Cheap nannies who don’t have insanely high turnover are no longer something anyone has access to. But certainly people who were raising kids during peak women in the workforce (1990s) had access to it, as shown in Die Hard.

So I guess I’m agreeing with the basic no consequences point. Childcare isn’t really something American women used to do solo nearly to the extent they do nowadays though and this is hidden behind rhetoric about cheap nannies.

You can almost always trust to the expertise of airplane designers, pilots, mechanics, and air traffic controllers to get you to you destination safely. You cannot trust the expertise of economists and MBAs to predict the safety of a mortgage-loan pool with anything like the same degree of certainty….and when it comes to predicting the true effects of legislation driving massive social changes, the opinion of an ‘expert’ is probably no better than that of a random guy down at Joe’s Bar.

Occasionally the universe throws a curveball that gives the experts a pretty good justification for being wrong. E.g., Sir W. Thompson concludes that the consolidation of the crust can hardly have occurred less than twenty or more than four hundred million years ago, but probably not less than ninety-eight or more than two hundred million years. That was a pretty sound estimate until radioactive materials were discovered some two decades later, and radioactivity had done a good enough job of concealing itself until then that I don’t think it was unreasonable that it had been overlooked.

Before that, treating optical interference patterns as conclusive evidence that light is a wave not a particle seems very reasonable (and useful) to me: many decades would pass before experimental problems with that started to turn up.

The more usual pattern, though, is not the occasional innocent slip into Nature’s sneaky traps by true experts, but frauds speaking power to truth while claiming to be experts. This seems to be a particular temptation in the twilight of the long march through the institutions, for the ability to argue from authority while stoutly pretending that there is no corruption and decay naturally lasts long after corruption and decay has ravaged other abilities.