A rather tangential sidebar, but I remembered Shinji's epically dysfunctional relationship with his father Dr. Ikari as a major plot driver in *Neon Genesis Evangelion* -- so much generational trauma... nice to see some positive depiction of parent-child relationship, however form it takes.
"For roughly fifteen years, the prestige triple-A game canon has rendered fathers as men processing grief... Fatherhood-as-trauma-expulsion is the shape the form settled into. Pragmata does not do this. Hugh names Diana in the first minutes of the game, asks her to keep telling him about whatever she is thinking about, hangs her drawings on the wall of their base camp, and promises to show her Earth. "
I think you aren't categorize the anti girlboss stance correctly.
The view isn't "women shouldn't be allowed to work." This is obviously inaccurate hyperbole meant to avoid the issue.
The view is "the government should stop subsidizing working women at the expense of everyone else (including women that don't want to work)."
This can be divided into a few issues:
1) That sectors dominant in female employment (education, healthcare, HR) are all mostly paid for by government, regulated by government, and are controlled by professional guilds in hoc to government and that support it with their votes.
These sectors also have show ever increasing costs while delivering no measurable benefits. You will note BTW that these are sectors people commonly cite when they say they its hard to afford kids.
The anti girl boss stance then would be that purging these sectors of waste will result in a lot of women losing their jobs or taking pay cuts. Some may remain and some may or may not find employment elsewhere, but presumably there will be some losses.
Women would still have careers, but probably fewer and for less money. By contrast, the living standards of men and women not in these fields would go up, because they no longer had to be looted to subsidize them.
2) When a woman works the cost of rising kids becomes scalar. Each child is another daycare bill. Another summer camp bill. Etc.
When your a SAHM the marginal costs of kids is practically zero. You don't get an extra daycare bill, it's just another kid at home.
So it's no wonder that girl boss fertility is low. Each kid of a girl boss is a big expense. People respond to incentives.
Now this would be fine except that if the girl boss fertility is way below replacement, she's going to need other women's children to pay for her retirement. And lo and behold that is how our retirement system works. It does nothing to account for the number of future payroll tax contributors you raised.
So the incentive structure is such that if you send both spouses to work you get a lot of extra disposable income, your costs stay down, and someone else picks up the tab for your retirement.
Meanwhile, the SAHM with a bunch of kids that gave up her career for them losses out on a second income but receives no benefit in the present and her kids are taxed in the future to pay for someone else.
You could solve this problem by taxing parents less based on number of children, in effect paying the SAHM for the work she is doing.
But girl bosses don't want this. Half the reason they became a girl boss is because they want the extra income from two working spouses so they could bid up positional goods versus high fertility rivals and have more disposable income. If they pay their fair share of payroll taxes so that the SAHM can be compensated for her household labor, then that free riding advantage is gone.
3) There is also the individual horse trading of benefits. Some things, like the Dependent Care Tax Credit, literally only benefit working mothers and not SAHM.
A rather tangential sidebar, but I remembered Shinji's epically dysfunctional relationship with his father Dr. Ikari as a major plot driver in *Neon Genesis Evangelion* -- so much generational trauma... nice to see some positive depiction of parent-child relationship, however form it takes.
"For roughly fifteen years, the prestige triple-A game canon has rendered fathers as men processing grief... Fatherhood-as-trauma-expulsion is the shape the form settled into. Pragmata does not do this. Hugh names Diana in the first minutes of the game, asks her to keep telling him about whatever she is thinking about, hangs her drawings on the wall of their base camp, and promises to show her Earth. "
Such a good essay…I’m going to need to reread this one a few times before forming a (badly incentivized) take
I think you aren't categorize the anti girlboss stance correctly.
The view isn't "women shouldn't be allowed to work." This is obviously inaccurate hyperbole meant to avoid the issue.
The view is "the government should stop subsidizing working women at the expense of everyone else (including women that don't want to work)."
This can be divided into a few issues:
1) That sectors dominant in female employment (education, healthcare, HR) are all mostly paid for by government, regulated by government, and are controlled by professional guilds in hoc to government and that support it with their votes.
These sectors also have show ever increasing costs while delivering no measurable benefits. You will note BTW that these are sectors people commonly cite when they say they its hard to afford kids.
The anti girl boss stance then would be that purging these sectors of waste will result in a lot of women losing their jobs or taking pay cuts. Some may remain and some may or may not find employment elsewhere, but presumably there will be some losses.
Women would still have careers, but probably fewer and for less money. By contrast, the living standards of men and women not in these fields would go up, because they no longer had to be looted to subsidize them.
2) When a woman works the cost of rising kids becomes scalar. Each child is another daycare bill. Another summer camp bill. Etc.
When your a SAHM the marginal costs of kids is practically zero. You don't get an extra daycare bill, it's just another kid at home.
So it's no wonder that girl boss fertility is low. Each kid of a girl boss is a big expense. People respond to incentives.
Now this would be fine except that if the girl boss fertility is way below replacement, she's going to need other women's children to pay for her retirement. And lo and behold that is how our retirement system works. It does nothing to account for the number of future payroll tax contributors you raised.
So the incentive structure is such that if you send both spouses to work you get a lot of extra disposable income, your costs stay down, and someone else picks up the tab for your retirement.
Meanwhile, the SAHM with a bunch of kids that gave up her career for them losses out on a second income but receives no benefit in the present and her kids are taxed in the future to pay for someone else.
You could solve this problem by taxing parents less based on number of children, in effect paying the SAHM for the work she is doing.
But girl bosses don't want this. Half the reason they became a girl boss is because they want the extra income from two working spouses so they could bid up positional goods versus high fertility rivals and have more disposable income. If they pay their fair share of payroll taxes so that the SAHM can be compensated for her household labor, then that free riding advantage is gone.
3) There is also the individual horse trading of benefits. Some things, like the Dependent Care Tax Credit, literally only benefit working mothers and not SAHM.