Working people can't afford homes or starting a family, but at least we are generating amazing value for shareholders.

As someone who has done research on pricing in a range of sectors, it’s usually some form of ignorance rather than altruism.

In case you think I’m just picking on child care providers, I will provide an additional example — non-VC SaaS services were often wildly mispriced/underpriced until the “charge more” mantra became more widespread (thank you, patio11).

PE did this with medical providers. When I was a child family doctors were a thing (btw, 2000s). I saw in my area that a lot of the small practices were bought out, and now there are medical "campuses" which have like dozens of different providers. I was talking to my dentist about this and she explained it to me that way so unless she's lying idk what to say.

That "slack", where people provide better goods and services, for a lower price than the market could theoretically bear, is the very definition of Having Nice Things.

The implied "optimal" price discovery is a highly adversarial process - derived from an every-growing playbook of price discrimination tactics, deceptive marketing, high-pressure sales tactics, exploitation of intertia and other external overheads, covert cuts to the quality being provided, etc, etc.

Such pricing is both a symptom and cause for "low trust society" behaviors. The increasing ubiquity of those "efficient" pricing strategies may very well have amounted to a covert pillaging of the commons.

I'm not sure this is true. PE driven markets currently seem to cater to the break point. What is the absolute most I can charge until someone will walk away? If I break it into a subscription, or into pieces will I be able to charge even more than that break point because the buyer has not or cannot easily do the math? Maybe offer financing and take a cut there as well.

I am not making a moral argument, but it is far more sophisticated than "those who can afford it" and so, this is then not really about affording it, rather its about restructuring what the category should cost socially speaking and pushing that even further. This is happening in a large number of sectors at the same time.

Yes—and then we can (in theory—obviously not going to happen in the current political climate) shift the bulk of that cost onto the taxpayers who can most afford to subsidize it, and away from the people who are just getting by. Who are, not entirely coincidentally, also the people most likely to be in need of childcare services.

And for awhile the market looks good as the prices can rise as the “cheapest” leave.

But eventually it will collapse.

I think if you're breaking even on daycare and salary then you're still coming out economically ahead to keep working.

Daycare costs stop once you enroll the kid into school. Typically salaries scale with years of experience so you're forfeiting ~7-9 years of salary growth by stopping work.

That said, there are non-economic reasons to raise your kids ...

Roughly one thirds of American incomes go to cover housing. Cheaper housing means lower wage demands.

1. Families. 2. Women. 3. Corporations.

The problem is that all of that wealth went to the billionaires and the rest of us got the bones in the scrap pile. Now we can't even raise our children because we need to work, but we cannot even not raise our children because it costs more than we make.

It was a period of high taxation on the highest incomes, large social welfare programs and by relative terms fairly low income inequality.

Finally productivity gains benefitted the labor class and not just the capital class.

That all halted in the 70s and 80s.

You do have to intentionally budget but you can raise five+ kids on a single salary if you want to.

The essential costs - housing, healthcare and education - have far outpaced inflation while the cost of food and appliances has not. How can a single income compete in buying from the limited supply of houses against dual incomes?

Yes - given a small number of rights that frankly we should have always had - women have found all kinds of representation in education, salaries and diverse paths in life. Paths not previously open to us and pursued at tremendously high cost.

But population decline frankly is occurring because society is uninterested in changing its relationship with child bearing and child rearing. Men have limited interested in stepping up, women are doing work at home, work at work, work in society. Corporations have less interested in flexibility where women are near continuously penalized or held back. Even in a "progressive" presidency there were more CEOs named John than women CEOs. There's disinterest even when the next generation of workers is on the line and the government...well they are actively moving to unwind the rights we've won.

It's not about having better options so much as knowing that they'll be bringing a child into a world that's only going to get worse. A child who may never own a home, who may struggle to make ends meet. A child who may go bankrupt if they lose the healthcare lotto.