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My
father in law could support a family of 2 kids and wife, afford a new house
and car---all at a middle class salary level. This in the 1950's.
Today, well you know. Two earners in the family and running faster and
faster to keep up.
So
what happened in the last 40 to 50 years or so. It is it just the entry to
the labour force of women thereby driving up land values (over to you Harry, to
spell out what we should have done with the land tax that didn't
happen).....
Or was
it something else. How did we go from relative ease in the late 50's to
keen, lean and mean in the late 90's and early 2000's.? Why do we need two
wage earner households to more or less accomplish what a one wage earner
household accomplished in the 1950s and early 60s?
Arthur
Cordell
>The point is that a half millennium ago, it was possible to have a
pretty
good working life with high wages, so why isn't it possible
now?
>So, there's my question for today.
>Harry
I agree, Harry, that time were good for workers in many parts of
Europe for more than a century after the Black Death. The plague had
wiped out a lot of people, one third or more of the population of Europe, and
good labour remained scarce until population rebuilt itself. Rounds of
plague recurred every so often, keeping population from rebounding
quickly. After it had done so, things began to worsen again.
The following passage illustrates this for a region of France at the turn
of the 18th Century:
"There was a family in Beauvais in the parish of Saint Etienne in the
year 1693 named Cocu: Jean Cocu, weaver of serges, and his wife with three
daughters, all four spinning wool for him, since the youngest daughter was
already nine years old. The family earned 108 sole a week, but they ate 70
pounds of bread between them. With bread up to � a sol a pound, their
livelihood was secure. With bread at 1 sol a pound, it began to get
difficult. With bread at 2 sols, then at 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 -- as it was in
1649, in 1652, in 1662, in 1694, in 1710 -- it was misery.
Crisis in agriculture was nearly always intensified by crisis in
manufacturing: it certainly was in 1698, so work began to fall off, then
income. They went without; perhaps they were able to lay their hands on a
coin or two saved for a rainy day; they pawned their things; they began to
eat unwholesome food, bran bread, cooked nettles, mouldy cereals, entrails
of animals picked up outside the slaughterhouses. The 'contagion manifested
itself in various ways; after hunger came lassitude, starvation, 'pernicious
and mortifying fevers. The family was registered at the Office of the Poor
in December, 1698. In March, 1694, the youngest daughter died; in May the
eldest daughter and the father. All that remained of a particularly
fortunate family, fortunate because everyone in it worked, was a widow and
an orphan. Because of the price of bread." (Goubert, Pierre (1960), Beauvais
et les Beauvaisis de 1600 � 1730, Paris, quoted in Laslett, Peter, The World
we have Lost, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1984, pp. 127-8)
Before the last two centuries or so, ever so much depended on weather and
climate, the incidence of diseases of various kinds, whether or not there were
wars among princes or Viking (or Tatar or whatever) raids, and other such
factors. The European world was not really very stable. This is
off the top of my head, but I recall that conditions in the 12th Century were
highly favourable, but things then turned miserable late in the 13th and very,
very miserable in the 14th and then less miserable again and then quite
favourable. Apart from people being miserable toward each other (always
the case), they had no control over their natural circumstances. Nor did
they have the technology that permitted them to store food from good to bad
years or the distribution systems to move food to those in need.
All of which suggests that we should be very grateful to live in
societies that do have the technology to smooth out food surpluses and
shortages, that have learned to control major diseases, that, via fiscal and
monetary policy, are able to exercise some control over the trade cycle, and
that care enough about their citizens to initiate publicly funded programs in
health, education, and welfare.
Regards,
Ed W.
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