Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction This chapter considers the limitations of using the market as a workable model for the organisation and delivery of childcare. It presents a brief overview of the reach of economics as a basis for making decisions about childcare, and describes changes in ideas about the application of market principles to traditional welfare contexts. It describes the neoliberal view of the market, in which the role of the state is regarded as minimal, and taxation and regulation are viewed as mainly controversial impositions on business. From this perspective individual choice – including the choice of parents seeking to buy childcare – is paramount; and the best placed people to provide childcare are entrepreneurs whose profits depend on their accurate reading of market demand. Entrepreneurs are therefore likely to be more cost effective and flexible in meeting demand than any than any monolithic state provider could be, and are more likely to be able to muster the capital investment to set up the childcare service. The childcare market is a way of describing a situation where the state has relatively little influence on – or interest in – how services for young children are set up, maintained and delivered. This is contrasted with a social welfare view of the role of the state, in which communal obligations and social citizenship are given greater priority. Prioritising profit over the needs of vulnerable individuals, such as young children or old and frail people is viewed as morally repugnant, and undermining of basic communal solidarity, citizenship and caring. In this view, the state is the best guarantor that childcare services will be reliable and, in particular, will meet the needs of the most vulnerable alongside those of the strongest, each benefiting from each other's participation in the service (Sandel, 2009). Here the key issue is equity rather than choice. The market model for childcare, as opposed to a state provided and/or a state funded model of childcare, has been adopted with little public discussion in a number of mainly neoliberal English speaking countries and also in many East and South Asian countries (see Yuen, this volume). In Canada there has been a debate about the role of for-profit childcare versus non-profit care, but essentially within a market context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.072 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".