alt Hacker NewsEvery single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
Replies
A picnic is basically free, for those near enough to open spaces. Likewise for hikes, which I’ll happily pay to drive an hour or more to enjoy.
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
Babysitting is the big one for me. I can eat cheaper, but I can't really get a cheaper babysitter. My wife used to babysit for 5 bucks an hour just 10 years ago, and high school aged girls now want 20 an hour minimum. We're not talking "professionals" and my cost of going out is now at least 60-80 bucks without acting else.
When I'm visiting developing countries, I'm often in awe of the increased social activity and wondering why we don't have that in the western world anymore. One thing I think about is the cost increase like this.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
So true. Society has been captured by banks and telecoms/internet/TV.
Feels like a guinea pig society with all of the rapid changes happening
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
This is very sad to read, every social thing I do cost me zero dollars because they're in my community with my neighbors.
Why do you feel the need to spend money to socialize?
Dinner + tip is not $200, parking is not $50, I live in a city lol
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.