Skill-Biased Diaper Change

Supply and demand is more than how difficult it is to acquire a skill.

It probably takes more training to become a good secretary than to become a hod carrier – but the hod carrier’s job is unpleasant, working out in the weather, doing a physically demanding job. People would rather do secretarial work in a nice, clean, air-conditioned office, so secretaries tend to make less money.

Similarly, any licensed physician can perform surgery, but a brain surgeon has a highly stressful job demanding great manual dexterity, and he may be standing up doing this job for hours and hours at a time. It’s a lot easier to sit in an office examining people who have minor complaints, and consequently family physicians are a lot cheaper to hire.

As a rule, you get paid more if you work in unpleasant (honey-dipping) or dangerous (high steel) jobs, or if not everybody is allowed to do the job (licensed professions).

And if your job looks like fun – playing with babies fits in that category – there are lots of people wanting those jobs; you aren’t likely to get paid much at all.

(I am speaking from the experience of a parent whose longsuffering spouse has searched high and low for a decent babysitter so she could get back to work part-time.)

For one, babysitting must pay less than the net take after taxes on other jobs, otherwise there would be no economic benefit to hiring a babysitter so you can work. I realize that money isn’t everything, but it still becomes difficult to justify forking over >100% of your wages just to be a productive member of society.

Second, ‘skilled’ babysitters are a) extremely rare and b) quite expensive. You know them- the ones who, when you meet them, provoke all kinds of suppressed angst- “Dammit, why couldn’t YOU have been my mother?”, followed by the general uneasiness that they’ll be better parents to your kids than you are.

… which probably adequately explains why we remain babysitterless.

And if your job looks like fun – playing with babies fits in that category

What Keiran said. “Looks like” is not a terribly good way of measuring a job. If McArdle (and harl delos) thinks that doing laundry, feeding formula (no breastfeeding mothers in her world apparently) and changing nappies are all it takes to look after a baby, well, she doesn’t have a baby.

As to supply and demand, it seems to be a fairly standard society-wide trope, not just a libertarian one, to downplay the value and difficulty of what is perceived to be “women’s work”.

Isn’t the problem that paying more for child care doesn’t guarantee you getting a better skilled or more conscientious babysitter. Seeing as you are normally not there when they do their job, it will take some time to work out if they are worth the money. Equally there are no league tables listing every potential babysitter and how many times they have dropped babies on their heads, so it takes a lot of time to get anything like a reliable idea of if their previous work history is any good, and most people aren’t going to have the time/resouces to do so. Hence whoever charges less is going to get most jobs regardless of skill/experience, and this will move the market to pay fairly limited premiums for skill/ability except in exceptional circumstances.

“I noticed that toddlers are very resilient. They eat dirt and nothing happens to them.”

Not so: There’s substantial evidence eating dirt actually benefits them; Apparently a lot of auto-immune diseases are due to not giving the immune system enough to do while you’re growing up, so it starts looking for something to do…

caregiving requires empathy and empathy is not a “skill”

caregiving requires empathy and empathy is not a “skill”

In the economic sense, how is it not? Some people have more of it than others, you can increase it by practice or let it degenerate, and, as you point out, it makes you more effective at certain tasks.

“nephew Sam, . . . downright enthusiastic about the percussive possibilities of everything, convinced the world is made of food (no, don’t eat dead bugs) but basically expecting major nourishment to be delivered by bottle”

Is his first name by any chance “Uncle”?

Anyway, my one contribution is to complain about the terminology, the conflating of “babysitter” and full time childcare workers in general. Not that it doesn’t happen, in terms of usage – as Mrs. S. points out, she gets referred to (or clearly thought of) as a babysitter, and she’s a kindergarten teacher [meanwhile, kindergarten nowadays is kinda what 1st grade used to be, in many ways] – but it’s linguistically de-skilling a field that really needs to become an even higher-skilled & standard-ed profession. (And of course, such deskilling is, in part, because it’s a caring, woman-associated and almost completely -staffed field).

harl delos: “It probably takes more training to become a good secretary than to become a hod carrier – but the hod carrier’s job is unpleasant, working out in the weather, doing a physically demanding job. People would rather do secretarial work in a nice, clean, air-conditioned office, so secretaries tend to make less money.”

Unionized hod carriers (in someplace like NYC) – maybe.

Otherwise, I find this hard to believe. What’s the non-union wage for unskilled construction labor – $10/hr in most places? That’s $20K/year (depending, of course, on hours worked). They might earn more than that given substantial overtime, in which case they are comparable to a secretary with a part-time side job.

10: Therein lies an outstanding problem for conventional economics; it simply isn’t very good at justifying what people get paid to do for a living. Part of the answer is obvious. Athletes and entertainers can be paid very, very, very well. No one objects to this because the metrics are clear, agreed upon, fairly objective, and easy to evaluate. What’s Mark McGuire’s worth? Look at his stats.

That’s not so easy for a vast array of jobs, daycare in this particular instance. In fact, not only are parents not good at evaluating the performance of daycare providers, they aren’t very good at evaluating their own performance as parents. So extremely good providers get lumped in with those who feed their charges cheerios and plop them on the couch to watch the Cartoon Network.

No, it doesn’t take a lot of skill to change diapers, wipe noses, etc. But that’s far and away the least of it, at least if the kids are being properly cared for.

Is McCardle’s math or assumptions right?

Leaving aside center overhead, she says you need a pretax income of $10,000 to pay a day-care worker $40,000 plus payroll taxes and benefits at a 8-1 child-worker ratio. OK, but at her 25% tax rate, when I multiply $7500 (the post-tax amount) by 8, I get $60,000. Do payroll taxes and benefits really amount to 50% of salary?

(By the way, we pay $1,000 a month for our day-care, which provides up to 11.5 hours of coverage a weekday).

Re 23’s
You wouldn’t categorize the skills of an attorney or a manager as shuffling paper, writing notes, and sitting in meetings.

Yes you would, depending on what they do. Many senior partners, even at top law firms, and many senior business executives or top government officials seem to do exactly that. They also read documents or listen to presentations, and then they “decide.”

Look at the memorandums for a decision that US presidents get — they are not that hard to read, don’t go into much detail, and are supplemented by oral briefings by a few advisers. How hard is that job, especially when you have maids, butlers, chefs, waiters, and groundskeepers to take care of all the chores we have.

In fact, not only are parents not good at evaluating the performance of daycare providers, they aren’t very good at evaluating their own performance as parents. So extremely good providers get lumped in with those who feed their charges cheerios and plop them on the couch to watch the Cartoon Network.

I think you’re very wrong here. Most people interview dozens of nannies before hiring one, and often go through many. Most parents are very aware of what goes on. It’s actually much easier to judge somebody elses’ skills than your own. And believe me, the nanny and parent gossip goes around.

For instance, we have a nanny we’re not thrilled with. But the things we’re unhappy about about aren’t major and very subjective (she doesn’t do things exactly the way we’d like), she loves our kids and they love her. But because of the time and effort it takes to replace her, she’s staying.

You’re really underestimating the informal flow of information. Nannies generally know pretty much what they should get paid for the number of kids, their background, the annoyance factor of the family, etc., and families know the same.

I don’t fiercely dislike Megan McArdle like they do at certain liberal sites. She is, for instance, one of the few engaging bloggingheads vid people. She actually has a camera presence. But sometimes she is a bit irritating. For instance, her response to the pay scale of babysitting is: supply and demand. Well, no. Supply and demand has never explained the difference between labor that is coded female as opposed to male. In fact, one notices that female work – housework, mothering, etc. – is very often defined as not-work. But when a branch of work is coded female, it will not be paid as much as a branch of work that is coded male. This has to do with patriarchy, not supply and demand. There are exceptions – mostly in the entertainment industry – but otherwise, this is the way it is. It used to be that this was no secret, and women would be told that they were not being paid as much as men, because, unlike men, they did not have to support a family. This has long been non-politically correct (and of course it bogusly rationalized the general oppression of women), but the structures remain. To pretend that this is does so is pretty silly. When, for instance, secretarial work went from being a mostly masculine to a mostly feminine sector, the wage of the secretary did not go down because, suddenly, there was a larger supply of them. It went down because females are paid less than men. End of story.

leederick, that’s either radical or reactionary depending on which direction you take it. If it’s radical then you’re positioning caregiving to a social activity that can not be isolated as economic, so that when we pay someone to do it we are in an awkward mix.
Again as in the difference between rules and values, technocracy wants to say that rules are enough, that Welfare is compassion tout court and that Social Democracy is a set of regulations rather than the sensibility that produces them.

If paid caregivers can be seen as like an extended family then there’s no need to pretend to define their value. What’s the value of friendship? When I hire friends I’d rather pay them too much than too little. That way money never becomes an issue. Still if you can’t isolate the economic value of caregiving then the best answer is that that labor should be shared. Day care is a poor replacement for an extended family.

Leederick has a point. Labor, economic activity in capitalist society is oriented towards mass-production of goods and services. Those working for the child-care industry, child-care companies – they do labor, but a babysitter is more like a companion, often a member of extended family; not exactly a part of the economy. Babysitting is extremely ineffective, waste of valuable man-hours.

“Housework, mothering and so on is not remotely equivalent to market-related work for a living. It’s quite patronising to those of us who do work for a living to try and equivalise our work with activities like these.”

{Gets out popcorn, leans forward on sofa . . .}

Productivity, SG, housewifing and mothering lack productivity. The same housewife employed by an entrepreneur could clean 270% more living space and take care of 317% more children, according to the recent studies.

“Let us be sure to proceed from here as though no-one has ever given this question any thought before.”

How many people have argued that you can’t be an individualist and a social democrat?

I will not be mocked.

Just for the record, btw, it’s not Megan McArdle. please click the link. The author of the post is Megan Carpentier,

“Supply and demand has never explained the difference between labor that is coded female as opposed to male.”

It’s not just male and female it’s quantifiable and unquantifiable. What is nurturing? What is companionship? What is the “right” way to care for the young? I know parents who let their kids play barefoot in the snow if the kids want. Is that caregiving or irresponsibility? There are 10,000 thousand ways to raise a kid.

Women are in a double bind: what’s called “women’s work” is undefinable as work. But if you want to no longer call it “women’s work” that doesn’t mean you should try to define it as what it’s not. That’s like redefining education as testing. It’s been done, and it’s not a good idea.

“Demand” doesn’t mean the amount of a product or service that would be consumed if people could consume all they want or even in some sense need. It means the amount they will consume at a given price. Wages for caregivers cannot be higher than the wages of the parent who is freed for work. A caregiver can care for multiple infants and children, of course, but over a few children this means a day care center – a physical facility with rent, overhead, insurance, and management. Although there is room at the top end for high-priced caregivers, the average simply cannot be higher than what the customer earns.

I was the stay at home parent: my late wife had the ‘real job’ (the one with health insurance) and I pursued an art career, doing infant and child care in the studio. My two children did ok, good students and good people. But I could not have done it without lots of help from both grandmothers (some 30 mi away) and hiring out some day care, when I had to travel or make some impossible commission deadline.
I came to think that primitive man had invented war and the market system to avoid child care.

“HR departments.” Human interaction as bureaucracy, and a service economy based not on care but efficiency. [Skip to the last two sentences if you want]

“Furthermore, people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism are usually, outside certain narrow fields (software engineering, economics…”
political science, academic philosophy and the theory of ideas as opposed to the study of events.

Theorists of political liberalism still aren’t willing to admit that seduction is more important to politics than ideas; and if they are, they’re still unwilling to accept that seduction and assumptions are important drives for themselves as much as those they study. What after all is Rawls actually doing, and why? I’m always struck by the irony of attacks on Maureen Dowd by people who are much less observant than she is and just as driven by assumption.

Do claims of reason and rationalism mark the acceptance of simple self-interest (cf. theories moral hazard) or the promulgation of the academic ideals of collaboration? How many more examples do I have to lay out (and I’ve laid out quite a few over my time trolling here) of contempt of the educated elite for the majority? Never mind Kansas, what is the matter with Harvard?
—

“Under the present system our captains of industry are paid megabucks for…”
making the bets that either win or lose large amounts of money.
They’re the generals in the army of capitalism. I’ve know a few of them and they’re very smart men. But they’re out for themselves and not very well socialized. They don’t serve people, they use them, deploying an advanced instrumental rationalism in the service of self-aggrandizing and often destructive silliness. Some of them try to play the benign god, after the fact. And people buy into that.

It’s always struck me as odd that some of those who consider themselves intellectuals would actively defend the aggressively self-interested as opposed to simply acknowledging their presence, at what one would imagine would be the opposite end of the spectrum.
The intellectual defense of “efficiency” is the defense of whatever goal that efficiency furthers. And efficiency as a goal in itself is the definition of autism.

Doesn’t the classic “market for lemons” paper apply here? While there is clearly good childcare and bad childcare, people find it hard to tell the difference in advance or even during the childcare (because by definition it doesn’t happen while the person commissioning the service is there). So the price falls to the “bad” rate.

Also, the before-tax pay of the carer cannot be greater than the after-tax pay of the less well paid parent, or people do it themselves.

If utility is immeasurable, and I agree, what’s a utilitarianism other than an intellectual vulgarity?

“I also don’t know why you say that if something can’t be measured precisely, it either doesn’t matter, or doesn’t exist.”

Ask a philosophy professor in any department in the US, Great Britain, or Australia
Again, I’m not agreeing with the argument, except as a sometimes necessary vulgarization and impoverishment of language in service to the banalities of functionalism; the functionalism that is the ecstasy of autism.
Do we want childcare to be governed by such banalities? Is autism the moral philosophy of the day? I’d say yes, actually.
I just spent the afternoon with an autistic architect.
A tragedy he can not understand.

Hesienberg was pulled over by a traffic cop. “Do you know how fast you were going?” asked the cop. “No,”, Heisenberg replied, “but I know exactly where I am.”

In reply to #18: I should have signed my #9 by what my nieces & nephews call me: Uncle Jim.

This discussion has been amazing. It’s been my commonplace observation that since we ceased to deny women the opportunity to work outside the home, apart from teaching and nursing – in other words, when we allowed women to work alongside men in whatever field of endeavor they chose – the proessions of teaching and nursing went to hell, perhaps because we could never rid ourselves of the impression that those professions were merely women’s work, or perhaps because we could never bring ourselves to pay more than we used to, back when mainly women did those jobs.

In other news, the patriarchy is still alive, but showing signs of dementia, and Americans still revere the Reagan presidency.

I think we have to take the lower carer to caree – horrible word! – ratio as a given. There are proven ways to adjust it somewhat but it won’t go away – not as long as children benefit from growing up among a manageable, to the child, number of people whom s/he can trust totally, not as long as the elderly would choose to spend their final years in their own homes and surrounded by their own kit. And to listen to the radio station they have preferred for the whole of their adult lives – you can tell I’m getting on a bit for as the possibility of losing Radio 4 at some stage looms it matters ever more.

Not being a philosopher, I don’t really care whether utility can be proved to exist or is measurable in any formal sense.

Having been on several sides of this conundrum both personally and professionally I know what I want the world to start doing. Quite simple really – start comparing the cost of doing something reasonably well – the carer, the parent – with the cost of not doing it at all or doing it very badly.

If as the carer I completely lose the plot – fail to teach a child to speak, mess up someone’s medication, allow the parent with Alzheimers to wander or the one who is bedridden to develop pressure sores then the degree of misery caused may be difficult to measure but the cost of sorting it all out – hospital, prison, armies of social workers will have a string of zeroes on the end. That’s where we start.

I am not suggesting that every carer should be paid as much as a consultant geriatrician – or tenured philosopher? – but we then have a starting point. We can see precisely why the minimum wage or zilch are not adequate reward for work which will cost us all dearly if it is not done.

Righteous Bubba , quoting from the Wikipedia article you linked to:

“This is an exact counterpart to a well known result in signal processing — the shorter a pulse in time, the less well defined the frequency. The width of a pulse in frequency space is inversely proportional to the width in time. It is a fundamental result in Fourier analysis, the narrower the peak of a function, the broader the Fourier transform.”

This result is what I was referring to – the implication of those sentences is that if we take a larger sample of time we can measure the frequency more precisely, but then we don’t know the time it happened as precisely as before.

Which means that we cannot measure precisely the characteristics of EM signals for fundamental reasons, not merely due to inadequacy of our current equipment.

“Just on the ‘domestic labour’ side of things, off the top of my head, 100 years ago in the UK, something like 10% of the entire female population was employed as paid domestic labour.”

That’s true of course but “servants” are not merely workers among workers, they’re in [lower] class of people. I had a girlfriend who was a tenured professor at a major university. She told her grad students to get cleaning ladies, and not to waste their valuable time on housework. Although I never mentioned it, that was probably one reason the relationship didn’t last.

On a related note someone should do some research on the return of the sensibility (the esthetic) of willed servitude. It’s popular these days to choose to see oneself as a “bottom:” to ask others to bear the burdens of moral responsibility and to offer up your ass as payment for the privilege. Examples are everywhere, in employment and in private life. It’s all very “story of ‘O'” and not a good sign in a democracy.

And related to that:
Radek, if you want to measure people as numbers than do so. On the question is whether to consider that an ideal or a vulgar necessity I’ll argue with you and win.
I’ve seen blog posts about scientists with equations tattooed on their chests. All symptoms of the same “posthumanism”