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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.

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).

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).