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I don't recall the 1950s and 1960s being a time of ease. The paradigm
we were operating under was that husbands were supposed to provide and women
were supposed to stay home and look after the kids. My first wife and I
operated that way very early in my career, and it was not easy. We lived
in rented housing, bought used cars, and made do with what we had.
Things changed quite radically during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Women entered the labour force en masse. I suspect that, along with a
rising number of double incomes, expectations rose quite dramatically. I
would suggest that we may now be into a situation in which the things that
define us as being successful have expanded considerably in comparison with the
things that defined us forty or fifty years ago. Or, to put it another
way, the bundle of goods and services that we must buy to make us feel
good as members of our society has become larger and more
complex. It includes all of the things that we bought forty or fifty years
ago, plus ever so many things that were not, such as vacations abroad,
computers, and entertainment centres. Incomes went further then because,
essentially, there were fewer things to buy or that we felt we had to buy.
That's one way of explaining it. Another way would be in terms of
costs-of-living having risen more rapidly than incomes and thus falling real
incomes, but I don't think that is the case. Or, at least, I don't think
that's been the most important factor.
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2001 3:38
PM
Subject: RE: Very gentle reminder to Ed
(was Re: community and money
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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