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I
didn't say that the 50 and 60s were a time of ease. Just that one income
households were able to do or accomplish what a 2 income household now
needs. Housing, car, food, etc. all were accessible to the middle
income one worker household with 2.1 children.
Land
values have clearly risen and we have much more stuff around us.
There must be something more.
arthur
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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