Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.
It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.
Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
Taking care of a baby can be very social ... as long as the other mother's aren't all at work.
And what exactly are these jobs that are a rest compared to taking care of a baby? Are they actually economically productive or are they bureaucratic fake jobs?
I have noticed that many of my peer parents make parenting more stressful than it needs to be, and don't invest enough in learning techniques to make it less stressful. Like, some parents don't even invest in baby-proofing and then they are constantly chasing their toddler around. But, the first year of baby is always going to be stressful because everything is so new, just as the first year at a brand new job is always going to be more stressful than a job one is highly experienced at.
Look up how much housing costs, and how much professional nannies cost, in a location where the software engineer and lawyer are making $500k combined. And you'll need at least two nannies, one overnight, one during the day. I don't think the math is going to work out very well. Also, there are a lot of greedy jobs that don't pay nearly as well as $250k, especially early in career.
It all adds up. On average, daycare in USA costs $18k a year per child ( https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/ ), which is the best measure of the total resources that it takes up, all-in. Median income for a 30yo man is $55k and for a woman $45k. So even with just two kids, the lower earning parent with the non-greedy job is not clearing much if anything over the cost of the daycare.
No, because you have to count all the employment going into running and supplying the daycare, which includes facilities, equipment, administration, extra staff, etc. You have to look at the all-in cost.
I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...
Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.
The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.
What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.
In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).
From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?
Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.
- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting
- Taxes
- Insurance
- Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance
- Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own.
- Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)
Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?
That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.
I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.
But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare
> Game Of Thrones
I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.
Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.
You are conflating social trends among young people to identify as gender non-confirming for social clout, with adults who have intractable gender dysphoria.
It's not just me who is conflating them, the official medical establishment doesn't treat children much differently these days. Zucker was canceled, "watchful waiting" or "reparative therapy" is officially condemned by the APA. "Intractable gender dysphoria" is not something that can be reliably or objectively diagnosed a priori. A relative of mine who has transitioned their son, partly based on medical advice, partly on the advice of adult trans friends, seems to repeating arguments about it being a fixed property and affirmative care being the only approach. Now, I personally do not think this boy has dysphoria at all, he sees a perfectly normal boy to me, he just liked Elsa and princess dresses as a kid because Elsa is a super-stimuli character. But that's not what the medical people say.
You can't separate the kids and adults issue because the most powerful activists who are making policy and getting people canceled are not making a proper distinction themselves.
You can't separate the kids and adults issue because there was a direct road from redefining the words "man" and "woman" to the medical "experts" like Diane Ehrensaft, cited by NPR and NY Times telling parents to not tell their four-year-old things like: "you have a penis, you can never grow up to be a woman or get pregnant, you will grow up to be a man, you are a boy."
I don't know the best way to accomplish that - maybe do some research and read some stories of transgender people published prior to 2015 before it became the political fight du jour.
I have, but you need to re-calibrate your understand for the recent situation. The people who transitioning now are not exhibiting the same types of life stories as those who did thirty years ago. It seems like a different phenomena, and I am much more concerned with the phenomena now, when if afflicts so many people, including parents I know who are transitioning their kids, than I am about the phenomena 30 years ago.
You've gone from demanding randomized controlled trials to referring to random comments from anonymous users on Reddit about how lifting weights cures gender dysphoria?
Yes, once you have anecdotal evidence of something working on a n=1 approach, the thing to do is expand it to an n=many RCT. That hasn't been done. It should have been done. Also, comments on niche subreddits inhabited by relatively normal people are some of the best anecdotal evidence you can find. Anecdotes from friend groups are limited in their own way. Popular memoirs and newspaper stories are both highly selected and filtered by publishers for preferred narratives, and the person writing them understands that a lot is at stake and they have to be careful about how they narrate their story. Random commenters on niche forums have much less incentive to lie (this doesn't apply to big forums where people will lie to get rise out of people, and the comments that reach visibility are selected).
There is zero evidence that your "common sense approach" works at all, and there is zero evidence that reparative or conversion therapy works at all for those with legitimate gender dysphoria.
Every random comment on Reddit that "I suffered from dysphoria and then started lifting and doing masculine things and got completely over it" is evidence that reparative therapy works.
It's not gold standard evidence, it's not proof-beyond-a-reasonable doubt, but it is evidence. But the "evidence" for "affirmation" and "medical transition" do not meet this gold standard either.
With medicine, the burden of proof is on the person doing the intervention. "First do no harm." Social transition and medical transition are both MAJOR interventions, the burden of proof is on the proponents. "You have to give people this drug, no we have never done a controlled clinical trial on it, but you have no evidence that NOT giving them the treatment works." What? You need to do a RCT before promoting a new treatment as the standard of care. "Affirmation" has never proved itself in an RCT so "Sorry, you are a man" should be the default.
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.