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C0rrupdate's avatar

"Families have responded by relying more on a second working parent’s income, which economists have tended to celebrate. More people working more hours means higher household incomes and GDP. But that perspective suffers from an enormous blindspot: the value of the non-market labor that parents perform at home and in their communities."

I've now lived a bit over half of my life in the US, the first half having been Eastern Europe, 90s just after the collapse of communism and with all the attendant issues of conversion to (whatever abominable cleptocratic approximation of) free market economy my motherland now operates under. Even after all these years of exposure to a different ways of thinking, I find the notion of economists *celebrating* more people in a household working and, consequently, increasing household incomes and GDP, a completely bizarre one. Perhaps due to a (vastly?) different upbringing, I've always held that leisure time and time spent with family and friend's enjoying their company was the ultimate goal - not the economic value we create in and of itself. Economic value was, at most, the enabler for the quality leisure time, but really nothing more. Same goes for labor in general, market or non-market variety - merely an enabler for quality leisure time. To see human lives viewed exclusively through the lens of the economic or labor value they can provide feels - and always will feel - existentially depressing. It seems like people continue to conflate economic output and happiness as if the correlation was 1:1 and causation was undeniable beyond any possible scrutiny, which is offensively naive...

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Bob Huskey's avatar

As a progressive I don't disagree with the solution Oren proposes. What I do object to is his continued distortions about who does what policy. Progressives support what he proposes. Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians have forced the help options to require workforce participation. That's absolute reality and arguing otherwise is simply lying. Oren's trying force a square peg into a round hole. It's tiresome and wrong. Just be an extreme economic progressive with a conservative social bent. That's fine and respectable.

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