The Household Economy

It has been a busy fall, as my two-month absence from these pages might suggest. 

Directing my first stage play in many years was a wonderful experience, but it also left me behind in several other tracks of activity. And somehow the various tracks of life have been coming to resemble a rail yard around here.

Owning a 130 year old home means committing to a constant stream of home projects, large and small, as MrsDarwin recently mentioned.  I can report that the silverware drawer whose demise she described now has a handsome replacement:

And the leveling of the floor for the Great Bathroom Remodel is near completion.  (In a testament to the ability of old houses to settle, I'm having to level a floor which has height differences of up to 1.5 inches in the joists.)

Over at ThePillar, my latest data journalism project has involved applying quantitative text analysis techniques to the documents of the Synod on Synodality. I've been working through a series of pieces using correspondence analysis to examine the documents and the apparent connections (or lack thereof) between them.  What made this tricky was that I had never actually done correspondence analysis before this, I'd only read about it. ThePillar deserves a good deal of credit for being willing to give me the time to figure out new techniques which no one is currently applying to Catholic journalism.  (There are more installments coming shortly.)  I also did a quick piece on the increasingly advanced ages of popes at election and death through history.

And, of course, I needed to deal with the end of year press work. Since I deal with pricing, I end up fairly closely involved with the process of building the company budget, and that's a time consuming thing which comes at the end of the year.

The need to keep up with these various things, and the fact that work always has to trump the others in a crunch, has had me thinking lately about the part that work plays in our family's life. 

I have several friends who are deeply interested in the idea of work being more accommodating towards family life. Their proposals often focus around the kind of policies which make it easier for a family with two working parents to integrate the demands and parenting and working: longer post partem leave for both parents, taking sick days to care for sick children, more flexibility for working at home and working flexible hours so that parents can balance watching kids and doing work, etc.

I do not deny that these approaches help families in which all parents work. And as a manager, I am certainly always conscious of giving parents flexibility to deal with family things.

And yet, we have always pursued a different approach with our family.  Rather than seeking to both have jobs which are more compatible with raising children while working, we've made it a priority to have only one working parent.

In a sense, either way, this means taking some distance from the world in which so much of our value is seen as coming from working.  But the one approach involves both parents working, but doing so in a "work to live, not live to work" kind of fashion which makes more room for child rearing.  And the other involves having one parent step outside the working world entirely.  

Arguably, this means that we are even less trapped within the so called rat-race than those who are trying to pursue more flexible work schedules. But our tactics are the opposite.  Back when I started this blog, I was still working hourly, and at that time I always made sure to try to get overtime whenever I could.  Mour hours meant more dollars, and more dollars paid the bills while MrsDarwin stayed home.

I've been salaried for a long time now, but I have over the years pursued higher level work which at times requires travel or long hours because that has allowed me to take roles which pay more and thus grant our family what at this point is upper middle class affluence, even while unlike most of my coworkers we bring home one check not two (and have three times the number of kids.)

I don't have any issue with those who pursue the other strategy. But unfortunately from a policy point of view they can be somewhat opposed.  

In both cases, we want to spend less of our total family's time working on things outside the working economy.  When we cook and clean and teach the kids and reglaze the windows and re-tile the bathroom, we're doing things that we would otherwise have to pay someone a lot of money to do.  And when we write and put on theater, we're doing things which people do pay for to some degree, but which don't provide enough money to support people full time for the kind of work that we're doing.

However, our ability to have some spouse entirely outside the market economy is premised on my ability to make enough money to suppose the whole family off one paycheck.  If my job was broken into two jobs so that each person could get six months of parent leave after each child, and more vacation every year, and more flexible and shorter hours, the result would be that I wouldn't make as much money, and while perhaps now we could get by simply by living more modestly, at an early stage in our marriage that would probably have meant both of us having to work.  (And once you both work, the transition back to one income is notoriously hard.)

So I wish those who want more flexible jobs for family reasons well, but their desires are not my desires, and I hope they don't end up setting policy over me.