3 ms·

It a US-centric dumbass nostaligia bullshit thing. I don't know where all these "good jobs that easily supported a family on a single wage earner" existed but

by bsder 2y ago

It a US-centric dumbass nostaligia bullshit thing. I don't know where all these "good jobs that easily supported a family on a single wage earner" existed but I sure as hell didn't know anybody who had one. Yeah, my grandfather worked in the mill. He was one of those "good jobs" everybody blathers about (overhead welder). Our family still grew a garden and raised fowl, and it wasn't because we were "healthy". It was because we were poor. My other grandfather worked in the mines. Also one of those "good jobs"--until he got into an accident, and it shattered his arm. Still needed a garden to make the budget work even before the accident. Yeah, still poor. My Dad was the first generation of college grads in the family and worked as a schoolteacher. He had to work the mill in summers to make ends meet until mandatory minimum salary came online in the state for teachers. He was constantly worred about how he was going to send me to a decent college--especially after the mills went down. Yeah, still poor. Farms are an exception where everybody in the family always got worked like hell. There is a reason why all the farms in the US are dependent upon illegal immigrant labor--the work super sucks shit and you have to pay a lot of money before a legal citizen will take the job. Yeah, super poor. TV wasn't reality. Here's reality: https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/Rs8AAOSw4URhO9dk/s-l500.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/Rs8AAOSw4URhO9dk/s-l50... Men striking in the early 1950s, Truman seizing the mills, and the Supreme Court ruling that unconstitutional. Very "Leave It To Beaver", no? Here's probably one of the better jobs in the mill, a set of machinists. Still a crappy job: https://www.google.com/imgres?q=image%20us%20steel%20mill%20workers%20in%20the%20195%5C0s&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fc8.alamy.com%2Fcomp%2FHH9JKJ%2F1950s-historical-workers-in-factory-using-machines-to-make-steel-parts-HH9JKJ.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alamy.com%2Fstock-photo-1950s-historical-workers-in-factory-using-machines-to-make-steel-parts-131133958.html&docid=xrkvRmjiGYeZmM&tbnid=oUCHpjkehwSZ_M&vet=12ahUKEwj-xauYjpeKAxX-5ckDHb7cDCUQM3oECBgQAA..i&w=1300&h=1375&hcb=2&ved=2ahUKEwj-xauYjpeKAxX-5ckDHb7cDCUQM3oECBgQAA https://www.google.com/imgres?q=image%20us%20steel%20mill%20... Steel Strike of 1919: https://www.history.com/news/steel-strike-of-1919-defeat https://www.history.com/news/steel-strike-of-1919-defeat Money quote: "Mike Connolly had a dream: an eight-hour day. A Pennsylvania steel worker for 41 years, he toiled for 12 or more hours a day behind the locked doors of a steel mill with no days off and little hope for the future. If he worked eight hours a day, he imagined, “I could have a garden, a couple of hundred chickens and know my family…This way one doesn’t want to live long. What is the use of living, since one doesn’t enjoy life?”" I desperately wish I could send people from this time back to work one of those "good jobs" they so extol. We'll see how long it takes you before you become a functional alcoholic like the rest of the men working those "good jobs".

Retric 2y ago
You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-037.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/median-household-income.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. Why? Because drastically increasing the labor force drove down wages. We need a lot of childcare, restaurant workers, delivery drivers etc to support dual income households which obviously don’t pay very well. Worse households are paying a large fraction of that 20k on things like childcare and meals that used to be done by the stay at home parent.
- gruez 2y ago
  >You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... "almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant. >Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. "number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%. Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

by bsder 2y ago

Retric 2y ago

You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-037.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/median-household-income.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. Why? Because drastically increasing the labor force drove down wages. We need a lot of childcare, restaurant workers, delivery drivers etc to support dual income households which obviously don’t pay very well. Worse households are paying a large fraction of that 20k on things like childcare and meals that used to be done by the stay at home parent.

gruez 2y ago
>You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... "almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant. >Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. "number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%. Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001