This flies in the face of historical experience, and it robs everyone involved of opportunities for learning and growth. It is nuts that we segregate children by birth year, all the way from preschool until college.

In a mixed-age setting, the older kids can do enough teaching, entertaining, and watching to significantly amplify a single adult's capabilities. To the point where much higher kid-to-adult ratios work just fine.

And far from taking something away from older kids by engaging them in this work, you actually give them valuable learning opportunities. You give them real responsibility to be proud of, an immediate motivation to master the things they'll be asked to teach, and a longer-term perspective on their own growth and life trajectory.

If something happens to your child whose fault is it? The adult, the older child. How can you qualify that an older child is able to 'help' and in what capacity.

My mother in law runs an in home daycare. Has been for over 25 years. Fully licensed. The rules and regulations get harder every year. She is allowed 8 kids at most at one time. She has to be certified in CPR for children and newborns, take continuing education courses, background check anybody who lives in her house (including herself) since she runs an in home daycare, monthly/quarterly/random visits from the state, and stay on top of all of the various new rules.

While it has worked in the past, I just can not see it working in our current sue happy culture.

Kids of different ages (and even of same ages) will teach each other naturally when they hang out. It's not that hard. Officially they are all just kids in the daycare, they just happen to be of mixed ages.

Newborns are a different kettle of fish. But people are aware of the differences.

Just as an example, here is how school runs are organized in Japan: You usually do not see parents involved. Instead a senpai in the neighbourhood is assigned to each group of young children to lead them to school, starting at age 6. At each street corner there is an adult watching, often seniors. All this is organized through some sort of neighborhood councils. Works beautifully, gives parents more time and older children a sense of responsibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Do you see the contradiction in your own statement? Teaching younger children is both too easy and too hard? Responsibility is the whole point. Yes, it's supposed to be a non-trivial challenge. That is part of why it's worth doing.

> education is more advanced than it was, say, 100 years ago.

Education is certainly more democratized now, but it's hard to identify any advances. Picking up a student textbook from 1900 is very eye opening.

Students today don't learn any math invented later than the 18th century. Though that is hardly the worst thing I can say about school math.

They study history in much the same way that students studied history two hundred years ago -- but without actually learning classical languages to read the original works.

They study literature and composition the same way it has been done for many generations. The canon that educated people are supposed to have read has shifted somewhat, but it is just different, not more complex.

The contents of their science books have updated somewhat, but the method sadly has not. Memorization of facts is still the norm -- the dried up husks of actual science.

The only true advance I see is the elimination of corporal punishment.

It's too much to assume that an average child can productively solve problems that are related to raising children with various family backgrounds. How to deal with shy or angry children, conflicts with the family members and so on. While I don't know how it's done everywhere in the world, contrast that to kindergarten teachers that have academic education with focus on teaching (including methods, subjects, psychology, and so on).

If you claim that education hasn't advanced in 100 years tremendously, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. For instance, think about the education of children with mental or learning disabilities. It has advanced a lot in my lifetime, too.

Education without this is like building a sandcastle. The brain is going to discard the information after the test if you aren't required to reexplain it the next year, and your foundations get eroded.

This "discarding after test" is already and automatically addressed in the education: high school repeats things learned in previous schools and builds on those. Our high schools also have large final exams that require one to be able to understand the whole curriculum of the subject. The grade measures your memory, and understanding because you cannot just memorise everything. The same is true for all education levels.

Under the principal of spaced repetition, you might also want people in the workforce infrequently tutoring college students, graduate students infrequently tutoring high school students, college students infrequently tutoring middle schoolers, so on and so forth.

The teacher-student heirarchy was decent way to mass produce educational services during industrialization but creates unnecessarily rigid classifications between learners at different levels of knowledge.

I think there is room for a more mutualistic exchange, between tutors who would like to clarify their existing knowledge, and between students who like to learn something new, to emerge in the future.

k-12 (13 yrs), Collage (4yrs), Med School(4 years), Residency (3 years), Specialty medical training (3yrs) = 28 years. Ignoring pre k and the fact that this is the happy path.

Residency starts out with extreme levels of supervision. The end of fellowship is the point where they are considered competent enough to not need direct supervision. Though doctors still have plenty of people looking over there shoulders.

The point is 32 is when doctors can start paying back significant amounts of there student loans and saving for retirement. Including interest it's not hard to be 32 and have 1/2 million in debt.

PS: Also, specialist's can't afford to make the path cheaper for the next person as they need to constrain supply to keep there wages high. Which not only increases cost of healthcare, but also medical research.

Our high school biology ends with relatively detailed information about DNA replication and sequencing using PCR that combines chemistry and physics. Physics includes nuclear physics and electrical engineering. Mathematics contains differential equations and statistics. Chemistry has topics going in to details of organic chemistry. Was Plato talking about those too?

If you feel that there's some problem in education that you can solve better, feel free to get a degree and write a thesis about that.

There will always be deviations from the mean, regardless of whether or not they are pathologized as behavioral disorders, which will slow down such attempts at synchronous learning.

This is why sense classical times the ultimate model for education has been that of the individual conversation, dialogue, between student and tutor.

We aren't using alternative methods outside of tutorship for education because we have discovered better methodologies, we are doing so because of economics and cost.

Expert tutors were formerly extremely scarce and retained by the nobility. We employ group lectures in packed classrooms not because they are a necessary or efficient way to learn, but because educated teachers used to be extremely scarce, and it gave everybody a chance to hear.

The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on.

As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.

Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education.

It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access.

You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market.

A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date.

Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning.

> You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions.

You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one.

> The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions.

In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing.

> earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on.

Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know.

Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process.

> As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree.

I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals.

>It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be

I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.

There are people who mostly attend lectures and read little and do extremely well. There are also people who mostly read and attend few lectures and also do well. The more methods are available, the better the education.

My point in the context of children with learning disabilities was that they must be tended to by adults. I assume you are agreeing with that.

The counterpoint is that those teenagers suck because they missed out on years of practice because they were never given the opportunity to actually teach anyone anything meaningful before.

You are also presuming a high-stakes situation where mistakes are costly and go uncorrected forever. That is not realistic. Well-educated teachers are still vital, and a lesson gone bad presents even more teaching opportunities than a lesson gone well.

If an 8-year-old is helping a 6-year-old with math, then they are both learning, and the teacher is spending a lot less time watching either of them.

I think what we're seeing here is a general problem with outsourcing: you try to come up with a clean separation of responsibilities, but you end up with a costly mistake instead. In this case, thinking of all children as customers that are served by your employees, it would make a lot more sense to make it a collaborative effort between expert caregivers/teachers and students of various ages.

Offtopic, I can't help but wonder how much the tutoring reinforces what they were probably certain to forget anyway. In the same way that blogging about a subject reinforces your understanding of it (e.g., if you can't explain it, you don't know it), I suspect that tutoring a younger generation would help those tutors cement that knowledge more deeply into their minds than just retaining it long enough to pass whatever tests they're given in the short term.

At the end of the day though, your dojo analogy is most precise -- senseis don't just promote every student to assistant instructor. They carefully curate based on knowledge, discipline and behavior. Having every older child tutor the younger is probably unnecessary, and would likely lead to chaos, but if teachers chose only those students capable of helping out the younger children, even assuming some failure rate in selection, it would probably be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.

I've learned eg cycling from practical demonstrations of my slightly older cousins.

Having the older children help the younger ones had the great result that, once in elementary school where they are separated, the younger ones are like younger siblings to the older ones. It has been fantastic watching this develop thru the years.

There's also a HUGE gap in educability between the majority of kids who attended preschool (of any kind) and kids who stayed home until kindergarten. I'm not sure if this says more about kindergarten or preschool, but there's no question that the socialization and group learning environment of preschool helps kids adjust to primary school.

Getting to explain and articulate ideas to others so that they can understand it is how many people learn best. Everyone wins in these situations.

Is there any particular research on this topic that would provide some depth for the curious?

How do you go about qualifying and reviewing the abilities and performance of non-adult caretakers in a way that is also useful to their own development?

Why do we need a 'scientific study' for everything? This is particularly evident in 'nutritional science' too, when I see an article 'such-and-such vegetable is good for you' I just laugh. Of course it is, we've been eating plants (and animals) for hundreds of thousands of years. What else?

How should we humans raise our young? It'd be pretty difficult to do worse than the current standard.

I remember watching Koyaanisqatsi a couple of decades ago and just thinking "Yep, pretty much." In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "unbalanced life"

One of our issues in these times is that we are all so sceptical we demand 'evidence' for everything, then go on to doubt the methodology and debate how to interpret the results, and then fail to act.

We've reduced the family unit to 1 -we literally live alone- and then wonder why children, adolescents, and adults aren't 'well adjusted'. Are families are (often) so sick it's little wonder we move away from them. Not to mention the economic incentives: we can sell more lawn mowers if everyone has to own one. It's good for 'the economy', as though The Economy is some entity separate from ourselves.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti

Mustn't've had my medication today.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi

This stuff needs scientific study because simply being ancient doesn't mean something is any good. Sometimes these things are great, sometimes they're useless, sometimes they're harmful. Science is how you figure out which is which.

Which is incidentally like a lot of other destructive ideas and traditions.

Perhaps a certain vegetable is known to provide the most nutrients for the longest storage time. This could benefit people in third-world countries, whose food storage is at a premium.

I get it, you're disillusioned with people who demand scientific evidence uber alles. But the approach has its benefits. And what you may think is obvious because it was true in the past may be proven wrong.

What I don't understand is that you seem to be asking for people to think less critically. We should end science and just return to the olden times? Some of your argument makes a lot of sense to me (sharing lawnmowers with our neighbors rather than owning them entirely). But you also ask people to act without knowledge.

Your argument doesn't offer much in the way of solutions besides immediately acting without data.

There's value in knowing that we do something because it's actually a good thing to do, and not just a quirk some ancient monarch had that was adopted by the peasantry.

There's also value in knowing why something is good to do. Maybe we can find more ways to do it.

In the field of psychology, counterintuitive things happen all the time. And there's plenty of things our forebears did that were not optimal - one easy example is women being second-class citizens pretty much everywhere people settled down.

But can only be replicated a few times.

That said, there is (in general) much too little evidence-based policy around, we don't need less of it.

But can only be replicated a few times.

Jared Diamonds recent book "the world until yesterday" is on the topic of stuff we can learn from such other societies.

And people complain of all the same problems with the elderly: they need to be looked after, and it's expensive, and caregivers are underpaid.

Child-"minding" gives the wrong impression I feel, child-rearing [raising to adulthood] perhaps gives a better view.

Childminding to me suggests the very basic task of ensuring the child doesn't come to harm as opposed to the more complex task of aiding them to develop in to well rounded adults.

The ones that were doing differently are being forced to stop:

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/10/30/new-daycare-rules...

Anything you can do yourself will save an enormous amount of money because using money is extremely inefficient.

But in a highly specialized society, different people do different things very well -- sometimes orders of magnitude better. Paying some guys to replace my windows is much more efficient than trying to do it myself.

(I'm presently a stay-at-home dad. Not only can I do it just as well as others, but the marginal benefit of a second income is much less than the marginal benefit of being able to take care of my child and my house exactly how I want to, and the enjoyment I get from those things.)

In other words, our tax system is encouraging people to stay home. Whether or not we want to do that is up for debate but we can fix this by 1) taxing stay at home moms for the value they are creating or 2) removing child care service taxes.

Its a valid argument.

That sounds incredibly distopian.

Plenty of studies show the benefits of children being raised by their actual parents. If anything, the bias towards staying at home is not strong enough, because it only has negative motivators - the taxes on paying childcare / having a career. That doesn't make it any easier to have either or preferably both parents actively raise the child where neither of them have to be absent from their life to provide food and shelter, but it does make it harder to have both parents working.

But that hardship demonstrably does not outweigh the lost income, since so many households are two income with children in third party care services. I would hesitate to ever advocate trying to punish dual income households more for using child care services, since those are exactly the ones who often have no choice in the matter.

> That sounds incredibly distopian.

It sounds a bit sexist (as if moms should stay home and their spouse, male of female should be employed) - but it's only dystopian if society doesn't recognize that the work not only needs to be taxed, but also rewarded.

For example, with basic income - or simply by paying people to stay home to care for their kids. The problem with the latter is that it reinforces gender stereotypes in a job market where there is gender difference in pay (ie: all current real-world job markets) -- it makes financial sense for the one that makes the least above caregiver compensation to stay home. I'm sure there are other ways to combat this (say base compensation on whole-household income, so that the net will end up being roughly the same no matter who stays home) -- but it's not entirely trivial to figure out.

I never implied that. Preferably society would be rich enough both parents could raise their kids without having to fend for survival while doing so. I would hope we have advanced as a species enough at this point, generated enough wealth at this point, to enable that.

And if that were not possible, I know classical sexism would drive the women to stay home, but preferrably whoever preferred their job would continue working and the other could raise the children, irrespective of sex.

> For example, with basic income

UBI is almost certainly the optimal solution here. I'd argue because it enables that joint parental rearing much more often - if parents have any financial assets they could potentially both drop out of the workforce to optimally raise their child, and depending on their wealth they could both withdraw for variable lengths of time. Even in the worst case scenario one successful careered individual in a family of two with joint UBI should definitely be able to have a stay at home parent and a working one maintain a working class lifestyle.

In Sweden, there's fixed maternity and paternity leave of the same length.

German fathers don't stay home for the kids much---it's almost all used by the mothers. Sweden's use-it-or-lose-it approach seems to work better if you goal is to get fathers to take time off.

For a couple in even a middle marginal rate, where the second worker would drive only 20 miles round trip [including to/from daycare site twice] ($10/day) and pay $5 more for lunch than eating at home and pay an extra $1000/yr for a work wardrobe, it's easy to need to cover $4000 just for the expenses of working, plus the ~$26K or so for childcare, so you need to earn $50K just to break even if your combined marginal bracket (fed + state + local + FICA + Medicare) is "only" 40%. It's even worse if the second full-time job requires an additional or better[more reliable] car, paying for parking, or any other recurring expenses. If the stress results in needing extra spa days, meals out because everyone's too pooped to cook, vacations to get back family time, etc, it can really sky-rocket.

In terms of time, you save two adult trips to daycare, the full commute, and all the coordination overhead of dealing with childcare provider issues (family daycare providers get sick, take their own vacations, and in our case, randomly closed on short notice sometimes).

My wife is highly educated and left a very good position because she would have otherwise been working only for her 401K contributions. Several years in, everyone in our family is thrilled with that choice, it's way less stressful overall, and I'm convinced our children are way better off for it. (Though our daycare costs and marginal rate were somewhat higher than the figures in this example, there are many cases where the economic cost to one spouse staying at home is quite low.)

On your second point, I don't agree that the tax system needs to be patched for this as a special case. IMO, we should reduce taxes across the board, but failing the will to do that, we should accept that the system creates these incentives and educate people as to the math and the reality that, with more than one kid pre-K, it's almost surely a low (or even negative) cost for one parent to stay home.

Taxing a stay at home parent for imputed childcare costs is a crazily slippery slope. Must I pay taxes if I do my own dishes, clean my own house, cut my own grass, do my own laundry, cook my own dinner, fix my own brakes, clean my own gutters, fix my kid's broken toy, etc, etc?

Or 3) allowing a deduction from income equal to the amount spent on child care.

This is the option Canada takes, incidentally; the only thing I don't like about it is that you're not allowed to pay your spouse for child care, and so stay-at-home fathers end up without any taxable income and thus without any pension contributions.

The only difference I can see if that you have to wait till tax day to get your money back.

Interesting.

In some sense it's the other way 'round: division of labour is so stupidly efficient, that the state can tax the hell out of it, and it's still better than doing most things yourself.

or if one is a worker especially valued by the economy, such as one of a few nuclear scientists or doctor or software engineer.

This is a particular and unusual case where specialising does not improve efficiency much. Cooking and cleaning are similar. It still improves efficiency by 100% or more (most of that being the tax man's cut), not by that orders of magnitudes in other products of services.

However there is no evidence spending time with children has any benefit.

In general, if there isn't increased productivity because of technology, we shouldn't expect lower costs in terms of labor-hours consumed. See "Baumol's cost disease" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)

Child care was the biggest money maker at my organization, which was a fully-featured ymca with seasonal sports, fitness, olympic pool, gymnastics, rock wall, skate park, and 10 million in the bank. We had a pre-school, after-school, and summer camps. I can't speak to the % of net income that came from child care, but I think it was very large.

I think given multiple children, it becomes very likely that it's better for one parent to stay home. They get to spend a lot more time with the kids at a very small financial difference.

[edit http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/tta-system/teaching/eecd/L... has space and staffing rules for EHS and HS which states tend to copy]

We typically kept about 20:1 until a time when we were trying to qualify for a higher standard, which required a 15:1 maximum.

And occasionally my co-counselor would be gone and I'd have 50+ kids for the day. It went okay for me, but many of the counselors could not have managed that whatsoever. In fact, many of my later co-counselors couldn't handle any amount of children by themselves.

Hard to work ability into a standard, of course.

For instance, I might have the soccer field for a given rotation (we had several each day), and on the playground nearby was another group or two, supervisors inside, etc.

Any kind of non-herding-children emergency would have been handled without issue. Fire could be an issue, though I'm not sure an additional staff member would improve the situation much--the problem would be the doorways creating choke points.

Little humans are typically very controllable and well-behaved, and even more so after a few days in a good system.

I went to my sons school the other day - parents were invited to attend for half an hour. He's 6. The children sat down quietly when the teacher asked. One of the parents took a phone call (!), at which point one of the kids immediately turned around, gave her the most incredibly stern look and went "shhh!" - it was quite amusing to see a bunch of 6 year old kids behaving better than their parents.

Conversely, though, I had teachers as a kid that wouldn't have been able to get anyone to behave... My class drove more than one teacher to run crying from the class room. In primary school.

Do the math: if parents want one carer for every N kids, they have to pay 1/N-th of the costs of a carer.

I guess that 10 is a conservative estimate for the value of N, taking into account holidays, sick days, and the fact that kids will be at the center for over 8 hours because parents have to do their own workday between dropping off and picking up their child.

Also, parents do not want to make daycare look industrial, daycare needs a kitchen, beds so that kids can rest in the afternoon, etc. That means parents effectively have to pay for about half a second house for their kids, an extra set of toys, etc. and they want it all from 8AM-6PM, so daycare providers cannot run shifts to more efficiently use their facility.

Edit: and don't forget income tax. Parents have to pay a daycare worker's income before tax from from their income after taxes.

For me, that makes it clear that, at current price level, daycare workers cannot have a middle class income. Also, if they had, lots of people couldn't afford child care.

And historically, child care wasn't a full time job. Housewifes also prepared food, cleaned the house, washed clothes, found time to repair clothing, went shopping, etc. Even with modern appliances, that adds up.

You're assuming here that the payment all has to come from the parents disposable income. Other countries (try to) address this with government or employer subsidies for childcare, eg in Australia http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink...

Obviously, education is seen as a necessity both for (semi)functioning democracy, but also for any modern society to work. It seems odd that we're happy to take care of kids for free (or highly subsidized cost) from the age from 6 to 16 -- but somehow the years 1-6 needs to be paid for by parents? Are those 4 years really so much more expensive, that it wouldn't make sense to just roll that all up into one budget?

I actually need to look at the arguments around this in Norway -- free school from the age of 6 to 18, along with a free college education isn't really an issue - and full coverage of child care services also have broad agreement -- but somehow simply making said childcare free seems to be much more contentious. Or perhaps just overlooked.

I suppose one could make up microeconomic arguments along the lines of a solid education for all benefits all, while allowing all parents those extra 3-4 per child in the job market might not benefit all. Perhaps more interesting is the general trend that there's less work -- so having people spend some time off from work (with eg: pay from the government) might simply be a more efficient model going forward.

But if we accept that free primary school is a good thing, I don't see how we can argue that free kinder garden isn't too.

If the government subsidizes it, taxes will go up and disposable income goes down (though part of the cost gets externalized to childless taxpayers).

If most employers pays for it, cost of living will go down, and salaries will also go down (for everyone, so your childless coworker's salary will also go down and the difference will either go to the shareholders, or maybe the CEO will just pat himself in the back for his brilliant cost cutting ideas and give himself a big Christmas bonus).

All in all, it sounds like the only cases where it makes sense to subsidize is in countries with an aging population. Otherwise, it's fairer to pay living wages to workers and have each parent pay out of pocket.

I know this will sound terrible, but if you cannot afford to pay child care, maybe the economy is telling you that your marginal job is not worth be done or held. The reality in US and many countries following it's economic model is that unemployment is a chronic, ignored problem. Marginally useful jobs can exist because there is always a big pool of desperate people ready to take poverty wages. You will do yourself and everyone a favor by not competing in that race to the bottom.

As long as the child is being raised by a family with at least 2 adults, a stay at home mom or dad is perfectly capable of providing care while at the same time engage in all types of frugality and household economy activities that will extend the salary of the sole breadwinner beyond what is normally possible for a couple of overstressed careerists. They can also engage in education and creative activities that will allow them to pick up a career later, when the kids are old enough to attend school (which is a sort of mandatory daycare, anyways).

Also, it is important to recognize that a single parent raising children is a extraordinary and unsustainable situation (though sadly common through history). Subsidies, charity and informal help from extended family, friends and neighbors should be directed to this cases, instead of being spread out trying to benefit as many people as possible.

These are all tasks that 'child care' includes, and some of them are magnified in difficulty when kids are attached.

At the income levels at issue, payroll tax is far more significant than income tax.

http://ece.berkeley.edu/facstaff

so, ($3,400 * 12) / .15 = $272,000 a year.

There may be cheaper options, but seriously, fifteen percent sounds very low even for two income well paid families. And of course, at such an ultra wealthy income bracket, tax breaks have phased out far lower in the income scale.

Another way to look at it is $3,400 * 12 = $40,800. Let's assume a 20% tax bracket (assuming one spouse makes a good income and intends to keep working), so it costs you $51,000 to go to work vs staying home. Even if you don't strictly lose money by working, that second income has to go way up before it's really worth it.

There is one other factor, of course, which is career continuity. It may make sense to work essentially for 20% of your pay if it means that in 5-6 years, when the kiddos are older, you can rejoin the workforce at a higher income level, rather than trying to break in after an extended absence. Also, my numbers are a worst case scenario, where you have two small children in daycare at the same time, though of course spacing it out comes with a different set of problems.

Add in the sky high cost of housing, and you can see how hard it is to raise a family in the bay area now. The best bet is actually to have one very high earning spouse (medical or nursing specialist, higher echelons of law or finance, some upper tech or managerial positions). $200k+ a year is a very different picture if it is all earned by a single spouse. Alternatively, for two very high earners (again in that 200k+ range), the percentage spent on childcare and basic housing starts to diminish to acceptable ranges.

This is also why, ahem, I don't take claims of a labor shortage in SF seriously at "six figure" salaries if the salaries are barely above 100k.

Can you please cite these research results. There are some specific results, but I would be interested in your long term data.

I would be interested how research defines this "high quality social/cultural environments" and how it controls for factors such as genetics, family cultural and financial background, etc. Separated twin studies would probably be ideal (but I'm not an expert in the field).

I'm not sure how we expect a 1:6 ratio to be "cheap", even before factoring in costs like real estate.

http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/research/pri/VPKthrough3rd_fin...

A Randomized Control Trial of a Statewide Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Skills and Behaviors through Third Grade

>The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures. In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.

>First grade teachers rated the TN‐VPK children as less well prepared for school, having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school. It is notable that these ratings preceded the downward achievement trend we found for VPK children in second and third grade.

Further commentary and discussion

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/null-hypothesis-for-pre-k-ed...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/10/new...

The office janitor's salary is deductible from the business owner's income tax, but the child caregiver is not.

If it's not an economical proposition, involving the government surely can't help.

The issue is that folks want a very high caregiver/child ration, for what is essentially unskilled labour (any non-pathological adolescent or adult can take care of children acceptably). So the supply of workers (i.e., just about everyone) vastly outstrips the demand.

Why not just go back to single-earner households and extended families?

Define "acceptably".

Some babysitters think it's acceptable to just chat on Facebook all day and plant the child in front of the TV for 10 hours. That's not acceptable to me, but that's more or less what you get for very cheap labor; just someone to keep you legally clear from abandoning a minor. Like those super-cheap bare minimum car insurance that does nothing but keep you legally driving.

Here's the definition of acceptable when it comes to my children: Take kids to parks and museums. Can avoid using profanity around them. Won't smoke around them. Won't be speeding down the highway with them. Can be trusted not to fill my children with junk food. Can truly trust them to actively watch the kids so they don't do something crazy like sticking a fork into a power outlet or turning on the gas stove without the flame, thus filling the house with gas. Right now, the only people my wife & I trust with our kids are their grandparents... aside from the pre-school teachers.

Finding quality childcare is harder than you think.

If there's so much money to be made in child are, why aren't childcare centres popping up on every street corner? It's the kind of business you can easily run from your house. Get five neighbours to pay you twenty bucks a day to look after their kid, and everybody is coming out ahead.

I can only assume that the reason it doesn't happen is massive government licensing requirements.

Well, except the kids.

Each family spends 10% of income.

Average household income is X.

3 teachers per 19 kids

=

Each teacher generates revenue of 0.63X. Considering each parent is making 0.5X in a two parent household, that's cutting it a bit close.

Edit: I originally commented with an incorrect 6.3X. Fixed. 19 kids * 10% * X / 3 teachers = 0.63X

Thus, high supply and limited demand -> low wages.

Of all the ways tax money can be used to create a more level playing field for the next generation, this is IMHO one of the best. Parents get to have a career, kids get to know other kids from varying backgrounds, and kids with less than ideal parents get to do more worthwhile things than stare at TV and eat at McD.

I feel like that no longer happens in the world, with profits being pushed ever higher.

Are people becoming greedier?

Why is competition failing?

Goldman and Google have a 20% profit margin and pay their employees well. Walmart has about 3% and lots of competition.

Goldman and Google are employing a relatively small number of highly-skilled people, which means they have to pay them more than Wal-mart pays its retail staff. Their pay is almost exactly what those people would expect to be paid for the same jobs elsewhere. For example, it turns out that Google pays their software engineers only slightly more than Wal-mart (really, look it up) despite demanding higher skill levels from employees.

$10 * 40 * 4.3 * 1.10 (taxes, bennies, etc) = $1892 per month.

Rent...

Etc...

Basically no one can accept that children might survive without constant adult supervision so costs are astronomical.

The cheapest daycare is having 2+ kids and getting a live in care giver that way rather than pay 2X for daycare you pay 1X and divide it over 2+ kids.

In The Netherlands we have a 33/33/33 model - parents pay 33% of the costs, the state pays 33% and the parent's employers pay 33% (which is an extra charge split over all workers).

In recent years they've tweaked the model: parents with 2 x modal income pay 100% of the costs (and their employers also pay 33%). Only the lowest incomes hit 33/33/33.

For the 2nd+ children the subsidy is much higher for all income groups.

We send our son to daycare for 2 days a week, costing ~700 EUR/month. My wife works 36hrs (4x9) and I work 40hrs (4x9,1x4 at home). Grandma/pa do one day (the other grandparents live in the UK). I really like this mix - he gets 4/days week of parents, 2/days a week playing with other kids and 1 day of being spoilt by grandparents.

For all the numbers and percentages it throws around it just doesn't do the sums on the basics. From the article's facts:

- 3 teacher for 19 children - 6.3 children per carer.

- Cost = 15% of median income

- lets assume 1.5 children per family.

- 6.3/1.5 =4.2 child carers per family.

- 4.2 carers X 15% of median family income = a revenue of 63% of family income per child care worker.

Assuming overheads, profits, etc., .... you get the point. Child care is expensive and low paying for similar reasons. It takes a lot of teachers per student. This isn't a government conspiracy or a corporate one, it's just the reality of the requirements of caring for children.

I don't really have a problem with intervention, but I'd rather it be in the form of simple payments to the parents. Otherwise, we are paying Jill to take care of Jack's kid so Jack can go out and work making spoons. Why shouldn't Jack look after his own kid and Jill can make the spoons.

They have to live in homes that are set up as daycares though, and it's very hard for them to take a sick day.

A very short and simplistic argument:

Does having rich people benefit all of society? If it doesn't then we should tax the rich to create more wealth-equality. If having wealth inequality does benefit society then we - democratic societies - should enable parents to raise their children to become rich [not necessarily financially but in skills at least] so that they can benefit the rest of society.

Another very simplistic argument is that we require the younger generations to work when we get old, children are a necessary part of the continuation of the state. If the state is valuable, or at least more valuable than other modes of government that would otherwise take hold or encroach on the population, then its continued existence should be encouraged. If a state government is damaging to child rearing then ultimately it will fail as the population of the state falls below sustainable levels. [Barring models that are selective from a surrounding population, in which case the state would have to encourage the surrounding population to generate more population with the characteristics they select for.]

Because obviously anyone proposing progressive taxation wants the terms to be "once you make a million dollars, all assets are seized and you are left to die in the woods, filthy elitist". Definitely not anything, even in the most extreme case, like "oh hey, you made a million dollars this year, that is demonstrably enough to not only fund all your needs and probably 99% of conceivable wants but also those of at least a dozen family members or more", so we are going to take every cent you make beyond that and redistribute it to those who don't have enough to even fulfill their own needs".

That is not eating the rich. It is obviously way too redistributive and would catastrophically disincentivize wealth creation and probably wreck the economy, but even in the most extreme case it is not locally "devouring". You still have a million dollars a year, enough to afford almost anything.

And thats just the unreasonable super-communist perspective. A real world progressive tax rate that optimizes for societal wellbeing would probably be a NIT that guarantees at least 30k and caps your income in the hundreds of millions with the bisection at the peak income happiness threshold thats around 90k per person.

I'm sure "devouring" all the income beyond 500 million dollars of someone who made that much this year will certainly destroy them, at least as much as deep poverty and systemic inequality is definitely not destroying the minds of the children and the health of the parents living in it today.

It is often remarked that capitalism is a beneficial regime because of the "trickle down effect" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics).

>So if society is comprised of 10 people, and you devour one of them and redistribute to the other 9, thats OK simply because the 9 recipients benefit? //

That doesn't benefit all of society now does it?

>If you can gang up and rob your own rich, why not arm up and attack a neighboring country and enslave its population? //

Attacking a neighbouring country won't benefit society it will be a substantial detriment as would enslaving members of society.

The thing about "rob[bing] your own rich" is that the many of the richest members of our societies [in the UK] are rich because of chance, because of rent seeking, because despite the world belonging to mankind they by violence [usually of their ancestors] have acquired a larger share of it's resources. Why is it unjust to redistribute such wealth?

Let's flip your first question - if society is composed of 10 people and one of them has enough food to feed 10, should we just let 9 starve so that the 1 can keep "his" portion? Or to look at it a different way: how about we look at an island that's got resources to feed them all, they each are provided a random share and one has the most fertile and productive part - they all work equally hard and he always has excess and grows fat and rich in resources whilst the others suffer to varying degrees. Why should the benefit born of random chance overrule our humanity?

"We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down." (Dabla-Norris et al., http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42986.0)

[FWIW I don't agree that GDP is the best measure of improvements in society but it at least appears to indicate the efficiency - within humanitarian bounds - of a capitalist system. I'd prefer to follow happiness quotients.]

How does then involuntary wealth transfer from the rich to the poor benefit _all_ of society, including the rich?

> Attacking a neighbouring country won't benefit society

Wat? If attacking and robbing a neighbouring society wont benefit the attacking society, how does attacking and robbing the rich neighbour benefit the poor attacking neighbourhood? Its the same concept, just another scale.

Conquest and enslavement have been successful empire-building strategies for millenia.

> are rich ... because of rent seeking

Whats wrong with that? I work and build a house, you need a stay and pay a monthly rent, whats wrong with that except your envy?

> the world belonging to mankind they by violence [usually of their ancestors] have acquired a larger share of it's resources.

We're not talking about wealth-by-robbing, as you see above. Youre explicitely throwing chance (aka inheritance) and rent-seeking into the mix, even though they are completely moral ways to accumulate. If my ancestors were hard-working accumulators, and your ancestors wasteful rakes, it is difficult to construct an argument why half of my inheritance should be awarded to your ancestors progeny instead of my ancestors progeny. Why should the ant be forced to take from his children and give to the grasshoppers children?

> should we just let 9 starve so that the 1 can keep "his" portion?

If the society is composed of 10 people, 1 is rich and 9 are starving, who is "we"? "We" is either the rich guy or the 9 starving ones. There is no single entity called "we" that can impartially and benevolently move around wealth. So if he robbed you, it is not "his" portion in the first place, then its ok for its rightful owners to take it back, including by force. But if he didnt rob you, and just accumulated it by hard-working and saving, then it indeed _is_ his portion, and youre shit out of luck. If you can construct an argument why its ok for you to attack him because you brought yourself in a situation where you literally cant survive anymore without attacking a hard-working innocent accumulator, then he has every right to also premptively attack you in order to prevent your planned envy-motivated attack. Youre essentially advocating for an vicious, eat-or-be-eaten climate of constant conflict.

[1] The Fate of Empire - Sir John Grubb http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

That's how taxation and government funding works.

Are you advocating no taxation, and no government?

None.

> If you don't pay taxes, you go to jail.

"If you dont pay protection money, we demolish your restaurant."

So essentially youre advocating for a society thats indistinguishable from a Yakuza-run shanty town.

Congrats, which basically ends our small discourse.

e.g., You can buy a Lambo for nearly one million but the cars salesman who sold it to you probably isn't rich.

But when you buy a painting for nearly one million, it'd make sense to think the actual painter is doing pretty well.

A (good)public school teacher in America is woefully underpaid compared to the service they provide. They should be paid similar to doctors & nurses, imho.

I can wholeheartedly assure you they are not as deserving as doctors, in large part because their training is much less rigorous, the job is much less demanding, requires less skill/ability, and a whole lot of teachers aren't "good" teachers. Just like any other profession, you have good, bad, and mostly average. The average teacher does not deserve nearly the same salary as the average doctor.