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I agree - and will take it one step further: he misses the root causes of "instability", and I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class start

I agree - and will take it one step further: he misses the root causes of "instability", and I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's, and/or the same flat-lining of wages (not keeping up with inflation etc) despite huge increases in productivity in about the same time period. Money is a huge stressor in relationships. Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well.

bradlys 4y ago
The author of this article used Charles Murray’s Coming Apart as a source. He’s a pretty… controversial figure. The counterpart to him that is more progressive and less controversial is Robert Putnam. His books are a lot more digestible. I’d suggest looking up talks with the author on YouTube. (He even has a debate with Charles Murray - as they are somewhat of friends) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing One thing I want to mention here is that it seems that social effects come before economic effects. People go through social change and then the economics follow later. That’s the one thing I would take away from the books/talks. Somewhat ironic to many here.
- parineum 4y ago
  I noticed that you didn't mention which of these arguments were good or bad.
fwip 4y ago
It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes: > Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die. Without seeming to make any sort of connection that poverty is a causative factor in every single one of these. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes of desperation. Poor people are over-policed when compared to middle-or-upper class people. Poverty makes it more difficult to escape domestic abuse. (Idk about the infidelity one). Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor. But y'know, that doesn't fit into his worldview that the dissolution of "family values" is the root cause of all this.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor." I imagine this explains the correlation between poor minority neighborhoods during the crack epidemic or between the depressed rural areas and the opioid epidemic now.
- paradox242 4y ago
  Did you grow poor or have friends from poor backgrounds? I saw lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence, and little if any of it had to do with their trying to survive in a material sense. There are different norms around which behaviors grant status, and this is the primary driver behind this kind of behavior in my experience.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    You're describing the cultural correlates of social marginalization and fraying social capital, not "poverty" per se. In many poor countries, casual anti-social behavior does not grant community status; in fact, the opposite is the case and punishments can be quite harsh indeed (though not nearly as harsh or socially damaging as the long-term imprisonment that's all-too-common in the US.) Widespread poverty in those failing communities is the consequence of such dynamics, not the cause.
  - fwip 4y ago
    Yeah, I did.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    It's about survival in mental sense which lack of material means makes extremely hard. People don't need money, but they desperately need sense of agency and entertainment and lack of money makes fulfilling those core needs in legal and moral manner super hard.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    I grew up poor, but was lucky enough to go to a fairly 'rich' school district amongst fairly rich people (upper middle class more than "rich" I guess). You know what I saw in rich kids? Lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence. I just rarely saw them suffer any consequences for it.
pyuser583 4y ago
The author is focusing on working class families, not middle class families (they are discuss as a comparison). How does the gutting of the middle class harm stability of working class families?
rayiner 4y ago
How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?
- nightvoomer 4y ago
  Community.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    The “community” in those countries enforces exactly the norms the author talks about.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- danans 4y ago
  > And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer? Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own. But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...). E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other. Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.
rayiner 4y ago
Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970-_Relative_income_growth_by_percentiles_-_US.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970-_Relative_incom... You can make a fair argument that the bottom 50% haven’t gotten their share of productivity growth, but that doesn’t explain why social indicators among the bottom quantile have gotten so much worse.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970 It's grown for every group used in that breakout, but while it breaks out the upper income groups on relatively fine categories, it groups the bottom half as one category. (It's useful for the graph's original purpose of discussing top-weighted inequality, it's not useful for the argument you are trying to make with it.)
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970 And education, housing, and health costs has sky-rocketed, number of "essential services" to pay for (mobile phone, internet, severan "rentier" subscriptions) has increased, while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted... But yes, the top 10%, the types to usually post at HN, never had it better.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    But a lot of those requirements are manufactured. Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college? I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperception of what income is necessary to maintain a similar quality of life to the past.
    - danaris 4y ago
marcusverus 4y ago
> I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's This belief is oddly common, considering it has no basis in reality. The share of adults living in households with sub-middle-class incomes has only grown by 4% since 1971.[0] The share of adults living in upper-class households grew by more (5%)! And this even as the number of single-adult households has soared[1], reducing the average number of earners per household! [0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-...
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  The portion of double income households more than doubled between 1960 and today[1]. The middle class is working more because they want to, or because they need to? Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work. That fewer people are getting married or having kids is likely not because human nature shifted in the past few decades, but probably because their lives are not going well or developing properly. 1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2... 2 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work That “flat” wage is accounting for inflation according to your own link. So not only would a single earner be doing just as good today as back then, adding a second income means they are raking in twice the spending power as back then. The only thing that has changed are expectations. People want way bigger houses, nicer cars, computers, smart phones, more meat, dental care, better medical care, etc. Worst of all (from a financial perspective), they want both of their average kids to spend 4 years at an expensive university.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
>Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well. yes, this is why I couldn't quite be convinced of the thesis being proposed here. Or at the very least, they way they try to describe the "marketing" of being in a faithful marriage runs counter to the reality. While the situation of "deadbeat dad becomes alcoholic, won't get jobs, and cheats" is not an uncommon cause of divorce, the more common narrative pushes it as a liberation of women's right. Less about a man breaking away to be free and more about a woman not being trapped. That above deadbeat stereotype has more become the "violent domestic abuser" type as of late. So divorce is a way to turn an absolute nightmare of a situation into emotional stability in exchange for what will likely be financial hardship. It turns a bad into slightly less bad, not a potentially patchful good into a bad. Or at least, that's how society markets it. I don't have hard sources and admit these are just the notions I feel have risen over 3 decades of media consumption.
quantified 4y ago
>> Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.” > It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore. As though it’s ever been considered high-status to have crap pay and deal with abusive bosses and coworkers. Ask the really high-status people whether it was. You need recordings to be able to review interactions for who is more in the right, telling the employee they need to turn off FB and get on with work seems like it management would say it’s reasonable and worker might say it’s overbearing.

bradlys 4y ago

The author of this article used Charles Murray’s Coming Apart as a source. He’s a pretty… controversial figure. The counterpart to him that is more progressive and less controversial is Robert Putnam. His books are a lot more digestible. I’d suggest looking up talks with the author on YouTube. (He even has a debate with Charles Murray - as they are somewhat of friends) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing One thing I want to mention here is that it seems that social effects come before economic effects. People go through social change and then the economics follow later. That’s the one thing I would take away from the books/talks. Somewhat ironic to many here.

parineum 4y ago
I noticed that you didn't mention which of these arguments were good or bad.

fwip 4y ago

It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes: > Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die. Without seeming to make any sort of connection that poverty is a causative factor in every single one of these. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes of desperation. Poor people are over-policed when compared to middle-or-upper class people. Poverty makes it more difficult to escape domestic abuse. (Idk about the infidelity one). Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor. But y'know, that doesn't fit into his worldview that the dissolution of "family values" is the root cause of all this.

giantg2 4y ago
"Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor." I imagine this explains the correlation between poor minority neighborhoods during the crack epidemic or between the depressed rural areas and the opioid epidemic now.
paradox242 4y ago
Did you grow poor or have friends from poor backgrounds? I saw lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence, and little if any of it had to do with their trying to survive in a material sense. There are different norms around which behaviors grant status, and this is the primary driver behind this kind of behavior in my experience.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  You're describing the cultural correlates of social marginalization and fraying social capital, not "poverty" per se. In many poor countries, casual anti-social behavior does not grant community status; in fact, the opposite is the case and punishments can be quite harsh indeed (though not nearly as harsh or socially damaging as the long-term imprisonment that's all-too-common in the US.) Widespread poverty in those failing communities is the consequence of such dynamics, not the cause.
- fwip 4y ago
  Yeah, I did.
- scotty79 4y ago
  It's about survival in mental sense which lack of material means makes extremely hard. People don't need money, but they desperately need sense of agency and entertainment and lack of money makes fulfilling those core needs in legal and moral manner super hard.
- etchalon 4y ago
  I grew up poor, but was lucky enough to go to a fairly 'rich' school district amongst fairly rich people (upper middle class more than "rich" I guess). You know what I saw in rich kids? Lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence. I just rarely saw them suffer any consequences for it.

pyuser583 4y ago

The author is focusing on working class families, not middle class families (they are discuss as a comparison). How does the gutting of the middle class harm stability of working class families?

rayiner 4y ago

How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?

nightvoomer 4y ago
Community.
- rayiner 4y ago
  The “community” in those countries enforces exactly the norms the author talks about.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danans 4y ago
> And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer? Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own. But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...). E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other. Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.

rayiner 4y ago

Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970-_Relative_income_growth_by_percentiles_-_US.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970-_Relative_incom... You can make a fair argument that the bottom 50% haven’t gotten their share of productivity growth, but that doesn’t explain why social indicators among the bottom quantile have gotten so much worse.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970 It's grown for every group used in that breakout, but while it breaks out the upper income groups on relatively fine categories, it groups the bottom half as one category. (It's useful for the graph's original purpose of discussing top-weighted inequality, it's not useful for the argument you are trying to make with it.)
coldtea 4y ago
>Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970 And education, housing, and health costs has sky-rocketed, number of "essential services" to pay for (mobile phone, internet, severan "rentier" subscriptions) has increased, while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted... But yes, the top 10%, the types to usually post at HN, never had it better.
- rayiner 4y ago
  But a lot of those requirements are manufactured. Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college? I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperception of what income is necessary to maintain a similar quality of life to the past.
  - danaris 4y ago

marcusverus 4y ago

> I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's This belief is oddly common, considering it has no basis in reality. The share of adults living in households with sub-middle-class incomes has only grown by 4% since 1971.[0] The share of adults living in upper-class households grew by more (5%)! And this even as the number of single-adult households has soared[1], reducing the average number of earners per household! [0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-...

ALittleLight 4y ago
The portion of double income households more than doubled between 1960 and today[1]. The middle class is working more because they want to, or because they need to? Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work. That fewer people are getting married or having kids is likely not because human nature shifted in the past few decades, but probably because their lives are not going well or developing properly. 1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2... 2 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
- kortilla 4y ago
  > Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work That “flat” wage is accounting for inflation according to your own link. So not only would a single earner be doing just as good today as back then, adding a second income means they are raking in twice the spending power as back then. The only thing that has changed are expectations. People want way bigger houses, nicer cars, computers, smart phones, more meat, dental care, better medical care, etc. Worst of all (from a financial perspective), they want both of their average kids to spend 4 years at an expensive university.

johnnyanmac 4y ago

>Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well. yes, this is why I couldn't quite be convinced of the thesis being proposed here. Or at the very least, they way they try to describe the "marketing" of being in a faithful marriage runs counter to the reality. While the situation of "deadbeat dad becomes alcoholic, won't get jobs, and cheats" is not an uncommon cause of divorce, the more common narrative pushes it as a liberation of women's right. Less about a man breaking away to be free and more about a woman not being trapped. That above deadbeat stereotype has more become the "violent domestic abuser" type as of late. So divorce is a way to turn an absolute nightmare of a situation into emotional stability in exchange for what will likely be financial hardship. It turns a bad into slightly less bad, not a potentially patchful good into a bad. Or at least, that's how society markets it. I don't have hard sources and admit these are just the notions I feel have risen over 3 decades of media consumption.

quantified 4y ago

>> Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.” > It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore. As though it’s ever been considered high-status to have crap pay and deal with abusive bosses and coworkers. Ask the really high-status people whether it was. You need recordings to be able to review interactions for who is more in the right, telling the employee they need to turn off FB and get on with work seems like it management would say it’s reasonable and worker might say it’s overbearing.