As we’ve been saying for a couple of decades about childcare
This is true:
The Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has shown that women are paid less not because they are discriminated against but because of the roles they often end up in: jobs with greater flexibility but lower wages.
People make different choices in life and they get paid different amounts of money. What is currently called the “gender pay gap” is in fact about the choice - or not - to be the primary child carer.
We can indeed go on to say that the feminisation of the economy is going to - should even - happen. This does not mean abandoning that masculine insistence upon logic and sums.
The trend since the pandemic towards more flexible working for men and women — for white-collar workers, at least — gives fathers more scope to share the caring burden with mothers and will help to narrow the gender pay gap.
But it won’t be enough alone to deliver a better economy for women, especially women in low-paid jobs in social care, hospitality and retail, who can’t work from home when it suits them.
If people change their behaviour then that’s great. After all, the very point of a liberal polity is that folk can do - absent third party harms - as they wish with their lives and the society we end up with is the aggregation of those individual choices. Pay gap or no pay gap - the point is construction from below but the choices from below.
The case for better childcare and social care has been known and understood for years. So why hasn’t any government delivered them? A handy rule of British life is that policies don’t happen if the Treasury opposes them, generally because it thinks they are too expensive.
But the argument being made is not better childcare and social care. It’s more paid childcare and social care. Further, there’s handwavey over how this will grow the economy. The thing being that the Treasury is right about the expense.
As we all know - as is the complaint in fact - for women (or, if we prefer, “primary child carers”) in the lower half of the earnings spectrum going to work, collecting the money, then paying for the childcare that allows them to work doesn’t, in fact, work. The costs of the childcare - or the social care - are higher than the income from the work.
Changing who pays these costs doesn’t change that expense. Sticking those care costs on the tax bill most certainly doesn’t change those costs - nor, importantly, that the costs are higher than the value of the work done. Increasing costs while increasing revenues by less than those increased costs is one of those not good economic ideas.
It is simply true that for some significant part of the workforce the most valuable labour they can perform is taking care of their own families - kids or social care. Which we can see by the fact that it costs more to provide the child or social care than they earn working doing something else.
If what everyone wants is increased feminisation of the economy then good luck to everyone - that is the liberal point. But there’s no reason to abandon logic and sums at the same time.
Tim Worstall