The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care

A lot of the "regulations" baked into childcare aren't really going to move the needle - the inefficiencies are baked into the model. I don't care how lax your state is, you're not going to run a successful childcare center with 100 kids and 1 caretaker. So the cost of childcare is always going to be linked strongly to median prevailing wages.

While I think Baumol may have something to say here, I think we should listen to Henry George a bit more. The lion's share of overhead for a daycare goes towards its real estate costs. Similarly, it's a growing share of cost of living for both the workers and the customers. And as Henry George pointed out, the cost of housing goes up without creating economic value for anyone.

Another important factor in many states is the drive towards living wages across the board. For decades, child care (and probably pet care) was done by low-status immigrants and women, often at wages not sufficient to live alone or raise a family on. In more recent years, we've pushed up minimum wages and allowed not just white men to seek and obtain jobs that do pay more. It's overall good that we shrunk the under-classes compared to 100 years ago, but that does mean that if your business model depends on taking advantage of low-status people, it's not sustainable anymore, and you have to raise prices.

We've lost the fundamental stability of a time when one income could comfortably sustain a family. There has been a systemic shift that undermines family well-being.

the Baumol effect isn't an effect, it just describes a narrow case of the Substitution Effect. Price of beef goes up, you substitute pork and chicken, and those prices go up. You may think of yourself as a Computer Programmer but if Ditchdiggers get paid 3x as much in your area, you'd put Ditch Digging on your resume. To get you to program computers again, they'd have to pay you more.

> Many explanations have been offered for rising child care costs. The Institute for Family Studies, for example, shows that prices rise with regulations like “group sizes, child-to-staff ratios, required annual training hours, and minimum educational requirements for teachers and center directors.” I don’t deny that regulation raises prices—places with more regulation have higher costs—but I don’t think that explains the slow, steady price increase over time. As with health care and education, the better explanation is the Baumol effect, as I argued in my book (with Helland) Why Are the Prices So Damn High?

While I agree regulation probably doesn't explain the whole price increase, I wonder if governments can do a better job preventing regulation from causing price increases without cutting corners on the regulation itself. Subsidize training for example. Make the child-staff ratios and group sizes a more dynamic factor based on age and needs. Maybe set aside funds to subsidize targeted special needs child care so the kids with fewer needs can be cared for more cheaply(I imagine this is controversial just like schools having separate special needs classes was).

Of course there's the catch all approach of adding childcare to the public schools budget and rolling the cost into taxes.

I wonder how much of the need for both of these industries would vanish if more families had one stay-at-home parent.

Daycare and basically all child non-entertainment services (health and education) should be heavily subsidized. It's a new taxpayer, all money will be repaid tenfold.

wage increases not matching price increases... ah yes the american dream. simply put, youre poor, youre country has conned you, people live in better conditions all over the world.

> Still, the basic truth remains: if we want more affordable day care—for kids or pets—we need to use less of what’s expensive: skilled labor. That means either importing more people to do the work, or investing harder in ways to do it with fewer hands.

Both has serious problems. #1 is politically untenable (unless, of course, continuing the status quo of turning a blind eye towards employers abusing undocumented people to drive down wages), and #2 is fundamentally impossible until we gain AGI. It's bad enough when bad AI deletes production databases [1] - I'd raise hell when an "AI cat care" provider would kill my cat, and probably engage in some sort of self-justice should an "AI child care" provider kill or maim my child.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Artificial-intelligence-Vibe-co...

Perhaps the "barrel children" concept can be utilized within countries like the united states where the parents work in urban centers to provide for the children living in lower cost rural areas?

weird, I thought the labor theory of value was "debunked".

Maybe property taxes. Cities keep bumping these up. But also the intersection of people that neet multiple sets of requirements approaches zero pretty quickly. I watched a guy that's a professional filmer, and he explained that actually the circle he's in is pretty small. So while the set of people that want to do his career is fairly large. That people that jumped through all the requirmeny hoops is like filter. So he has no problems finding work because of it