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Everybody is an individual and everybody is making decisions
to benefit themselves either as a consumer or as a business person.
You want either more consumer goods or
more consumer satisfaction or you want higher profits for your company.
So the discipline of economics is very individual oriented.
We talk a little bit about external benefits and
by the way that is really the rational for subsidizing child care.
That the benefits to the children will benefit us all eventually.
It's not just sticking with those children and that's the rational for
subsidizing education.
So from an employers perspective child care matters,
because your employees have a place to send their child and
they're not worried all during the day about what's happening to that child.
And so peace of mind for employees is very important to productivity.
So it's a clear win-win.
All of the research on Head Start shows you the value of
taking kids at a young age and making them ready for
kindergarten, and giving them a loving supportive environment.
So we're going to save a lot of money in law enforcement,
we're going to save money in remedial education.
It's just so clear that it's an important investment.
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When I first came to the business school, this is 1972,
Nixon had vetoed a childcare bill in 1971 which
would have provided a national system of childcare.
And his rationale, was that it would weaken the family.
So I knew this, when I came here, but I had doing research on the economics
of childcare and my very first faculty seminar at the business school
was on the economics of childcare, in which I argued or tried to argue,
that subsidizing childcare would be a worthwhile economic investment.
And my colleagues, all white men,
conservative white men, wouldn't let me give the seminar.
They were so outraged at the notion that I was proposing a subsidy for
child care, that they just talked among each other about how outrageous this was.
And I was too new to tell them to be quiet so I could speak.
And the person who was running the seminar didn't tell them to be quiet.
So I realized early on that there was just tremendous opposition to this idea.
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It would be a good investment for the government to subsidize childcare for
families who can't afford it and for the rest of the population,
it would be good to ensure good quality childcare.
A lot of the childcare that exists now is not good quality.
And so all the research is done says that childcare is beneficial to children.
But that research is done on good quality childcare.
Because poor quality childcare doesn't let researchers in.
[LAUGH] So we know that a lot of the care is not good quality and
we know that this is not a good thing that our children are being
raised in situations that are not helping them to grow and develop.
At a national level, I would like to see a childcare system.
We don't have a childcare system.
We have lots of people trying to get childcare and
one of the women, who comes to talk in my class, is a GSB graduate.
She's married to another GSB graduate, their issue is not financial.
They have enough money, but when she became pregnant, she put her child
on a waiting list at a childcare center the day she knew that she was pregnant.
The child was born approximately nine months later and
she wanted to go back to work three months after that.
So it was almost a year that the child had been on the waiting list.
And they had no slot for the child.
It didn't matter what she was willing to pay, there was no slot.
The other question about childcare is affordability.
That was not her issue,
but many people cannot afford the childcare that does exist.
We need a child care system and we need it to be subsidized for
people who need the subsidy.
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Fremont was proposing a ballot initiative
that would cost homeowners, $1 a month,
$12 a year to provide after school childcare for
Fremont Public School children.
And 86% of the population voted this down.
And my student was doing an exit poll.
Of course, we didn't know how the vote would come,
but we were interested in why people were voting however they had voted.
And what he found was that most people said it's
not my problem if people don't have childcare.
They should figure it out.
I don't have to pay $12 a year to help them figure this out.
This is not my problem.
I think we need to look globally.
We need to look beyond just our own satisfaction or
our country's satisfaction.
Because we are a global economy.
We are a global entity.
And I'll never forget when
the astronauts saw the Earth from the moon, and saw how we were a single entity.
And pollution in one place affects pollution in another.
And nuclear power affects the whole world.
So I think all of us need to be thinking more broadly than ourselves or
our families to our country and then to the world as a whole.
And I think that's the challenge of our current moment,
is how to get us to think more broadly.
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