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Commentary By Oren Cass

Your Family, Your Choice

Economics, Culture Employment, Children & Family

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Oren Cass’ new book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, released today by Encounter Books. 

America’s obsession with consumption, and with consumer welfare as the ultimate measuring stick for individual and family well-being, has eroded our commitment to pluralism—to a society in which people can build lives that align with their values and priorities. Measures like “Gross Domestic Product” create the convenient illusion of a homogenous population benefiting (or suffering) in lockstep. The most efficient economic arrangements, which produce the greatest output for consumption, are the presumptively superior ones. 

Real life is not so simple. Having two parents work while the children attend daycare may be more efficient, understood in a narrowly economic sense, but a community consisting entirely of such households is one that many families would rather not live in. Growth may be fastest if we channel everyone to wherever his economic output is greatest, but pluralism will improve real prosperity if the options it leaves available more closely match people’s abilities and the range of life choices they wish to make. If two-parent families could support themselves with only one parent working outside the home in the past, then something is wrong with “growth” that imposes a de facto need for two incomes. 

Unfortunately, policy programs marketed under the auspices of expanding choice often have designs that do just the opposite—channeling families toward the policymaker’s preferred outcome. Take the “childcare calculator” created by the progressive Center for American Progress (CAP) to show the purported opportunity cost of staying home to raise children.CAP pretends that its goal is merely to place “financial tradeoffs in the economic framework of opportunity costs,” helpfully explaining that “Jane,” an elementary school teacher who has her first child at age 26, will lose $707,000 of lifetime income if she leaves the labor force until her child starts kindergarten. But the bias is obvious if the value of staying home is not presented alongside the value of working. Why is there no opportunity-cost calculator for delegating your child’s upbringing? For that matter, why is there no opportunity-cost calculator for choosing to work at CAP instead of becoming a petroleum engineer?

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies

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Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the forthcoming book “The Once and Future Worker.” Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies