Child care in the U.S. has been in crisis mode for a long time. It’s wildly expensive for families to afford, and difficult for providers to make ends meet. But now, in the age of COVID-19, even the future existence of child care in America is in doubt. Jessyn and Nick tackle the value of care work, the impossibility of finding affordable child care, and the importance of feminist economics with economist Kate Bahn.

Kate Bahn is the director of labor market policy and economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her areas of research include gender, race, and ethnicity in the labor market, care work, and monopsonistic labor markets. Previously, she was an economist at the Center for American Progress. Bahn also serves as the executive vice president and secretary for the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Twitter: @LipstickEcon

Further reading:

A feminist economic policy agenda in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the quest for racial justice: https://equitablegrowth.org/a-feminist-economic-policy-agenda-in-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-the-quest-for-racial-justice/

America’s child care problem is an economic problem: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/16/21324192/covid-schools-reopening-daycare-child-care-coronavirus

Where is the American Child Care Bailout?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/u-s-child-care-providers-need-a-bailout-fast

Women’s work-life economics: https://equitablegrowth.org/womens-work-life-economics/

Child care is still the missing ingredient for a fast economic recovery: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-08/lack-of-childcare-options-missing-ingredient-fast-economic-recovery

After coronavirus, nearly half of the day care centers in the U.S. could be gone: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coming-child-care-crisis-coronavirus-covid-19_n_5ea1fab4c5b6bb28aa34b642?guccounter=1

Why child care is so ridiculously expensive: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/why-child-care-so-expensive/602599/

Senator Murray introduces $50 billion child care stabilization fund legislation: https://www.murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/newsreleases?ContentRecord_id=6CA6719F-5CF4-46F8-B3DC-05630F7C0AF1

Biden announces $75 billion plan to fund universal child care and in-home elder care: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/07/21/biden-to-unveil-775-billion-plan-to-fund-child-care-and-elder-care.html

Public education should be a birthright: https://crooked.com/articles/public-education-birthright/

If you support public schools, you should support universal child care: https://civicskunk.works/if-you-support-public-schools-you-should-support-universal-child-care-4944041934b1

Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

 

Kate Bahn:

Caregiving always has been a type of function, a phenomenon in our society that is the least accessible exactly to the people who need it the most.

Nick Hanauer:

You expect your workers to have children so that there’ll be people that buy your products. But nobody has accounted for the fact that somebody has to take care of the kids when the parents are at work.

Jessyn Farrell:

The 41 million workers who have kids under 18 are feeling this. I mean, suddenly all childcare disappeared.

Speaker 2:

From the Offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. An honest conversation about how to make capitalism work for everyone.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

Jessyn Farrell:

I’m Jessyn Farrell and I’m senior vice president at Civic Ventures and a former state legislator.

Nick Hanauer:

So, Jessyn, today on Pitchfork Economics, we’re going to talk about childcare and the childcare crisis that was facing the country before Covid hit, and now the even more dramatic childcare crisis facing almost every family in the midst of the pandemic.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah, Nick. I will just say that I am feeling this so personally, probably like so many families, the 41 million workers who have kids under 18 are feeling this. I mean, this was already a really challenging issue. It was already hard to find childcare. And suddenly all childcare disappeared. For example, I relied on my parents in a lot of ways. And I can’t see them, right, because of the pandemic. So, even like just the social supports that a lot of us had cobbled together to be able to deal with this, let alone the more formal childcare that we had also used for our children, that is all gone. And it is this moment where a social support that had already not been great is now entirely gone. And like, looking ahead to the fall, when we’re going to start the school year knowing that our kids aren’t going back to school, it’s just almost overwhelming.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. No, it’s…

Jessyn Farrell:

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest, Nick.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m sorry to laugh. It’s just I’m so pleased my children are no longer-

Jessyn Farrell:

I know. You go them out. them out.

Nick Hanauer:

I got them out.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Just in time.

Jessyn Farrell:

But it’s really serious. Right?

Nick Hanauer:

[crosstalk 00:02:31]. Yeah.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah. Yeah. And so, like the scope and scale of the crisis is just so big. Right? Because, before the crisis, we already knew that childcare workers were underpaid, families were paying so much money, college, for infants and kids under three. And that finding childcare, the accessibility issue was really, really challenging.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Jessyn Farrell:

And now, you have this really tight nexus between getting people back to work, but they don’t have childcare, and this whole issue of public health and public safety and how we do it, given that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. It’s a really knotty policy issue.

Nick Hanauer:

It is. It is. And there’s so many factors involved. It’s not just that there’s not enough childcare available. It’s also the childcare workers are poorly paid and badly treated often. That problem, in turn, is bound up in all sorts of issues around the way in which women are treated in the workplace and people of color, to add another layer of complexity and problem. And it is just a very thorny problem. So, today we have to talk to Kate Bahn, who is director of labor market policy and an economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah. We’re really excited to have Kate Bahn, who can talk to us about the root causes of this issue and then some policy solutions. Because this is solvable. It is not like this is something that just has to exist like the water or air. Right? There are policy solutions that can make this better for families and kids.

Kate Bahn:

Name is Kate Bahn. I’m the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which is a think tank in Washington D.C. where we investigate the causes and consequences of inequality. And so, my work at Equatable Growth, I do a lot of work looking at anti-competitive labor markets and the types of barriers that workers face along the lines of gender, race, and ethnicity, and the labor market that lead to the persistent outcomes, unequal outcomes that we still see today.

Nick Hanauer:

So, Kate, today we get to talk about childcare, what we’re going to do with all those darn kids. So, Jessyn, why don’t you kick us off, given that you’re dealing with it in a very big way?

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah. Yes, exactly. I’m a parent of three kids. And this situation is really hard. So, Kate, we are really glad to have you here with us today. And one of the things that the pandemic has really done is, of course, shine a light on all of these different systems that were very fragile before are failing us now. Childcare is definitely one of those systems. It would be really great if you could talk a little bit about what was going on with childcare prior to the pandemic, and then what you are seeing right now and kind of the despair and suffering that a lot of families are going through without adequate childcare right now.

Kate Bahn:

Yeah. Sure. And I don’t envy you, as someone without children. I, in some ways, feel lucky that I can do this interview in middle of the day and not have to worry about childcare duties so I can continue to do my job. So, what we saw prior to the current crisis is childcare is really inaccessible for a lot of people. And I think it’s inaccessible for low income families, as well as middle income families in somewhat different ways. And I think those differences are also really crucial. But the fact of the matter is, caregiving always has been a type of function or phenomenon in our society that is the least accessible exactly to the people who need it the most. So, it’s least accessible to single mothers who are going to need it more than other people.

Beyond just childcare, elder care, which I think is also an issue in the crisis, the current pandemic, similarly it’s people on fixed incomes who need care the most. And so, these have always been happening prior to the crisis. But I don’t want to diminish what middle income families and even sort of upper middle income families are also dealing with because childcare is so expensive in our country. It’s the cost of college, essentially. That, even families who otherwise may be financially secure, still face a lot of constraints when trying to get high quality accessible childcare.

I was recently looking at some data on the unpaid work hours that people do sort of any given man or woman in a household when they have caregiving responsibilities. Something like women’s household unpaid work was 35 hours a week prior to the crisis. Now it’s 65 hours a week. Men who have caregiving duties went from 25 hours a week to 50 hours a week. So, they’re huge numbers for both men and women, but it is still consistently much worse for women.

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah. It’s still consistently much worse for women. And here we are in 2020, I mean, granted there’s a pandemic, but the numbers weren’t great going into this. And I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about why we’ve always undervalued care and care taking from an economic standpoint in the first place.

Kate Bahn:

So, I mentioned this briefly, that people who need it the most are at least able to pay for it. But really our economic paradigm has a hard time, at least with mainstream economic paradigms, has a really hard time fully sort of acknowledging the central role of care taking as a foundation to our entire economy. So, this is where I look to the field of feminist economics, which has been studying this and offering really valuable insight for a really long time. And so, there’s a couple of reasons I think this is sort of happening the why we devalue it.

A piece of it is that it’s just really hard to measure the output. Economists really like… if you open an econ 101 textbook, they really like looking at how you can make widgets. And what are the costs of the inputs to making a widget in a factory. And then, how much can you sell them for within the next year. But something like caregiving and childcare, the benefits of it lasts the rest of the lifetime. So, it’s really hard to measure the outputs. And so, it really, in that sense, makes it harder to value it in our society if The value is spread across someone’s entire lifetime. It’s also often done in teams. So, both when it’s unpaid caregiving in the home, it’s typically done in teams, whether it be between two parents, maybe it’s within a community, with an extended family network. But also, in workplaces it’s typically done in teams. So, that makes it really hard to sort of figure out how each person contributes and what the value should be that each person contributes.

But I think the really deeper, underlying thing here is that it’s associated with women. And there’s evidence that any work associated with women is devalued. But also, this work that we sort of see as coming from a place of altruistic motivation shouldn’t be worth fair pay, or shouldn’t be seen as an economic policy priority because people should just be doing it because they love it. So, it’s almost a little bit of a contradiction sometimes where we talk about like, this is such valuable work, but then we shouldn’t pay for it.

Nick Hanauer:

Do you think that the pandemic has changed how people generally view care work in our society?

Kate Bahn:

I think people are coming around to that. I remember seeing something that Justin Wolfers wrote in the New York Times, that there is a big value to the fact that people are staying home and caring for their families right now because it delays the spread of the virus itself. So, the fact that we are shutting down childcare centers does have an economic value in and of itself because it is delaying worse health outcomes. And I think that is one piece that we’re starting to recognize that this work we’re doing in the homes, not only takes a lot of work and we’re recognizing it as labor, but it also has like a really big social value right now because we are trying to offset an uncontrolled pandemic.

Jessyn Farrell:

And you talk about, not only is there a social value, but the economic value that goes with care work has been traditionally undervalued. And it makes me think of one of the themes we address on this podcast quite a bit, which are the myths of trickle down economics and, in particular, that value equals price. And maybe you can talk a little bit about how this continues to be the case and why job quality continues to be so low for childcare workers.

Kate Bahn:

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it is that it’s just sort of outside our economic framework, as you mentioned. That, if something is not like sort of within what as a society we see as like formally part of the economy, we have a hard time valuing it. But that is really just sort of an arbitrary line, in my viewpoint. There are tools we could use to attach quantitative values to these things, if we wanted to. And we could try to make the case that way. That’s some of the work we do at Equitable Growth. It’s some of the work that feminist economists have been doing a really long time.

For example, I think it’s not quite childcare, but in K through 12 care there’s research that shows that access one year of quality K through 12 education increases someone’s future lifetime earnings by almost a half a million dollars. So, we could think about that. We could say, well, that means a teacher who is a high quality teacher, that increased earnings that we’re getting to those people when they grow up and are on the labor market should be internalized by raising teacher salaries. In economics, we often thin too about like public goods. And I think sort of caregiving like infrastructure should be considered part of the infrastructure because it is improving the overall economy in the long run going forward.

Nick Hanauer:

So, clearly the United States lags the rest of the developed world in terms of dealing with care work, and childcare, and so on, and so forth. Can you give us a perspective about going on in other countries?

Kate Bahn:

Some other countries have done a better job, but it’s still tricky in other countries. One of the frustrating things studying economics from a gender perspective is that a lot of these patterns are really persistent across the world over time. So, some countries have done better. There’s definitely a much better social safety net, particularly in European countries. But, of course, the U.S. is among the very, very few countries that has no paid leave time off for maternal leave.

But, even those countries that have good policies, sometimes they entrench gender roles of caregiving. So, we take some of the Scandinavian countries that have really generous time off at the birth of a child has meant that actually women are more likely to take more time off in the labor market for very early life childcare. And it really re-entrenches some of those roles. And so, it’s a really tricky policy problem because what we also need is to change the culture of how we value this work so that men take part in it just as much as women and that all families have access to quality care outside the home as well, if they choose to use that, so they can really make well informed choices about how to care for their family.

Jessyn Farrell:

It’s really tricky. One of the things I’ve thought about, as companies and states adopt paid family leave policies is, you can have generous paid family leave policies. But, if you have a work culture where men are not encouraged to take advantage of paid family leave, you continue to have all of these problems where women are forced to make choices around childcare, and children, and various family dynamics. So, you make a really important point. What would you say is the scale of the response required here? Like, if we really do want to change our culture and change our policies and laws around this, what is the scale of change that we’re looking at?

Kate Bahn:

I mean, it’s everything. It’s sort of like patriarchy needs to be upended. But, in the meantime, I think there’s things we can do besides getting rid of patriarchy, because I know that that’s a long term project. So, there are a couple things we can do. There’s ways we can incentivize men to pick up the Slack. So, that could be through the ways in which… I referred to the Scandinavian countries that had a problem of retrenching it. They did tinker with their policies to incentivize men taking more time off for childcare. So, there’s ways to sort of tinker with the policies that exist for work, life balance.

I also think some really actionable things could be addressing labor market discrimination against women and mothers in particular. Because part of what you described is like families are making really impossible choices and women may make a short term choice because, day to day, they need to care for their families. But it has a really longterm impact on their earnings that then will make this sort of even more persistent because it’s really rational for a family to say, well, if the man in the family earns twice as much as the woman, then it obviously makes more sense for the women to take time off. But, if we address women’s earning inequality by looking at labor market discrimination, that might help somewhat. I think sort of publicly available childcare is a big piece of it. So, then families are in less of a bind. So, there’s some good policies out there, but they take a lot of money and a lot of political will to institute.

And then, broadly I think the biggest thing, and this is sort of what I always end up coming to in all of my work, is that we need to increase worker bargaining power so that workers are able to bargain for the pay that allows them to sort of make those choices about the trade offs, and also bargain for the job characteristics that they need to be able to make these choices. So, maybe bargaining for more flexibility in the workplace, maybe bargaining for workplace based childcare centers. There’s lots of ways in which just increasing worker bargaining power through the types of institutions that support unions, I think, would trickle down and really have a huge impact on this particular issue of caregiving within families.

Nick Hanauer:

So, Kate, how much would it cost nationally to have an adequate childcare system zero to five?

Kate Bahn:

I’m not sure of an exact number. They exist out there. They’re just not numbers that I have looked through off the top of my head. I think one thing to keep in mind too is that there’s also a big cost to not doing it.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Kate Bahn:

So, we know that women taking a few years off in the early lives of their children leads to decreased lifetime earnings, more than just the lost earnings from that year off.

Nick Hanauer:

I suspect it’s a hundred billion dollars a year probably.

Kate Bahn:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

To implement what you would call a first class childcare system nationwide. But, even if you put aside the primitive neoclassical economic ROI analysis, the truth is that a hundred billion dollars is really not that much money in the context of our economy.

Kate Bahn:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

And, for perspective, again, we always come back to this on this podcast, corporate America spent 800 billion dollars last year on stock buy backs alone. So, clearly there was no economic benefit to that spending, other than enriching a few rich people. So, the money is in the economy. And what’s quite shocking is that we have not been able to muster the political will to take just a tiny bit and solve this problem in a way that other industrialized countries have.

Kate Bahn:

Exactly. And I think you’re totally right, that it’s sort of about political will. Caregiving is a central function to any society. It’s really the basis of all of our wellbeing in society. And it’s also universal. We all need care at some point. And almost all of us give care at some point. So, one of my frustrations is that, even though care is the building block of our society, it’s not recognized as core to our economic policy priorities. So, I think we need to try to center care and make it really clear that, unless we’re caring for people day to day and year over year, nothing else is possible. We need to recognize that no one escapes life without receiving care. It’s critical to every single person. And we need to center it as an economic issue and prioritize it in economic policy.

Nick Hanauer:

Is it possible that this pandemic, by creating a childcare crisis for middle class and upper middle class families in a way that poor families had been dealing with it for a long time, may be an important catalyst to try to get something done?

Kate Bahn:

That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I think in my more optimistic moments. I think that’s correct. I think everyone is realizing how critical this is right now in this moment. I just want to make sure that we are still centering the workers and families that are most marginalized because they may need different solutions than other people.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. But the political will-

Kate Bahn:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Will only come as a consequence of a huge number of middle class people saying we need a different system.

Kate Bahn:

That’s true. And the current crisis too is also… childcare is a big piece of it but we’re also dealing with the need for more healthcare, generally speaking, elder care, particularly as elderly people need to isolate themselves more, so they need more intensive care. So, there’s just, across so many realms, something about it sort of being a health pandemic is just really demonstrating that, unless people are cared for, our society will totally falter. And everyone is facing that. And so, I do think that that is, not only childcare, but centering care broadly in our economy.

Jessyn Farrell:

Speaking of that, there was a really interesting… one of the things in a piece that you wrote linked to something that the state of Hawaii did on a report entitled The Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19. And it’s a really interesting document. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kate Bahn:

So, it’s really exciting that Hawaii has sort of led the way in the U.S. in applying some principles from feminist economics to their policy priorities and their policy evaluation, which is when you’re looking at, when you institute any policy or you want to propose any policy, what are going to be the gendered impacts of that policy, and prioritizing the types of policies that will improve women’s economic outcomes. What’s kind of interesting about this too is that, to some extent, this type of policy work has been done in developing countries for a longer period of time, but is newer to the U.S. Because women’s outcomes are much starker in developing countries, there has been a lot of principles from feminist economics applied to policy, in development of economic policy, but it’s new to the U.S. So, that is really exciting to see. And it’s really heartening to see. Hawaii in general has sort of always led the way on some progressive policies like longterm care and things like that. So, I think this is a good start.

Nick Hanauer:

Are you at all encouraged or satisfied with any of the proposals that the Biden administration? Or are there congressional proposals that we should be excited by right now around any of this stuff?

Kate Bahn:

I do you think that the Biden plan that just came out in July is pretty exciting in terms of trying to make childcare accessible? And so, I think that is a really good sign that it has been, at least in my corner of people thinking about economic policy, has gotten a lot of really good press, which I think that, in and of itself, is a really optimistic reflection that maybe people in economic policy are recognizing this as being critical to sort of any policy platform. So, I think that is a really good plan.

I think the issue we’re facing right now is that we have like an immediate crisis. And we need to really think through how we’re going to deal with pent up demand, once we are in a sort of a post pandemic world. So, it’s a good start to sort of take types of policies for accessible childcare that progressive advocates have been advocating for for a really long time, but we’re going to need something even bolder to deal with the fact that we’re going to have to be facing pent up demand, once we get to the other side of the pandemic.

Jessyn Farrell:

And a childcare system that has been really decimated. Right? Like I think 40% of all childcare facilities are expected to close if there’s not some pretty major policy intervention.

Kate Bahn:

Exactly.

Jessyn Farrell:

And this gets to one of the comments you were making a little bit earlier around supporting worker power and worker advocacy.

Kate Bahn:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jessyn Farrell:

And where we have supported that in care work, like the FCIU in particular states, teachers unions, there’s a really reinvigorated teacher movement, I think, with strikes for higher pay in both red states and blue states. How do we improve the quality for childcare workers where they are barely getting by on minimum wage themselves, lack of benefits, other things that make it really hard to have economic security?

Kate Bahn:

Yeah, that’s a good point. Sort of another policy, when you were asking policies, I think, are really going to be helpful. And I was thinking of the Pro Act, which was introduced by Representative Scott in the house, but has not been introduced on the Senate floor. It’s more general. It’s just about labor organizing broadly. But I do think supporting labor organizing broadly may help when these workers are some of the most exploited workers in our economy. But that is only one piece of it.

The other piece of it is sort of the public support for that type of work too. So, we need both things. We both need policies to support organizing broadly that will help these childcare workers themselves organize and be able to collectively bargain. But, on the other side, we also need to make sure that there’s adequate public funding for these services because they are a public good. They should be considered part of our infrastructure. And they should be funded like that.

Jessyn Farrell:

For sure. So, one of our favorite questions that we always like to ask is, if you were a benevolent dictator and you could wave a magic wand, what would you do? I think… and I want to put a two part question. What would you do right now to alleviate some of the crisis that families are facing? And what would you do when the pandemic is over?

Kate Bahn:

That’s a really good question because there are two very different answers, I think. I think right now everyone needs to be working less. I’ve sort of become, as people who are lucky enough to have jobs working at home, are working all the time. People who go to jobs where they have to have face to face interaction are at really high risk. I just feel like we should have everyone be working less than they’re currently working. And that would also help with these caregiving needs. So, that would require some sort of income support for families. So, as a benevolent dictator, I would try to give people more income support just to be able to facilitate lower work hours for people right now.

What I would do in a post pandemic world is, I think every caregiver should be paid $100,000 a year. It’s a huge amount of money compared to what they’re paid now. I mean, they’re now paid about $12 an hour or a teacher might be paid something like $50,000. But I think that caregivers should be paid $100,000 a year. We should put our money towards getting those salaries to caregivers. And I think that would have a huge impact, multiplicative impact sort, but both immediately for aggregate demand, and for like longterm developing our society.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking about this important issue. As important as it feels today, when school doesn’t start in the fall, I think we’re going to have a much more vigorous national conversation about how we’re going to handle all this stuff. So, again, maybe that’s good news in the long term.

Kate Bahn:

It’s true. Hopefully, it will really, as you talked about political will a number of times, like that is really what we need right now because we have the scholarship for feminist economics that shows that it’s valuable. And now, we need to actually just have the policies that reflect that value.

Jessyn Farrell:

That’s great. We really appreciate your coming and talking to us, Kate, and all the work you’re doing on this issue. Thank you.

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely.

Kate Bahn:

Thanks. Have a good day.

Nick Hanauer:

Talk soon. Bye.

Kate Bahn:

Bye.

Nick Hanauer:

So, Jessyn, we continue to learn, from Kate Bahn, that it is a thorny and expensive problem. But, as I reflect on it, I think the best research shows that there are at least three drivers of the cost of childcare. Of course, the first cost is people, because childcare is not really a scalable business in the sense that you can’t make it more efficient, like a technology company necessarily. And the truth is that we want to pay those folks more money, not less. So, that’s going to account for a lot of the cost. The second cost is real estate, particularly in cities where real estate is very, very expensive. That drives cost a lot too. And finally, there’s some really interesting problems and opportunities around regulation. Aren’t there?

Jessyn Farrell:

Yeah. That’s right. And that tension between wanting to have high quality-

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

Jessyn Farrell:

And a high standard for what we expect in our childcare facilities, but at the same time, not making them so onerous that you simply can’t open a facility in a center city, say, because of the open space requirements or outdoor requirements.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

Jessyn Farrell:

So, there’s that managing that tension as well.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. And, Jessyn, you mentioned that one of the things which is in our state, there’s an open space requirement for childcare centers, which basically means they need an outdoor play area. Which in turn means that all of the space in the giant, fancy building where we have our offices is excluded from being possibly childcare space, which is nuts.

Jessyn Farrell:

Right. Right. But it really lays bare just what a massively… just that it is an expensive proposition. There’s no way of getting around that.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Jessyn Farrell:

Because A, we want to pay people well who would provide this work. And B, we want to make sure that kids are really well taken care of. And we need to really vastly expand our notion of what our societal responsibility is towards this. This is something that we need to be investing in collectively. And, in our exploration, our own internal exploration, I think one of the things that really struck us is that there’s this arbitrary age cutoff that we come to where we need to start public investments. And it’s age five. And that is this weird historical artifact that’s not really based on science. We know that infants are our earliest learners. Like kids and infants start learning right away. And so, it is strange that so much of our public investment is withheld until kids are five.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Jessyn Farrell:

When they’ve already had a lot of exposure to learning environments, both good and bad. And so, we really need to change our ideas around when and to what extent we’re investing in publicly funded childcare. And the good news is Kate talked a lot about that. There’s some great policy proposals. Vice President Biden issued one. Patty Murray has the Childcare is Essential Act. There’s a growing interest and focus on this. And we need to really get in front of it, given the crisis that families are facing in this pandemic and what’s going to be happening afterwards too.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And I think that there are a couple of policy principles that seem really important and robust to me. The first is that, if we’re going to tax folks for childcare, it should be the businesses that rely on the workers that have the children. Right? Like it’s this ridiculous thing of free riding where you expect your workers to come to work on time and to be productive. And you expect them to have children so that there will be people that buy your products. But nobody has accounted for the fact that somebody has to take care of the kids when the parents are at work. And I think a small payroll tax or a small business and operations tax would go a long ways nationally to closing the gap.

The second is the real estate problem, which I think is a super big contributor to cost and availability. And, if it was me, I would require all commercial landlords to put aside either some money or some space for childcare.

Jessyn Farrell:

You could even take it a step further and say that childcare facilities are essential public facilities, right, the way we do with transportation facilities or water infrastructure.

Nick Hanauer:

Or schools.

Jessyn Farrell:

And just say, we are… or schools. Right. When we’re building and planning communities, we are going to deliberately plan and fund, through private or public mechanisms, ample facilities for childcare. And that, again, you don’t get at the people issue and how we’re paying and compensating people.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Jessyn Farrell:

You need to do that piece too. But just looking at it as an infrastructure issue, I think, is solving part of the problem.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Jessyn Farrell:

So, I really like that.

Nick Hanauer:

Yep. We need to find a way to get our childcare system through this crisis. But then, we need to put some real energy into re-imagining it. And I guess, for me, the punchline is, of course we can afford to do it. Of course we can have a decent childcare system in this country. We’re just going to have to rearrange the way in which we value things in a more reasonable way.

Jessyn Farrell:

100%.

Nick Hanauer:

In the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we’re going to talk to economist Trevon Logan from Ohio State University about our slow walk off an economic cliff.

Speaker 5:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook @CivicAction and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium @CivicSkunkWorks. And peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @PitchforkEconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.