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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   34487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Like Warren, I blame double-income lifestyle becoming the norm. If I were to suggest my own idea of how to stimulate the TFR using heavy-handed government regulations that would never get implemented and probably wouldn't work, I would ban working full-time with one exception.

You are not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week. If you want to have a full-time job, you have to get married and have a homemaker spouse. He or she can't go back to work unless you move back to part-time.

  • what about picking up a second job? Not allowed unless you're married and have a homemaker spouse, every employer has to register its employees with the state.

  • what about running a business? Not allowed unless you're married and have a homemaker spouse, because you need a business license from the government.

  • what about driving an Uber or working another gig job? It's running a business, see above.

  • what about illegal immigrants working full time? Yes, what about them? How can you hope to fix the fertility rates if you can't fix immigration?

  • what about single mothers who can't support their family on a single part-time paycheck? I recommend adoption.

  • won't this place an undue stress on the businesses? Not really, the total compensation should stay more or less the same. It will increase at first because they will have to compete with each other to double the headcount, but:

    • I'm quite sure we will learn that people working part-time do more in 20 hours that a full-timer does, so we won't need to literally double the headcount

    • the businesses will eliminate a lot of useless positions themselves to reassign people to the positions where increasing the headcount is necessary

Money and exchange directs economic activity. "the total compensation should stay more or less the same" may be true in nominal dollars, but if the number of hours worked goes down dramatically, output, i.e. things produced or useful activity undertaken, necessarily decreases as well. And when "amount of money" stays the same but "output" decreases ... you have the same share of a smaller pie. Some jobs are straightforwardly "hours worked = output" - like they're manual labor jobs, simple service jobs (hours spent serving customers), etc. Even in other jobs, just because some of 40 hours are wasted doesn't mean a 20hr work week will cut the less-efficient hours disproportionately. The less efficient hours are often background work necessary for the more 'efficient' hours (commute, wind-up and wind-down, general coordination, finding clients), and in ""knowledge work"" each hour builds ... knowledge that makes a worker more productive over time.

Just by econ 101, this has massive deadweight loss over the 'tax single people', like a pigouvian tax vs a production restriction. If an unmarried person wants to work 40 hours a week and donate half their income (and actualized productive activity) to the married, isn't that better than working 20 hours a week and spending the other 20 on video games?

I think I may have just fallen in love with you.

On a more serious note, I wish this was brought up more! It’s amazing how even though double income full time only happened a few decades ago it’s so ingrained in the culture people can’t fathom going back. Capitalism is a gnarly beast.

What if I as a man want to be the one staying at home???

I prefer apparently gender-neutral policies.

Ah, but what if I don't want to restore gender roles?

what about illegal immigrants working full time? Yes, what about them? How can you hope to fix the fertility rates if you can't fix immigration?

Good recipe for land of omnipresent black markets and universal snitching and snooping (nothing like laws that ban something everyone does and everyone has to do to survive).

Such countries have many problems, but illegal immigration is not one of them. Such countries do not need big and beautiful border walls, such countries need strong anti-fascist protection barriers.

everyone does and everyone has to do to survive

.. everyone needs illegal immigrants ?

I am talking about whole of OP's clever plan, forbidding people to work for living (not even private patch of potato allowed).

Such times and places existed, but they were not immigration magnets, to put it mildly.

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