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There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of

There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of liberalization was very small, ignoring long-term government debt. The New Left in the 1960s mostly just failed outright. Any change then was due to judicial or executive action.

wpietri 11y ago
Exclusions certainly make things work better from the point of view of the excluders. Slavery, for example, worked wonderfully for the slavers. When we abolished slavery but kept former slaves from full participation in society, they mostly ended up as underpaid servants and laborers. Women restricted from earning a living on their own still had to survive somehow. Which in the 50s often meant attaching themselves to men and providing them with a lot of unpaid support.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Nope. The economy is bigger than you are, and it's keenly in your enlightened self-interest to have each other person in your economy producing at maximum. The "excluders" in the antebellum South lived under a rather delusional post-hoc rationalization of slavery. John C. Clahoun wrote of this belief system at length. This was minimally modified in the Reconstruction South and after. My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Your comment aggressively misses my point. In a broad, idealistic sense, yes, I would like each person in the economy producing at maximum. (Assuming we could agree on an ideal value metric, which I'm not sure we can.) There we agree. But if I am narrowly self-interested (which many humans are), and if I value positional success over absolute wealth (which many do), then I am better off participating in a system of oppression where the value of other people's production is diverted into my pockets. Which is why the great bulk of human history takes place in those sorts of conditions. > My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids. Good for her, and I mean that sincerely. But it's not proof of anything. The question to ask isn't, "Can you name an outlier?" Instead try asking, "What was the average condition of women during the Depression." Or, "Would your family have been better off if women's labor hadn't been systematically devalued for centuries?"
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      It's quite clear that the cognitive dissonance necessary to buy into membership in a truly* privileged class is very costly. You can't value positional success at the expense of the success of the others in your economy without incurring greater cost. *the present-day use of the word seems incoherent at best - so let's stick to easier-to-see versions for now. Narrow self-interest appears to be completely at odds with enlightened self-interest. This isn't some ascetic protestation of moral superiority; it's a purely practical mechanism for personally having things that work. I'm not sure how an average is better (or worse) than an outlier; I meant simply to show what was possible. She was able to use institutions other than marriage for support.
quadrangle 11y ago
Partially devil's advocate: Women not working en masse means single-income households as a norm, which means all the real economic value of someone staying at home to take care of home issues and a general supply-and-demand situation where workers needed to be paid enough to make things work on a single income. Flood the market with twice as many workers, wages go down and the expectation becomes two-incomes, and thus people end up working harder (there's still work at home to do), but they aren't richer for it.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  IMO, this was principally expressed in raised real estate price/value. Some of this is hedonic in nature; if you watch "Fargo" second season, you see in pretty good detail how people lived 35 years ago. I'm pretty sure this would be considered something much more like poverty now. Of course, I'd be ignoring any inflation in price of the homes shown, by design.

wpietri 11y ago

Exclusions certainly make things work better from the point of view of the excluders. Slavery, for example, worked wonderfully for the slavers. When we abolished slavery but kept former slaves from full participation in society, they mostly ended up as underpaid servants and laborers. Women restricted from earning a living on their own still had to survive somehow. Which in the 50s often meant attaching themselves to men and providing them with a lot of unpaid support.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Nope. The economy is bigger than you are, and it's keenly in your enlightened self-interest to have each other person in your economy producing at maximum. The "excluders" in the antebellum South lived under a rather delusional post-hoc rationalization of slavery. John C. Clahoun wrote of this belief system at length. This was minimally modified in the Reconstruction South and after. My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Your comment aggressively misses my point. In a broad, idealistic sense, yes, I would like each person in the economy producing at maximum. (Assuming we could agree on an ideal value metric, which I'm not sure we can.) There we agree. But if I am narrowly self-interested (which many humans are), and if I value positional success over absolute wealth (which many do), then I am better off participating in a system of oppression where the value of other people's production is diverted into my pockets. Which is why the great bulk of human history takes place in those sorts of conditions. > My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids. Good for her, and I mean that sincerely. But it's not proof of anything. The question to ask isn't, "Can you name an outlier?" Instead try asking, "What was the average condition of women during the Depression." Or, "Would your family have been better off if women's labor hadn't been systematically devalued for centuries?"
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    It's quite clear that the cognitive dissonance necessary to buy into membership in a truly* privileged class is very costly. You can't value positional success at the expense of the success of the others in your economy without incurring greater cost. *the present-day use of the word seems incoherent at best - so let's stick to easier-to-see versions for now. Narrow self-interest appears to be completely at odds with enlightened self-interest. This isn't some ascetic protestation of moral superiority; it's a purely practical mechanism for personally having things that work. I'm not sure how an average is better (or worse) than an outlier; I meant simply to show what was possible. She was able to use institutions other than marriage for support.

quadrangle 11y ago

Partially devil's advocate: Women not working en masse means single-income households as a norm, which means all the real economic value of someone staying at home to take care of home issues and a general supply-and-demand situation where workers needed to be paid enough to make things work on a single income. Flood the market with twice as many workers, wages go down and the expectation becomes two-incomes, and thus people end up working harder (there's still work at home to do), but they aren't richer for it.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago
IMO, this was principally expressed in raised real estate price/value. Some of this is hedonic in nature; if you watch "Fargo" second season, you see in pretty good detail how people lived 35 years ago. I'm pretty sure this would be considered something much more like poverty now. Of course, I'd be ignoring any inflation in price of the homes shown, by design.