4 ms·

A popular book on the subject is The Two-Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren.

PaulHoule 9y ago
It's a very interesting book, but I think it is more about changes that happened in the 1950-2000 time frame more than later than that. The core idea is that a two income family is less financially resilient than a one income family because (a) the extra money goes to bid up housing prices (education, healthcare, etc.), and (b) if either partner has a setback, the family is at risk of bankruptcy. Impacts of "women entering the workforce" have been relatively unexamined; one of them is that it frees up employers to practice other kinds of discrimination. For instance, many believe that black men held service jobs that got taken over by white women. You will get a woman on the Supreme Court but she will have been educated at Harvard. Pointedly, the supply of "people from high-class families" is doubled, so any bias towards hiring them can be indulged more freely. --- Some of these ideas have gotten traction in unexpected places. I was talking to a conservative friend the other day and he told me that "the gains of paying workers more would be eaten up by cost increases in housing, education and health care", which he didn't know was classic Elizabeth Warren!
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  It's not like Warren discovered it. Conservatives have been whining about the destruction of the family for ages. It's just that since they say that about everything, people did not take them seriously when they were right. Broken clocks and all that.
  - erroneousfunk 9y ago
    You're saying that the participation of women in the labor force is a bad thing?
    - saint_fiasco 9y ago
      Not for me. Even if wages don't go up, productivity does, and that makes things cheaper. I don't think we would be able to produce and consume so much with only half the workforce. As for the destruction of families, that's going to happen under capitalism anyway. Free markets don't like nepotism and families don't like mobility of labor. For the people who don't benefit from capitalism, it's a very bad deal to them because they gave up the safety nets of familial bonds in exchange for nothing. It's why conservatives aren't enthusiastic about capitalism and free markets (anymore?).
    - PaulHoule 9y ago
      It is what it is. It has many benefits and it is not going to be reversed, but it has negative effects on social and racial inequality. If a person educates their own child, or cooks their own meals, or provides other domestic services, that labor does not get taxed, does not contribute to making distant investors rich, and does not employ union labor. (I am male and I have done those all of those things at times.) Liz Warren points out that an "at home" family member can often get a job to supplement or replace the wages of a primary wage earner; long-term changes could be weathered by the secondary wage earner becoming the primary, or it could be a temporary job to save some money or pay off some debt. It is not a subject we have good conversations on because it is so inflammatory.
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    One crazy old book along those lines is "Sexual Suicide" by George Gilder which was strident, I almost want to say hysterical, to an extent it could have been career ending if he hadn't pivoted away from it so completely. Also, I think of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the one liberal who worked for Nixon, who caught hell for diagnosing the breakdown of black families but who laid the foundation for how people think about the breakdown of all sorts of families under economic and social pressures.

It's a very interesting book, but I think it is more about changes that happened in the 1950-2000 time frame more than later than that. The core idea is that a two income family is less financially resilient than a one income family because (a) the extra money goes to bid up housing prices (education, healthcare, etc.), and (b) if either partner has a setback, the family is at risk of bankruptcy. Impacts of "women entering the workforce" have been relatively unexamined; one of them is that it frees up employers to practice other kinds of discrimination. For instance, many believe that black men held service jobs that got taken over by white women. You will get a woman on the Supreme Court but she will have been educated at Harvard. Pointedly, the supply of "people from high-class families" is doubled, so any bias towards hiring them can be indulged more freely. --- Some of these ideas have gotten traction in unexpected places. I was talking to a conservative friend the other day and he told me that "the gains of paying workers more would be eaten up by cost increases in housing, education and health care", which he didn't know was classic Elizabeth Warren!

saint_fiasco 9y ago
It's not like Warren discovered it. Conservatives have been whining about the destruction of the family for ages. It's just that since they say that about everything, people did not take them seriously when they were right. Broken clocks and all that.
- erroneousfunk 9y ago
  You're saying that the participation of women in the labor force is a bad thing?
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Not for me. Even if wages don't go up, productivity does, and that makes things cheaper. I don't think we would be able to produce and consume so much with only half the workforce. As for the destruction of families, that's going to happen under capitalism anyway. Free markets don't like nepotism and families don't like mobility of labor. For the people who don't benefit from capitalism, it's a very bad deal to them because they gave up the safety nets of familial bonds in exchange for nothing. It's why conservatives aren't enthusiastic about capitalism and free markets (anymore?).
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    It is what it is. It has many benefits and it is not going to be reversed, but it has negative effects on social and racial inequality. If a person educates their own child, or cooks their own meals, or provides other domestic services, that labor does not get taxed, does not contribute to making distant investors rich, and does not employ union labor. (I am male and I have done those all of those things at times.) Liz Warren points out that an "at home" family member can often get a job to supplement or replace the wages of a primary wage earner; long-term changes could be weathered by the secondary wage earner becoming the primary, or it could be a temporary job to save some money or pay off some debt. It is not a subject we have good conversations on because it is so inflammatory.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  One crazy old book along those lines is "Sexual Suicide" by George Gilder which was strident, I almost want to say hysterical, to an extent it could have been career ending if he hadn't pivoted away from it so completely. Also, I think of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the one liberal who worked for Nixon, who caught hell for diagnosing the breakdown of black families but who laid the foundation for how people think about the breakdown of all sorts of families under economic and social pressures.