ATWT Series one: The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi
Disassembling the dissembling of Chapter Two, continued
Chapter Two, part two
To resume the thread from the previous post, on to the rest of this deeply incoherent chapter, starting with its weird voucher discourse.
The section on vouchers is as muddled and confused as all the rest of this chapter. What Warren proposes is a bizarre system of public school-only vouchers for "any public school in the area". Which area is left to the reader to puzzle out. Warren also is ignorant (or refuses to note, as it undermines her argument) of what was already occurring in public schools at the time of writing, which was a move to magnet and choice school programs within the public school system. That is, parents in many school districts were already demanding and often getting alternative, location-independent educational options within those districts. This odd "public voucher" system is proposed as a solution to "bankrupting yourself to escape lousy schools". But we already know that the lousy schools are almost entirely high-crime urban ones. Warren just circles around this but ultimately skitters away to move on to one of the most truly destructive memetic elements of this book, universal preschool.
Warren notes that preschool uptake went from 4% in the 1960s for three and four year olds to about 65% in the year 2000. She is being sneaky again, as 4% was only 3yos in 1965 and the 65% was only 4yos in 2000. She also points out that "nearly" half of all stay at home mothers were using pre-k in 2000. This is important because the view that Warren presents as "middle class" of preschool+public school+college as the proper educational program is her presenting a novel and rapid shift as reasonable. And the preschool shift was extremely rapid, taking place almost entirely during the 1980s and 1990s. The preschool shift was bigger than the college shift. That is, people were enrolling their child in preschool at higher rates than families expected the same children to attend college, even as late as 2000. This is from the same statistics Warren is manipulating for her middle-class education claims. She is describing what I have used in other contexts as "college educated working class" views as more generically middle class.
To digress briefly, the idea is that with massive college attainment by white women after WWII, there arose increasingly a class of people with college educations but distinctly working class views and this class represents the bulk of college graduates because having a larger college attending population doesn't remove the background of said college attendees.
So back to the "preschool and college are mandatory middle class spending" argument from Warren. Once she's defined this spending as mandatory, going bankrupt to pay for it means that said bankrupts were not spending frivolously, a nice parlor trick. This all leads to her claim that a year of prek in one region (Chicago) costs as much as a year of college in the same region. Then she mentions "one study" that claims prek costs twice as much as college in 15 states. This has escaped the book to become "prek costs twice as much as college" or "prek costs more than college!". Even if it is true (and the footnote discussion will reveal it mostly isn't), one would expect 3 and 4 year olds to cost more to take care of than teenagers and early 20something adults. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it has turned out to have intensely strong memetic power among the now vast college educated working class.
Interestingly Warren does not particularly strongly argue that this is to be publically funded, perhaps because her example of a prek costing more than a college was a public school prek. She mentions how it could be done, but doesn't commit to it argumentatively. This is a curious divergence, but speculating why she doesn't fully commit to universal preschool is beyond the scope of even this post. On to college degrees, which she also has very odd views about.
A statistic that $8600/yr for average public 4-year tuition represents 17% of the average family's pretax income is dropped after survey data that nearly everyone thinks a college education is "necessary" or "helpful". The context here is that only about 25% of adults had a college degree at the time. A further context is that public college tuition doubled twice during the 70s and 80s, taking a decade each time to do so and then doubled only a bit more rapidly during the 90s, within eight or so years rather than ten. So Warren is speaking at the tail end of thirty continuous years of rapid increases as if the most recent set is particularly new. Warren has no answer for why college costs doubled every decade but bankruptcies did not increase during those periods of much higher college costs, co-occurring with ever-rising attendance by the middle class. Instead she just mentions sports and administration as cost centers before moving on to why tuition should be frozen to fix the college cost problem.
Warren briefly discusses the fact that federal student loan borrowing dollars tripled over the prior decade (from about 10 billion to 34 billion) and that private student loan dollars quintupled over a six year period. Notably, she even mentions that a million households a year use home equity to pay for college. The borrowing increases are then linked to public universities receiving 13% more public dollars. Warren then comes out swinging against more taxes in favor of tuition freezes to, in some manner, force colleges to reduce costs. Her reasoning is that if public colleges froze tuition and didn't seek "ephemeral national prestige", private colleges would be forced to set their own prices more reasonably. She also argues that raising taxes is pointless, as it would just lead to public colleges spending more money. After offering this solution to college costs, Warren then moves on to weird lies about the family car.
Shortly before wrapping up this chapter with a discussion comparing families from the 1970s and families in the current year (2000) the book was written, Warren devotes a whole section to discussing the family car. She claims that families spending on a second car is essential and new. In fact it was not. The second car had already become part of family spending during the 1970s. Warren's daughter is the one to discuss car seats and how they require larger, more expensive cars for families of more than two children (and notably she uses a stay at home mother of three to discuss that point), but as her mother did with defining pre-k as "justified" spending, she defines the safetyism driving car seat uptake as acceptable and reasonable, even though car seats for children up to age eight were already being considered ideal. There is a depressing possibility that this book provided political cover to eventually codify car seats for children up to age 8 in the seatbelt laws of numerous states.
After that slightly strange detour, we come to the end of this chapter. Warren retakes the narrative voice and compares two families from the 1970s and the 2000s to discuss how the latter family has entered a "Two-Income Trap". As ever, Warren starts with a questionable assumption. She uses a 40th percentile family for her 1970s family rather than a 50th percentile family, which made 63k in 2000 dollars rather than just under 39k. Warren conflates full time male income for all males with married father earnings, even though the two overlap but are not the same. But by using a poorer than average family from the 1970s to compare with an approximately median two-earner family in 2000, Warren can get the frame she wants, that the mother as second earner income is "eaten up" by new costs in the 2000s family.
Interestingly, this concluding section has come up for discussion by libertarians who noted that the two-income family of 2000 somehow had "33%" of its income lost to taxes and that this might perhaps have been a bigger impact than all the other expenses Warren tacks on. The increase in taxes is mentioned almost in passing compared to, say, Warren insisting that after-school care is a necessary cost. With such arguments she gets to 75% of the 2000s family's incomes being earmarked for required spending. On this note she then moves to the chapter about Mom as a backup earner, the frequently discussed heart of the book that is almost entirely false.
But before moving on to that chapter, it's time to discuss the footnotes for this one. As they require their own post entirely, that’s the next post and hopefully last post for this chapter. Due to travel and health issues, it will be posted about a week from now.