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Women's introduction to the workforce was the right thing to happen but it fundamentally hurt labor and the "middle class". You can't double the supply without
by tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Women's introduction to the workforce was the right thing to happen but it fundamentally hurt labor and the "middle class". You can't double the supply without changing anything in the system and inflationary effects of dual income are ridiculous.
- dcolkitt 7y agoI don't think there's any firm evidence to back this up. In Japan, women entered the workforce much slower than the West. Yet incomes and wages in Japan have grown at slower rates than America and Europe.
- jandrese 7y agoJapan has some pretty severe confounding economic factors however.
- PaulHoule 7y agoSee this Liz Warren book: https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-Going/dp/0465090907 https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-... Henry Ford realized that the automobile was not going to change the world unless auto workers were so productive that they could easily afford the cars they made. That kind of productivity increase is not possible w/ Childcare. I remember a Z Magazine cartoon more than 20 years ago where two women were pondering the mystery of why a child care worker can't afford child care and the unspoken punch line was that it was the perversity of capitalism but, no, it's not that economically efficient to pay somebody else to watch your kid for you. It makes money for the day care center, it makes money for your employer if you go to work, you pay taxes on the money you earn -- it makes money for a whole lot of people who aren't you. You, not so much. Universal child care is currently reeling from the discovery that recipients of universal child care in Montreal have turned into DQN adolescents. Maybe "the kids will be alright" in the end, but it is not looking like a program that pays for itself like Head Start.
- raincom 7y agoWhat is DQN?
- PaulHoule 7y agoJapanese slang for "Delinquent"
- bluedino 7y agoIn my state, a single childcare worker can watch up to 6 children. If they are infants I belive the number goes down to 4.
- PaulHoule 7y agoThat is not a lot to work with. If there wasn't any overhead, the childcare worker with one infant would pay 1/4 of their wages on childcare, which doesn't leave a lot for housing, food, transportation, student loans, etc. They are only infants so long however... Actually there is overhead, the child care center has to pay for a building, administrators, marketing, and possibly taxes. Contrast that to the auto worker, who probably gets a new car relatively often, let's say it works out like a $300 a month, or $3600 a year. I think auto workers are relatively well paid, so the cost of that car is 5% of their wages as opposed to 20% or more.
- pnutjam 7y agoYour acting like this is new, the poor have always been crapped on. It was common for wet nurses babies to die in the 18th and 19th century. A mother can make enough milk for 2 babies, but the wealthy who hired wet nurses didn't want poor babies around their precious rich babies. Heartbreaking: https://daily.jstor.org/lifesaving-horrifying-history-wet-nurses/ https://daily.jstor.org/lifesaving-horrifying-history-wet-nu... edit (typo)
- Miner49er 7y agoWell it's a chicken and an egg thing. Did women entering the workforce hurt labor? Or was labor hurting and that's why women entered the workforce?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rollerboi 7y agoThis is actually quite interesting, because the timeline for the massive inflation in the US during 1980s (which was solved by Volcker, RIP) roughly lines up with the upswing in labor participation rate among women: https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/es_110117_01_labor_force_participation_prime_age_women_oecd_countries.jpg?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/... Of course correlation =/= causation, but perhaps it was one of the contributing factors to the 10+% inflation rates of the late 70s early 80s.
- cortesoft 7y agoThis doesn't make economic sense.... 'doubling supply' is what economic growth is.... producing more should be balanced out with people consuming more, which is what a healthy economy does. This is like arguing that the invention of the assembly line caused inflation because you could produce too much. You contradict yourself by saying 'double supply' and 'inflationary effects'... increasing supply of a commodity (in this case labor) should DECREASE inflation, not increase it.
- ng12 7y agoIt makes perfect economic sense: it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. The only confounding factor is whether the increase in workers increases the speed at which the economy grows/ I'd guess it probably does, but not enough to offset the downward pressure on wages.
- cortesoft 7y agoIt is pretty well accepted fact in economics that a growing workforce is a good thing for economic growth. > it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. You are leaving out a crucial factor - the wages that the 'new' workers earn are going to be spent in the economy, growing the economy as a whole. This is increasing the 'demand' side of that supply and demand curve. This is the same flaw that anti-immigrant people use when saying that immigrants 'take our jobs'. They take a job, but they also create jobs by spending the money they earn. That is what an economy is. Every worker creates more value than they take (otherwise no one would hire the worker in the first place!)
- iguy 7y agoThe most solid argument in this direction (IMHO) is that quite a lot of the extra spending seems to have gone on positional goods, like housing. It's mostly a bidding war, and once every family has two earners, the winning bid is much higher. And, making that worse: Once you have two careers to plan for, it's much harder to move to a smaller cheaper city to escape. Perhaps both of you can find good jobs in the big city, and in 5 smaller places... but not the same 5! So you have to pick the big center.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI'm sure it's more complex than this, and of course equal opportunities for everyone is good, but yes I think it hurt. More people going to university -> Demand outgrows supply, universities can charge more and spend more money on appealing things. More student debt. More workers -> More supply than demand, companies can pay less. Each worker needs a vehicle. More expenses. Both parents working, need to pay someone else to take care of kids. More expenses. More debt/expenses, less pay.
- RandomBacon 7y agoMore people sitting in traffic, more parents that don't get to be with their kids as much, more reliance on public schools to raise kids.
- kauffj 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
- UncleMeat 7y agoWhy don't people say this about population growth? The US population is 2x what it was in 1950. Yet nobody says that this depresses wages causes problems. Would we have a stronger middle class if we Thanosed the population? That doesn't seem right.
- organsnyder 7y agoPopulation growth leads to more consumers as well as producers. Activating a "dormant" producer segment (as if stay-at-home parenting isn't producing tangible value...) leads to an increase in producers, while the number of consumers stays the same.
- anthonypasq 7y agodual income houses have more money to spend...
- jdbernard 7y agoAnd I'll point out that your parenthetical is one of the points of the article: that stay-at-home parenting is apparently extremely costly to replace. So it's a double-edged sword: you flood the supply side with new laborers while keeping the demand side static, and you increase the general cost of living because you now have to pay for childcare that you used to get for free.
- snerbles 7y ago> Would we have a stronger middle class if we Thanosed the population? There is historical precedent for it, see 14th-century Italy after the Black Death halved the population. https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Bubonic_Plague_make_the_Italian_Renaissance_possible%3F https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Bubonic_Plague_make_the...
- trianglem 7y agoWomen entered the workforce in response to a societal and social ideal and not based on the free market (outside of severe labor shortages during WW2). Of course it has a direct impact on wages and quality of life for everyone.
- tehjoker 7y agoThis is why we must fight for socialism. True liberation is impossible under capitalism.