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I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a h

• muro 3y ago
  First it was "support a family of five", then "luxurious lifestyle" then "humble lifestyle". Except for the "luxurious" one, it was possible pretty much at any time in human history, including now.
  • alisonatwork 3y ago
    The post I am responding to mentioned providing a family of five with a self-owned house, a car, a couple of vacations per year and a comfortable retirement. To many people around the world - still today - that would be considered a luxurious lifestyle. You are right that it's possible for one person to support a family. For most people working in the tech industry here on HN they could probably figure out a way to do it. But is it realistic for all families everywhere to be able to support themselves with just a single worker? If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor. We would not see any poverty at all. Clearly we are not yet at the point as a species where we can enjoy a post-scarcity or job-free utopia. We could certainly be doing a lot more to work towards that than we are, though, and I think that's a more interesting point of discussion than looking back through rose-tinted glasses on a few decades of post-WW2 America.
    • anigbrowl 3y ago
      If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor. You have it backwards. We wouldn't see any child labor if employers weren't trying to cut corners on wages while the people at the top of the economic pyramid rake in billions. Ownership is way overcompensated in this society, most owners/CEOs do not provide that much value and are just collecting economic rents because they occupy a position in social/economic networks with high bridging centrality coefficients. It may involve some work to get there, but culture, luck, and marketing also have a lot to do with it too. https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2006-05.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2006-05.pdf
      • throwaway47290 3y ago
        Are you a CEO? If not when are you becoming a CEO to rake in billions then? It ought to be easy since they don’t do much according to you. They get compensated a lot because it is a lot of responsibility and stress.
        • polygamous_bat 3y ago
          Why doesn't the prime minister of UK become the king of Britain, even though it's less work for way more luxury? (In case you can't reason your way into it, some positions are gained through nonzero amount of luck rather than pure "hard work and grit" or whatever boomer nonsense.)
      • alisonatwork 3y ago
        I agree that wealth inequality is a problem, and I fully support billionaire taxes and wealth caps. If we were to take all that stored wealth and redistribute it equally amongst the rest of the world, each person might get around US$10000. That would provide enough to take everyone currently living in absolute poverty out of it for a decade or so. Would that solve child labor? Perhaps. Would it allow Americans to afford a house and car and freedom from work for 4 out of every 5 people? I don't think so. So I think the problem is bigger than just the inequality between the fantastically wealthy and everyone else, if the goal is for everyone to have the "golden age" lifestyle.
• PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  [flagged]
• hotdogscout 3y ago
  This is my experience in Brazil. Also, wasn't this golden age in the US fueled by concentrated demand for industrial goods after the second world war? Without an unprecedented imbalance in the economy I cannot see this happening. Some people that hate imperialism also demand it's spoils back (?).
• kaashif 3y ago
  It is funny, people somehow think that a momentary episode of utter economic dominance after all other economic powers had been bombed into dust should be the norm. And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either.
  • coldtea 3y ago
    >And the 50s and 60s weren't that great for e.g. black people or women in the US either. This argument is repeated a lot anytime someone mentions the working conditions in the 50s/60s, but how is it any relevant? Is there some natural law that says that mistreatment of blacks for example have to always go hand in hand with livable wages? And that anybody that likes the latter from the 50s/60s must also want the former?
    • lazyasciiart 3y ago
      There are enormous amounts of study on the concept that the above-average lifestyle enjoyed at that specific point in history by white men was built on the exploitation of other groups. Frequently, people who name that specific point in time as the model for how they would like the world to be are simply unaware of this tradeoff and have no idea that simply reverting society to that point would make it worse for some groups - this is why it gets mentioned when someone says "let's go back to those good times", to educate these people. Less frequently, they already know this and simply don't care, and it's always useful to give this group an opportunity to be explicit about their priorities.
      • coldtea 3y ago
        The "above-average lifestyle enjoyed at that specific point in history" came in the US because Europe was destroyed in WWII, and they got to easily be the world's producer and exporter and dictator of terms for decades. That plus strong unions and growing economy. And the tide also lifted black people with it, that's the era when the civil rights progress was made, for example. Oh, and Europe also ended up enjoying a similar stability and uplifting economy a few decades later, as the economy recovered there too, without having those other groups to exploit, and even for countries which lost their colonies the decades prior. The economic rise since the 60s though (in productivity, GDP etc) hasn't translated to similar stability, because the unions were left to die, and neoliberal politics and attitudes became the norm, while the banks and capitalists got a free pass to anything they wanted. >Less frequently, they already know this and simply don't care, and it's always useful to give this group an opportunity to be explicit about their priorities. I think it's more that people making your argument are with the side of capitalists, and you want to make a bogus argument as if livable wages and job prospects are racist and only feasible when combined with exploitation, to absolve the current neoliberal order as "the best possible world". So they weaselly mark anybody pointing to those things as pinning for the rasist aspects of 1950s/60s too.
• coldtea 3y ago
  >I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. Keyword "luxurious". People first and foremost want to be able to have a roof, food, some leisure time, and so on, not luxury. And people could have a lot of that for more than "a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries". Between common wrong tropes, movies, and ignorance of history, the past is hugely downplayed as to these aspects. The "industrial revolution" era of Marx and Dickens time, actually worsened (for the first 2 centuries or so) the working conditions and increased the working hours for huge swaths of the population. People had to be forced (via law, violence, and destruction of their prior livelihood) to go work in factories (and many fought hard for keeping their rural way of life).
  • Nifty3929 3y ago
    A roof, food and leisure time are historically luxurious. Poverty is the natural default. Anything more than that requires a lot of hard work as a society, and has only been realized in the tiny sliver of humanity that is recent (last ~200 years) western society. Everywhere else and at all other times has been starvation, strife and constant work to subsist. And you die by 40 on average.
    • wizofaus 3y ago
      Studies of how remaining hunter/gatherer tribes around the world have/had been living suggests that's not really true - shelter, food and leisure time were almost always readily available. What wasn't was modern medical technology, which has been almost solely responsible for massively reducing deaths in childbirth and early infancy and giving us the average lifespans we enjoy today. Even among civilizations that founded around agriculture, there's little evidence that homelessness, starvation or lack of free time were the constant reality for the masses, even if there's no question what life they did have would be considered incredibly basic by modern developed-world standards.
• phpisthebest 3y ago
  All of that is true, even in the US. It is a false narrative that the "middle class is collapsing" in the US There is a very narrow band, and very specific regions in the US where that is true unfortunately for the the rest of us the people and regions where this is the reality those people hold outsized control over the media, and government so it gives the appearance it is a universal reality. The World Is Becoming a Better Place[1] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg
  • fragmede 3y ago
    What Antony Davies fails to account for is the rising cost of housing, and a college education, and he compares us to 100 years ago, which is a nice round number, but the living standard I want to revisit is the 1950's, minus the out-of-control racism and sexism and abuse. By that time electricity was ubiquitous, washing machines were prevalent, people had cars, and college and housing was still affordable for the middle class. By the 1960's, central air condition was being designed into homes.
• Iulioh 3y ago
  Honestly that's a valid criticism BUT I would point out the wealth distribution in our economy. If it was more equable would this luxurious lifestyle for all still be possible ?
  • andruby 3y ago
    Let’s take a look at income (not wealth) The US has a GDP per capita of $80K, so if it were distributed equally, everyone would “get” $80K. Since in reality the distribution is very skewed a lot of people would earn more. Of course, that’s if we artificially constrain this to the US. The world-wide GDP per capita is only $12K. So if we’d be really equitable with the whole world, we’d all have to make do with a lot less.
    • dragonwriter 3y ago
      > The US has a GDP per capita of $80K, so if it were distributed equally, everyone would “get” $80K Pedantically, you actually want GNI, not GDP, here. (But they are close enough in practice for the US–and identical on a worldwide basis since there is no foreign income—that it doesn’t materially change anything else in your comment.)
    • Iulioh 3y ago
      That is just math and does not account of what this would cause to the economy. Is the same old discourse, if poor people get more money they will put it back in the economy and consume it generating a bigger economy and better life quality for everyone. And gdp is kindaaaa useless as wealth pays an important role. Economic inequality in income grew since the 80' and that's simply a fact
      • andruby 3y ago
        Of course. Afaik there are no numbers we could use to estimate the effect on GDP of such redistribution. We could indeed hypothesize that GDP would increase due to poorer people having more to spend. On the other hand, in this scenario the successful business owners no longer earn outsized reward for their risk, so perhaps entrepreneurship and innovation is stumped. It’s very hard to predict the effect on GDP
• arrozconcosas 3y ago
  There were a lot of people working very hard in the 50s and 60s, not having luxurious lifestyles. My grandparents had 6 kids on a farm because they all had to work to make ends meet, and lived in a modest farm house. They grew their own food, and didn't have what some would describe as 'luxury'. My other grandparents had a 1000 square foot home with 5 boys in it. Both parents worked and a vacation consisted of driving 4 hours to a nearby big city once a year, not going to Machu Picchu or the Amalfi Coast.
• gmadsen 3y ago
  its also the case that people want different things. Even if all work could be remote, there will still be people that will pay most of their income to live in NYC or SF, because when you are living in those places you are not just paying for a roof over your head. You are getting opportunities professionally and culturally that do not exist elsewhere
• eli_gottlieb 3y ago
  You talk about the "relative privilege" of middle class people in developed countries as though the cause for their declining standard of living was other people having more, as if their "slice of pie" was being cut in pieces and given away. That's not how economic growth works. When China and India grow, the total productive power of the world economy grows. So now the world ought to be able to support "luxurious" standards of living for more people, but in fact we see fewer people enjoying such lives. So where's the output of all our work going, eh?
  • alisonatwork 3y ago
    In China alone, hundreds of millions of people now have a middle class lifestyle that 50 years ago did not. I suspect that far outweighs the number of people in countries that were already developed 50 years ago who fell from a middle class lifestyle back to subsistence farming.