6 ms·

Yes and no. What puzzles me is that people seem to have to work more and more to make ends meet. Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner, no

• jerf 14y ago
  "I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation." In theory, work and leisure time both are goods that you can choose to consume with varying degrees of flexibility. In theory, they are both subject to the usual decrease in marginal utility as you have more of one or the other. In theory, on a marginal basis you will choose to do one or the other as it has more value to you, so if you face an hour in which you could work for $40 or experience leisure time you value at $45, you will not do the work. I've larded that entire paragraph up with "in theory" because it is a massive oversimplification and we all know that. However, I think in the end the point it leads to is still significantly true, which is that as society has advanced, an hour of work produces more value to the user. Even if the gain is flat in purely monetary terms, in terms of subjectively-experienced wealth the value can still be rising, per all the advances mentioned in the article. (No amount of 1980-money will bring you Minecraft, etc.) Therefore, it is easy for leisure time to get crowded out through perfectly rational decisions by the worker. Due to diminishing marginal advantage, it's not a linear process; one may work a 55-hour week instead of a 45-hour week, but this process is not capable of producing someone who works a 120-hour week who would have chosen a 30-hour week. The value of the next hour of work goes down too fast and the value of the leisure time goes up too quickly. But it is an effect that shows how an increase in productivity can actually be a cause of longer work hours, not a bizarre inexplicable side effect.
  • JeffL 14y ago
    But in practice, the vast majority of quality jobs are 40 hours per week minimum, and its somewhat difficult to get a comparably good job for less. If I had to guess, I would guess that nearly everyone I know with a full time job would take an extra few weeks of unpaid vacation if they were allowed to without stigma.
• wavesounds 14y ago
  The rich are much richer today then they used to be.
  • ams6110 14y ago
    But how does that impact the ability of a "middle class" person to earn a decent living?
    • wavesounds 14y ago
      Because middle class Americans used to make more money in relative terms, you have to work longer to afford the same things while at the same time our productivity as a whole has gone up. The rich have modified the system so that they take more out of companies and give less back to the government and as a consequence its much harder to climb the economic ladder without the safety net and with increased competition for scarcer resources. Being able to send all your companies work to China is a big advantage for the company owner (rich) and a real problem for the American workers (middle class) if the rich don't have to give enough of that profit back to society.
      • yummyfajitas 14y ago
        What resource do you believe is more scarce than before? Please be specific - name a resource that you believe average Americans consume less of now than in the 70s or 80s. Or, similarly, please name a resource that you believe middle class Americans need to "work longer to afford". Also, shipping work to China is very good for the American consumer, who benefits from lower prices.
      • marknutter 14y ago
        "Being able to send all your companies work to China is a big advantage for the company owner" This is also a big advantage for the American consumer. Y'know.. the middle class?
        • icebraining 14y ago
• yummyfajitas 14y ago
  What puzzles me is that people seem to have to work more and more to make ends meet. I don't know about Germany, but in the US we work less than before. Hours worked per employee is down, while the employment to population ratio isn't up enough to compensate: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO Employment per capita was up a bit during the peak of the 90's bubble - by 2 hours/week over the 1970's. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=d5P http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=d5P Further, I think if you compared the same basket of goods, you'd discover that it's actually quite easy to make ends meet 1970's style. You'd live in a house that is tiny (by modern standards), drive one car/family, and give up all sorts of expensive medical treatments invented more recently than 1970 (MRI, chemotherapy, viagra, most prescription drugs). Not to mention all sorts of labor saving devices in the home (e.g., a dishwasher, washer/dryer or roomba). The right question to ask: is all the stuff we've gained since 1970 worth an extra 1-2 hours/week of paid labor? [edit: an earlier version of this post asserted working hours didn't rise at all. That was incorrect - I compared the endpoints. After the fact I spotted the fallacy, and put my third graph in the post.]
  • tomwalker 14y ago
    My grandfather worked as a bar manager (not owner) and his wife did not work. They were one of the first to get a TV and washing machine on their street, had a car, went on foreign holidays every few years and had 5 children. What wage would you need to be in a similar position today?
    • jiggy2011 14y ago
      Depends what you mean by similar position, absolutely or relatively? In other words, what would be equiv lifestyle be today? A holiday every year, a new car and a house full of apple stuff? In the UK you could get a TV and washing machine off craigslist for not very much. You could fly to continental europe and back for less than £100 pp. You can pick up a car for maybe £2000 or so. Difficult to say what a bar managers salary is today, I've seen very vary from marginally above minimum wage to maybe £50-60K.
• captobvious 14y ago
  This is exactly my feelings as well. I just compare my situation with my parents and see that they had it ridiculously easy compared to what my situation is like now, while the lifestyle is basically the same in every way. It's like my parents asking me if I want to be just like them, only work a lot harder and get a lot less for it. Um, no thanks.
• rmk2 14y ago
  This is what someone said about why the times don't seem to get easier despite everything being seemingly more advanced: > Die kapitalistische Produktion strebt beständig, diese ihr immanenten Schranken zu überwinden, aber sie überwindet sie nur durch Mittel, die ihr diese Schranken aufs neue und auf gewaltigerm Maßstab entgegenstellen. Die wahre Schranke der kapitalistischen Produktion ist das Kapital selbst, ist dies: daß das Kapital und seine Selbstverwertung als Ausgangspunkt und Endpunkt, als Motiv und Zweck der Produktion erscheint; daß die Produktion nur Produktion für das Kapital ist und nicht umgekehrt die Produktionsmittel bloße Mittel für eine stets sich erweiternde Gestaltung des Lebensprozesses für die Gesellschaft der Produzenten sind. (Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Bd. 3, S. 260) > Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. (Karl Marx: Capital, Volume III, p. 249)
  • ckuehne 14y ago
    Since the standard of living for the 'society of producers' has risen by a good measure since the time 'someone' said that, I guess 'someone' has been proven wrong by a good measure.
    • AdelsonVLandis 14y ago
      I don't think you read what was written. First, it says that this form of production has an organizational drive/inertia of its own. I don't think this idea would be that alien to most people here. Bureaucracies are created to achieve an objective. As the bureaucracy grows larger and larger, sometimes the original objective begins to get hazy, as the objective of a bureaucracy protecting itself becomes larger and larger. Then it says "the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers". A repetition of what was said before. The means of production is not JUST about improving the standard of living for the society of producers. It is about other things. You're claiming it says somewhere in there that the standard of living will not rise for producers. It does not say that. You have not contradicted anything. We live in a day and age of shareholders rights and profit and dividend being the key objective of corporations. This is actually codified into law. Layoffs, mergers and salary freezes/cuts are seen as good things. This is not a secret at all, just read Business Week or the Wall Street Journal. So the original point holds. "The means of production are not MERE means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers." You seem to be ignoring the word mere in that sentence, and the sentence before it.
• noonespecial 14y ago
  No small part of it could be that our parents generation did not have the means to spend $1mm in resources to keep an old man alive for 8 months longer coupled with the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point. This seems to me like the huge, looming problem our generation will have to solve.
  • potatolicious 14y ago
    > "the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point." Are you suggesting that the amount of medical resources expended to keep an individual alive/healthy should be keenly judged on an individual basis, based on some arbitrary notion of "worthiness", by some authority? Would this hypothetical authority be called a "death panel"? It would seem very fitting.
    • Tichy 14y ago
      I think eventually some kind of "cutoff" point will have to be defined. I imagine that in the future it may be possible to keep people "alive" indefinitely while attached to expensive machines. So the costs may well be infinitely high. In the UK I heard you don't get Dialysis after a certain age, which I always found quite shocking. But some equivalent of that will probably happen everywhere :-( Also the worthiness of the previous comment probably referred to people actively ruining their health. That could be seen as freeloading off society.
    • noonespecial 14y ago
      I didn't propose any solution at all. Merely point out that it will be a very difficult problem indeed. Technology seems to be bringing us to a point where indefinite life extension is possible at exponentially increasing cost. Eventually the simple reality will be that there are more people whose lives could be extended than can be extended, even with our entire economic output allocated to that purpose. We correctly recoil in horror at the thought of "fair and impartial" authorities rationing those resources because we instinctively know that once government gets involved, those decisions will be anything but fair and impartial. At the same time, it doesn't seem that the free market as it is now will perform any better because health care is a completely inelastic good and the "free" has been riddled with monopoly and regulatory capture. Either way, right now it looks like the rich and influential win disproportionately at the dire expense of the less well off. This is the big looming problem. It's a deep rabbit hole, but the point is, it's a tough puzzle. It might take moral mettle equal to or even greater than winning a global war against a genocidal madman bent on world domination to solve it. We've got our work cut out for us and then some.
• cynicalkane 14y ago
  For the lower and lower middle classes the standard of living has been about the same since the 70s. But what you expect to see is life get easier for some segments of the population, and harder for others. You might be stuck in a population where life got harder. In particular, I remember seeing a paper (wish I could find the link) that claimed, specifically, white lower class individuals are worse off, whereas most population cohorts are better off today than decades ago. Avoid Marxist conspiracy theorizing: though it might be useful and easy to think about the capitalist class as a class, trying to reify them as a coordinated conspiracy of exploiters creates a lot of conflict but offers little in the way of explanatory power and little in the way of working solutions. Aside from the philosophical argument, you can see this is also historically true.
• QuantumGood 14y ago
  It would be interesting to calculate cost of living per square foot, adding in changing monthly technology costs and commute costs. In the U.S., all three keep expanding: living space per person keeps growing, as do monthly tech costs, e.g. cable, mobile phone, etc. and there are more and more people choosing long commutes. These are just the things that occur to me off the top of my head, making me think comparing the past to the present over generations is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison.
• wissler 14y ago
  Would you like the red pill or the blue pill?
• bokonist 14y ago
  "Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner, now both parents have to work." The causality might go the other way. When feminism became popular and women entered the workforce, it's not as if more homes got built, more oil was pumped from the ground, more land was discovered, more cars were manufactured, etc. Women did not enter construction and manufacturing trades in large numbers, and the production of homes and natural resources are bounded by natural conditions and regulations, not by labor. So when women enter the workforce wages are pushed down as they compete with men, the price of housing is bid up by two earner families, but production of housing does not go up accordingly. So prices rise and then all households need to have two earners to keep up. The modern economy is primarily not labor bound, it is natural resource and regulation bound, so more labor just results in an arms race where other people need to work harder to keep up. Legislation that mandates maximum work weeks, minimum vacation amounts, and mandatory retirement, might make a lot of sense to avoid the sort of work-hours-prisoners-dilemma we seem to be stuck in.
  • yummyfajitas 14y ago
    But production of housing did go up. A quick google search suggests the increase was from about 1500ft^2 to 2500ft^2 [1], though I can't seem to find the primary source. Eliminating legislation which mandates minimum house sizes, minimum insurance coverage, etc, can also serve to make the cost of living cheaper. If houses smaller than 2000 ft^2 are illegal (which they are in many places), you are obligated to pay more for a house bigger than you need. [1] E.g.: http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?OpenDocument http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope... or http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/us-home-size.html http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/us-home-size.html)
    • bokonist 14y ago
      Yes, housing construction did go up, but it was very uneven. Due to the craziness with the subprime lending there was a lot of housing built in the desserts of the southwest or the outer exurbs of Jacksonsville. If you want to move there you can find homes for really cheap, but good luck finding a job. Also note that even as more homes were being built, the resources to build these homes were getting more expensive due to the price of lumber and copper getting bid up. So even if you can change the zoning laws to allow more building, the price still gets bid up to some extent from the price of the natural resources. I agree of course that these laws enforcing minimum house sizes and minimum lot sizes should be repealed. I think there are all sorts of policy policies that should be enacted to lower the minimum cost of living while preserving quality of life for the things that really matter.
• gcheong 14y ago
  People have been lamenting the difficulty of making ends meet for as long as humanity has been around and I'm not so sure that today it is truly any less possible to finance a home and family with just one earner than it was a generation ago. I certainly don't think it was easily affordable on one income a generation ago as seems to be the perception. A lot of the reason for two earner families today is because of the fact that more women are able to work due to a more equitable marketplace for jobs. Perhaps the people of a generation ago would have liked the extra income but that just was not an option. Now two inomes is often seen as a necessity but that could be because people's expectations of what kind standard of living they should have, as well as what is possible for the average person to have today, has risen along with their incomes. As for the 40 hour workweek, if I read the same source, that amounted to a reduction in hours for the average person.
• marknutter 14y ago
  I think what happened was that more and more women entered the workforce, either out of necessity or out of personal desire (I think largely the latter) and the market adjusted accordingly. Because the work pool roughly doubled, the wages decreased over time. Add to that the fact that one of the two largest expenses a family typically has, a car, doubled because both parents work, and also the fact that we generally live in houses that are larger and better equipped than the previous generations, and I think it makes sense that we have adjusted our lifestyles to using up the full capital we receive when both parents work.
• Turing_Machine 14y ago
  "Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner" Homes were much smaller and had many fewer amenities. In the U.S. home sizes have doubled since the 1950s, at the same time the family sizes have declined. My house as originally built in 1949 was about 800 square feet and had one bathroom (of a size that would qualify as a "3/4 bath" now). That was for a husband, wife, and three kids. It's had some additions over the years that bring it up to 1100 square feet, but no one would consider it a "large" house. It's okay for just me, though. Families had one car at most. Kids in previous generations didn't need thousands of dollars in electronics and sports gear to keep themselves entertained, nor did they have (e.g.) orthodontics or other expensive (but elective) medical procedures. Vacations didn't involve trips to Hawaii. I'm not saying that these are bad things (in fact they're largely good), but neither are they cheap.
  • refurb 14y ago
    Just a week or so ago someone posted an article that stated "Increases in electrical efficiency just lead to the use of more electricity." It seems to be true economically. Take a look at the communities built post-WW2. The homes are tiny. As wages increased, people didn't reduce the % spent on housing, they increased the value of their housing so that the % stayed the same. I have a colleague at work who is the sole breadwinner in his family. His wife home-schools their 7 (yes, seven) kids. He earns $75K if he gets a lot of overtime. He has substantial retirement savings. It can be done. Of course, he buys steers from 4H, raises and slaughters them for meat. He penny-pinches like crazy (not unlike my grandparents). I think a big cause of human suffering is the built-in human psychology that you always have to work to make things better. Of course, humans never would have reach the level of wealth (in the broad definition) without that drive. However, it also leads to a lot of suffering as people who are very well off (the vast majority of the US) lament their unfortunate circumstances.
• dave_sullivan 14y ago
  I think a lot of it has to do with who benefits most from efficiency and where that benefit is allocated after. For example, if I'm expected to work a 40 hour work week but I figure out a way that everyone at the company with my job can do their job twice as fast, I don't suddenly get to work 20 hours a week and get paid the same--I get half the other employees fired because the company doesn't need them anymore--and maybe I get a pat on the back and some extra paid vacation. The company gets a tremendous benefit, they take that money and invest it in software and robots that will help eliminate more jobs and make a small startup's founders rich in the process. The people that got laid off take whatever money they happen to have (which is probably a negative value) and try to get another job in a similar scenario and continue the cycle of being expected to do "more with less" And what do people do with their savings if they're lucky enough to have managed to save something sizable? They buy houses, cars, TVs, and other stuff that has little likelihood of building more wealth. I don't think anyone designed it this way on purpose, it just works out this way and will continue to until people start building value for themselves and escape from 9-5 prison (or 8-6 since no one actually works 40 hours anymore, or 7-7 if you include a decent commute)