Daycare

This is Joseph

This point rather illustrates the issues going forward:

If a bunch of the local elementary schools address social distancing by going to split days in the fall -- whether by hours of the day, days of the week, weeks of the month or whatever -- they will immediately create massive local childcare crises. The mismatch of the length of the school day (and year) with adult workplaces is bad enough already; add some sort of hybrid delivery and you’re putting extreme demands on parents and local daycare options. Given the income levels of many of our students, some of the arrangements are likely to be far worse than most of us would like to believe. And that’s assuming no second wave that abruptly closes the schools.

Basically, for the past three months we've ended the public (and private!) provision of childcare with rather extreme results for everyone with young children. I am not saying that this may not have been worthwhile in terms of lives saved, but the implications are . . . growing.

Several features of note are worth being highlighted.

The first is that, even when it works ok (e.g., teenagers), doing schooling from home massively increases the privilege of having a quiet workspace (large house, separate rooms) and good technology access (everyone has a computer, internet bandwidth is adequate). Same issue with food security and safe spaces. So for long periods of time this is rough.

The second is that we completely lack the ability to compensate parents for childcare. Many historical societies saw raising children as an important public good. It is unclear when that drifted to a form of conspicuous consumption instead. Small children cannot be left alone safely for a workday and require attention in a pattern that defies schedules.

The third is that this will rapidly exacerbate gender inequality, perhaps in unexpected directions. Years of trying to both raise children and do full time jobs is going to get parents to think about whether two incomes are necessary. Regardless of which parent gives up on market income, that's a power imbalance right away in the relationship.

Most of the "take time off" ideas are daft. Minimum wage in the US is $15,000 a year or so. It can be very challenging to live on that little with children. And single parents exist too. Many jobs are difficult to get and not easily replaced at the end of an epidemic when there is a major recession going on.

As this period of restricted social gathering evolves from short-term to long-term (probably right call now that covid-19 is a leading cause of death in the US), failing to grapple with this is a huge hit to working parents. There has been speculation that covid-19 could cause a rise in births -- I see the contrary as an issue. How many parents will want more children if this could happen again?