increasing representation of women in the workforce is not the result of the two-income trap, but the result of women, individually, wanting to work. In other words, not every two-income household is actually in a trap. Many of them are formed by two people who each have jobs they like and want to keep.
My wife, for example, has advanced training and likes her job. She couldn't wait to get back to work after we had our first child. As a family, we could survive fine on my salary today... but she would kill me if I suggested this. Now we're struggling to home-educate our child while we both work remotely. If I suggested that she quit her job to be our family's "insurance policy", again, she would kill me (even if I invoked Elizabeth Warren).
My mom worked too, because she wanted to. Good thing she did, because when my parents divorced she was able, financially, to transition to being on her own right away.
Single-income families can be a trap too... for the person who is not earning an income. About half of U.S. marriages end in divorce. A spouse with no independent financial base and no job of their own is not in a position to leave when they want to.
This stuff is really important to understand, so we don't go down a fruitless rabbit hole of wringing our collective hands about the decline of the traditional family culture or whatever. Taking that broad simple view of two-income households runs a very real risk of simply denying the agency of women who want to work and make their own way in the world... even if they are married with kids.
Welcome to the feminist utopia, I suppose? Equal representation of women in the workplace, ignoring the fact that a large percentage of women (majority in my middle class social circle) would rather bear and raise children than slave away in a cubicle, if given a choice?
The article calls the book "controversial", but I don't see how the harm from effectively denying motherhood to women is "controversial" at all.
I mean the real problem is that we went halfsies and didn't actually build out systems that allow women to do both effectively, but then everyone got lumped into doing work because not doing so put your family at a distinct disadvantage.
It's hard enough to do _one_ of those things effectively, let alone both. Welfare certainly helps, but you're still half-assing both things at best, and the results are pretty self-evident by now.
I mean, it's also not clear that mothers are necessarily the best people to be raising children either, given that being a mother and being trained in childcare are not the same thing.
From the Quebec study:
> For those kids who are in Quebec’s public programs, known as centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), “repeated studies have found sharp improvements in child development,” Fortin said. This accounts for about one-third of Quebec’s children in care right now.
Now the problem is scaling up good childcare to the other two thirds.
Other than this I don't really see how you would put the genie back in the bottle for women juggling childcare with employment, without also screwing over women who want both or don't want children.
Have you been in a daycare? They're basically staffed by generic retail/service workers. I thought they were highly trained folks like teachers, but upon touring them, I realized they're not and also learned they're paid very little, so it kind of makes sense.
It's moot. Childcare is no longer a real option from the epidemiological standpoint. It's one thing when your kid brings back a cold or a flu from their preschool. It's another when they bring back coronavirus.
Besides, I don't believe anyone other than parents are "the best" to raise children, on average. That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good. We should just make it socially unacceptable to abdicate parental responsibility at this point, IMO. It's absolutely nuts that 6 months old children end up in daycare.
That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good.
As opposed to the average parent who is great at parenting, right?
Sorry, but many (most?) parents absolutely suck at raising their kids. They didn’t have good parents themselves and they never dealt with the psychological issues that resulted. And in 99% of cases, they’re totally blind to this, and think (as you apparently do) that loving their kids makes them good caregivers.
I’m not arguing for or against childcare, but it’s a mistake to think the average parent is well-equipped.
Average parent is at least predisposed to giving a shit about their progeny. And what constitutes an "average parent" is not a constant. If we could make good parenting feasible (which it currently absolutely isn't) and bad parenting socially unacceptable (which, in contrast, is almost expected, at least in the US), the quality of parenting would improve quickly.
I mean, if only we could radically and rapidly change the values our society, there's a long list of things we could apply that ability to.
But even there, just looking at developed countries around the world with arguably much better values around parenting, I still think we'd end up with most kids in childcare. Maybe not starting at six months, but starting pretty young. I'm biased as a parent too, just in the other direction. There are just too many benefits to both children and women.
> Modern society is highly efficient, but also highly susceptible to disruption.
That's something my wife & I have been discussing recently. She pointed out that traditional family structures have more slack built into them, which comes in handy in times of trouble. The problem is that in the modern Taylorist world we treat slack as waste. But it really isn't, any more than insurance is waste.
