<p>A common leftist idea (at least from the campus leftists when I was in college) is that something like college admission or graduation should be some sort of group entitlement, so that admission procedures should give a blanket preference to admit a quota of every disadvantaged group. The idea of expanding opportunity to become well qualified despite disadvantages or considering individual experiences in overcoming a disadvantageous situation rather than a blanket lowering the qualifications for some groups seems to be ignored among those who espouse this argument.</p>
<p>Rightists commonly correctly poke all kinds of holes in this argument, but also seem uninterested in expanding opportunity to become well qualified despite disadvantages or considering individual experiences in overcoming a disadvantageous situation, perhaps because they really want to preserve for their kids an inherited upper class (or “upper middle class”) status without more competition from the high ability and motivation kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.</p>
<p>Bus driver,
Encouraging one parent to stay home with their child/ren is not the same as simply encouraging people not to work. I don’t understand why encouraging one parent to stay home with his/her child could ever be seen as bad policy, (unless one prefers a nanny -type-state like Sweden, perhaps?)</p>
<p>Yes, it might be difficult for some to return to work after taking many years off, but I don’t think that is generally true or a reason not to do it. There is plenty that a stay-home parent can do to hone new and old skills. </p>
<p>I know it won’t happen here because we do value individual choice in the matter (and i agree) but it seems like an obvious fix for a society with high unemployment, so I’m surprised it doesn’t get any attention as an idea.</p>
<p>It assumes that the spouses who quit the jobs to stay at home can be replaced by those who are currently unemployed, which is not necessarily true. In addition, after all of the spouses left the labor force, there would then be a severe labor shortage* after all of the employable unemployed are hired, which would cause the overall economy to shrink.</p>
<p>Of course, at an individual level, many people choose spouses of similar skill and education level, which may not be optimal for a society organized along the lines of one spouse working and the other at home. The optimal arrangement would be to have one skilled better educated spouse and one less skilled spouse; two skilled better educated spouses would “waste” the skills and education of one of them, while two less skilled spouses may have a hard time supporting themselves on one job.</p>
<p>*Yes, immigration could bring in some labor, but it may not necessarily be labor that substitutes well for the spouses who left the labor force, and the advocates of stay at home spouses usually favor it for social reasons (i.e. the “traditional” stay at home wife) and are likely to be the least friendly to immigration.</p>
<p>“Encouraging one parent to stay home with their child/ren is not the same as simply encouraging people not to work. I don’t understand why encouraging one parent to stay home with his/her child could ever be seen as bad policy, (unless one prefers a nanny -type-state like Sweden, perhaps?)”</p>
<p>There is a difference between encouraging people to take care of their own children, and incentivizing them to do so. Would it really be right to offer people a big chunk of money so they can stay home? The question always comes down to…who pays? Maybe in an ideal world where we as a society have so much money that we don’t know what to do with it, perhaps. But we don’t. We’re broke. It would be awesome if we had so much money that we could provide everything for everybody, and people only had to work for pure pleasure. But we can’t. We’re broke.</p>
<p>My kids never went to daycare, and they very rarely had to go to a babysitter (occasionally my sister or parents watched them), after the first two years of hell during Desert Storm deployment. For 18 years, we worked opposite schedules, and I completely support people’s choices to stay home or work. But if we are giving tax incentives for people to stay home…where are going to get the money from? Are we going to take it from somewhere else?</p>
<p>Bay, I don’t mean to be attacking your thoughts, really. It’s just one of those topics that brings back memories that make me go ballistic. We all have our flash points. I’ve heard this discussed before, though it is phrased as “one parent” not working and staying home with the kids, people really mean that the woman shouldn’t work. Taking all those jobs away from men, leaving their children in the hands of others.</p>
<p>And I truly think that people should do whatever they think is best for their family, and have the freedom to do so. Not incentivized, not penalized. Women should not be made to feel badly because they work, nor if they stay home.</p>
<p>Brings me back to a conversation I had some time ago with a wife of a friend of mine. Her husband was laid off during a downturn, and he wasn’t offered an interview with my company. She was complaining that if they just didn’t hire so many women, her husband might have a chance. It took all I had to resist to say, “Yeah, so those TWO percent of women they hire are really taking away all the slots from those 98% of men, right?”</p>
<p>The overall balance and trend, however, is for the vast majority of new jobs created to be created offshore.</p>
<p>Ultimately, jobs come back not because of economics but because the offshore workers can’t deliver. And, more often than not, the jobs that come back are H1B and other visa acronym jobs that are temporary in nature until the project is done.</p>
<p>Ucb,
What do you mean by “severe” labor shortage? There are 34 million two-parent families with children under 18, and in 58% or 19 million of them, both parents work. There are something like 15 million unemployed persons in the US, not counting those who stopped looking and those child care workers who would be displaced. It could be a wash. </p>
<p>Also, what do you think is the optimal education and skill level for a parent who stays home with children? Why would skills be “wasted” if removing oneself from the workforce is temporary?</p>
<p>Bus driver,
What is this big chunk of money you refer to that will have to be paid?</p>
<p>I think both of you need to expand your analysis outside of conventional thinking. It need not be women who stay home nor need it be the same spouse for the entire 18 or so years.</p>
<p>The tax code already benefits families where the wife stays home in some respects:</p>
<p>(1) The domestic labor a houswife does (childrearing, cooking, cleaning etc.) is valuable but untaxed. Two-income couples pay for some of these things with after-tax dollars.</p>
<p>(2) For a given income a married man does not pay more in Social Security taxes than a single one, but his non-working wife qualifies for survivor’s benefits.</p>
<p>These aren’t problems to be fixed IMO. Are we are going to impute $30K of income to a housewife and tax the family on it? Do we want widows who were housewives not to get any Social Security benefits? But given the existing benefits for single-income couples, I don’t support further benefits.</p>
<p>“People who do not work often do lots of volunteer work”
-And drive all HS and college kids absolutely nuts after they discover that many volunteering positions have a waiting lists and would not be available for them in a summer. Many places are so crowded with volunteers that they really have to take care of volunteers instead of having help from them.</p>
<p>"which can be more fulfilling than sitting behind a desk in a boring job all day. "
-This for those who CHOOSE to be bored. If one does not like the job, then she should be looking for something else. And in regard to helping others, I do not know how knowing that your taxes are supporting few other families could be less fullfilling than serving them couple of meals. These assumptions are not sound at all, they are just assumptions, not facts.
The facts are that if you work than the volunteering position is available for somebody else who might be in desparate need for it. And while you are working, you are providing much more help than any volunteering activity can possibly do, not even comparable.</p>
<p>I always learn from UCB although our politics differ.</p>
<p>An advantage of “assortative mating” along educational lines is that if both spouses are intelligent and the husband earns a high income, the wife has the flexibility to stay at home or work part time and have more children than if she were forced to work full time for the family to its desired standard of living. Since IQ is largely hereditary and is a major factor in educational and career success, it is important for society for educated people to have large families.</p>
<p>Smart men not only understand that marrying smart women is more likely to result in high IQ kids but also know that to navigate a complex and often opaque college admissions system, (not just the application process but monitoring school grades and supporting extracurriculars) it is helpful to have a well-educated mother. The Tiger Mother noted the pattern in academic circles of Jewish men marrying Asian women in academic circles, perhaps for these reasons in part.</p>
<p>“The Tiger Mother noted the pattern in academic circles of Jewish men marrying Asian women in academic circles, perhaps for these reasons in part.”</p>
<p>What is wrong with Jewish men marrying Jewish women? Jewish women aren’t smart enough?</p>
<p>^These are very funny, thanks for entertainment!!!
When Facebook guy married Chinese, I assumed that he simply would be bored otherwise. Now I realize how stupid my assumption was… he has calculated the IQ of his future kids and decided that the Chinese mother would provide the one that is right on the target.</p>
<p>Yep, all Chinese and Jews are very superior intellectually, let’s continue with the morning entertainment, it will make our day brighter, it is so cold and gloomy outside, we need some internal sunshine to keep going…You see where the wrong statement leads, wrong leading the wrong, oops, it was blind leading the blind, the same difference though, close enough for me.</p>
<p>We will not have to worry about peak jobs in this country if we can destroy unions, pay workers .50 an hour, destroy women who are not married and have children, Jewish men marry Asian women, and the 49ers win the Super Bowl.</p>
<p>^That is the way to go, thanks for enlightnment. Very strange contradiction though, none in my family ever been union members and nobody has .5 / hour, we must be super duper rich, very lucky, selectively treated right, oh, got it, 100 years ago unions made sure that we are not paid .5 / hour. I am very thankful, now I know that we have absolutely nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>It doesn’t appear that the educated people in our society are smart enough to have figured that out; or else they don’t care. Birth rates decrease with education level. TigerMom only had 2 kids.</p>