The two-income trap
"... provide... evidence that the culprit is not "over-consumption"... they point to the ferocious bidding war for housing and decent schools that has quietly engulfed America's suburbs, driving up the cost of raising children in the middle class"--Jacket flap.
Stats for nerds
16recommend
84mentions
68people
2008–2025years
23% recommend76% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > same politicians that insist on allowing the free-market to dictate childcare costs?
I'm going to be honest. Im a republican voter living in Portland Oregon of all places. It's a high cost of living area. We go to a fairly traditional church where couples of all incomes are having 4-5 kids each and usually one spouse working. So basically, we go to church with other republicans living in a high cost of living area.
I vote the way I do because I honestly don't understand child care. I was never put in child care the way people seem to do it now
I'll be honest when I see my neighbors put their few weeks old babies into daycare I am simply filled with horror. Yet the parents seem to think this arrangement is great. Children should be at home with their mom or dad. I know many couples in this same area making it work. They have richer lives because having a spouse at home leads to greater community involvement and better neighborhoods.
Moreover, when I talk to my neighbors about finances, it is dubious whether they're actually making more. They're also not taking into account basic costs that inevitably crop up.
For example because my wife stays at home, we have one car. Because my wife stays at home, our entire community will get fed when they have a new baby because the mom's have arranged meal trains amongst themselves as a standard 'benefit'. Because of how close the mom's are after seeing each other day in and day out, we often 'share' money. If a family is having a tough time, money is just shoved onto them. This means things like emergencies are much less scary. Again, these are all costs those families would have to incur if they both worked and couldn't take part in the community. Even childcare for things like date night can be arranged pretty easily. It's amazing and I estimate we save thousands upon thousands per year because of it. Elizabeth Warren of all people covers these hidden benefits of staying at home extremely well in her book 'The Two income trap'. I highly recommend it.
Now going back to politics. I would venture that many more republicans have my arrangement. Thus when we see calls to subsidize daycare, we see people wanting our tax money for less desirable outcomes. Children raised at daycare instead of parents. Parents too stressed out that they the report they have no 'village'. Lack of community in our cities and towns and rural areas, etc. Lonelines. All these things are symptoms of the continued financialization of the nuclear family, the extended family, and the neighborhood.
And yes I'm very much against that.
- It was different in premodern cultures.
Back then a child could be contributing positively to the farm in a few years and don't need a lot of training because they want to do the same things people around them are doing. Power tools require a certain level of maturity and judgement, my son was able to pick up a hoe when he was a toddler but our tractor has a weight switch in the seat and we had to make him wear a backpack with weights in it to drive it for the first time. (We even had a small adult woman living at the farm who was too light to trigger the switch.)
(My son didn't make a positive contribution, however, to the family business, a riding academy, until his mid teens. Until then he was always a little resentful of the horses since they were the reason his mom was often not around. Then there was that day he was roughhousing in the barn, a behavior the horses can find a little offputting, and he realized that one horse was taking an interest in his activity and that got him to recognize the social intelligence of horses... Before then we were worried about who would cut the hay when the farmer who does it retired, now we are not.)
Contrast that to the current day where children are an economic cost up to high school graduation if not college, grad school, etc. and whether or not kids go to college they often seem to have an adolescence that extends into the mid 20's.
Back in the day a huge family was your retirement, now we have social security and stocks and bonds (which are still dependent on demographics.)
I've known a few people who have had huge families (10+ kids) in the modern day and they have a very different mindset. It's not as much work and cost once you reach a certain point as the older kids help take care of the younger kids and that gets around the "parents are not gods" problem that are talked about in
https://www.amazon.com/Parent-Effectiveness-Training-Respons...
also there are a lot of hand-me-downs and other synergies. (Although my dad was quite bitter about getting hand-me-downs and sharing the bed with his brothers...)
A lot of the increased "standard of living" is not the things we think are optional (and "consumption") like the iPhone and the vacations, but rather the things that we think are necessary (and even "an investment") such as health care, a house in an expensive neighborhood with a good school district, etc. Remember this Liz Warren classic
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...
- If one parent stays home (or only works part time), then you don't need to pay for daycare, and there's lots of cheap homes.
The median male salary for 25-35 year old men is 50k. That means you can afford a house up to 200-225k depending on interest rate. Looking in my own HCOL city of Portland, there are many apartments and condos going for that price, which would be perfectly adequate for one or two children. If you're willing to drive out to the burbs, there's plenty of options.
Elizabeth Warren's the two income trap goes into the reasons of why two working spouses is significantly more expensive than one working spouse. I have never understood why this isn't obvious to everyone.
Also, communities started falling apart well before the cost of living.
> do you want your kids playing in a neighborhood full of families with 30 year mortgages, or ones full of renters who move every year because the rental market changed the makeup of who could afford housing in your neighborhood?
I am indifferent realistically. Having done both, both are fine. Part of the problem with my own generation is that we're the 'instagram' generation. Everything has to be pinterest perfect before anyone's willing to do anything. Sad.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a book in 2004 on the two income trap. Excellent read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22568858M/The_two-income_tra...
- The Two-Income Trap is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-.... Try to ignore the cover, as its content is excellent and the book isn't a partisan jeremiad.
- This is something that Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia covered in their book "The Two Income Trap." I'm aware that recommending a book by a political figure is fraught, but I'm not aware of any economists who took umbrage with the claim, either. They make the observation in chapter 1 that "Even as millions of mothers marched into the workforce, savings declined, and not, as we will show, because families were frittering away their paychecks on toys for themselves or their children. Instead, families were swept up in a bidding war, competing furiously with one another for their most important possession: a house in a decent school district."
Housing is a great way to establish a level of security for your family and kids; but there's a finite number of houses with proximity to good schools, jobs, and other necessary resources, and so families needed to dedicate larger and larger portions of their income to compete against other dual-income families that were bringing new money to the housing market.
