[cryoshon]

the case for national paid parental leave -- that's right, parental leave, not just maternity leave -- is that it's a standard feature of developed countries.

the US will start to see more and more brain drain to other developed countries until some basic aspects of the social contract here are corrected. we'll also see fewer highly-skilled immigrants wanting to join our workforce.

there's no reason for highly educated people to stay here or immigrate to here when their quality of life will be significantly worse than elsewhere because our basic suite of mandatory and ubiquitous social amenities are entirely absent.

[enitihas]

The brain drain is heavy in the other direction (towards the US from elsewhere), and doesn't seem to be slowing down. As long as the US can pay far higher salaries than other countries, the social benefits are irrelevant for the high performers.

> we'll also see fewer highly-skilled immigrants wanting to join our workforce

The high skilled people would earn far more in the US than elsewhere, and get a lot of benefits as part of their high paying job. It's difficult to see the brain drain to the US stopping, let alone the reverse brain drain you forsee.

[maerF0x0]

I will add to your point that high salaries + not losing it all to taxes is the kind of equation that matters. Some developed countries with strong social policy have reasonably high salaries, but much lower after taxes.

[MattGaiser]

> the US will start to see more and more brain drain to other developed countries

Why? The social contract exists for skilled people through their employers as part of their benefits package.

Highly skilled people generally have compensation packages to match and that includes healthcare and parental leave.

[cryoshon]

>The social contract exists for skilled people through their employers

that's not what the social contract is. and unfortunately, the crux of that very misunderstanding is exactly why the US is being absolutely shredded by a plethora of different and seemingly intractable systemic problems.

the social contract is between citizens and the state, wherein citizens consent to to taxation and governance which curtails some of their freedoms such that the state can guarantee their freedom from certain maladies and undesirable conditions. employers have nothing to do with it because businessess operate within the confines of the social contract at large because they are goverened by the laws of society.

we're in the middle of a pandemic, and there are millions and millions of people who are uninsured and who cannot get medical care because they were separated from their employer-provided health insurance.

pretending that businesses are stand-ins for the services that the government's end of the social contract should guarantee simply doesn't work in practice.

[MattGaiser]

> there are millions and millions of people who are uninsured and who cannot get medical care because they were separated from their employer-provided health insurance.

True, but they are overwhelmingly unskilled. We are discussing a brain drain of skilled workers.

> simply doesn't work in practice.

If you are a high skill employee with the compensation to match, it works perfectly well.

I am not saying this is a reasonable state of affairs, just that it doesn't cause any talent loss.

[beisner]

I’m not sure that’s true. The people who have agency to move don’t need to; Highly-skilled knowledge workers are already being showered in benefits and compensation in the USA. This is definitely true in tech, and increasingly true in conventionally “high-status” professions (ie finance, consulting, strategy, etc).

A lot of people talk about the 1%, but there’s a separate, massive quality of life divide (especially at work) between the top 10% and bottom 90% of workers. Working conditions have never been better for the top 10%, and are getting worse for the rest.

So while there are definitely other immediate negative consequences to the US not having these benefits unilaterally, the fact that they already exist for the richest/most-educated makes me skeptical we’ll see an exodus of that demographic.

[Orou]

Do you have any data you could share on the 10%/90% divide when it comes to working conditions? I assume you're talking primarily about compensation and benefits here.

One of the interesting things about the American work system to me is that even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many. The system doesn't seem geared towards life balance at all, it seems geared toward giving outsized rewards to workaholics for whom there is little going on in life besides their jobs.

[scott_s]

It's not on working conditions, but the phenomenon itself: "The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, has a recent book, "The Meritocracy Trap" that goes into your last paragraph. I heard about it on an interview with Ezra Klein (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/6...), and Vox has a good summary of it (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...), with a section that is very similar to what you wrote:

> In order to win this competition, elites are forced to exploit their own talents and abilities. They spend their lives acquiring the degrees, skills, attitudes, and habits (i.e. “human capital”) that makes them valuable to elite educational institutions and employers. In doing so, elites, Markovits writes, transform themselves into “asset manager[s] whose portfolio contains [their] own persons.” This process damages the very identity of its participants.

> > [Elites] become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self apart from status.

> In short, elites are shuttled into a life-long, endless competition that not only consumes their life quantitatively but qualitatively as well, leaving no room for self-expression, actualization, or discovery — only self-exploitation, value extraction, and endless anxiety.

[MattGaiser]

> even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many.

An interesting article about that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Also, anecdotally, my friends in the high powered law tracks all got there by spending their lives generating stuff for their resumes, so when they arrive, they compete the same way.

[harryh]

The US has been "behind" many other developed countries in areas like paternal leave for quite some time and has not experienced the sort of brain drain you assert. In fact the drain has generally gone towards the US rather than away from it.

It's hard to see why this trend would reverse now.

[paulcole]

> there's no reason for highly educated people to stay here or immigrate to here when their quality of life will be significantly worse than elsewhere because our basic suite of mandatory and ubiquitous social amenities are entirely absent.

If you're wealthy enough, the United States is still an extremely attractive place to live.

[rubidium]

Fully paid parental leave (typically 8 weeks) is becoming quite common at fortune 500 companies in the US.

Many comment that they're trying to get ahead of the legislation and lawsuits, and buy some goodwill in the process. I'm fully in support!

[geodel]

These are not new rules. If people looking to migrate to US and find situation increasingly worse due to lack employment / governmental support for raising family, they can decide to not come. But the fact is situation is increasingly getting worse across the world. And places where there are great benefits are not looking to have horde of immigrants.

Also those "highly educated people" if they are really worth they think they are then individual negotiations with employers are always an option. Default set of benefits help average folks who otherwise would not get a better deal from employers.

[toast0]

> the case for national paid parental leave -- that's right, parental leave, not just maternity leave -- is that it's a standard feature of developed countries.

This argument by itself is somewhere between bogus and crazy. Everybody else is doing it, so we should do it shouldn't be a key metric for a policy like this. Instead, we should look at why they did, how they did, what the measurable effects were, etc.

[pyuser583]

We’ll see more highly skilled workers who aren’t interested in having kids. That’s a common dynamic. The SF Bay Area has more dogs than children.