[mlboss]

It is also kind of forced. Modern industrial society wants to extract as much productivity out of workforce as possible. What that means is in 1965 one income was able to sustain a household but now we need two incomes. There is no dedicated support for kids now so fathers have to give up time and mothers have to exchange child-mother bonding time from kids to the company.

The real benefiter of this is the capitalist who can now have twice the workforce at the price of one.

How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.

[throwway120385]

My spouse and I are single-income and I still try. It's not about economic output, but rather there are things I want my son to know that I can only teach him by being present in his life.

> How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.

Considering that the current political majority in the US wants people to have more kids, this would be a really reasonable thing to do if they were serious about that.

[bombcar]

The US already does heavily subsidize kids unless you make a brazillion dollars anyway.

Count the EITC and the child tax credit as “wife income” if you must. Also the increase in the standard deduction.

[whateveracct]

I help with my kid a lot, and I'm remote so I do it around the clock. I take contact naps, change every diaper, watch her for periods of time so my wife is free.

my wife doesn't work. and she didn't work before we had a baby. because one of our salaries was enough, so instead we work less. and again due to remote work, work has barely been top 5 in my life focus areas for the last decade.

[popalchemist]

You are by far the exception.

[bombcar]

He might be the exception in your circles but there are many out there mimicking him, and it’s not only the Amish.

Out of close family and friends I only know of … three where they both work, and none have kids.

[whateveracct]

there's a lot of remote jobs out there

or were. tough out there rn.

[watwut]

> 1965

You may not like it, but women benefited a lot. And fought a lot to get those benefits.

Not just in terms of money. They are beaten less. When they are beaten or constantly insulted, they can leave and feed themselves.

[lazyasciiart]

The benefit comes from women being able to work, not from each household needing two incomes to raise kids. When a woman needs two incomes to raise her kids that means there is still a significant obstacle to leaving their partner.

[pertymcpert]

Have to disagree as a father. The real benefit is the father and child who are now bonding. That doesn't mean the mother can't also bond, it just means it's not one sided.

[thechao]

I got to spend a bit more than 2 years doing math homework 1:1 with my youngest. Now, she's moving up to honors & gets 100% without any help. I miss all that time we got to hang out, do homework, watch videos of cats, etc.

[tayo42]

The mother's are now working. So they're bonding less. I think that's what he means not that father's are taking away mother-child bonding time.

[pertymcpert]

Except if anyone bothered to read the damn article you'd see that the research showed the highly educated were more likely to have involved fathers. Those are not going to be forced as the person seems to imply.

[SoftTalker]

Kind of forced economically but also culturally.

In the 1950s, fathers worked and paid for everything. Mothers raised the kids. This was taught in schools, girls were steered into marriage, motherhood, and housekeeping and men into vocations or college.

Let's not pretend that many women didn't go to work so they could have more, and feel like they were a more complete person. Many people just don't want to be pigeonholed into roles defined by tradition, and the 1960s were a huge rebellion against this. This wasn't some grand capitalist scheme.

It's still possible to raise a family on one professional income, if you live like most people did in the 1960s. Can you do it on minimum wage? No, but you couldn't do it then either.

[K0balt]

Don’t imagine that it wasn’t heavily promoted by industrialites after they saw that after ww2 they could increase the labor force by 30 percent without paying more than they were before.

Everything that starts out with a few well meaning people is, especially now, immediately turned into an astroturfing campaign to fuel some specific economic or political (is there really a difference?) end.

[bombcar]

The FIRE movement is in direct opposition to this and should be encouraged for that alone - as it reduces the pool of workers.

[K0balt]

Yes, and it also points people away from pathological overconsumption, which is arguably a very good idea on a number of axis. And also would shrink the economy significantly if it was widely adopted… which maybe hints at the inconvenient fact that an economy based on ever-expanding per-capita extraction is ultimately unsustainable.

Fundamentally, the economy is sustained by energy. In preindustrial society, that energy was provided by agriculture, which tends to be somewhat sustainable. Fossil fuels fuelled explosive expansion, leading to the paradigm that unlimited geometric expansion of the economy was desirable, which led to delusional theories that it was uncapped even in limited space.

Now the world is near its carrying capacity in several dimensions, and we are going to find the limits to our delusion. Automation may help us find the economic limits of this paradigm before we hit the physical wall, which might turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing.

At any create, I am convinced that the next century will be marked by systemic change that fundamentally reorganises global priorities and might best be described in terms of collapsing paradigms as economies move away from human labor, in the process changing focus from the accumulation of money, which is mostly useful for paying wages, to pure power and resource control.

[hagbard_c]

> The real benefiter of this is the capitalist ...

Tired old socialist rhetoric.

The real benefiter of this is the state which can now have many times the tax base at the price of none. Where women used to take care of the children and do the housekeeping those tasks are now often done by paid day care, taxed by the state and paid help, again taxed by the state. From a single tax payer a family - father, mother, two children - now supplies two tax payers and several 'downstream' tax payers.

[mothballed]

It's hilarious how the government used Rosy the Riveter to convince women that being liberated is slaving away building death machines for the state to literally blow up all our money, while sending your kids to people who don't give two fucks for them, all while moving all that domestic stuff to the GDP so they can tax the shit out of it.

[gurumeditations]

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s not the capitalists making trillions from the free doubling of labor supply, it’s the politicians taking their 10%…

Guess who owns the politicians!

How can you be so ignorant.

[bombcar]

They can be in collusion and/or one and the same.

And you don’t need snidely whiplash to create an evil master plan, it can just be how everything “naturally” works out.