Infrastructure in Real Life: Emerging Infrastructure

EMERGINGINF_MainGraphic.jpg

We've talked water, electricity, and transportation, but today's final episode of our Infrastructure In Real Life series is about the 21st century infrastructures that are still emerging. ⁠

⁠We spoke to Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Adie Tomer, and Kathryn de Wit about broadband and how vital it is for communities to have high-speed access. We also spoke to Savitha Moorthy and Anne Helen Petersen about why dependable childcare is essential to our economy and how we should be supporting both parents and childcare workers better. ⁠

Click here for our Premium content on Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.

Buy your Limited Edition Pantsuit Politics Summer Series 2021 Book Box here!

Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do what we do without you. To become a financial supporter of the show, please visit our Patreon page, purchase a copy of our book, I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), or share the word about our work in your own circles. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for our real time reactions to breaking news, GIF news threads, and personal content. To purchase Pantsuit Politics merchandise, check out our TeePublic store and our branded tumblers available in partnership with Stealth Steel Designs. To read along with us, join our Extra Credit Book Club subscription. You can find information and links for all our sponsors on our website.

Guests

Resources

Transcript

Misc. Voices: [00:00:00] The pandemic has really shown that broadband is just like electricity and just like water. You really need it these days to survive. 

In most regions of the country, childcare is the most expensive part of the family's budget. 

There was no way we, I was going to be able to ever afford daycare.

So why is the country's broadband infrastructure still not reliably connecting rural communities?

And so one of the things we must do, and I know that Joe will do as president, we need to expand broadband so that every student in this country has access to the internet.

Sarah: [00:00:48] From today's bills to tomorrow's jobs.

Beth: [00:00:51] We're looking for the government at work and our tap water, light switches and bridges and broadband.

Sarah: [00:00:56] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics' summer series: 

Beth: [00:00:59] Infrastructure in Real Life.

Sarah: [00:01:27] Hello everyone and welcome back to our Infrastructure in Real Life series here at Pantsuit Politics. Over the past three episodes, we've talked about huge pieces of American infrastructure systems that have been in place for decades, if not centuries, in one form or another. We've learned about how vital those systems are, where they need attention and maintenance and what the future may hold for them.

Beth: [00:01:50] What we've not discussed yet is the infrastructure of the 21st century. The infrastructure emerging as necessary to the structures of our culture and economy, but [00:02:00] around which we haven't built much so we're going to try to tackle two of those areas today: broadband and childcare, and we know that specifically talking about childcare as infrastructure is controversial, but as we have put together these episodes, I know I personally, Sarah have become more convinced that that's an appropriate label for childcare, because I feel like we've spent a lot of time thinking about what is infrastructure and what is the point of it and my conclusion has become that infrastructure is our best way of showing care for each other.

It is our way of saying these particular elements are so foundational to the way that we live. And they are so difficult and challenging and not profitable ways to do in adjust way that we have to pitch in together and find some supports and some balance of connectedness and also customizing based on regions of the United States and those regions needs and I think childcare fits pretty well under that umbrella.

[00:03:00] Sarah: [00:03:10] We're going to make the case in the second half of the show that childcare is infrastructure but before that, we're going to tackle a topic that fits more naturally into our traditional definitions of infrastructure broadband and even though providing broadband involves physical infrastructure: pipes, tunnels, poles. We are still a very long way from making it accessible and reliable to millions of Americans.

Beth: [00:03:33] So let's start at the beginning, understanding that America has always had some kind of communications infrastructure. We began with written communication with the founding of the United States post office. This actually predated our constitution and made its way into the constitution and then Ben Franklin oversaw its creation as a head of department for a short while.

Sarah: [00:03:54] That's old Ben second appearance in the series, which I think makes him our founding father of US [00:04:00] infrastructure. In the mid 1800s, we saw a new communication technology taking off and the United  States laid thousands of miles of telegram lines to speed the transmission of communication. 

Beth: [00:04:11] Then in the early 1900s radio transmission enters the scene and suddenly we're able to transmit audio communications instead of just text, but radio spectrum is finite and so this is where we start to seek government regulations. In 1927, we had the Radio Act establishing that radio waves are public property and that means that radio stations have to have licenses from the government in order to use that spectrum but government did decide not to charge stations for the use of this property.

Sarah: [00:04:42] And we're also seeing the dramatic growth of telephone communications and suddenly the federal government realizes growth is the name of the game when it comes to communications and they need a new way to govern wire, radio, telephone communications. So they pass the Communications Act of [00:05:00] 1934, which creates the federal communications commission and here's the language from that bill about what the FCC is supposed to do. 

It's for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce and communication by wire and radio so as to make available so far as possible to all the people of the United States, a rapid efficient, nationwide and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority here to, for granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to the interstate and foreign commerce and wire and radio communications. This is hereby created a commission to be known as the federal communications commission, which shall be constituted as here in, after provided in which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this act. 

Beth: [00:05:57] So we have telegrams, radio, transmission [00:06:00] and ever-growing telephone network and then in the 1980s, we start to see computer networks communicating with one another.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:06:07] Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow governance studies and director of the center for technology innovation at the Brookings Institute. Many of us can think about the early days of telephones and how the early days of telephones were really our communication artery coming off of the Telegraph. Telephone really transformed our communications infrastructure. Well, after the breakup of the baby bells, we began to see something called modems, which some folks might remember as AOL, you got mailed. That then transitioned to copper wires, which was at that time considered DSL. Some people I actually understand still have DSL services where high-speed broadband has been harder to install, which is a faster version of DSL and a [00:07:00] high-speed broadband basically allowed for more of the transmission of information services along you know, now a variety of modalities.

We're seeing satellite, we're seeing wireless, we're seeing cable services that are now complimenting the ability to transmit broadband. The end of the day as an information service, what broadband is able to do compared to what we were able to see with the telephone line is it's not just able to transmit voice like we're talking now, but data.

Sarah: [00:07:32] Okay, so that history brings us to broadband. Broadband is transmitting data of all kinds, not just our voice, not just text. It's high speed internet access that's able to be passed through a variety of physical modalities. We've got our layperson's definition, but considering that the government can be notoriously slow to understand and legislate around new technologies, we should probably check in on the government definition as well.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:07:56] My name is Kathryn de Wit and I am the project director [00:08:00] for the broadband access initiative at the pew charitable trust. When we talk about broadband in the context of policy, the federal communications commission defines broadband speeds, broadband internet speeds as being 25 megabits per second download and three megabits per second upload. Technically it is sufficient for one person in a household to do what we're doing right now, which is, you know, rely on real-time audio and visual communication, send emails without any problem, uh, and download information from the internet. 

Beth: [00:08:35] The fact that you downloaded the show from the internet likely means that you have an understanding of how impactful high speed internet access can be. It's become ubiquitous to our daily lives and routines. It's really interesting, like this infrastructure's existence has created new forms of communications, not just facilitated them. This means that broadband is an increasingly vital part of Dr. Turner Lee's conception of our communications [00:09:00] infrastructure.

Sarah: [00:09:01] And you may just think of your upload and download speeds impacting the refresh rate of your social media or your Netflix but if the pandemic showed us anything, it's that those speeds are also affecting how students get online for school. How you engage in visits remotely with your healthcare providers or how you collaborate with your coworkers across the country. It's not just about entertainment and how fast it's delivered to our house. 

Beth: [00:09:26] Just to personalize this for a second, the team that works on Pantsuit Politics works everyday from five different states together. Every single aspect of this series has been put together across many more states without anyone ever being in the same physical room.

Sarah: [00:09:41] Just because the threat of COVID is fading, that doesn't mean that the trends the pandemic dramatically accelerated are going away. Over the past two decades, e-commerce grew from 1% to more than 16% of retail sales. Then in 2020, it doubled. We have 50% more [00:10:00] telehealth visits and two thirds of those working from home say they'd like to continue to do so.

Beth: [00:10:04] Even as most kids returned to a brick and mortar classroom or folks opt to see physicians in person, having more options available has definitely shown us that our society can be more equitable for people with all sorts of reasons to need a virtual connection instead of a physical one. Basically we're all using broadband so many ways every single day and this is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn't long ago at all, that this kind of data transmission would have felt like a science fiction moment. The technology of data transmission has involved really fast and the next big evolution of 5g is at our doorstep. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:10:40] The mobile device in many respects, particularly the smartphone is only about 11, 12 years old and we started with mobile where it was primarily SMS services, which is actually the platform for our text messaging that we do but over time, what started out as I call it no G, cause there's still [00:11:00] communities around the country that do not have any type of mobile access, we went to 2G, 3G and I think the pivotal moment actually was 4G LTE, which allowed us to actually enable applications like ride sharing services.

Now we have these devices that allow us to order ride sharing services, track the location of the particular, uh, transportation, be able to share that with somebody and at the same time, get into that vehicle and perhaps, you know, videotape your experience. But now we're going into something called 5G, which is going to have lower latency and high speeds that will allow us to enable not just our ride sharing services, but precision medicine and tele-health services where you could actually be within the comfort of your home and North Carolina, and speak to a doctor in New York city, where they could do surgery without missing a beat in terms of the bandwidth.

That's very new and it's more advanced. Obviously there [00:12:00] are challenges to make sure that everybody has access, not just to the technology, but the technology itself will also demand a new device and so some people out there listening, maybe getting these advertisements around, get a 5G phone that has a lot to do with the capability of that device to work along these advanced networks. 

Sarah: [00:12:19] As we consider the next steps of ensuring broadband accessibility, we also need to remember the technologies that will follow quickly and broadband footsteps and consider how we'll make them accessible as well and our conversations with Adie Tomer, he explained why 5G will be an even greater challenge.

Beth: [00:12:34] So 5G requires, and by the way, we are still at really early stages of not just 5G deployment, but figuring out exactly which kind of quote unquote 5G we're gonna do. In general, the wireless technology cannot go as far as the current quote, unquote, 4G. You probably, some of you will have, right, they have phones, it says 4G at the top or it says LTE. It's the same idea. So because it can't go as far, we have to daisy chain [00:13:00] all these towers, but much smaller towers. They call them small cells. In underneath, quite many are in the ground or you could string it above ground if you want it to, it has to have fiber pipes going between them or what they call it fiber backbone so by having all these small cells, you've got to build a lot more of them, more places so this is why 5G is not coming to rural America anytime soon.

Sarah: [00:13:23] While too many of us access to broadband seems like a given, there are Americans who only have access to unreliable service or maybe no service at all. How many Americans? Well-

Kathryn de Wit: [00:13:34] We don't know the answer to that question that in and of itself is a fundamental problem and it's less about how those connections are provided and more about how those connections are reported. So twice a year, internet service providers are required to submit something called form 477 to the federal communications commission. That form is designed to capture where broadband is either provided or could reasonably be [00:14:00] provided throughout the country. The most recent reporting is just over 14 million Americans who don't have access to a connection. The challenge, and why we get to that point of a lack of clarity as to how many Americans have it or don't have it, is the fact that providers are reporting where they either provide service to a single address, or could reasonably provide service to a single address within that census block. If one address within that census block is either connected or could be connected, that census block is considered served. More problematically, that also means that that census block is ineligible for federal funding. 

Beth: [00:14:36] Let's just take a second to recognize how wild it is by current standards that providing service just means that you could provide access to one address in an entire area. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone on that census block is, or could be connected with good quality service. We would never stand for that level of assessment with electricity or water running. [00:15:00] So what do we do about this? Kathryn points out that we really have two distinct problems to consider.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:15:05] The first is the availability of those connections. And the second is the affordability of those connections. Where we see the positive impacts on communities, on individual households, on income, on unemployment is when we factor in the level of adoption on people actually using the internet but in order to use the internet, they have to be able to afford the internet.

Sarah: [00:15:27] I really don't think we can emphasize that enough. There are two components to broadband infrastructure. Availability, the actual physical connectivity and affordability, or an adoption gap like of affordable broadband or digital skills or other barriers that keep people from connect. 

Beth: [00:15:44] So it's always important to center this conversation around how we actually use connections.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:15:50] It's about creating opportunity and communities that have been left behind. You know, this often gets painted as an urban versus rural issue, and that's a disservice to a lot of communities across the [00:16:00] country, because this is a challenge that affects communities of all types, all sizes in all locations.

Sarah: [00:16:07] I love that framing of broadband as opportunity because that's how we started the series, right? As the the opportunity to grow and thrive and flourish in the United States, particularly economically has always been built on a physical foundation of services, be it water, electricity road service, and now broadband. How in 2021, someone could not see that is a foundation to any opportunity someone wants to pursue particularly economically, but honestly, educationally or otherwise is just mind blowing to me. 

Beth: [00:16:47] We had Jason Kander on the podcast recently to talk about his military service but as we are wrapping that conversation up, one of the things he said to us that has stuck with me and I've thought about so much since then, is that he thinks what [00:17:00] people really need from government is the opportunity to be happy, healthy, safe, and together.

Jason Kander: [00:17:07] I think that most of politics is about four things and they all have to do with one thing and that's your family and what it is is that people want four things for their family. They want their family to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe and to be nearby and every single political issue comes down to that.

We're not that different on these issues. The problem is we got to recognize that when we're talking to people in the middle of the country or in the, in the Southern part of the country or in any ruralish part of the country, we got to remember that what everybody's trying to do is make it so that their kids don't have to leave so that they can be near their grandkids.

Beth: [00:17:43] That together component has really been left behind in terms of brain drain from rural areas, large employers concentrating in major cities and that we just need to understand how important it is for generations of families to feel like [00:18:00] there is an opportunity to stay in their home towns and broadband to me is that major key to good jobs being available everywhere. To people being able to pursue whatever kind of education they want and still stay in proximity with the people who raised them and who love them if they want to do that. It makes me really excited to think about what society could look like even if I reflect on my own experience. You know, I graduated from high school in a very rural county, and I never believed that I would be able to stay in that county because of the job opportunities available there and I think that has to already be different and will be so different 10, 20 years from now. 

Sarah: [00:18:38] So there is the thread that it infrastructure offers enormous opportunity but another thread that we've been picking up throughout this series is that there is often, in fact, almost never a silver bullet solution and so broadband isn't that silver bullet either. It has enormous impact on our communities, but it can't solve everything even if it does have really tangible impact. 

[00:19:00] Kathryn de Wit: [00:19:00] We know that the getting the infrastructure in place is really the first step. Like we often hear from lawmakers, candidly at every level of government saying, okay, if we get fiber, if we get broadband, you know, that's going to solve the opioid crisis. We can attract all these companies and, you know, we can, you know, keep our rural healthcare facility and that's not necessarily true but what we do know is that when that both infrastructure and that adoption plan is rolled into a broader economic development strategy, that's really where we see the impacts and being able to attract and retain businesses.

To see sort of that boomerang effect of younger people moving back to the home towns that they grew up in. People want that lifestyle and now those communities have the internet connections to be able to support remote work and that they're able to support their parents are aging members of their family. Being able to facilitate connections with medical facilities and just honestly, [00:20:00] being able to do simple things like, you know, shop online.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:20:02] We need more people to understand that it has to be everywhere. I did studies years ago that when we look at where broadband goes, most states and cities look at it for tourism, right? It's an improved quality of life. It's like having a pool with a house where people want to move to places where there's broadband. But the economic upside, in addition to actually having it for people's ability to tell a work main street America's ability to actually have broadband so that they could export their products and services out, farmers' ability to have broadband so they can engage in precision agriculture, potentially knowing when there's rainfall and when there's not and when there's going to be a dry season.

Technology has always been used as a way to solve problems, social problems at that and here we have people who have this resource within their pocket or purse in places where we have high rates of opioid addiction, in places where we have high rates of poverty, in places where people have no clue on how to get vaccinated [00:21:00] or how to schedule an appointment to get vaccinated and we have to start looking at whole communities going forward because it's these whole communities that are going to be forced to move from in-person economies to those that are online and governments serve to benefit when they can actually get their folks connected, because they're able to get more things out.

I mean, think about the early stages of SMS, text message. What did that do in places like Kentucky or other places? It allowed us to put out Amber alerts when kids are missing. It allows us to share when major thunderstorms or tornadoes or hurricanes are coming to places. We need now to go to the next level but we cannot do that if people do not have the access to broadband, if it's not affordable to people across the board, and they're not convinced about why they should use it or adopt it. So this is not like a, an instance again, where we have to be one size fits all. We need broadband so we can modernize [00:22:00] our nation's infrastructure and we can look at this as complimentary to many of the goals where we as a country want to be digitally repetitive. 

Beth: [00:22:09] So connecting everyone in an equitable way probably starts to sound expensive and it is. Let's talk about those costs. Realistically, the numbers being kicked around Washington sound like a lot. When you look at what needs to be done, it still might not be enough money to make it all happen and that money would be going to very specific places.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:22:30] Your connection that you and I are both using in our homes or offices right now is what's called the last mile connection. That's the last piece of the network, but the middle mile, which is the part of the network that connects your community, anchor institutions like schools and libraries and healthcare facilities, that part of the network carries a lot of data. It's a huge trunk line. You need more middle mile in the network in order, uh, one to bring down the cost of delivering last mile connections, but also to [00:23:00] make sure that the quality of those connections are good and we don't have a very firm understanding right now of how much middle mile is actually in the ground what's available for use and how much money needs to be invested 

Sarah: [00:23:12] in building out the middle mile, it could cost $100 billion to solve availability, but half of that would be the final 2% of locations and that will come with enormous maintenance costs. The users couldn't possibly shoulder with just subscription fees and the reality is that subscription fees are what is often covering the cost of access, which is why access is limited because broadband connections are overwhelmingly provided by private sector entities whose focus is private.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:23:43] Communities may not always present an obvious business case for internet service providers. Maybe the provider decides the median income in that area is too low. Sometimes it's of geography and topography. Someone lives on top of a mountain and you know, Rocky terrain, that's extremely expensive to [00:24:00] build through. There just a lot of factors in place that influence a provider's decision to get these unconnected communities online but that's where it's really important for us to have policies and programs in place to help address some of those challenges. What we found through our research is that in some cases, just a relatively small amount of public funding, 2, $3 million was enough to help a smaller regional provider or other providers say, you know what? Yes, I can get this community online. We can make that work. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:24:34] In some cases, we're going to be able to bring into rural communities fiber. In other rural communities, we may not be able to do that because fiber has to be pulled and stretched and it has to be dug up and available. I was recently doing an interview and one of the companies that was represented as part of the guest was a man that told us about how he had to put fiber optic cables on the [00:25:00] back of a mule to get up the Hills of the Rocky Kentucky mountains to be able to string it. So that's one technology that will get the job done in terms of high speed, broadband connections. 

But then we're seeing this promise of 5G, where 5G has the potential to bring huge capacity to large swath of land that may work out in certain communities in rural areas and it may work to the advantage of densified urban spaces, where you see more buildings than cows, where people need the same type of high speed access.

Beth: [00:25:31] So it's really expensive. It is inefficient to deliver it equitably. We've come across that over and over again when we talk about water and electricity. There are places where it's going to cost an awful lot of money for not a lot of people and we still have to do it and that's really, I think where we are with broadband.

Sarah, you posed a question when the Biden administration first rolled out this $4 trillion infrastructure package, that what does it cost or how do we [00:26:00] pay for it is not the first question. The first question should be, is it worth it? 

Sarah: [00:26:05] Yes. I think focusing on our purpose, you know, we talked a little bit about that when we were talking about climate change in another episode, that we need a vision and I think in a lot of ways, because it's been so long since we've tackled big infrastructure projects when we've had to figure out how to get electricity to everybody in America. We've lost our vision, we've lost the idea that efficiency is only a piece of the puzzle. Cost-effectiveness is only a piece of the puzzle when we're talking about infrastructure and equity. You know, the biggest piece of the puzzle is that we come together to do hard things. That's why we're here. That's why we're together as this country and we're not treating our citizens and other parts of the country as clients or customers and doing some cost benefit analysis.

That's why this is [00:27:00] important for the government to step in because they don't have to be driven by cost effectiveness or cost benefit ratios. It's not that that shouldn't be a piece of the puzzle. It should, but we have to keep in mind that vision, that we are here to do things together, that we are here to protect each other, that we are here because doing things together is better than trying to tackle it all individually and letting people get left behind. People that didn't just choose to move to the outer reaches of Alaska, right? 

Adie Tomer: [00:27:32] It's about community. Are you okay with the idea that there is some kid growing up, was born on, you know, in a small town or farm cause we're talking about rural areas, right and because she or he was born there, they don't get to be on the internet?

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:27:46] We need to think about what is our social contract with people so that we ensure that schools don't have to wait around for 6, 7, 8 months to get a tablet, to connect the kids to the internet. 

Beth: [00:27:56] So knowing that the economic success of all of our [00:28:00] communities, particularly our small ones, depends on reliable high-speed internet access. Thinking about how we actually bring all those interests together to get something done helps us understand that the government is going to have to be involved. You know, I'm a person who typically favors private sector solutions to problems but as we see with both water and the electrical grid, our transportation systems, and now with broadband, there has to be an intersection of private and public interests to make these projects happen. It's too big of a lift to be done in just the private sector or just the public sector.

Sarah: [00:28:42] And we know right now that broadband is largely private industry.

Kathryn de Wit: [00:28:47] One of the interesting things that has occurred in the last few years is that lawmakers are really viewing this less as a luxury and viewing it more as an [00:29:00] essential service, this meaning internet connections. Interestingly, we saw that change happening more rapidly at the state level than we did at the federal level and I think we are seeing more policymakers view this as an essential service because they're seeing the ramifications of what happens when those connections aren't available. They're seeing communities lose jobs, lose businesses. They're seeing population loss. You know, we had more than one official in our field research, tell us, you know, we didn't have this internet connection like our town would die. 

Beth: [00:29:33] Dr. Turner Lee has really advocated for a Tech New Deal as you've heard her talk about and will again, and that it is important not to push the entire burden here to the public sector or the private sector, but that the public sector must take on a greater role. In part, we've talked about how we can't even put our arms around who has good, reliable access today. We need a public entity taking a look at just the assessment of our current [00:30:00] broadband availability. We know that there are national security dimensions. It's in our face more and more all the time with the national security dimensions look like as it relates to broadband and we know that we cannot create the workforce of the future if we have students out there who lack access to broadband. 

Sarah: [00:30:17] Well, and I love that she talks about not marginalizing it and I think that's the next step here when we talk about broadband and technological infrastructure, is that understanding that we work hard to get broadband access across the country, not because it's this special, siloed infrastructure that everybody needs, because we think it's important, although that is true, but because that infrastructure is the infrastructure of all infrastructure, right? That we need it with water monitoring, that we needed with the electrical grid to support our security, that we need it as we build the labor force for [00:31:00] all of these infrastructures, that we needed in transportation, as we increasingly looked to electrical cars and we need the infrastructure for self-driving and so that siloing and off to the side and saying, well, it's this own thing. We have to decide how to treat it. I think she's so right. No, it's essential. It's connected, if you'll forgive the pun, to every other piece of our infrastructure, to every other piece of our functioning as a society and so it has to be a top priority.

Beth: [00:31:31] And it's hard to figure out what the correct public role here is because technology is moving faster than what our regulators and legislators can keep up with. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:31:41] Those technologies are moving at a pace that is out performing what policymakers can do on the regulatory and legislative side. It's even outpacing in some instances, what civil society understands about these technologies and what the disproportionate impacts of these technologies could be on underserved, rural communities, as well as [00:32:00] underserved and marginalized, vulnerable communities and so I think it's important for us to not necessarily take a pause, but to think about this new society in which we live. Now, we're looking at the same type of technologies, which are just out performing our wildest dreams.

Sarah: [00:32:14] So as we talk about good infrastructure citizenship, what does that mean? When we talk about broadband, what does that mean for the average person? What can we do to be a good digital citizen? And sometimes I think it's important to realize that a central component of this infrastructure is access, it often takes only one person to advocate successfully for that access. 

Kathryn de Wit: [00:32:37] The local broadband champion, who really can be just your average citizen, who says, you know, this is a problem in my community. You know, there's one story of a woman who, uh, she is a blueberry farmer or wanting to sell her jam online and couldn't because they didn't have a good internet connection so that's what started this community broadband initiative in her town in Maine. So you have this person who says, you know, I really want to take this on.

Beth: [00:32:59] So you can [00:33:00] advocate for that access. You can, as Dr. Turner Lee advocates, just take a pause now and then on your own to consider where we are, what we're doing with technology, why it matters to everyone to be a champion for both public and private involvement in this field, and to consider how each piece of our infrastructure intersects with others and I think we're going to see that come up more as we start to think about childcare.

Sarah: [00:33:39] Just like with our broadband conversation, we brought in two experts to talk with us about childcare, both dear friends of ours and of the show. 

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:33:46] My name is Anne Helen Petersen. I am a journalist former academic writer. I write the newsletter culture study and I also write books. 

Adie Tomer: [00:33:55] My name is Savitha Moorthy. I'm the executive director of Tandem, Partners [00:34:00] in Early Learning. We're a small nonprofit doing big work at the intersection of social justice and early childhood education in the San Francisco bay area. 

Sarah: [00:34:10] At the start of the show, we touched on briefly why we believe childcare should be considered part of the infrastructure conversation, but let's let Anne Helen and Savitha make their case.

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:34:18] I mean, I think of infrastructure as like, what are the things, what are the frameworks that we need? What are the foundational supports in order to make our society work? And those don't have to be things that you yourself directly benefit from so like adequate funding for ECE as infrastructure, even though I don't have children because I care about our society working for everyone.

Sarah: [00:34:45] A quick break to say, ECE stands for early childhood education. 

Savitha Moorthy: [00:34:52] I believe that childcare is an issue that affects every single person in this country. Doesn't matter if you have young [00:35:00] children, doesn't matter if you have children who are grown up, in school or children who have grown up and now they have left the home, or if you don't have children. It is actually an issue that impacts every single person in America, because you know, it affects who is able to work and what they're able to do when they come to work.

Adie Tomer: [00:35:21] I feel like childcare is at that intersection of children's learning and women's earning. 

Beth: [00:35:29] So during the pandemic we saw how clearly learning and earning intersect with one another. As anyone who has spent even a single day trying to watch young children and work at the same time knows, childcare is an absolutely critical service for the nation's productivity. This was particularly on stark display during the pandemic when nearly 20% of working age adults said that they couldn't work because COVID-19 disrupted their childcare arrangements. [00:36:00] Of that 20% of women between the ages of 25 and 44 were almost three times more likely than men not to be working specifically due to childcare issues.

Sarah: [00:36:11] And look, this has been an issue for thousands of years. Mothers have used a variety of strategies to monitor small children because while the idea that women will be wage earners outside the home is relatively new in human history. Women have been working inside the home for a long time and that worked required monitor small children and keep them safe. The strategies that have been used over the years and across cultures are amazing. Literally like tying children to a post in the yard so they can't wander into a Creek or I was reading about during the agricultural age, they would put cradle boxes mounted onto the actual plows and just pull the baby along with the plow.

Beth: [00:36:53] Like so many other parts of our current social structures, major change to childcare came about during the progressive [00:37:00] era. Two things happen, women reformers advocated for day nursery. In 1898, we got the national Federation of day nurseries, which was the first nationwide organization devoted to this issue. We also started seeing the welfare system and if you'll remember from long, long ago, we did an an episode that is an overview of the history of welfare that we'll link here in the notes. Mothers and widows pensions were paying women to stay home and take care of their children.

Sarah: [00:37:28] And during the great depression, as a part of the new deal, the federal government established emergency nursery schools for the unemployed and there was an attempt to scale it up when American women took manufacturing jobs during world war two, but it was largely unsuccessful and you start to see media reports of latchkey kids that blamed selfish, wage earning mothers, instead of the government for calling these women to work without providing a childcare solution.

Beth: [00:37:51] After world war II and coming into the mid 20th century, America started to pivot from childcare infrastructure to childcare [00:38:00] subsidies, beginning with the childcare tax deduction. This tax deduction permitted low and moderate income families, couples earning up to $4,500 per year to deduct up to $600 for childcare from their income taxes provided that the services were needed to permit the taxpayer to hold gainful employment.

Sarah: [00:38:21] And you see childcare advocates, almost all women, try to advocate for childcare infrastructure in addition to these subsidies and there's some receptivity, especially in the Kennedy administration to try to advocate for this due to what they correctly saw as a coming increase in women's employment and as a way to address racial and economic inequities, but they couldn't muster the political support. Can't imagine why when Congress was filled with men, but instead the federal government really followed this welfare strategy and focused on low income mothers and trying to get them into the work force.

Beth: [00:38:56] So we have a really messed up history reflecting the fact that the [00:39:00] people who have been primarily doing childcare are absent from the decision making processes and excluded from positions of power and you see it still in our societal attitudes toward childcare, because we keep talking about working outside the home as a choice. Even as more fathers are staying home with children and more households have two working parents where the burden of childcare impacts both people, I know so many couples, especially this summer are incredibly strained.

Both parents are so strained because of an absence of childcare availability. Single parents are struggling so significantly right now because everything that we would normally use in the summer to get us through until the school year is not available yet and so hopefully the fact that labor force participation rates of mothers with children under 18 was 72.3% in 2019 [00:40:00] will get us motivated to do what we need to do. 

Sarah: [00:40:03] But despite those labor statistics, our attitudes on this issue could not be farther from the reality that an overwhelming majority of mothers work. 

Savitha Moorthy: [00:40:13] There was a 2019 QSEHRA survey that came out with said that 21% of US adults said that it was best for women with young children to stay home. 42% said it was best for them to work part time and only 33% said it was best for a mom to work full-time. When my son was a baby, I've had like personal experience of it and this was like 2016. I was in my forties and the number of people that I encountered, who just expected me to stay home because he was a baby was, was ridiculous and not that there's anything wrong with women staying at home, but I feel like that choice has to be the woman's choice to make. It cannot be a choice that's imposed upon the woman. Either the mom or the dad, it cannot be a choice that's imposed because you know, there are systemic structures [00:41:00] that be.

Beth: [00:41:00] So again, that trend of it's difficult to even quantify the infrastructure problem. We know that we don't have an entirely accurate understanding of the labor force. We also still don't have a good vision of what childcare infrastructure should look like and we continue to have that sort of Nixon era fear-mongering in our heads. When he vetoed a childcare bill, president Nixon said that bi-partisan childcare legislation could create a communal approach to child rearing and in his view, that was a detrimental thing. 

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:41:35] I think that there is this understanding that like, somehow it's going to be like this dark Soviet vision of like the group housing for babies. Like all the babies have to nap and like matching beds that go on for miles and that, that is so not what ECE experts in policy proponents are actually envisioning. What they really want and, and I've [00:42:00] heard this on so many different fronts is just an incredibly hybrid model because kids need, and parents need all different types of care. Some kids who need like 24 hour care or care that is happening at night as well because their parents work a night shift and they're a single parent and they can't find someone and if we have work that has to go on at night, we need someone to be able to offer that care.

Some people need, you know, the very, uh, like three hours, three days a week that style. Some people need six to six. Some people need nine to two. Like there are just so many different modes.

Sarah: [00:42:39] So the history is challenging enough, but the reality on the ground feels almost possible to so many families. Finding childcare that can meet a regular Monday through Friday nine to five job is [00:43:00] incredibly difficult. Now, if you need hours outside that regular Monday through Friday nine to five situation, then you've really got your work cut out for you because that's going to be even more difficult. 

Beth: [00:43:12] According to the center for American progress, nearly half of the childcare supply in the country, roughly 4.5 million slots may be closed permanently as a result of the pandemic. There are more than four children under three per each licensed childcare slot. Think about that. For every slot we have available in licensed childcare, there are four kids under three years old who need that spot. Basically we have enough licensed childcare to serve 23% of infants and toddlers. That's three times more scarce than it is for children who are three to five. 

Sarah: [00:43:48] And it scarce for children three to five, and it was scarce before the pandemic so after the pandemic it's even worse. More than 80% of the counties in that study qualified as childcare [00:44:00] deserts, where there are three or more children per licensed childcare slot.

Beth: [00:44:05] And we know that all of us, to some extent, just have to navigate this patchwork of care. That you borrow a little time here, you lean on a friend there. So many families where a parent stays at home become just this vital catch all in their neighborhoods. You know, the people who are willing to step up when that patchwork fails. When I was working full time in an office, especially when my husband was traveling for work, I always described our situation as like a Jenga tower, where if you moved too many pieces at one time, everything started to fall down because we don't have family locally and so our backup options start to run out very quickly and we navigate that Jenga tower with a whole lot of resources behind us and a whole lot of community around us and two parents. That puts us in an easier [00:45:00] situation than lots of people are navigating.

Sarah: [00:45:02] It's so broken. We have two working people in my home with highly flexible schedules. I have my parents who live up the street. One whom is retired and one who also has a flexible schedule and childcare is still a perpetual stressor for me. I cannot fathom, I cannot fathom how people without resources make this work.

Beth: [00:45:28] So we have this system with diverse needs in terms of hours, not to even get into the diverse needs that children have for how they need to be supported during their days. We have really limited access to licensed providers. The one consistent across the board is that childcare is expensive and it is so hard to understand why. So we ask Savitha and Anne Helen to help us understand why parents are paying so much for childcare and childcare providers are still [00:46:00] operating at these razor thin margins. 

Adie Tomer: [00:46:03] A lot of it has to do with the student to teacher ratios or with the child to teacher ratios because when you're working with children under five, you have to have the number of adults in relation to the number of children is actually quite high and the number of adults you need in relation to the number of children in class increases the younger the children. 

This is why infant childcare is so hard to find. I mean, the cost is huge for a childcare provider because you have to have like quite a few adults employed for not that many slots so most childcare providers don't have any kind of like financial cushion and so when they have to deal with any kind of catastrophe, like a global pandemic, for example, when they don't have any kind of like financial resources. The weather, those kinds of storms and those kinds of like a [00:47:00] really catastrophic kind of situations. So that's, that's the big problem so in the situation of like for the average American child care is cripplingly expensive and then for the provider, it's so hard to, to run a high quality viable, sustainable, small business is, is also such a huge challenge. 

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:47:26] With our current understanding of what safe childcare looks like, which is talking about the regulations that are in place in terms of how many teachers need to be with how many kids, right, our ratios, that is a market failure, right? It is too expensive and just as you know, a handful of families in your neighborhood would really struggle to pay the salary of a first grade teacher and a fourth grade teacher, right. If you were just paying for that on your own, and also the space in which [00:48:00] that first grade classroom takes place and also all of the supplies and all of the, um, edification that comes from like PE teachers and music teachers, this sort of thing.

And so if, if middle-class people can't pay a living wage for people to work in these care centers, then what can poor people do, right? And if we think of care as a necessity, in order for people to be part of the marketplace, then who's going to provide this care and the solution that we currently have in place is that we pay the people doing this work very little, and then they rely on government subsidies in order to get by. Why don't we just use that money to pay the workers more? Why don't we actually create the infrastructure to make this a sustainable enterprise? 

Sarah: [00:48:53] You know, as I listened to both of them, I think it's expensive even the right word? Should we just say completely unaffordable? I mean, infant [00:49:00] childcare costs on average $11,000 annually. That's more than the price of public college in 33 states. I think we've zoomed right past discussions of affordability when the numbers get that high and what is so incredibly frustrating, angering enraging to think about is that as expensive as childcare is that many of the people, mostly women, doing the actual work of caring for our children are still severely underpaid.

Adie Tomer: [00:49:36] Childcare workers are so poorly paid. Like if you compare salaries for the average childcare worker with salaries for their counterparts, and K-12, I'm not by any means suggesting that teachers are well-paid. Teachers in the K-12 system should also be paid more but a few years ago, the average was something like $11 an hour or thereabouts and so then it creates this nexus of we're [00:50:00] not valuing it sufficiently as a profession and so that creates some inequities in terms of like, who gets employed in the childcare sector. We talking about childcare and high quality, early learning as being a huge lever for addressing and ameliorating poverty.

We cannot expect our preschool teachers to do the work of ameliorating poverty, even as they're living in it themselves. So we want preschool teachers to earn at least as muchk-12 teachers and I think, you know, Right now a majority of preschool teachers are low income women of color. Only 15% of them are receiving employer sponsored health insurance and depending on what state they're in, nearly half of them are relying on some form of public assistance. We've got to really think about this as the workforce that is educating the future generation of our country and I think we've got to value that workforce. That's where [00:51:00] I would direct the Biden administration's attention.

Beth: [00:51:04] The whole problem here is that the work of caring for children does not scale. We pay a huge premium for other types of labor requiring unique skills and we take for granted the unique, vital skills that caregivers bring to our society. When we're undervaluing our childcare workers, we're creating high rates of burnout and high rates of turnover. High rates of turnover are not good for children, they are not good for employers. They are not good for families. 

Sarah: [00:51:38] Yeah, when my son, Felix went to Headstart, they talked to us about how they try to keep the children at Headstart with the same teacher all three years, because changing teacher is, is seen as like a childhood trauma and I thought, oh my gosh, that's incredible because they have difficulty keeping teachers there because of the turnover and look, it doesn't take rocket [00:52:00] science to figure out why we undervalue this work. It's because it's done by women and I don't think it's just because it's done by women. I think it's done by women for children because we talk a big game about kids in this country, but we don't put our money where our mouth is and I think it is infuriating that this essential, important, truly like life-giving and life building work is not paid what it is deserved. 

Beth: [00:52:29] Throughout this series, we've been talking about jobs. We want infrastructure to create jobs because jobs are like a golden standard for any political policies success. A big missing piece is whether anyone who has to take care of another person is going to have access to think about new jobs. We have this huge problem of trying to get people back to work and childcare is the missing piece. 

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:52:54] A lot of women who would otherwise be on the job market, be looking for work don't have [00:53:00] the ability to, because low cost care is not accessible to them. So many caregiving centers, especially lower cost ones shut down during the pandemic. So where do you find that care? How do you cobble it together? Why, why would you do that? Why would you work that hard to get paid $12 an hour? It's not worth the cost benefit analysis. 

Sarah: [00:53:22] Not to mention it gives people jobs. It allows people to work. It creates industry. It's such a win-win on so many levels. Okay. So where does all that leave us? Can we officially classify childcare as infrastructure and why does that even matter? 

Beth: [00:53:40] I think we are going to have a really difficult time formulating something like the electrical grid around childcare and I don't think that's the goal and to me, this is the trouble. I don't think the debate about whether to call it infrastructure is the actual debate, right? I think the trouble is when we hear childcare and [00:54:00] federal policy and infrastructure together, we start to think is childcare going to be delivered like water coming from a faucet, where we all have exactly the same thing, take it or leave it. This is how it's done.

In my mind though, a country that is capable of delivering drinking water to our toilets all day, every day, and the miraculous thought and science and work behind that, a country that's capable of that can figure out the challenge of meeting families and children, where they are and finding a way to take this thing that right now is priced like a luxury good, despite it being essential to our lives, I think we can meet the challenge of figuring out how to do this. 

Sarah: [00:54:47] Well, and it just feels like infrastructure because infrastructure is always about short-term pain for long-term gain. It's always about investing now for the future later, and that's what we're doing because right now [00:55:00] it's not just inefficient for the families, the way that we're doing, it's inefficient for all of us. If you never pay for childcare, believe it's affecting you and that's what infrastructure is about, right? Like helping people see that the interconnected nature of the foundation upon which we build our society and our economy affects everybody and so everybody needs to pitch in, and that could not be more true for childcare because again, we're investing right now, just further down the pipeline.

Anne Helen Petersen: [00:55:28] I think that's the struggle, right? I think that we also are just so reticent to fund things that are preventative, right, like maintenance. We're like, oh wait till it breaks and then fix it and this is, this is true in the way that we think of care too. We're like, oh, there's like all of these things that we can very clearly trace back to learning styles and environments when kids are between the ages of one and five, [00:56:00] so many different things but instead of actually trying to ameliorate those conditions and try to create learning and situations that are nurturing and safe and encourage creativity experimentation, like instead we're like, oh, well, let's just like incarcerate people. Let's try to Jerry rig a backward solution. 

Beth: [00:56:24] Wherever you are on this issue, we're hopeful that we can all recognize the ripple effects created by inadequate childcare in our society and in our economy and at least start to open better conversations about it.

Savitha Moorthy: [00:56:37] If I were in charge of presenting this issue to the American public, I would say, this is about the next generation. This is about the future of our country. It's the future of our world. Thinking about it as an issue of infrastructure locates in the present and thinking about it, as you know, the, the next generation of Americans [00:57:00] helps us tell a powerful future story.

Sarah: [00:57:14] Both broadband and childcare really highlight this turning point in history. We have the opportunity to level the playing field for Americans in so many real ways. Where we put our dollars will have generational impact and both of these issues are vital to the continued success of everyone in our nation and we hope that's been evident, not just in this episode, but throughout this whole series. 

Beth: [00:57:36] We also hope that that theme of equity throughout this series is really landing. That since the beginning of infrastructure, you know, we have been focused on infrastructure as an equalizing force that everyone has access to the post office, not just the cities. That everyone needs, running water, that everyone needs electricity, that everyone needs reliable, broadband and reliable [00:58:00] childcare and again, this is why I see infrastructure as such an expression of care. It is our way of showing that we believe everyone gets baseline things to help them navigate their lives. Equity is a vital part of this conversation because it perfectly represents how we're bound together and that access to quality infrastructure for one person benefits everyone.

Sarah: [00:58:24] So let's ensure that we're prioritizing equity. As we look to refurbish the systems of the past, improve the systems of the present and innovate the systems of the future. 

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [00:58:35] I think it's important if society is going to move in that direction, that we need to make sure that it's equitable and making it equitable means being able to have infrastructure in place that people can access it just like they do electricity and water, but also making sure to our point that people understand what these critical infrastructures mean for their everyday lives.

You can't drive a highway without a car and in the same way, you can't get on broadband without a [00:59:00] device and so I think it's important for us to not necessarily take a pause, but to think about this new society in which we live. We've always known that it was coming. I mean, come on now we put a man and a woman in outer space. Now we're looking at the same type of technologies, which are just out performing our wildest dreams. 

Beth: [00:59:18] We're so grateful that you joined us for this journey through Infrastructure in Real Life. We know that we have only scratched the surface of these topics, and we'll keep having these conversations on the show as we return to our regular format next week but we really hope that this has been educational. We hope it's been encouraging, and we hope that you're ready to do the work on making the infrastructure in this country the best it can be. 

Sarah: [00:59:41] And we hope that you've spent time thinking about how to be a good infrastructure citizen, how to advocate for infrastructure in your own community, how to just see the infrastructure in your own life. That's what we hope we've done throughout this series. That's what we hope to continue to do here at Pantsuit [01:00:00] Politics.

 Thank you so much for joining us for Infrastructure in Real Life. There is tons of extended bonus content on our premium  channels, both on  Apple Podcasts and Patreon. We will be back again with you next week and until then, keep it nuanced, y'all.

Sarah: Infrastructure in Real Life was produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director. Megan Hart is our community engagement manager. 

Beth: Special thanks to every expert who spoke to us for this series and our series contributors: Alyssa Maxwell, Monte Lawson, Courtney Verclare and Jordan Bond. 

Sarah: Ray Creative and Kathleen Shannon put together the very cool groovy graphics for this series. You can purchase a companion book box for the series and join our extra credit book club through Wild Geese bookshop.

Beth: Our show is listener supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers (Read their own names):  Martha Bronitsky, Linda Daniel, Ali Edwards, Janice Elliot, Sarah Greepup, Julie Haller, Helen Handley, Tiffany Hassler, Barry Kaufman, Molly Kohrs.

The Kriebs, Laurie LaDow, Lilly McClure, David McWilliams, Jared Minson, Emily Neesley, Danny Ozment, The Pentons, Tawni Peterson, Tracy Puthoff, Sarah Ralph, Jeremy Sequoia, Karin True.

Beth: Amy Whited, Joshua Allen, Morgan McHugh, Nichole Berklas, Paula Bremer and Tim Miller

Sarah: To support Pantsuit Politics, and receive lots of bonus features, visit patreon.com/pantsuit politics. 

Beth: You can connect with us on our website, PantsuitPoliticsShow.com. Sign up for our weekly emails and follow us on Instagram @PantsuitPolitics.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee: [01:01:48] Yeah, I hope it was up. I was trying to give you a lot of sound bites. I've got to preach to you all this stuff cause I feel like so strongly about it, you know, that um-

Beth: [01:01:53] you know what I'm speaking at broadband, my internet connection has become unstable. Ugh.

Dial Up Voice: [01:02:00] We're sorry you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.

Alise Napp: [01:02:06] Oh, okay. So this is from Sarah's notes. Sorry. I'm actually looking at it on big screen now. I will figure out what the world she's talking about there. 

Beth: [01:02:15] Um, because I, um, I'm having a week and really want to die right now. Thank God for transcripts that made this so much easier.

Sarah: [01:02:23] Okay. Y'all tell me if you think this is cheesey or not.

Adie Tomer: [01:02:26] I love that idea.

Sarah: [01:02:26] It's because it's, it makes me so mad. I'm gonna cry, I'm not gonna cry though Hold on. 

Beth: [01:02:30] You can cry. If you need to cry, Sarah. People love it when you cry.

Sarah: [01:02:32] No I'm not gonna cry.

Beth: [01:02:33] Don't let those haters aren't you down.

Sarah: [01:02:35] Not in this series. Okay.

Beth: [01:02:36] Let me do that again because somebody just slammed a door. So we-

Sarah: [01:02:41] Childcare.

Beth: [01:02:42] Childcare.

Sarah: [01:02:44] That's the cut. Perfect. Good job whoever slammed the door in Beth's house.

Beth: [01:02:48] *big exhale* It's fine.

Alise NappComment