Late last week, one of the New York Times blogs featured a post suggesting that, when it comes to welfare spending, “both economic theory and most people’s intuition” are wrong. Not just wrong, but “backward.”

You see, conventional wisdom says that social programs that pay people not to work lead to fewer people working. This, says Times blogger Neil Irwin, is contradicted by a new study that finds social programs that pay people extra to work actually lead to more people working.

To Irwin’s credit, his post does eventually progress beyond this absurd clickbait. Unfortunately, progress does not always signify improvement. Irwin includes this vignette.

Consider Marianne Hillestad of Steinberg, Norway. She teaches kindergarten; her husband, Ruben Sanchez, installs heating and ventilation systems. Day care for their three children, ages 4, 7, and 9, works out to about $1,100 a month; Ms. Hillestad estimates that if she had to pay a market rate, it would be nearly twice that, eating up most of her paycheck.

“Using day care and working full time was a matter of costs and benefits,” Ms. Hillestad said. “The system is designed to keep us working….”

Collectively, these policies and subsidies create flexibility such that a person on the fence between taking a job versus staying at home to care for children or parents may be more likely to take a job.

Yes, it’s true. More mothers work in countries like Norway that heavily subsidize daycare (which, contrary to the Times, is not contrary to economic theory). Yet left entirely out of this equation is the value of parents—mostly mothers—who work as full time parents. (Also left out is that somebody gets forced to foot the bill for the subsidies.)

According to Irwin and the Times, parents who work and get a paycheck are good and parents who work and do not collect a paycheck are worth, well, nothing. Actually, given that the Times would have government pay these parents not to stay at home, perhaps the real thesis is that they are worth less than nothing, causing some sort of undefined social harm. (This article, on the other hand, estimates the market value of a stay-at-home mom at $115,000.)

Irwin never explains this bias, nor offers any evidence to substantiate it. Then again, the New York Times has a history of supporting social engineering schemes (and, of course, criticizing conservative opponents of such measures).