I was just trying to respond to the original question. Being required to send kids to school raises the cost of kids because you can’t have them do work during that time. Legal limits on working ages do the same thing, although officially-working isn’t the only open (consider chores and family businesses). Other reasons school increases the cost of having kids is that parents may need to use their own time to transport kids to school and back, and to help with school work; and they may need to pay for school supplies.
Whether you think this is worth it depends on if you think the value kids get from going to school exceeds the costs of fewer people having kids / the costs to parents. My understanding is that Zvi thinks the value of school to kids is negative, but if you disagree then it wouldn’t be surprising if you disagree on this cost/benefit tradeoff.
But it is obvious that if they don’t go to school someone has to take care of them, and this is much more expensive. One cannot leave a kid alone at home (regardless if he is tasked to do chores or not) until (s)he is quite grown. That would be pretty crazy (and probably illegal). And having kids working on a family business or similar, it is costly as well: you cannot work half as well, they don’t work well either or fast.
The fact that Zvi thinks the value of school to kids is negative is irrelevant here, as what I quoted strictly refers to economic cost (dramatically increasing it, he says, even if tuition is 0). It really looks to me like blatant overlooking of the economic costs of not bringing kids to school. But Zvi seems reasonable (and the tweet is not available), so I asked.
One could argue that from, I don’t know, 12 or 13y they could start doing something marginally productive (BTW, sorry, the legal age to start working is 16y, not 14y). This means a max of 4 years doing something productive before they can start legally working, and leaves at least 6 years having someone locked at home taking care of the kid (and hopefully trying to teach something to him), the productivity of whom would be anyway much higher than that of the kid. And note that the kid being able to start doing something productive does not exclude the adult having to be locked at home during that time.
That’s a good point. At least in the modern world the childcare aspect of school is an economic benefit for parents. It’s worth pointing out that raising younger children was one of the useful jobs older children have historically done.
The article is about historical child labor in the 1800′s, and finds that children cost more than they produced, but they were able to do useful farm work past the age of 7.
He finds that children under 7 reduced the value of farm output, presumably because they reduced their mothers’ economic activities. For each child aged 7 to 12 the family’s output increased by about $16 per year – only 7 percent of the income produced by a typical adult male. Teen-aged females boosted family farm income by only about $22, while teen-aged males boosted income by $58.
It’s unclear to me what the breakdown here is but children “age 15 and under” were a large portion of the manufacturing workforce.
In 1820 children aged 15 and under made up 23 percent of the manufacturing labor force of the industrializing Northeast. They were especially common in textiles, constituting 50 percent of the work force in cotton mills with 16 or more employees, as well as 41 percent of workers in wool mills, and 24 percent in paper mills.
Nobody is saying that not sending kids to school could be not-net-negative economically in some specific cases (eg. when someone is anyway at home not doing much, maybe in farms still nowadays?). Such cases represent a tiny minority of current population, at lest in Europe (and in all rich countries). And, even for these small percentage of cases, not being net negative economically is still far away from dramatically raising the economic cost of raising these kids (even if tuition is zero).
I was just trying to respond to the original question. Being required to send kids to school raises the cost of kids because you can’t have them do work during that time. Legal limits on working ages do the same thing, although officially-working isn’t the only open (consider chores and family businesses). Other reasons school increases the cost of having kids is that parents may need to use their own time to transport kids to school and back, and to help with school work; and they may need to pay for school supplies.
Whether you think this is worth it depends on if you think the value kids get from going to school exceeds the costs of fewer people having kids / the costs to parents. My understanding is that Zvi thinks the value of school to kids is negative, but if you disagree then it wouldn’t be surprising if you disagree on this cost/benefit tradeoff.
But it is obvious that if they don’t go to school someone has to take care of them, and this is much more expensive. One cannot leave a kid alone at home (regardless if he is tasked to do chores or not) until (s)he is quite grown. That would be pretty crazy (and probably illegal). And having kids working on a family business or similar, it is costly as well: you cannot work half as well, they don’t work well either or fast.
The fact that Zvi thinks the value of school to kids is negative is irrelevant here, as what I quoted strictly refers to economic cost (dramatically increasing it, he says, even if tuition is 0). It really looks to me like blatant overlooking of the economic costs of not bringing kids to school. But Zvi seems reasonable (and the tweet is not available), so I asked.
One could argue that from, I don’t know, 12 or 13y they could start doing something marginally productive (BTW, sorry, the legal age to start working is 16y, not 14y). This means a max of 4 years doing something productive before they can start legally working, and leaves at least 6 years having someone locked at home taking care of the kid (and hopefully trying to teach something to him), the productivity of whom would be anyway much higher than that of the kid. And note that the kid being able to start doing something productive does not exclude the adult having to be locked at home during that time.
That’s a good point. At least in the modern world the childcare aspect of school is an economic benefit for parents. It’s worth pointing out that raising younger children was one of the useful jobs older children have historically done.
I think this source answers your questions better than I’ve been able to: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/child-labor-in-the-united-states/
The article is about historical child labor in the 1800′s, and finds that children cost more than they produced, but they were able to do useful farm work past the age of 7.
It’s unclear to me what the breakdown here is but children “age 15 and under” were a large portion of the manufacturing workforce.
Nobody is saying that not sending kids to school could be not-net-negative economically in some specific cases (eg. when someone is anyway at home not doing much, maybe in farms still nowadays?). Such cases represent a tiny minority of current population, at lest in Europe (and in all rich countries). And, even for these small percentage of cases, not being net negative economically is still far away from dramatically raising the economic cost of raising these kids (even if tuition is zero).