EMJ said: No category of women in Statistics Sweden shows women ahead of men by income
Right. I was taking this sort of thing into account:
Child allowance (barnbidrag)
Child allowance is a financial support that is automatically paid out to all parents who live and have children in Sweden. You do not need to apply for child allowance.
As of March 1, 2014 a new law was adopted in Sweden that says that the child allowance should be shared between the child’s guardians. Each parent of a child born on March 1 or later receives a half child allowance, SEK 525 per month.
However, if a parent has sole custody of the child he or she receives SEK 1,050 per month.
How does the benefit look like?
The benefit is paid from the month after the birth of the child or later if the child moves to Sweden. The child allowance is tax-free and is paid until the quarter when the child reaches the age of 16. The child allowance is SEK 1,050 per child per month. Large family supplement is paid automatically if child allowance is received for at least two children. The size of the large family supplement depends on how many child allowances are received.
How long is child allowance received for?
The child allowance is paid up to and including the quarter when the child reaches the age of 16. If the child studies at upper secondary school the National Board of Student Aid (Centrala studiestödsnämnden) will pay a study allowance. If this is the case, it is paid automatically without the need to apply. If, on the other hand, the child continues at compulsory school or special school, Försäkringskassan will continue to pay child allowance as of the quarter after the child reaches the age of 16.
There is also no tax incentive promoting marriage in Sweden. On some previous thread I suggested that another possible solution to the correlation between unwed mothers and child poverty in America might be allowing wealthy and/or frugal Americans the opportunity to marry multiple spouses and support their offspring, but nobody liked that idea.
Jacob said: On the flip-side, they haven't been in the currently higher-paying STEM fields (yet?!), so there's that.
Well, now you are just being silly because everybody knows that the person who stands up and hits the tree with a stick gets paid more than the person who bends down and gathers the fruit in her skirt.
brute is actually not convinced that more female humans graduating from college is an economic advantage for them or the sum of all humans. the whole idea that college degrees help you earn more money stems (<- brute funny) from the time when college meant becoming a doctor, an engineer, or similar. something that is actually rare and pays pretty well.
now you can study anything at all at college, and many (most?) of these subjects do not increase your earning potential. female humans seem to flock towards the non-doctor-engineer subjects. therefore, brute thinks maybe many of these female humans have just wasted 4 years and some money on a degree that barely raises their income potential. the same is of course true for all male humans that study a non-income-potential-raising subject.
human society also seems to believe that college degrees are licenses to print money. brute would suggest that that's not inherently true either, only if the degrees actually teach a marketable skill.
@BRUTE: Right, but not so very long ago (100 years?), a liberal education at a university was only something afforded by the quite affluent who had other sources of income. It is only in the last century that the bourgeoisie have taken over the academy with their merchant-minded focus on earned income and the constant ringing of the cash register applied to all realms of humanity. For instance, engineering colleges and teacher's colleges were housed separately from more prestigious universities with graduate programs. Because universal education at the primary level did not come to Iran until the mid-20th century and the Shah instituted a pro-technology revolution with free university education for those who score highest on high school exit exam, there is an over-abundance of engineers and physicians of both genders in that country. Cosmetic surgery is extremely popular there because it is so inexpensive and institutionalized sexism (women can get degrees but often not the associated higher paying jobs)gives high benefit to marriage. One thing my Ex told me was that something we under-appreciate in the U.S is our extensive system of public libraries. Poor people did not have access to textbooks in Iran in his youth (1960s, 70s) Affluent youth attended universities because that was where the valuable and expensive books were stored. Google is now in the process of completely eliminating this uneven playing field for those who will be able to afford access to the volumes they have scanned.
Therefore, I half agree with you, but not for the reasons you offer. If you are not already affluent (or very likely to be so upon inheritance), and therefore you are in need of an income, you would be best served by focusing on either a vocational education or embarking upon your own business or both. OTOH, if you are already objectively-affluent or subjectively-affluent-enough-because-frugal then "I" believe that you would be best served moving forward by affording yourself a liberal education towards erudition. Due to the fact that millions of very good books are now available for very little cost, free time or focus/stamina should be your primary limiting factors. No need to transport your body to Cambridge or St. John's unless you are in want of structure or somebody to occasionally hit you with a stick or a career path inclusive of tenure or proximity that would allow you to share food and sex with other humans who might say "Fibonacci" or "Chaucer."
7Wannabe5: brute agrees that a liberal arts education is great. brute believes himself to be quite liberal arts educated. but brute also likes to eat. brute sees no direct benefit for earning money from his liberal arts education. maybe in very indirect ways. in fact, certainly in indirect ways. but these indirect ways were very coincidental and serendipitous (<- so much for brutes liberal arts education!). brute certainly couldn't, and in fact didn't, plan on them. almost everybody brute knows who received the same education did not end up going these strange ways, and almost none of those humans have the same income potential.
brute also thinks that many people who received the same education as him did not profit in the fancy, hand-wavey liberal arts ways brute did. many humans don't seem to care or be interested in shakespeare, descartes, or mark twain. for them it was wasted time.
so while a liberal arts education has done great things for brute both directly (state of mind, enjoying literature) and indirectly (enabled unlikely increases in income potential), he is not convinced that the majority of humans would reap these same benefits from the same liberal arts education.
maybe liberal arts is the high risk, high reward education, and vocational school is the low risk, low reward way?
@BRUTE: Yes, but why would we care whether people who are not interested in Shakespeare, Twain or Descartes are able to eat? The question at hand is at what level of affluence would a person such as yourself be better served by expending next hour of life energy on activities towards liberal expansion of mind rather than the mining of filthy lucre? I do not believe that a liberal education is the high risk, high reward option because your brain is one of the few things that you can't lose completely. Tides rise, tides fall, possessing the ability to discern the qualitative difference between value and price in multiple realms will always prove to be in deep and critical alignment with your self-interest.
brute can't say that he himself is particularly interested in whether other humans can eat (there are just too many to care), but apparently, those humans are interested in this themselves. if a human is so low on the maslow pyramid that he can barely feed himself, would 7Wannabe5 still recommend the liberal arts education? brute thinks maybe this calls for a more short-term income potential increasing scheme.
@BRUTE: Well, if I was stripped of all assets and resources (inclusive of social connections, etc.) of any kind, and I was in modern affluent America, and I did not have a supply of food adequate for the next day or three, I would dumpster dive to meet my caloric needs. Of course, someplace warm and reasonably safe to sleep would be my first concern. The best, least expensive, solution for warmth I know of if is to construct a hammock cocoon using comforters on top and bottom and bungee cords. It's pretty easy to find textiles in dumpsters, but maybe I would need $2 for bungee cords, so I would have to find 20 returnable cans. That leaves excretion and sex to be dealt with before I can climb up one more level of the pyramid. Public restroom or bit of wooded area is all that is needed for first, and since I am a female under the age of 80, the second would also be readily obtainable at no cost. So, it would only be when I reached the second level of the pyramid where I am concerned with SECURITY of body, employment, morality, family, health and property that I might run into a conflict. If I imagine myself wrapped up in my scavenged textile cocoon, belly full of tossed unopened school lunch chocolate milk, with no urges to defecate or copulate in the moment, would I be relaxed enough to chuckle while reading the hinge-broken copy of "Tristram Shandy" that I found in the same dumpster as the slightly tattered Sponge-Bob SquarePants sleeping bag that forms part of my layer of cocoon, or would I feel a level of anxiety that would cause me to choose to exert my next hour of life energy on the task of completing an application for entry into technical education program at the nearby community college? Dunno. Are there perhaps some other options? Could there possibly be wormholes in Maslow's construction? What if I take the top of the triangle and twist it into and through the third dimension and stitch it to the side? Then what?
7Wannabe5 can twist a picture of a pyramid in any way she likes. but brute will probably still recommend his barista friend go into a trade than study underwater basket weaving.
liberal arts education is great, but it's not guaranteed just because a college degree doesn't teach any marketable skills.
Eh, we're talking apples and oranges now. Underwater Basket Weaving is just as narrow of a niche as C# Web Development. If that is the choice, narrow vs. narrow rather than narrow vs. liberal, then marketability is an obvious next factor to consider. Anyways, I'm not sure if paying to obtain any sort of education is the smartest move in the current climate. OTOH, I have a B.S in Mathematics, which I have found to be a fairly useful multi-purpose sort of base unto which any number of self-acquired skills can be pinned and rendered marketable, so...?
jennypenny wrote:*My son is on the HS soccer team, and his HS is in a league with many of the prep schools around Princeton. ... One kid on the team is really funny. When they played the Hun school, a couple of players started calling him "spook" after he scored on them. Instead of letting it get to him, our player started narrating the game while he played "Oh no, did the spook just beat you again?" "Uh oh, the spook just scored again." They try their best to handle it with humor.
That kid was killed in a horrible accident yesterday. Heartbreaking.
Life is short people. Make the hard choices and cross the ERE threshold as fast as you can.
jennypenny wrote:*My son is on the HS soccer team, and his HS is in a league with many of the prep schools around Princeton. ... One kid on the team is really funny.
That kid was killed in a horrible accident yesterday. Heartbreaking.
Life is short people. Make the hard choices and cross the ERE threshold as fast as you can.
I have one question ... how many of those students who were 'injured and affected' will be out drinking next weekend while wearing green, talking like the guy from Lucky Charms, and sporting "Today I'm Irish" buttons? Talk about cultural appropriation. Good thing the Irish have a sense of humor about such things or they'd need a shitload of counselors every March 18th.
humans are hilarious. just writing another human's name on a wall causes them physical pain.
@jacob: brute is triggered by the words "trigger warning", and encourages jacob NOT to post them any more, because they cause brute genuine pain and discomfort.
I can't get over the new Halloween costume rules at colleges prohibiting anything offensive. I always thought the best costumes were the edgy ones. I wore a few myself back in the day.
I understand telling elementary kids not to bring weapons or wear anything too scary, but why do college age kids need to be protected from anything? I am totally flummoxed by the safe space movement on campuses.
