Mom Salary

It turns out that moms do about $118,000 worth of work per year, according to Salary.com.  In light of this fact and the suggestions of certain less than intellectual U.S. public officials, I would like to share my thoughts on this. 

First let's look at the math.  One of the worst financial decisions anyone could make for single moms is to offer them free child care so they can work jobs that pay less than $10 an hour.  At full time, a $10 an hour job pays $20,800 a year, which is less than 20% of the value of staying at home to raise children.  It would be better to give them the $20,800 a year, no strings attached, because at least that way, we don't loose $97,200 a year in value.

Note that this accounts only for the actual monetary value of the work, not the social value.  The social value cannot even be calculated.  Civilization itself largely depends on it.


Now, here is a list of my immediate thoughts on this:

When we suggest that a mother work outside the home, we should start by comparing the income she could earn with the value of the work she does at home.  If the income from working is not significantly higher (recall that the $118,000 a year does not include social value), we should shut up and mind our own business.

There are not many jobs worth over $100,000 at entry level.  Motherhood is the easiest to get into.

While it is a volunteer position, unless we can justify the loss of volunteer labor at that value, we should be doing everything we can to make sure mothers have the necessary resources to do their job well.  In other words, it is a better financial choice to give a single mother $100,000 a year in welfare than it is to pay for daycare while she works a $10 an hour job.  The fact, however, is that $35,000 a year would be sufficient.  Are we really so stingy that we are not willing to pay 1/3 of the going rate for an essential service?  Even non-profits can afford to pay their lawyers and accountants around $40,000 a year.

As far as the government and society are concerned, raising children is an investment.  The average child does more to help society in the long run than to help her parents.  The majority of the payoff from the investment goes to the employers of the child, the government, and society in general, so why does the mother have to foot the entire bill of $100,000 per year worth of work?  In fact, why do the parents have to foot the entire monetary cost of child rearing, when they are not even in the top three who benefit from the investment?  We should not just be giving tax write offs and paltry credits for children.  Parents with children should be getting significant stipends, and society should be grateful that they are not demanding even more!

What I just said above is even more applicable when a majority of the children are being raised by a minority of the people.  When pretty much everyone raises 2 or 3 children, the costs get spread out fairly well (excluding the part owed by the government and businesses).  When Mormons have a birth rate of 3.4 and everyone else is hovering around 1.9, everyone but Mormons are freeloaders who are not doing their share.  Without Mormons, Catholics, and Protestants, we would probably be almost as bad off as Japan or South Korea.  You are welcome, all of you Americans who are choosing to have one child or less.  It would be nice if you at least acknowledged the massive value of our public service!  And it would be even better if you would occasionally help us out (without any petty complaining) when we needed it ("need" in this case should include things like occasional vacations, because raising children does not come with paid or even unpaid vacation time; you have to actually buy vacation time when you have children).


Now, I should probably note that a working mom evidently still does about $70,000 worth of work at home, in addition to paid work.  For single moms working $10 an hour jobs, the total value still comes out at only just over $90,000 a year (assuming full-time), except, of course, that the social value is significantly lower, because the kids get significantly less time with mom.  Also, the statistics seem to indicate that working moms ultimately do more hours of work total per week, for that lower total value.  This does not change the fact that a majority of U.S. society is freeloading though.  Likewise, even a working mom is doing $70,000 more worth of work that is benefiting everyone else more than herself, and that does not magically reduce the monetary cost of having kids (in fact, daycare actually increases that cost).

Alternative Medicine

Over the last several centuries, science has advanced by leaps and bounds.  Just in the last 200 years, our understanding of the structure of atoms has improved dramatically.  At first, many scientists thought that they were the smallest constituents of matter (atomic literally means irreducible or unsplittable).  Then electrons were discovered and scientists modeled atoms as a pudding, with electron "plums" in it.  It was not long before they were able to discover that the distribution of charge within an atom does not support that model, and next atoms were modeled as electrons orbiting the nucleus.  Again though, this model was frustrated by quantum physics, and our current model has an atomic nucleus surrounded by an "electron cloud" that is not actually an orbital, but a probability space within which the electrons are most likely to be located.  No one believes in the plum pudding model anymore, and while diagrams often represent atoms using the orbital model, no one in serious science actually believes in that model either.  As old science has been disproved, scientists have moved on to more proven and supported science.  This is true in all fields except for one.

In medicine, we still have this theory that diseases are caused by mysterious miasms.  Many people believe that burning a certain fungus on or near the skin (yes, this does often cause painful burns) can cure diseases.  There is a whole discipline of medicine that believes that pressure or pin pricks on the skin can cure anything.  There is even a discipline that believes merely imagining a disease leaving the body will make it actually do so.  I thought medical science was past all of this.  I thought that we established more than a century ago that most diseases were caused by viruses or bacteria, which can and have been observed under microscopes and in cultures, not some mystical, undetectable magic "miasms."  I thought that we invented medicines and medical practices to fight these infections, instead of using shamanistic practices without any record of verifiable success.  In short, I thought that medical science had advanced the same way classical physics has.  It turns out I was very wrong.

Homeopathy is a medical discipline that believes disease is caused by miasms.  Despite the fact that the existence of viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens, not to mention proven explanations for the causes of other non-pathogenic diseases, like cancer, has been well proven, plenty of people still believe in these totally undetectable magical disease causing things called miasms.  And worse, they pay real money for water or alcohol preparations that at one time might possibly have had a few molecules of some "medicine" in it, before it was diluted out to the point that modern science has proven that most homeopathic "drugs" don't even have a single molecule of the original, supposedly curative substance in them.  (Which is actually a good thing, given that many of them are potent poisons in high enough concentration to have any effect at all.)  The only thing homeopathy is actually successful in is the placebo effect and convincing seriously sick patients to forgo life saving treatments long enough that they die from preventable causes.

Most other forms of "alternative medicine" are more believable than homeopathy, but most of them also have a host of evidence against them.   For instance, Traditional Chinese Medicine, including acupuncture and moxibustion (that thing about burning the fungus) have potentially believable biological explanations for their claims.  Acupuncture is supposed to stimulate nerves in ways that aid the immune system (though, the original explanations involving the flow of life energy are a rather less supported by biology).  The problem is that it does not actually work.  This is not a matter of modern medicine attacking it to reduce competition.  Plenty of research, including many clinical trials, has shown that getting stuck with needles in special life energy or nerve points is no more effective than water or saline injections with a hypodermic needle in the normal places injections are given.  (It does turn out that getting injected is actually one of the most powerful placebos, but that does not justify the prices of Traditional Chinese Medicine.)  Still, many people choose to believe in these practices, despite the fact that they have repeatedly been disproved.  As with homeopathy, aside from the placebo effect, Traditional Chinese Medicine does little more than convince people to die by forgoing proven life saving medical treatment.

Even treatments like Chiropractic have questionable claims, though, Chiropractic has some proven benefits for spinal health, and it has been proven to relieve muscle pain associated with spinal misalignment.  There is not significant evidence that Chiropractic can cure cancer, but there do seem to be some health benefits from it, though those may largely be related to the fact that pain relief tends to relieve harmful stress.

Altogether, we almost live in a highly scientifically enlightened age.  The big exception is the field of medicine, where a lot of people seem to take the most important part of science, their own health, for granted, and treat it as something of so little value that they will ignore all of the warnings and choose to be guinea pigs for already disproved treatments.  I suppose this could be regarded as natural selection against poor judgment, but I think the government bears some of the blame as well.  Alternative medicine is the only medical discipline where the burden is to disprove, instead of to prove.  In modern medicine, there are strict government requirements on proving that a medication or procedure is reasonably safe before it can be administered to the general public.  In alternative medicine, largely anything is permitted so long as it is not proven ineffective or harmful under extremely rigorous trials (about the same rigor required of modern medicine to prove its claims, which no one is willing to fund for alternative medicine), and the burden of proof lies on no one in particular, making it very difficult to prosecute and shut down all the quacks and charlatans.  I am not opposed to finding new medical treatments, especially ones that might cause consternation in the modern medical community (they need to get stirred up about things once in a while, and some serious competition would do the medical industry a world of good), but it is beyond absurd to place strict restrictions on safety and evidence of claims on the only scientifically based medical community without doing the same for all of the medical disciplines that are not backed by science.  I mean, allowing faith healing is one thing, but allowing practices that have been proven harmful or potentially harmful is another altogether.

Work to Live: Death, Divorce, and Crime

The work to live ideology results in 700 deaths per year from freezing.  It is a major contributer to domestic violence as well as high divorce rates in the U.S.  It is highly likely that it also is a major factor in illegal drug use.  Of course, this does not even count the cases of starvation and other shelter related deaths.  Frankly, this work to live thing is imposing what amounts to serious cruel and unusual punishment on around 600,000 people (the government claims that this is how many people are homeless each night on average).

This is a shame, in a country that produces almost five times what it consumes of nearly all basic necessities (shelter may be an exception).  Even during the recent recession, we had a thriving economy, producing enormous amounts of nearly everything, and only a very small portion of that is necessary for survival.  A vast majority of our labor goes into producing things that we do not need.  We have too much of nearly everything (half of the food produced in the U.S. that is not exported gets thrown away), and yet, we are just letting people starve and freeze to death on the streets.  Why?

The problem is "work to live."  At the same time the U.S. is making great strides to abolishing the death penalty.  Last year, there were only 35 executions in the U.S. total.  The grand total since 1976 is 1,407.  Each year, 20 times as many people as were executed last year die from freezing alone.  It only takes two years for enough people to die from freezing to match the total number of executions since 1976.  The death penalty is not a significant source of death in the U.S., and more innocent people die every year in accidents than the grand total of innocent people that have died to the death penalty in all of U.S. history.  Why are we so vocal about the death penalty while huge numbers of people are dying constantly because of some outdated ideology that is based largely on a situation that never actually existed in known history?  We are evidently hypocrites.


Domestic violence, divorce rates, and drug abuse all go together.  These are all problems that are limited primarily to the lower class.  Domestic abuse in middle or upper class households is extremely rare compared to those living in poverty.  The most common cause of divorce is financial disagreements that stem from not having a high enough income.  Drug abuse is far more common among the homeless and poor than any other class.  In fact, crime in general (especially petty theft and violent crime) is most frequently committed by the poor.  The worst part is that a vast majority of poor people are not poor by their own choice, but they are punished for it and treated as if it were.  As with the death penalty, innocent people are being punished for not being able to work to live.  They largely have no choice, and multiple studies have shown that giving them sufficient money, even straight cash with no strings attached (the opposite of work to live), will alleviate most of these problem, and it will give them the means and motivation to permanently escape them.

Work to live has become a toxic ideology on our society.  It was the root cause of the recent recession, because even during the recession, goods were plentiful.  It causes people to keep jobs they hate, preventing other people who want those jobs from getting them.  It causes a great deal of death, far more than the death penalty.  It causes economists to make nonsensical statements revolving around the idea that reducing unnecessary work is bad.  It causes people to oppose valuable economic advances, again based on the idea that reducing necessary work is bad.  It is a major factor in  divorce, drug abuse, and crime.  Eliminating the work to live ideology (with, for example, a basic income) would do far more to reduce unnecessary death than eliminating the death penalty, and it would likely reduce crime far more effectively than the death penalty or any other law enforcement ever has.