Turn vacant office space into nurseries
The Collapse of 2008-? has resulted in many employers having a lot of extra office space. What to do with the cubicles of the fallen? Why not turn the aggregate vacant space, at least 15 percent in most cities, into nurseries for babies?
Currently a majority of U.S. college students are women. A significant and growing proportion of people in the U.S. with advanced degrees are women. Let’s look at the investment in a typical woman with a master’s or professional degree. Figure 12 years of public school at $15,000 per year and 7 years of university education at $80,000 per year (tuition plus the foregone income). That’s $740,000 of capital paid in from a combination of public and private sources.
Now let us suppose that our example woman gives birth to a child. At a minimum, she will want to be with her child every two or three hours to breastfeed. What are her options? She can choose career and leave the baby with a nanny or daycare center for a solid 9-hour block every day. She can choose the baby and quit her job. She can try to split the difference by working part time. In any case where the mother gives some priority to the baby, society loses some of its return on that $740,000 investment. This reduces GDP and, more critically right now, the government’s tax base.
Why should the mother have to choose? We have literally skyscrapers worth of empty office space in every major American city. Why can’t part of the average white collar workplace be set aside for an infant nursery? The mother shows up with her nanny and spends 10-11 hours at work (still being paid for a standard 8). The nanny stays with the kid in the nursery; the mother walks over when the nanny notifies her that the baby is ready to nurse or whenever the mother feels that she wants to see the baby. Thus the mother will have spent 2 or 3 hours during the course of a working day over in the nursery with her baby. She has still worked a full 8 hours but not in one stretch.
Thanks to the efforts of politicians and activists, working women have all kinds of rights that they didn’t have formerly. In many cases they have the right to be hired preferentially over a better qualified male (“affirmative action”). They have the right to sue an employer for not paying them equal wages to what men doing similar jobs are paid. They have the right to sue an employer for permitting loutish men to run around the office making lewd remarks. Seemingly every right has been secured except for the one that would matter the most to working women: the right to continue one’s career without separating from one’s cherished infant.
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as a book on tape. The prose is so beautifully crafted that one doesn’t mind the slow pace of an audio book compared to reading ordinary text. Based in part on the author’s visit to Zaire in 1975, the book has some themes that will be familiar to those who read newspaper accounts of present-day African life. Naipaul describes ethnic tensions based on white colonialism, Arab slave-trading, and conflicts among native tribes (not least among them the fact that some tribes were employed by Arabs to enslave other tribes). Every now and then the tensions get so strong that neighbors hack each other to death. There is a boom-and-bust economy based on a natural resource. Transportation is arduous and unreliable. There are high hopes for a bright future of sustained development and everything depends on the Big Man who is running the country.