A politically most incorrect truth about childcare

There’s a wave, a surge perhaps, of muttering about the cost of childcare in Britain today:

Somehow we have ended up with a system that’s too expensive for parents (especially single parents) but not lucrative enough to pay staff properly, plus a hidden drag on the economy, as parents reduce their hours because they can’t afford a full-time nursery place. A staggering 94% of those changing their working patterns after having children say childcare costs were a factor; surprise surprise, women were more likely than men to say they’d be more senior or better paid if it wasn’t for childcare considerations.

There’s no money to fix this, obviously; there’s never any money, unless of course the right people start asking.

This isn’t a problem that money can fix. Price are prices and they are information. We might not like that information, we might decide we’re going to ignore it but that information is still there in those prices.

Childcare is expensive to provide. So, childcare is expensive. It’s even true that childcare is more expensive than the income to be earned by doing something else. Or at least this is true for some number of people.

OK, childcare is more expensive than the income that can be earned by doing something else then. That’s just real world information that we’re being provided with by that price system. Deciding that we’re going to hide that by putting the cost onto the taxpayer doesn’t change that base fact.

This leaves us with two possible solutions. Either some people should stop doing that other thing of lower value and take care of their own children, or we should make childcare itself cheaper. No, not simply shift the cost elsewhere, but actually make it cheaper - kill some of the regulatory burden perhaps. That cost shifting, from the person doing the lower value work, doesn’t change the fact that it is lower value work they’re doing.

The very definition of wealth creation is that economic resources - of which labour is one - move from lower to higher value uses. If a job produces less income than the cost of the childcare required to do it then the childcare is the higher valued use of that labour. Society as a whole, let alone the individual concerned, is made richer by the childcare being done directly.

We do have a certain suspicion here. Most ungallant of us and all that but there we are. Those whose alternative labour really is of less value than their own childcare tend to do their own childcare. There are then those whose market labour is worth more than their childcare costs. Say, those who write for national newspapers. But those on the right end of that price information would still prefer that the rest of us pick up their costs. Because who wouldn’t? Or, as we could put it, the taxpayer should pay childcare costs to solve that servant problem for the professional middle classes.