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We brought women into the workforce but instead of splitting the work 50/50 we split it 100/100. Now nobody has time to raise children, but hey, the stocks, bon

We brought women into the workforce but instead of splitting the work 50/50 we split it 100/100. Now nobody has time to raise children, but hey, the stocks, bonds, and real estate got pumped (in units of median-worker-hours) and I guess that's what's important. Ugh. What to do? Policy aimed at reducing the market-induced-labor-quota so that people can raise kids again? Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time? No, never! That's radical! That's lazy! (Unintelligible screeching vaguely resembling the words "pareto optimality.") We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult). Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.

Swizec 2y ago
> Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery. Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands. Peasant and working class women have always had jobs. I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  It says volumes that your reference for "normal" is Dickens, the industrial revolution working class, subsistence farming, and literal peasants. You had to put the bar on the floor to make our policies sound reasonable. For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
  - Swizec 2y ago
    > For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines? No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis. Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. > Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. ...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions? If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
      - Swizec 2y ago
        > So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. No I’m saying the 1-income household utopia was built on someone doing that work. Usually unseen, unsung, and poorly rewarded. And for lots of people that utopia never existed. They simply weren’t allowed or able to partake. For the record: I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. I’m trying to provide an alternative view of default expectations from a different cultural and socioeconomic background. In my neck of the woods, for example, we didn’t have America’s post-ww2 boom. We were too busy industrializing from a mostly agrarian pre-war economy while also building a new country on the ashes of the old country (we had a civil war on top of the ww2 occupation thingy).
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Our World in Data has a nice series on this here. [1] Female labor participation rate was dramatically lower in the past. Unfortunately it only goes back to 1890 but even as 'recent' as that, it was still only ~19%. The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house. So the notion of work was just starkly different than what it is today in most urban Western areas. [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply
  - Swizec 2y ago
    > The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house So here’s my question: Would a woman helping out in her husband’s shop/restaurant/farm/etc even count as a job in terms of labor force participation? Personally I’d consider that a job but I have a feeling it doesn’t show up in stats because it’s an unpaid position and just considered the default expectation in a family business. Especially back then.
    - Cordiali 2y ago
      From my personal research of some local history, I've seen "farmer's wife" consistently listed as a woman's occupation from the 19th Century, in the same context of terms like "schoolmistress". Conversely, there are probably occupations today, that wouldn't have been regarded as occupations previously. That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.
- jajko 2y ago
  I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes. Central planning, collective ownership (meaning nobody felt the need to actually manage those assets since they were owned just by state) was a disaster in every single effin' country it implemented. Literally everybody was stealing stuff somehow. When I look at my ancestors, women worked darn hard. Giving birth directly on the field in the middle of work and resuming said work right after was considered normal. Those were not some rosy times some folks desperately wanting to own properties right here right now like to paint as.
  - Swizec 2y ago
    Yep. We weren’t quite as communist as that, but my parents used to share stories of going on work brigades in high school. Altho they must’ve had the mellower 1970’s version that was more about building the socialist spirit than getting actual work done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions
  - lossolo 2y ago
    > I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes. Come on, many jobs back then weren't what you would consider a job these days. And after work, you were free to do whatever you wanted. No on-call duties, no late-night catch-up after hours, etc. At least there was a sense of community—everyone knew and helped each other. There were a lot of bad things, especially in the economy. But there were also a lot of good things in society that were killed by capitalism and a Darwinian society.
    - atemerev 2y ago
      Were you also living in a communist country, or you speak theoretically?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
The war effects were population collapse based, it had happened once before after the black plague. It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.

Swizec 2y ago

> Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery. Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands. Peasant and working class women have always had jobs. I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
It says volumes that your reference for "normal" is Dickens, the industrial revolution working class, subsistence farming, and literal peasants. You had to put the bar on the floor to make our policies sound reasonable. For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
- Swizec 2y ago
  > For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines? No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis. Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. > Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. ...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions? If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
    - Swizec 2y ago
      > So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me. No I’m saying the 1-income household utopia was built on someone doing that work. Usually unseen, unsung, and poorly rewarded. And for lots of people that utopia never existed. They simply weren’t allowed or able to partake. For the record: I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. I’m trying to provide an alternative view of default expectations from a different cultural and socioeconomic background. In my neck of the woods, for example, we didn’t have America’s post-ww2 boom. We were too busy industrializing from a mostly agrarian pre-war economy while also building a new country on the ashes of the old country (we had a civil war on top of the ww2 occupation thingy).
somenameforme 2y ago
Our World in Data has a nice series on this here. [1] Female labor participation rate was dramatically lower in the past. Unfortunately it only goes back to 1890 but even as 'recent' as that, it was still only ~19%. The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house. So the notion of work was just starkly different than what it is today in most urban Western areas. [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply
- Swizec 2y ago
  > The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house So here’s my question: Would a woman helping out in her husband’s shop/restaurant/farm/etc even count as a job in terms of labor force participation? Personally I’d consider that a job but I have a feeling it doesn’t show up in stats because it’s an unpaid position and just considered the default expectation in a family business. Especially back then.
  - Cordiali 2y ago
    From my personal research of some local history, I've seen "farmer's wife" consistently listed as a woman's occupation from the 19th Century, in the same context of terms like "schoolmistress". Conversely, there are probably occupations today, that wouldn't have been regarded as occupations previously. That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.
jajko 2y ago
I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes. Central planning, collective ownership (meaning nobody felt the need to actually manage those assets since they were owned just by state) was a disaster in every single effin' country it implemented. Literally everybody was stealing stuff somehow. When I look at my ancestors, women worked darn hard. Giving birth directly on the field in the middle of work and resuming said work right after was considered normal. Those were not some rosy times some folks desperately wanting to own properties right here right now like to paint as.
- Swizec 2y ago
  Yep. We weren’t quite as communist as that, but my parents used to share stories of going on work brigades in high school. Altho they must’ve had the mellower 1970’s version that was more about building the socialist spirit than getting actual work done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions
- lossolo 2y ago
  > I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes. Come on, many jobs back then weren't what you would consider a job these days. And after work, you were free to do whatever you wanted. No on-call duties, no late-night catch-up after hours, etc. At least there was a sense of community—everyone knew and helped each other. There were a lot of bad things, especially in the economy. But there were also a lot of good things in society that were killed by capitalism and a Darwinian society.
  - atemerev 2y ago
    Were you also living in a communist country, or you speak theoretically?

mensetmanusman 2y ago

The war effects were population collapse based, it had happened once before after the black plague. It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.