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Counterpoint to the "status" argument- in Japan, being a mom/housewife is still considered a good, respectable job. Maybe not "high-status," but not low-status either, and it beats the hell out of working a terrible office job with insane hours. Young women there will unabashedly say "I want to become a housewife." But the birth rate there is still quite low, so apparently something is not working.
I wish I had a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that the decline in birth rate is mostly coming from a decline in the teen birth rate. Women who wait until they've finished college and started a career to have kids are just not the sort of person to have large families. They'll have 1, 2 at most, and often zero. The younger they start, the more likely they are to have more kids. In part that's just biology (higher fertility), but also psychological, young people are a lot more likely to think "why not just do it" instead of agonizing over the decision for years.
My crazy idea would be to, essentially, abolish high school. Or at least, rework it to be very, very different. I think it's insane that we expect teenagers to learn calculus and biology as if they're all on track to become future scientists, while at the same time forcing them to follow the strict rules and low status of children. I would change it to be more of a "finishing school" experience, where they get taught how to live independantly, give them a job that's subsidized by the government so it's less brutal than most minimum-wage jobs, but still gives them some responsibility and spending money. Give them some freedom and independance from their parents. At that point they'll have time, money, and freedom to interact with the opposite sex, and things will just happen naturally. Then they can decide for themselves whether they want to continue "real school" by going to college, or just keep working and raising a family/dating.
One simple solution would be to make parents of young children Priority Candidates for all government jobs. In other words, to hire someone who doesn’t have at least one child under ten at home, you need to show there are no viable candidates who do.
The nice thing about this policy is that it could be sold to both left and right in different terms. For the left, it’d be about reducing the child-rearing associated with careers, and it pattern matches to affirmative action. For the right it’s about raising TFR.
The best thing about this is that I think it would encourage people to have children younger too. Very often climbing the early rungs of the ladder is more difficult because there are more viable candidates for any one position. You can imagine professional couples in their early or mid 20s saying things like “if we want a shot at the big leagues we should have kids before we’re 30.” And while this would only apply to government jobs in the first instance, soft pressure could be put on private employers to copy it.
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Subsidization is not necessary. I started working part time minimum wage jobs when I was 14, high schoolers are more than capable of handling minimum wage work. It’s not like they’ll be sent to the salt mines (for one thing, salt mining pays a lot more than minimum wage).
There's so many easy jobs for a site boy, which seems to be a completely vanished role now. I was doing "construction work" at 12, even though most of it was sweep, fetch, and carry with a bit of "show the kid how to do this" whenever there was a slow minute.
By the time I was 15 I had a reputation and was worth an adult's salary, which really helped out with the "girlfriends are fucking expensive" issue.
Come to think of it Obama's rules probably made that job very illegal. But if I'd knocked up my HSGF and not gone to college, I could have still made a decent living and been a highly paid specialist by 20.
It still exists, but it's filled by illegal immigrants getting paid scraps under the table.
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Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.
Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.
Actual employers and people who do productive work will violently hate and oppose this idea. Putting someone who needs constant supervision into a potentially dangerous workplace, or even one with a modicum of complication, is a massive burden that would require ruinous compensation. That super below-average kid who can't understand conditionals and violently assaults people for taking his nintendo switch away would be a net negative for any business saddled with his care. The very below-average kids aren't just unproductive, they're actively destructive in any kind of task that's worth doing. Even as a customer I don't actually want the super below-average forced into humiliating service positions they have no hope of ever performing adequately - hell, I don't want to have to see that as a human being.
The whole point of labor vs "education" is to let the useless fail out in a way schools don't allow (witness 95% graduation rates at schools with 0% math proficiency and 20% attendance).
Any top 60% teenager is going to be useful for something and quickly trainable to do a lot more. The 4th quintile is still usable in the right roles, and the faster the bottom quintile can be shuffled off to where they can't do any harm, the better. Could it be worse than letting them stab their teachers and fellow students for 19 years like we do now?
I already talked about my dad starting work early. He quickly got scouted by a (then) high tech company, who paid him to work 4 days a week and go to school for his engineering license requirements the other 3 days.
We have already had working systems for this in living memory. We're in that situation where we collectively forget how to do something and then come up with crazy explanations for why it must be impossible.
I don't have a problem with kids being able to take on some work or go get experience in the real world. Hell, I think that's a great idea - but the way that it is presented here has real problems and that's what I zeroed in on. Sure, your dad was a top performer and got scouted out super quick... but if he's super talented then he's by definition not part of the super below average cohort, who are the actual biggest problem with this proposal. Some people are just net negatives, and as someone who has been both an employer and an employee, I would violently detest whatever system decided to use my business as a daycare for some special needs kid whose interests are jacking off in public and physical violence. Of course, the other end of the bell curve has issues as well - if you discover the next Terence Tao, they should be studying advanced maths rather than cleaning out the deep fryer.
Ultimately I don't think the idea of having kids in school go out to join the workplace is a bad idea - I just think making it mandatory and forcing even the super-below average kids to go do humiliating jobs in service positions they can't even perform adequately is bad for everyone involved.
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To be clear, I didn't mean kids who have severe mental issues- they probably belong in special-ed or juvenile detention. (but what will you do witih them after they turn 18....?) Just basic, normal kids who might sometimes misbehave or slack off a bit, but are perfectly capable of following simple directions. There's no reason to think they'd be any worse at doing most low wage jobs than the people currently doing them, other than lack of experience.
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There's this weird wish among decent groups of all ideologies for basically tuning the clock back on actual advancement - whether it's my fellow lefties unhappy that America's a productive enough country we no longer can make cheap t-shirts here or conservatives upset the workforce is advanced that nobody would want to hire a 14 year old to do a manufacturing job.
It's actually a good thing for you to be a country where you're so advanced, 13 year old's are basically useless in the workforce! Sure, there are downsides, but there's a reason why the only places where there's massive amounts of low-productivity manufacturing work and cihld labor are some of the poorest places in the world.
13 year olds aren't meaningfully more useless than 18 year olds in many roles. Particularly when you are comparing an intelligent 13 y/o to a illiterate illegal 18 year old. What has happened is they've been regulated and credentialed out of competition. Plus once they are 16 or so, they are still being economically undercut by unregulate, illegal labor, meaning they can't get the entry level job that serves as a stepping stone to, for example, become a master carpenter. Thus the system pushes them into education because sheepskins is the only other way to get into those higher level jobs now.
I was going to say, a 13 year old can wash vegetables in the back of a grocery store as well as the 30 year old meth heads and illegals who do it now, and with fewer downsides.
Any with brains will be handling inventory and ordering in a year, once they learn the basics.
From 12-18 I worked in various spots. Mostly refereeing. There are almost no 12 year old referees anymore. The state makes it really hard to start before 15 now. Cant be solo before 16. I used to solo ref 10 year olds as a 13 year old who rode a bike to the field and it was fine. Now they have 30 year olds doing that.
Also at 18 I worked for a glass company right after HS. The owner wanted me to stay on full time. I went to college on a full ride for engineering instead. But, perhaps in a different economic system I could have become head of the plant with no degree and started earning 50k a year out of HS and 100k by age 22. But that is simply not done.
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You are literally replying to a thread about how that worked in practice.
Yes, it worked in a time when America was a less productive country doing lower quality work that was so less advanced an uneducated 13-year-old could pull it off.
You know what the most annoying part of this is? The smug dismissal that construction sites in America don't need sweeping because "we don't do that kind of work any more"
Yes we do, it's just that it's done by the most recent illegal Guatemalan villager who doesn't even speak enough Spanish to take regular orders.
The "lower quality work" is always with us, it's just that you guys have managed to import an underclass of slaves to do it for you out of sight.
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Hey, i had a job at 13. It sucked, but it was still a real job. I dont know why you think its impossible for 13 year olds to be useful (but somehow also smart enough to do college prep classes)
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No, it was not. It was a few decades ago doing work that hasn't substantially changed. If it was naturally declining they wouldn't have put so much work into making it illegal
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making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.
This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.
You bring the median American 13-year-old from 1924 to live the life of a median American 13-year-old in 2024 and they'd kill their own mother to stay in 2024, so it's not as if the previous generations loved working.
Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances. The reason why we don't need 13-year-olds to work at the factory anymore isn't Mexican's, it's that for there to be a cost-effective factory in the US, your workers actually need to be fairly intelligent and efficient, even without a college education.
First, I think it's not at all obvious that a time-travelling 13-year-old would actually prefer it now. Maybe some would, but it would vary. I think a lot of them would really chafe at the lack of freedom now, and being forced to do everything digitally instead of physically. Immigrant children aren't always wide-eyed with glee at being brought here by their parents, you know.
Second- we mostly don't have factories anymore. At least, not factories that higher large amounts. Almost everyone now works in some sort of service-sector jobs. And many of those jobs are now crying out for lack of workers! McDonalds is closing early and raising prices almost everywhere, because they just can't find the staff. That's not a job that requires a college education, it just requires someone to work hard and be willing to learn.
In your idealized world where everyone spends their entire youth in school and is not allowed to work. Well, that was kind of what life was like for women, when they were restricted from most jobs. They didn't like it, it made them both bored and completely dependant on their husband. Allowing people to gain job skills and financial independance is a good thing!
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If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is.
This makes no sense. You spend approximately 0 hours learning how to handle modern technology in school, and even if you did, you don't need that knowledge for most service sector, and corporate office jobs.
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