The Macroeconomics of Raising Robots (or Children)
By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
On the Economix blog, Nancy Folbre has another take on our cost-benefit analysis of child-rearing, one that the parents among us, and their supporters, will love. In “Of Parents, Puppies and Robots,” she writes:
Capitalism, that masterful force, would have to pay much more for workers if families weren’t willing to pony up most of the time, money and effort necessary to raise them, train them and educate them.Imagine a world in which businesses could largely rely on highly customized battery-powered robots but would require some humans to design, build and program them. In a competitive market, the price of robots would be determined by the cost of producing them, including the wages demanded by their human producers.What a boon it would be to businesses – and to their