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Personally, I'd be happy for any time between 1270-1300.
You can't wag the finger about wanting to turn the clock back, then issue a manifesto that... turns the clock back.
That horse has bolted. One working parent in a family is for those who are wealthy enough to have the wife at home (or single-parent families where it's the mother working, or unemployed and on benefits). Expectations are built around couples where both are working and earning, if you want a mortgage or any kind of expense in living in today's society, there needs to be two wage-earners.
I'd like to go back to 1960 (everyone usually goes "oh the 50s is what you mean" for this view of the family, but it was something possible up to the 70s) but the economy has moved on since, and everyone is terrified to meddle with the economy because we have constructed such a house of cards around it and 'too big to fail' and the stock market and tech companies and all the rest of it, that pulling on one thread will unravel it all.
Tech layoffs right now because companies need to trim the fat and get back to profitability? Unless you have a guaranteed job to walk into as a replacement, you better hope your significant other is working and covering the bills while you try and get another job.
Also, parts of your manifesto are contradictory:
versus
So you're going to get rid of all the cleaners, porters, kitchen staff, nurse's aides, nurses, and maybe even doctors via 'automation' in order to have a more lean and efficient health service. So now what do all the unemployed health workers do? How many nurses for planting trees?
You can't say "everyone must have a job" on the one hand, while planning to do away with jobs on the other. And again, see here:
So let me get this straight. We need automation in healthcare because it is way too expensive. Automation does away with jobs. But we will make all women do two years' nursing service. Uhhhh - how you gonna pay for that, if healthcare costs have to be trimmed? And if there is a constant rota of untrained staff who then leave after two years, how do you expect your hospitals to work? I feel you have not thought this through (or you imagine that nursing just means bedpans and changing sheets).
If the mandatory armed forces/nursing service get paid via some kind of allowance, you still have not reduced your costs. You're just doing an accountancy shuffle where "we take the money for wages out of the healthcare budget and claim we've saved it, then we pay it out under a different heading".
I'm fine with "turning the clock back" if there is a first-principles based approach for justifying it. What I don't want is nostalgic wishing for the "good old days". This is neither a compelling forward-looking vision nor epistemologically sound.
I'm not here to defend my article to a great degree :). I only weakly believe in it myself. That said, this statement is not a contradiction for two reasons.
First, there are roughly 3.7-4 million nurses in the US. There are 30 million aged 18-24. Making some rough assumptions, 10 million are thus between 18-20. Half of those are women, so we have 5 million 18-20 year old nurses, which is not out of alignment with the existing nursing population.
Second, my aim is not to reduce nursing staff; it is to reduce the inordinate bureaucratic bloat in finance and health. We spend an astronomical amount of our output on health care and finance. Health care and finance are both "intermediate" activities for the economy. One keeps the working population healthy enough to work, the other provides capital for businesses. Both industries should be enablers but they are a drag instead. Reducing the bloat can free us to focus on "final" goods and services.
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This is totally false in lots of places that aren't San Francisco. Prior to the COVID run-up in house prices, the average house price in Phoenix was about $275k. Residents of working age earn in the ballpark of $70k.
https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/AZ/Maricopa-County-Demographics.html
https://www.redfin.com/city/14240/AZ/Phoenix/housing-market
Same is true in most of the fast growing cities.
I vaguely recall there was a much more detailed AAQC about this back on the subreddit.
Let me introduce you to the concept of saving money - something that was far more popular in the 1960's than today.
One plausible way that might work is a tiered system where the 2 year staff changes sheets/bedpans while the pros restrict their efforts to things that require skills that can't be quickly acquired.
I do not know what the breakdown of work is, but it seems quite plausible - thanks to the American guild system - that a lot of work currently requiring a registered nurse could be done by a far less skilled person. We have strong evidence that many such guild-based regulations are not medically necessary, as evidenced by the lack of deaths caused by state-to-state variation between them.
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