• daltotron@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. I think having a stay at home parent is kind of yesteryear, and should probably be viewed as such for a multitude of reasons, but I think, full time salary and able to support what are basically three people’s needs + savings is not an unreasonable demand. The more this is commonplace, the more everyone can afford to support everyone else collectively, since only a quarter of the total population would really need to be working at any given time, and the rest could be paylessly employed to manage each other. Beyond just stay at home moms or dads, it could entail any number of people in any number of living situations, but the free time means that taking care of the elderly, disabled, children, or whatever else could just be split among the local social network, instead of just kinda being foisted onto underfunded social systems which should more realistically not be the first option.

    Probably this is the main driver of why the social fabric of america is coming undone, that I can think of, but it’s also not so easy to solve, because none of this is really something you can solve long-term in a capitalist economy, where there are always incentives to undercut your competition by underpaying your workers, or outsourcing. Or really in any system that prioritizes short term gains over long term ones.