We might not like the answers but prices are information
Today’s harsh proof of the truth - we may well not like what prices tell us but they are still information.
Florencia is being forced to make a maddening choice between working and staying afloat. She and her husband employ a nanny to look after their two-year-old daughter, who has special needs, while they both work. “With the spike in costs, we can no longer afford [the nanny] so I have decided to take time off,” she tells me.
The labour of one woman is being used to look after the child, whichever way around this is done. Quite why there’s a societal interest in whether it’s Florencia doing the childcare or the nanny is something we don’t quite grasp. Or even, we’ve a way of working out what the societal interest is here. If Florencia’s non-childcare income is high enough to pay the costs of the childcare then that’s a net plus for society as a whole. If it isn’t then it isn’t. For, again, the starting set up is that the child requires the full time labour of one adult to care for it. The only question is whose - what is the societal interest in whose, that is?
“People still do not grasp this notion that if you invest in the childcare sector, you’re investing in the economy, because it enables people to work,” says Brearley. “What they think is: ‘My taxes are paying for your children.’ And that’s not fair.”
But run that through the Florencia Filter again. You are taking people away from other work to care for these children. In order for people to go out doing other work than caring for children. Only if the work being done not-caring for children is of higher value than the work being done caring for children is this a net plus for society. How do we work out what is higher value work? The income gained from doing the work. If that income supports the childcare then we have our proof that it is societally value add. And, in that cruelty of prices, if it doesn’t then we’ve our proof that it is not.
I know I’m not the only one who compares my wages each month with the cost of childcare, and wonders if the stress of juggling both, only to be barely breaking even, is worth it.
Those prices might well be saying that it isn’t.
But ask any expectant parent about the state of British childcare and you will settle upon a seemingly universal understanding: the system is woefully unfit for purpose.
After a Brexit exodus decimated staffing levels in nurseries, the pandemic quietly pushed the early years sector past the point of no return, and this winter promises even more hardship. Deliberate underfunding means providers have little choice but to charge astronomical fees, which have increased at a rate that far outstrips wages, to cover their own sizeable outgoings. And as energy prices rise, so too will costs.
That’s getting dangerously close to a claim that Brexit must be reversed in order to solve the servant problem. Which has, we agree, been something people have been complaining about for well over a century - the servant problem we mean, Brexit’s a little more recent.
We do entirely agree that there is a childcare “problem”. Children require care, so the problem is who should provide that? We also entirely agree that there’s no reason at all why it should necessarily be the mother that does so. But we do need a structure, a reasoning method, inside or with which to make the decision.
Where the work being done outside the nuclear family covers the cost of importing the childcare into the nuclear family then perhaps this should be done. Where it doesn’t it shouldn’t. As with absolutely any other discussion about home as opposed to market production of anything at all - cooking, laundry, floor sweeping, button sewing, lawn mowing, gutter clearing and all of the rest.
One added little extra piquancy here. It does seem to be those who demand more household production of all sorts of things - sew, make and mend rather than buying fast fashion, grow our own veggies on the allotment, slow cook at home rather than use the supermarket chiller shelf and on and on - who also demand that childcare should not be part of the household sector of production but must be moved over into the market sector. Which does strike us as odd, as the very reason for the household’s existence being the human economic unit is children and their long, long, raising periods.
But leave that grumpiness aside. We may well not like what prices tell us but they are information all the same. For some parents caring for their own children is higher value work than whatever it is they do in the office. Society as a whole is therefore richer - as it always is - if they do that higher value work.
We’ve our decision making structure that is - prices. We should use it.