> It is less possible when people choose to live further away and to live in constant fear of predators so their kids can't walk/bus themselves home.
Most people live where they can afford housing. Unless you are in the upper 5%, you are “choosing” a longer commute in the same way that you chose to use a time machine to set housing and transit policy after WWII.
Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently, or that busing and transit have been cut in many areas – I’m all about not driving everywhere, and we don’t use a car personally, but many of the families I know do not have that option because the built environment doesn’t have safe routes even to get to the closest bus stop (which is not close).
There are a lot of things we could do better but the average parent does not have control over their municipal zoning or budget, and certainly can’t turn their neighborhood into Amsterdam on a whim because their boss thinks Zoom calls are more productive in a cubicle.
> If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times.
Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
> It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different.
This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost – and especially how the increases in mandatory costs hit most workers harder. Saving $100/year on my electric bill is nice, but for many people that was cancelled out by rate increases and since it was never that big a part of their budget it’s nowhere near recouping how much rent has increased.
20% of US family households with children under 18 years of age have a household income over $200,000/year. (Source: HINC-04). A large percentage of this forum earn more than that individually. You also don't need nearly that much to live close to work. And that's across the whole US.
So it is definitely not only the top 5% that can afford to choose where they live. You know you don't need a McMansion! You don't need a single family home in an area designed around 1h commutes.
>Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently
Right but one of you working part time for a few years until the kids are old enough to get themselves around vs one of you working part time until the kids are adults? Big difference. A lot of teenagers in the US are carted around by their parents everywhere partly because their parents choose to live in car-dependent suburbia.
>Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
Teachers have among the most flexible and kid-friendly schedules of all professional or semiprofessional workers. They don't have weird night shift schedules half the week like nurses or 60 hour weeks like lawyers. They have pretty flexible hours when they aren't actually teaching. Because they are largely unionised and mostly women, they have negotiated flexible hours and openness to part time that you just don't find in many jobs.
You also ignore that even if they have to be there from say 8:30 to 4pm, that still means they have drop off flexibility with the kids at one end, and, obviously, in many cases the kids go where teacher-parent works!
>This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
As always this propaganda relates only to "production and non-supervisory workers". You can't just exclude large parts of the economy and call it proper analysis.
>One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost
It isn't just TVs but everything else. Appliances are better and cheaper across the board. Cars are cheaper. Houses are far bigger and families are smaller, so food and shelter are cheaper per earner. Clothing is virtually free, and decent clothing is still much cheaper than it was.
Education is free - no, tertiary education doesn't count because the expensive options are luxuries and move the average up a lot. Communication is cheap: remember long distance calls costing dollars a minute? Remember texts costing 79c each? And that was only 10 or 15 years ago.
Housing is more expensive largely (no, not entirely, but largely) because people's tastes are more expensive. You could build uninsulated damp houses with single glazed windows for a pittance if you want to spend what people spent in the 50s.
Retirement costs are up because people live longer. Cry me a river.
Most people live where they can afford housing. Unless you are in the upper 5%, you are “choosing” a longer commute in the same way that you chose to use a time machine to set housing and transit policy after WWII.
Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently, or that busing and transit have been cut in many areas – I’m all about not driving everywhere, and we don’t use a car personally, but many of the families I know do not have that option because the built environment doesn’t have safe routes even to get to the closest bus stop (which is not close).
There are a lot of things we could do better but the average parent does not have control over their municipal zoning or budget, and certainly can’t turn their neighborhood into Amsterdam on a whim because their boss thinks Zoom calls are more productive in a cubicle.
> If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times.
Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
> It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different.
This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost – and especially how the increases in mandatory costs hit most workers harder. Saving $100/year on my electric bill is nice, but for many people that was cancelled out by rate increases and since it was never that big a part of their budget it’s nowhere near recouping how much rent has increased.