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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.

Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, called the program an example of the "new socialist right." Conservative personality Tomi Lahren likened it to the money that was sent out during the COVID-19 pandemic that "destroyed our workforce and supply chain" and raised the possibility that it could create a "giant fraud boondoggle."

Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not? The payment is certainly not ideal, perhaps an argument could be made for support working parents as well. But I think this is at least on the right track. We hear people complain about the cost of raising children all the time, (though I suspect this isnt a genuine complaint for most - many who are saying this probably wouldn't have children even if the cost were $0) but I think this may encourage the few who do actually think like this to go through and continue with more.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

So I've been listening to some LSAT tutor podcasts lately. On the LSAT, there is a section for "Logical Reasoning", where some questions can be of type "flaw" where the tester has to find the fatal flaw in the reasoning of the passage. One tip/trick the tutor mentions is imagine your worst political enemy and pretend that the argument is being spoken by them, for some people, the flaws will start jumping out. I think you can use that trick to quickly think of how this proposal is flawed. I can think of the following:

  1. "SAHP" is one term, "welfare leeches" is another.
  2. The fund this comes from was supposed to support working parents, so this change is actually harming them (reduced allocation, longer wait time, etc.). Some families are already supported, the ones who enter the labor force as well.
  3. This move is a Presidential executive overreach of what was statutorily allocated by Congress for working parents, this would be illegal. Right or wrong, change the law to get it going. Principles are only worth something when it's hard.
  4. If the point is to support fertility rates, the 9k should be per kid, not per family. If a family has a kid, they already qualify for the $9k. The second kid calculation does not take that $9k into account because it doesn't move the needle.
  5. Also, the type of people who would be moved to have a kid for the $9k is not the type you want to have kids.

edit1: I striked points 4 and 5 because as it turns out the $9k might just be an average and is not just a one time payment based on how the Child Care and Development Fund currently works.

This board has more than a few users who never question the President on anything, so no, you can’t be the only one.

I notice that the money is coming out of an existing appropriation which subsidizes working parents. The most likely effect is encouraging some of those dual-income parents to quit.

I think this is stupid. At least the Trump Accounts were directly tied to the kid.

Yes, we can all agree that women provide no value to society if they're not running up credit card debt so she can look good while girlbossing at 40 hour a week email job. That way, she's contributing to GDP 2-fold; her earnings, then paying a nanny to raise her kids instead of her.

You guys get that when Samuelson said that "if a man marries his maid, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) actually goes down" he was making a joke, not an earnest policy proposal, no?

The most likely effect is shifting some of the money to families with one non-working parent- probably the father in most cases, because everything about the underclass is horribly dysfunctional. Even the underclass isn't replacing waged income with $9k/yr.

Story time.

I have 4 small kids and a SAH wife. Even with this modest family, the government has made basic errors with our taxes every year the youngest has been alive (3 years in a row now). For example:

  1. I live in California, and the California tax form 540 only has space for 3 children. For larger families, the official instructions are to write a letter explaining the situation to get the extra tax credits. Apparently this is so infrequent that there isn't even a form for it! Two out of the 3 years, California has lost this letter and not applied the tax credit for the 4th child until I do dozens of back-and-forths with the tax board.

  2. This year, the IRS had a mistake reading one of the SSNs of the children, and so they didn't count any of the children as deductible. (Apparently the OCR system they use didn't like the font of my pdf writer, but it's the same font as before... and they should already know all the SSNs...) We've been doing back-and-forths with the IRS since April and they still haven't resolved this for us.

So I don't trust the government at all to properly handle any sort of tax breaks/etc for large families.

I'll say one thing, this is a beautiful example of how modern "conservativism" has completely erased itself in pursuit of nonsense cultural war grievances and virtue signaling. They're taking already appropriated money set aside for working parents meant to encourage them to be productive members of society and putting it into doing the exact opposite and promoting welfare dependency. Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches? That's crazy. But of course, socialist welfare thought is the default now, we can all just coast off the rich if we ban trade, nationalize their companies, give infinite subsidies (especially to the old), and keep ramping up on debt.

But ok maybe birthrates would be worth it, but this is a policy that is very unlikely to actually promote any new childbirths, given the failure of similar ideas wherever they've been tried.

  • -16

So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?

If Alice is paid less than the cost of daycare for working, would do a better job than the daycare, and would prefer spending time with her own children to spending time at work, then working that job is not economically efficient. Subsidizing paid childcare is thus an obvious example of creating economic inefficiency, and the stay-at-home parents who get screwed by their exclusion have understandably been complaining. (Subsidizing childcare in general isn't necessarily inefficient because the average person creates net-positive externalities which parents aren't paid for because it's illegal and impractical to sell your children into slavery or take out loans against their future earnings. Thus the job of creating people suffers from underinvestment.)

Now, it is possible that subsidizing daycare but not stay-at-home parents served a beneficial purpose despite the obvious economic inefficiency. The average first-world person has net-positive externalities but lots of people do not. I assume that is what some of the backlash against "welfare-queen"-enabling policies was, not just enabling people to be net-negative to societal productivity but paying them to create more people who will likely also be net-negative in a fashion that is obviously unsustainable because somebody has to actually pay taxes. Proposals to increase the fertility rate often take the form of reducing taxes rather than direct payments for this reason. However the new proposal would require that the spouse be working 35+ hours a week, which might be sufficient to make it net-positive despite it cutting out at higher income levels.

I think one reason SAHM is hard is it’s a minority choice. As a result, there is almost a prisoner’s dilemma where if both Alice and Susie stayed home, each would like it more but if only one stays home it’s isolating.

Arguably getting more women to stay home increases the happiness of each SAHM.

So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?

Daycares actually take care of multiple children at once. I know, quite surprising isn't it?

Even for the youngest infants in my state of NC it's a 5x efficiency gain. Past 2 years old it's 10x. Maybe you don't think it's worth it, but framing it as cancelling out is incorrect. The entire premise of your comment falls into pieces with that basic fact.

Daycares actually take care of multiple children at once

Do they?

Assuming that the situation in California is representative, something like 40% of all care givers that receive government funding are PO boxes with no physical address, how do we know that they are taking care of anyone at all, much less multiple someones?

California tends to be one giant outlier, so I’m not sure it’s representative.

But also, what are you talking about? All I could find with a casual search were teacher:child ratios.

We have a much better way of measuring whether it cancels out than the number of children per carer: the number of dollars. If some of the dollars instead go to "the construction workers who built the daycare building" and "the daycare administrators who handle the legal issues and overhead of taking care of other people's children" that doesn't represent an increase in efficiency. If anything having a lower carer to child ratio will on average correspond to lower quality (not to mention differences like how on average carers care less than parents do), so if daycare costs more than Alice's job pays she is paying more for lower quality. Rather than deciding on Alice's behalf that daycare must be more efficient because it has more children, we can let her compare her wages to the cost of daycare (not to mention other factors like how much she likes her job) and decide for herself. Except that, by subsidizing paid childcare, we distort this comparison and end up paying her to take the economically less efficient option. Equally subsidizing childcare whether she does it herself or pays a daycare to do it removes this distortion, letting her once again decide for herself based on her individual situation which is the best option.

Like a lot of pricing issues in the US, a lot of the costs are from unnecessary regulations, like the rather famous example of food preparation extending so far it might even cover peeling a banana.

An argument of economic inefficiency because of regulation isn't a rebuttal at all, the answer is clear and obvious to stop driving up costs. Construction especially is well proven to not have to be nearly as expensive as it. It's the same logic behind saying Mamdani's grocery store might be better than the private alternatives cause they won't deal with taxes and other costs but also duh yeah if the private alternatives are being handicapped then it's not a fair fight to begin with.

If the problem is government, you can't argue the only solution is more government. And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.

Like a lot of pricing issues in the US, a lot of the costs are from unnecessary regulations...

...If the problem is government, you can't argue the only solution is more government.

All the more reason to cut out the middle man and distribute the money to parents directly.

Regardless of what improvements can be made to daycare regulations, "childcare subsidies but only if you pay for someone else to do it" is distortionary and produces economic inefficiency. Even if you hypothetically fixed regulations so hard that paying for daycare was always cheaper than even the worst-paying jobs, it would still be paying people trading off between "more money so we can save up for a cruise" and "getting to spend time with my kids instead of in an Amazon warehouse" to take the non-utility-maximizing option.

Making the childcare subsidies less distortionary is not "more government" in any meaningful sense, especially since it's coming out of the same fund so it is literally the same number of tax dollars being distributed. And of course until such hypothetical improvements are made we get the current situation where daycare for a couple children often costs more than the entire take-home pay for one of the parents, but the government will pay people to use it.

And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.

I think you are underestimating the overhead inherent in things like property costs, having a formal organization where people can sign up their kids, and compensating for the lower trustworthiness of multiple for-pay non-parent carers. Regarding the last I'm reminded of the statistic that non-relatives in the home are massively over-represented in abuse, while obviously some parents are abusive or neglectful it's less common. Not to mention the simple fact that more carers means a higher chance that at least one is bad. So if you're having strangers take care of your children there's an incentive to pursue overhead-increasing safety measures and expensive signaling like "all carers have a college degree in Early Childhood Education" or "daycare seems very well-maintained and high-class" to reduce risk, regardless of regulatory requirements. In any case, whether it can be made dramatically cheaper or not, subsidizing it over unpaid childcare is fundamentally paying people on the margin to choose it even if it would otherwise be the worse choice.

There is also a presumption that taking care of kids is the only output. A SAHM can help build a community especially if there is a critical mass

Not to mention how many of the daycare dollars are "wasted" because the child is sick and thus forced to stay home to avoid spreading the infection, which is usually not reimbursed despite the child not being cared for by the daycare.

They're taking money already appropriated set aside, and sending it to their supporters instead of their opponents.

I don't see the problem. Sure, I'd like to cut the appropriation, but that's not on the table, so between the options 1) do nothing and 2) do this, I'll take 2.

They're taking money already appropriated set aside, and sending it to their supporters instead of their opponents.

Republican supporters are jobless leeches, and democrat supporters are working parents? Interesting claim but perhaps.

  • -13

I suspect the median recipient is a nonvoter.

Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches?

Assuming you arent being sarcastic - Cmon, SAHP aren't leeches. Having and raising a child in a loving marriage to adulthood is a worthy and valid contribution. You cant have people working if there are no people to start with. How are stay at home moms/dads not "contributing"?

Being paid welfare by the government to stay at home instead of working is the literal definition of a leech here.

  • -13

This is almost certainly not driving anyone out of the workforce- the amount is simply too low.

I don't think you are thinking of this right - you aren't adequately considering the costs of a job vs being a stay at home parent.

Let's say you have two kids and are trying to send them to even a decent quality daycare. That's $2k a month easy (vast understatement in a lot of cities). Then there's gas and depreciation on the car you drive to work as well. And all of that is net dollars you are spending. So let's call it $24k plus $3k gas/depreciation a year to get to your job.

Now maybe you make ok money, $50k or something. Now that gets taxed, and if your spouse makes similar it's hitting the highest marginal rate of the two of you, but if you qualify for this it isn't getting taxed a whole lot, let's call it you net $42k a year. So even with all the daycare and everything you are making a bit of money, $15k a year, minimum wage ish. This is a pretty shit deal, but you are at least net positive.

Now if a $9k subsidy comes along, suddenly instead of netting 15k to have your kids sick all the time, get poor quality care particularly <1/2/3 (depending on the study), spend your days sitting in traffic and working a meh job, you can net 9k to do none of that. That's a pretty tempting offer.

obviously all numbers approximate, but hopefully it gets the idea.

Now in some ways this subsidy already exists, it's called "married men make more money than anyone else" for a variety of reasons and let their wives stay home".

For middle class people this is true. But if you qualify for this program you also qualified for government funded childcare.

then the tradeoff of federal dollars is even more direct?

It also freed up the non working spouse to do more non paid but valuable work (eg make meals, build community)

What if you're being paid by the government to increase tax revenue in future years? Leech or nah?

What if you're being paid by the government to increase tax revenue in future years?

They're not paying for people to have kids in general, they're paying people to stay home and not work. If you wanna go down that route, then we should question why have requirements for any welfare parents of a child receive.

And that's all assuming it works, which there is scarce evidence it does.

They're not paying for people to have kids in general, they're paying people to stay home and not work.

Doesn't the policy very specifically pay people to stay home and take care of kids? Isn't the specific policy about paying some people to take care of kids instead of other people?

I'm not sure that I actually like the actual policy (because among other things means-testing these programs create serious welfare traps that I think are bad) but I think I can see some important practical and in-principle differences from paying people to stay home and not work.

Yes, but the money would come out of a fund for parents who don’t stay home.

I don’t think they can change the welfare cliff but the easy solution is simply to phase out the welfare so the marginal tax rate isn’t too bad.

Do you use this description for any other category of people being paid welfare by the government to sit at home not working? Or only married mothers?

The phrase "not working" is doing a lot of work here, pun not intended. Taking care of children below a certain age is work.

It's work, of course. But it's not bringing external money into the family unit, so it functions as avoidance of consumption (external child care providers) rather than income. Perhaps we should impute the income of the SAHM and tax them on it, then we can call it work in the external sense. (I kid, I kid)

Yes of course, if they're being paid money to sit at home and not work then they are literally leeches. Heck this program is extra leech since it's being funded by taking from one currently going to working parents.

A leech is someone who takes from others in a negative sum way.

The whole theory here is that SAHM creates positive sum outcomes (eg better kids, perhaps more kids, better communities, husbands who are more focused to earn more money). Thus not leeches.

The money is being redirected from working parents.

productive members of society

SAHM are productive members of society. Working in corporate and making line go up is not the only productive use of a human, and raising children is in the top percentage of non-fake jobs one can have.

If, for any given woman, being a SAHM is more productive than what she would be doing working then society ought to be willing to compensate her such that she should prefer being a SAHM to working. Pretty rarely see any proposal like this in practice, though.

SAHM are productive members of society.

Sitting at home watching soap operas and scrolling tiktok while helicopter parenting your children away from learning basic responsibilities and competence is not productive.

Working in corporate and making line go up is not the only productive use of a human, and raising children is in the top percentage of non-fake jobs one can have.

Parents already spend more time with their children now. So much that in many ways it's to the detriment of the kids! My parents used to go out and play when they were young, now children can't even walk to a nearby pond in gated communities. I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!

We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college!

It's a lose lose lose. This welfare society drains money from productive members, encourages welfare leeching, and cripples the growth of our youth even more.

  • -15

Sitting at home watching soap operas and scrolling tiktok while helicopter parenting your children away from learning basic responsibilities and competence is not productive.

This is absurdly uncharitable. I'm sure you can find women who are shirking responsibility and ruining their kids, but there are far more women who would do right by their kids given the chance to do so. Besides that, someone has to raise the kids, and their parents are going to do a much better job, on average, than daycare operators or teachers.

It goes beyond this. One societal problem wr have is atomization and the breakdown of community. If you encourage more SAHM naturally they will form more community. If you are the only SAHM in the neighborhood it will be a bit lonely. But if every third house is a SAHM you’ll probably start to build relationships with the other SAHMs. Timmy will play with Samantha and the moms will chat. Maybe Alice watches Samantha whilst Bianca has to run an errand. Bianca returns the favor. Over time, community is built.

This is absurdly uncharitable. I'm sure you can find women who are shirking responsibility and ruining their kids, but there are far more women who would do right by their kids given the chance to do so.

We already do spend more time with our kids than previous generations. The very basis that current parents aren't "given the chance to do so" is factually wrong.

Am I supposed to believe that the silent gen/baby boomer/Gen x parents were all just unloving and bad? No, I don't think that's the case.

What we do see however is overparenting. Helicopter parents who won't even let their tweens go to another aisle in a grocery store, who simply wouldn't let their teenagers out of sight in a mall even if malls were still a thing, people who show up and do their kids laundry in university! I had a great 25-26 year old intern fresh graduate who still had her mother trying to butt in once when something happened at my work. She's lucky I'm very forgiving and understanding of her situation and I know that she was embarrassed about it too (I even helped her find a better living situation) but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that.

If I was a typical boss and wasn't well aware of how helicopter parenting was harming children and their independence already I might not have been as kind to her as I was, and she might have been stuck unable to free herself for even longer as she lost job after job because she got stuck with a crazy mother. This shit is getting far more common. Kids need more freedom and independence so they can grow and thrive, not even more time being dependent on their mommies and daddies.

We already do spend more time with our kids than previous generations.

Your link is about children under eighteen and explicitly controls for children under five. Helicopter parenting a 16 year old and taking care of a 2 year old are not the same thing, even if they both are literally "spend time with kids".

I'm not talking about people not spending time with their kids, and I have no idea why you are going on that road. I'm saying that someone has to be around to keep an eye on little kids. You need to change diapers if they are young enough, make them some food for lunch, etc. None of this requires the type of helicopter parenting you are bringing up out of nowhere. But it does require someone to be home, and many parents feel that they can't afford to have only one income in the household.

I'm not talking about people not spending time with their kids, and I have no idea why you are going on that road.

I'm saying that someone has to be around to keep an eye on little kids.

How do you think that sort of thing can be measured besides time spent with the children?

You need to change diapers if they are young enough, make them some food for lunch, etc.

Yeah, I'm a parent myself I'm well aware of this. Both me and my wife even took extended leave off for our children so we could spend the first year or so which we are fortunate enough to have saved up enough to do. But even then we still had daycare and stuff for them! Even at that very young age it is good for the children to have time away from us learning to navigate the world of other adults and their peers.

My kids are far more dependable and mature than many of the other children in parents groups I've taken a part in and that's because we are not coddling. And our kids are still less independent than what my own parents experienced in their youth, in part because we don't have the freedom to send them on errands and such. There needs to be less parenting among many of these families, not more.

This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society? This argument is so lacking I can't help but feel you are actually setting up a strawman argument in favor of the $9K SAHM subsidy.

This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society?

No, and I'm doubting your reading ability here that you think I'm giving her as an example of welfare leeching and not as an example of how society is coddling children through demands of overparenting given the surrounding context of my paragraph about that exact topic. Only the youngest of children need a 24/7 helicopter watch team over them, and yet we're extending it out to tweens not even going to other aisles in a grocery store.

This "parenting" is the exact opposite of productive, and we need less of it.

I would have been against this 5 years ago or super against it outside of that time frame. Here’s my thoughts:

  1. American fiscal capacity is amazing now. It really feels like we can run an economy with only 10-15% of the population working and everyone else on benefits or make-work programs. With half of our smartest people playing zero-sum games like trading or market making on prediction markets. It would be nice to get back to 80% of people working but I don’t know how. For all the things we subsidize I think subsidize children is the best.

  2. I don’t like it with current demographics. If we deport more I like it more. 50% of blacks are on government programs or government jobs (basically fake). I am fine with sharing with them now because we are rich enough but seems like we have migrant communities that will max abuse it.

  3. Way better than unlimited disability for benefits. If we are going to do UBI it should be for everyone.

  4. Decent chance the amount of people who need to work falls to <5% of the population by 2040 so something needs to happen. This actually isn’t rare event in human history. At one point 90% did agriculture so it’s not impossible we basically figure out how to make everything without working. The rest of the economy will be tastemakers. Weirdly architect was a terrible career for a while but the jobs of the future will be the tastemaker - someone who can make a neighborhood look nice.

  5. Somehow I think rich and poor people will still exists even with unlimited material wealth. Baltimore or Haiti will still be a ghetto while Greenwich and Palm Beach will not be. It’s just the poor areas will have a lot of stuff but lack all the other things that make a community great. Being high IQ, Conscientious, honest, fun to be around, good looking etc will still matter. The Southside of Chicago will likely still be shooting each other even when unlimited money exists.

When was Architect ever a terrible career? There definitely have been periods of oversupply versus demand and/or people learning that their dreams of being Frank Lloyd Wright that drove them through University aren't going to happen and please boxtick the generic townhouses. But that goes for the vast majority of creative jobs, and even other 'high agency' ones where it turns out the Orchestra of whatever requires a lot more Triangle players than it does Virtuoso Soloists.

I thought it always had a reputation for bad pay versus the amount of education required. In part because it attracted people who thought it would be enjoyable. Maybe I’m wrong on that. And there are definitely some routes you can make money like getting more into construction management/development.

I needed a career to pick as an example where human taste would have value versus AIs being very productive. Something that is affluent tastemaker and architect seemed like it fit that.

I mean sure you're not gonna make Surgeon or Corporate Lawyer money but I'm pretty sure you're still better off as an Architect than like pursuing academia or a bunch of other things that might require a thick stack of degrees to get you through the door. The most successful architects definitely end up more in construction management or in a generic quasi-sales/general business management role, but that's essentially every career.

I didn’t want to denigrate architects but mostly wanted to pick an white collar occupation that could rise in stature with higher productivity as excess wealth could be spent on design and community design.

True. Also a high-tier white collar profession that allows for nominal artistic creativity without obviously being a complete and utter crapshoot like being a musician or an artist.

I think it's just very hard to get started in that career. Of course every career has that to some extent, but in architecture it's especially hard to get people to trust you with that first, crucial career building step of being lead designer on a building. Meanwhile there's a ton of students getting architecture degrees thinking it'll be fun.

I would have loved to be a boxticker architect. Sadly, when I was looking at universities, they all wanted the next Frank Lloyd Wright. I walked into the admissions office, excellent SATs in hand, and before the topic came up was told, "oh, don't worry if your SATs are bad, we only really care about your portfolio!"

To which I (whose art courses had ended only slightly past stick figures) effectively responded, "Portfoli-what?"

Interesting. Maybe educational pathways in Australia are different for Architecture since my Architecture ambitious friends had essentially the inverse experience where they were great at sketching beautiful buildings then ran into a wall of the civil engineering adjacent subjects

  • Architecture is an art degree, while civil engineering is a STEM degree

  • But the govt. requires you to be an architect, not a civil engineer, in order to design a utilitarian apartment building, office building, school, or prison

Make it make sense. (Though, to be fair, not all states have this requirement.)

I figure when you have guild-like organizations advocating for the financial benefit of its members, any challenge to labor monopolies from rival organizations or individuals is always met with the greatest resistance possible. Allowing engineering credentials to be used in place of architectural credentials is a long term threat.

It's a general issue with university admissions, I think. No university department wants to be known as reliable producers of pretty-good-quality employees, they want to be known as the people who first spotted and nurtured a genius.

This is definitely not true. Schools care about volume and general reputation. If nothing else, state colleges usually target that market.

I think it's important to note this isn't a new appropriation authorized by Congress (at least, not yet) rather the money is supposed to be coming from the existing Child Care and Development Fund which subsidizes childcare for low income parents who work or are in education or training. So, it's a reallocation of a government subsidy from working parents to non-working parents.

So this isn't really natalist at all then, it's just punishing working parents and telling them they should be stay-at-home welfare leeches instead.

Amazing.

yeschad.png

The idea that double-income families are bad and self-defeating is not new or limited to social conservatism. Elizabeth Warren (yes, that one) wrote a book about it back in 2003.

If anything, we're not punishing double-income families enough.

Incentivizing people not to work is in fact a bad thing. If it led to a significant spike in fertility then maybe it might be justifiable. This is not the case, however.

I'm not sure what you think Warren's book does to buttress your argument. The thrust of her book is that when people have more money from an additional worker in the family, they spend that money on things instead of saving it.

I'm pretty sure the point of that book is that life becomes worse when two-working-parent families become commonplace. They are competing with all the other two-working-parent families so stuff isn't any more affordable, while now there is no longer a parent at home to do the non-economic stuff. That's why it's called a trap.

I thought the trap was legible vs. illegible value. Your non-economic labor had value but you didn’t realize how much.

This is going off Scott’s review. I haven’t read the book.

Neither have I tbf, I was going by my understanding of the popular understanding of the term :)

The "trap" is rising expectations where families respond to having more money by blowing it on stuff like bigger houses, vacations, and fancy crap. It's a normal human reaction, but not one many people are aware that they'll likely fall into themselves, and then they become unhappy when they have to have 2 people working to maintain the same spot on the lifestyle treadmill.

Women entering the workforce drove down the wages of their husbands and sons.

This isn’t true. The influx of women into the labor market since the 1970s wasn’t really a negative economic force but more of a survival mechanism in response to changes in underlying factors in the economy. What happened in response was banks and the housing market weaponized the transition from single-income to dual-income households to fuel a massive expansion of private debt. The standard narrative we all often hear was that this owed more to a change in social norms (and that’s true to some degree), but it was largely driven by the opposite effect.

The mid-1970s was when you first saw real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) begin to stagnate or fall, and that was due to anti-labor policies and weaker unions. So to keep their families afloat and maintain their standard of living wives entered the labor force in response. If you’re a dyed in the wool traditionalist who wants women back in the household, before you embark on a public propaganda campaign to brainwash women back into the home, shoot the banking sector first.

Wages today are significantly higher than before the days when women entered the workforce.

LOL. LMAO, even.

Sure, nominal wages are higher than ever. Held constant in something like the oldest, most widely used, and most stable form of money on earth (gold) they're lower than ever. Priced in silver, before the CRA you were paid in money that was real silver, you will see the same thing.

By the way, the price of a good beef cow has pretty much always been one ounce of gold, and guess what, it still is. Houses when priced in gold are reasonably priced and have not inflated like mad. Wages are significantly higher because they're being paid in scrip that's significantly less valuable.

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Stay at home moms do something valuable, they're worth encouraging, and this policy is terribly designed. But it's also just not enough to push very many people out of the workforce. Full time employment at minimum wage pays a lot more than this program does, and 90% of workers make more than double the minimum wage.

I think you are ignoring the costs of working, the marginal tax rate of working, and the quality of life differences for SAHM.

My wife was a teacher. When she ran the math with our first kid (and the quality of childcare she wanted) working only came out ahead by about 10k. She made the decision the 10k wasn’t worth it.

It’s certainly on-brand.

Punishing single parents is good, actually, and subsidizing them is bad. If they didn't have the government reaching into my pocket to take my money and give it to them, maybe they'd find a man to marry them and raise their children.

But as long as the government has its hand in my pocket, the money should go to subsidize good things like intact families, not bad things like single mothers.

For the class that actually becomes single mothers, there are simply not eligible men to marry. And that's with a supremely reasonable definition of eligible(like non substance addicted, full time employed, not currently engaged in the criminal justice system- simply not happening below the income cutoff for this program).

I suspect that this will be used by, like, grad students, or families with the husband on disability, and stuff like that.

My household would benefit from this and it would be nice. Would the income be taxable? Because that means it's gonna come out of my highest bracket.

What I'd much rather see is something like a 25% tax negation per child. Frankly, I'd rather incentivize people who pay substantial taxes to have more kids rather than stimulating the segments of the population for whom $9k is a life-changing amount of money.

Child tax credits already do this if you're operating in the right number-of-kids/tax bracket space, it just doesn't scale.

Yeah it's negligible for me and I have plenty of kids.

It’s limited to parents earning 2/3 of the state’s median income or less. Of course i’d rather the money go to poor housewives than to daycare operators, but none of us will benefit from it.

I think using these sorts of programs to hit daycare operators (and also schoolteachers with various voucher programs) in a Schmittian attack on political enemies is an under-utilized lens with which to examine these sorts of things. But I think that the media has a hard time examining things this way because that opens up uncomfortable possibilities about other programs...

Of course the government has been running a program to use welfare policy design to destroy the american family for a long time. Insofar as this policy pushes to reverse that, it's a good thing. I don't find it particularly well designed but it's an improvement- and possibly the best Trump can do.

It's means tested; you wouldn't get it at all.

Oh, lovely. Sounds about right.

It is obviously a very good idea. Traditionalism is more importan than liberalism, and conservatism that conserves liberalism rather than traditionalism is not my ally. Traditionalism is also Christian Western American tradition, attempts to support other forms of traditon are not conservatism and not my ally.

There is a broken pattern now, that anyone with eyes is able to recognize: Welfare is incentivization.

Subsidy spending is bad! Ok but what about the needy? Well of course, we'll subsidize the needy.

All well and good, unless being needy is at all downstream from individual choices.

The libertarian response: Just remove all the welfare is absolutely nothing but controlled opposition. It's pie in the sky nonsense. Libertarian boomers are free to distribute their Medicare and Social security check to the taxpaying base or better yet their married children who can't afford to start a family, while they go on cruises. I won't hold my breath.

Just cut spending mean: Don't spend on the base! Spend on the liberals. Establishment conservatism hates its base.

But that's not the only issue with the 'just cut the spending' crowd. It's also wrongly ordered. I've typed at length about "Liberalism of the Gaps" and my interest in post-detraditionalisation, and this is as good an example as any.

I don't think atomizing society is good, I don't think atomic liberalism is good, While I agree in the abstract in reducing spending, I'm not motivated by many of the same reasons as Con-Inc is here. Supporting traditional institutions like marriage and stay at home mothers is among the highest goods. When we've returned to a healthy social order, then I'll entertain discussions about why spending thats already being spend shouldn't be spent on good things instead of bad things.

I live near Section 8 housing and from what I can tell all the mothers are already stay-at-home. Stay-in-the-front-yard, even, when the weather is nice.

Yeah, it's a dumb idea. You can't support families in general with redistribution, because for every dollar of help you're also committing at least a dollar of harm. This mostly applies even if you try to target the harm -- if you target the childless, you make their lives more difficult and thus discourage them from having children. Even if you target the old, you end up harming their children making them less likely to have children. There's the old-and-childless, but there just aren't enough of them (and if your policies were successful they'd be self-limiting). If you use a means-tested program (as this is), you're helping the poor have children but making it less likely the wealthier have children.

There are also, of course, the hazards of making people into government dependents. And while the proposal claims to be using existing funds, it seems rather likely that once it is funding both R and D clients it will grow. And it will be used for fraud at a massive scale, like "elder care" and "learing centers".

If you use a means-tested program (as this is), you're helping the poor have children but making it less likely the wealthier have children.

The wealthy are already taxed heavily from what I understand. It doesnt seem to deter them all that much from having kids, depending on how high up the ladder you go. I doubt people in Elon Musks bracket are gonna feel much of general dent. Maybe an argument could be made for the top 9.9% of earners.

The wealthy are already taxed heavily from what I understand.

Are they? You could literally double the tax rate and still stay below Kennedy-Johnson rates, which were a tax cut.

The wealthy are already taxed heavily from what I understand. It doesnt seem to deter them all that much from having kids, depending on how high up the ladder you go. I doubt people in Elon Musks bracket [snip]

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. If you have to go up that high you've conceded the argument.

Mostly dumb.

  1. The US needs to spend less money, not more, given the deficit. If this is offset by cuts to Boomer entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, then that would be another story, but we all know that's not going to happen. The median voter wants to bankrupt the US while blaming their outgroup "it was always the other guys who were spending recklessly, my side was just spending in retaliation!"
  2. Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.
  3. Flat payments like this, if they have any effect are usually dysgenic.
  4. Why payments for stay at home moms instead of simple baby bonuses? Having a parent take care of the childwork for the first few years is genuinely labor intensive, but after that kids mostly take care of themselves apart from occasional doctor's appointments and helicopter parent stuff. Society likes to lionize parents that stay home for some reason, but once the kid is no longer a toddler the parent will spend their time either doing helicopter parent stuff or using their "stay at home mom" status as an excuse to bum around watching Netflix, neither of which should be incentivized by the government.

Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.

I recently came upon this study looking at the effect of access to housing on fertility in Brazil. It uses a Brazilian housing-finance system where people contribute regularly to a common pool and access to housing credit is partly determined by lottery. This gave the researchers a way of comparing people who received access to housing earlier with otherwise similar people who did not.

The effects seem particularly large for younger people: among those aged 20–25, receiving housing increased the probability of having a child by around 32% and the number of children by around 33% relative to the comparison group. Which suggests that housing and credit constraints could have a fairly large effect on fertility, especially when they delay access to housing during the ages when people are most likely to start families.

Child credits, on the other hand, mostly support people once they are already in a position to have children, rather than helping create the conditions that make having children possible. Which of course this study isn't either, since it's essentially randomly picking winners in a zero-sum housing system.

Maybe this study isn't very representative, I don't know, but this sort of thing seems to be rarely tried or studied. Efforts are mostly targeted at people who already have children, and with first births now happening relatively late, that leaves us subsidizing a cohort with a fairly limited remaining fertility window.

Late birth cohort may have a small fertility window, but their voting window is probably just starting to ramp up.

The problem with housing benefits for the young is that it's part of the old "subsidize demand, restrict supply" schtick that populists love but which keeps failing over and over and over. If you subsidize demand, most of that subsidy just flows to incumbent landowners. If you actually want to help young people in that regard, you could do some federally-enforced YIMBY stuff, but there's just no appetite for that. In Trump's affordability push he explicitly said that he wouldn't try to lower people's property values, and MAGA's reaction was basically "this is fine".

Also, in Brazil housing affordability might be a real limiter, but in America most young people who want to get their own place can at least rent their own apartment. It's expensive as hell, but America is wealthy enough to mostly face-tank that.

Hell, trailers are still affordable, and it’s better than 95% of the planet. They’re just stigmatized. America making housing affordable wont solve the status competition thats thé real economic block for childbearing, because that’s fundamentally impossible.

Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not?

I think that if anything, this is even underestimated. For instance the cost for educating students in K-12 system ranges for $12k in Mississippi to $32k in New York per year. So in a sense if some family does homeschooling with children having regular retesting, they should get the same support - as in such a case the family literally saves tens of thousands of dollars for taxpayer. And I'd like to see the tests having the same standards as let's say lower quartile in public schools. By the way with the current results of let's say New York public schools, 40%+ of students would fail if they were homeschooled.

Now we live in an insane system where we need dual income family, where the salary of a women with three children does not even cover the cost of their preschool or K-12 education, and the result is that there is almost 50/50 chance that they will score well belove the required grade level. The efficiency is horrendous. I think this proposal goes well in hand with age old starve the beast proposals.

Something like 6% of Americans are homeschooled now. 30% of moms are stay-at-home. Assuming all homeschoolers have one of those moms, that’s still only 1 in 5 who are getting out of the public school system. Incentivizing more births will mostly add more kids to public schools.

Now, I think this is going to incentivize stay-at-home parents before it actually incentivizes more kids, since the money is coming from subsidies for working parents. So out of every 5 parents it takes out of the workforce, maybe 1 of them will put in the effort to homeschool.

On the gripping hand, a flat payout is regressive. Do you think homeschooling is more popular amongst high-powered corporate types or part-time convenience-store clerks?

You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.

Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.

Yes, the current system is messy and perverse. Elizabeth Warren was right about some stuff.

I’m saying that this kind of subsidy for single-income families will not get them to pull their kids out of public school. They will mostly take the payout and keep collecting the $24k of public daycare.

Worse, the proposed funding source is currently earmarked for two-income families. Some of them will lose benefits, quit their jobs, pay less in taxes, and keep their kids in public school. Lose-lose.

If the Republicans conditioned this payout on homeschooling, and combined it with sweeping cuts to make public school even less appealing, you would get more people out of the system. But they aren’t doing that. The President has approximately zero incentive to court the small government faction, which is why he’s bombing Iran and subsidizing his cronies.

IME homeschooling is fairly middle class- the poorer people trying it tend to be pushed into the public school system or charters as a cheaper alternative, while the wealthy tend to bail out by paying lots of money for private schools that fit their particular educational philosophy. And make no mistake- the vast majority of homeschoolers are not doing this out of a commitment to 'education freedom' or 'children's rights' or even really opposition to systems.

IME homeschooling is fairly middle class-

Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.

The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.

By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.

age old starve the beast proposals.

Yeah, this makes sense. The government is going broke because we spend all our money on old people and degenerate lumpenproles. This situation is politically unfixable. You can't take away people's benefits. But you can promise benefits to a new group of people. So why not give it to the best, most deserving group? The government is going broke anyway, let's at least split the corpse fairly.

Of course, this proposal is unlikely to pass. But if you force Democrats to vote against it, it reveals their true colors as haters of traditional families.

Stay at home with kids means less usage for other things such as preschool and other programs, so it is to put private alternative on more competitive footing. It could actually save taxpayer money.

This seems like a very good policy and it's nice to see Republicans actually do something for families for once. Republicans really could do a lot more now that concern for birthrate is on their radar. The fact that it's Democrats who talk about free school lunch and paid maternal leave seems very counterintuitive.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

This is really hard to do on a policy level compared to directly supporting STAHPs though. I'm not sure what policy levers that could be pulled here outside of banning DEI and more gender blind civil rights law enforcement.

I'm not sure what policy levers that could be pulled here outside of banning DEI and more gender blind civil rights law enforcement.

Increase military pay and conditions?

Military pay has only kept up with the fake inflation rate, and my understanding (albeit from biased Reddit) is that the provided food and barracks are widely criticized. More women could join the military, but I doubt they will.

Thé provided food is disliked, but that just incentivizes soldiers to marry(and in the army, there is someone who wants to marry you).

The anecdotes I read imply soldiers get married a lot, but cheated and divorced a lot during deployments.

It turns out that poor but physically-fit 20somethings don’t make the best decisions about women.

Poor but physically fit 20somethings who are often the only men with full time incomes in their social class and place, and who get spiffy uniforms and come with a house to live in where your parents don't...

What’s to stop, uh, let’s call them ‘people who don’t vote Republican’ just getting married for the free $10k? Even if you say ‘you must have been legally married for five years’ there’s no central registry unlike European countries, meaning it’s ripe for fraud plus plenty of anti-Republican underclass groups like Somalis actually have high rates of marriage.

Convincing blacks to marry instead of living in sin would do wonders for reducing what we spend on their dysfunction. It's a win-win. Yeah, some of the somalis will get the money, but they already were through daycare fraud, this is just a slightly different set of paperwork for them to fill out when they defraud the government out of the same amount of money.

One idea I've seen mooted is that people with children get a $50k tax deduction or something. Completely useless to fraudsters. Extremely useful to the high performing people who we want to be having children.

Ideally the policy would be to promote marriage and family formation and not just give Republican voters gibs. I don't actually see the problem here do you view reduced Black single parenthood as a bad thing? Having on SAHP requires more than just a marriage it requires coordination between parents and I imagine the amount of people who would abuse it would be less than you think.

So what if it benefits Somalis? Even in a totally cynical realpolitik way there are not that many of them and Minnesota was going Blue anyway. But more realistically making sure a Somali never gets a dime is such a bad policy priority. I thought we wanted to encourage marriage and families?

So what if it benefits Somalis?

I don't want somalis in my country, and I don't want their anchor babies given citizenship in my country, and I don't want them voting in my country.

I'd like it to benefit Americans, not Somalis.

Whats your beef with Somali's? You really gonna sack a policy that will benefit the majority of people just so you can shiv people you don't like?

They're very foreign, very recent, and very unnecessary. Why should anyone from Somali be let in, never mind so many? It's short hand both for African migration and Muslim migration.

Umm, Ok. But thats not really an argument against them. Your basically saying that you just dont like them. How is there migration any better or worse than any other group? Are they more violent, are they lazy, etc?

Ok great but there are Somalis here and they have US passports so you have to deal with them. I personally think it's a horrible idea to make policy based on a tiny minority.

Oh I want them dealt with, believe you me. Start with taking away their passports.

It's a good idea when necessary and a bad idea when not. It depends on the minority, the law, and what the law is intended to stop.

This is the Boomer school of conservative thought, most famously represented by George W. Bush.

Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.

And it's just entirely discredited. There is little assimilation. Somalians are a massive drain on the economy, on schools, on the justice system, on the benefits system, on social trust, the list goes on. And its not just in the US. This has been observed in countries like Denmark too, where Somalians remain net negative to the state economy throughout their entire lives, even men, even during the peak earnings years of 40-50 when almost everyone else is hugely positive.

Any policy that encourages the creation of more Somalians in the US is a terrible policy. And why they are a small minority now, its unequally distributed. The places where they concentrate are rapidly enshittifying. The phase change between "they're a tiny minority, to small to care about" to "you need Somalian votes to win an election" happens rapidly. Look at Minneapolis.

So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!

The Zoomer/Trump conservatism seems to just be blatant self-dealing. The "Boomer" version was a lot better, but the reality is that Boomers are in fact the most guilty of anyone in voting themselves budget-busting entitlement expansions.

Boomers are in fact the most guilty of anyone in voting themselves budget-busting entitlement expansions.

Exhibit A being COVID-19, of course, to the tune of several trillion.

"Taking away the [outgroup] gibs" and "voting for more [ingroup] gibs" are the same thing, by the way, because the way they're paid for is through inflation.

Whoever's not getting the gibs is therefore who's paying for it.

I think Exhibit A is the $6k Social Security tax break in the BBB, which is the Covid stimulus in perpetuity. The Covid payments were universal, so much less of a stealing from one's grandchildren dynamic.

There are 169,000 Somalians according to Wikipedia. Basically all of them live in Blue Areas the vast majority in Minnesota. Opposing a policy that would help a ton of Republican families encourage the birthrate and family formation. Because it would help the 0.0005% of America that is Somali is just cutting your nose off to spite you face. I never said we should have more of them or that they'd be net taxpayers or that integration hasn't failed. Just opposing a policy that's great for tens of millions of conservatives because it might help the Somalis is just asinine.

So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!

You'll never get gibs for Republicans if you can't pass any because the Somalis might get some. And also them being married and having families is better than them not doing that. Marriage has a civilizing influence on young men.

Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.

Bush got a majority of Muslim votes the first time. Family values and all.

As of 2024 census numbers (American Community Survey 1 year estimates) there are 259,694 people in the US who identified as Somalians, already a 60% jump from your outdated number. This is 0.076%, not 0.0005%.

So even though only roughly one in 1300 people in the United States is Somalia, they've already done a lot of damage in Minnesota. Extremely toxic groups are like that.

Bush got a majority of Muslim votes the first time. Family values and all.

Too good to check, and likely untrue, but let's assume it is. The problem is that, bizarrely, after September 11 we opened up the floodgates to Islamic immigration. The Muslim population has roughly tripled since then. And they are consistently one of the furthest left groups.

At only 2% of the U.S. population, they're still too small to care about right? Except that the call to prayer is being blasted from mosques in Dearborn and the Democratic Party is now nominating Senate candidates who think the U.S. deserved 9/11.

The time to stop these problems is when they're still "too small to care about" and before they transition to "too big to stop".

Side note: Wikipedia quality has really plummeted over the last decade. I recommend just skipping it and going right to AI which can pull data directly from the original sources.

I didn't say we should have unlimited Muslim immigration or really any Muslim immigration. Just that opposing polices to help families because it might help the 2% of Muslims is counterproductive.

SAHP is not just marriage, it’s a parent forgoing income to raise their children. This imposes a cost, and depending on the career path possibly a significant one.

Yeah but the poorer you are the less of a cost and a bunch of groups that are more likely to adopt the arrangement and/or work under the table in cash are Democrat bastions

Do you want to promote marriage and families or do you just want to hurt Democrats?

If all you do is pay the least productive ends of society for something they were going to do anyways, you're probably not accomplishing much.

Well a lot of them weren't going to get married so that's a plus and on the working class side it really does make it easier to have a stay home wife. I really do see it as a benefit for the working class not just the underclass and I actually dont think much of the underclass will actually do it.

Agree all around.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

IIRC, there's some whitepill data out there suggests married, college-educated whites in the U.S. actually have pretty decent fertility.

Which means the big problem is relationship formation. And its fairly dire. A high income man is much more likely to marry than a low earning one. This relationship does not hold for women. Women want to pair with men who earn more than them, but there aren't enough to go around.

If we want a higher birth rate, we need higher status for men. Which means we need fewer tax transfers targets at women and more targeted at men. Fortunately, we don't even need DEI for dudes. Simple fairness would make a huge difference.

The biggest problem for high-abikity fertility is the financial opportunity cost of children. They are expensive, and having kids means significant lifestyle cutbacks, even for relatively upper middle class working pairs. Do you realize how many fancy vacations you could take for a daycare budget and the amount of money parents have to sock away for college? Just give it to all married parents and means test at an aggressively high level (like 300k or something).

It does seem like subsidizing STAHPs would help lower income men support a wife though. I think plenty of working class people could benefit from this especially because it's $9000 instead of paying for daycare.

Fortunately, we don't even need DEI for dudes.

Are you sure? Educational attainment starts to diverge back in school, as soon as puberty hits the boys. Pure intelligence tests show they aren't dumber than the girls, but are held back by the school environment, which values feminine approach to work more.

But schools haven't changed in a vacuum. Modern office environment, outside specific narrow niches, is also feminized.

IIRC if you remove names from the assignments boys and girls get the same grades…

But schools haven't changed in a vacuum. Modern office environment, outside specific narrow niches, is also feminized.

4Chan may be able to meme a RETVRN to the office movement into existence, certainly it would make being on-site more appealing.

Might mad lads make Mad Men mainstream?

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