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Notes -
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.
You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.
If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.
In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.
You might say that's a choice to live in such an area, and sure, it is. But the idea that you can just get up and move from it to rural Iowa exacerbates other problems: the disintegration of the extended family, the decline of friends, etc.
It's also worth digging into what we mean by "most of the country." If you're weighting by acreage, I agree, most of the country can be lived in on a single half decent job. If you're weighting by population distribution (more appropriate IMO), that shifts the needed income much higher. There are still realistic places to move (e.g. in the Sunbelt), but for those you need a single decent job, not a single half-decent job. Weighting regions by GDP contribution (which has some arguments for it) shifts us solidly into the two income requirement.
Many? I live in an expensive area of the country, northern New Jersey. It looks like that's true for Millburn, NJ -- one of the most expensive places in the area. It's not true for a lot of adjacent similar places. You don't have to go to to rural Iowa to get cheaper housing than that.
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