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Hello Folks,
Having lived through the forties, fifties and
sixties I tend to think that the middle class Hollywood culture was so
threatened by the rebellious leisure of the sixties that they decided that the
only answer was to make everyone go back to work and work and work.
I put this together with the information from Sally
about the "make work" and the basic labor glut with its need for a maintenance
income along with my experience of the tremendous waste in business.
I think that Reagan's first budget director David Stockman was
correct. I also note that the business leaders I know feel
vindicated in their tax cuts since they are being asked to absorb so much of the
labor glut and provide the "work" for the population at large and the products
of the educational machine. The problem is their imagination
but that is not what this post is about.
Remember, Stockman said that all of this was
not an economic but a "social" agenda. They wanted to bring
back the old culture of the Reagan era in Hollywood when everyone (men and
women) worked during the war and there was drop in social
rebellion. In that case it was the war. Every
Republican administration since Reagan has used the war metaphor as a policy for
social control. The great devil is the sixties and "sexual
license." They also praise the "rule of law" which means that
they should get divorced at all costs before having a sexual
"affair." It isn't about the sanctity of marriage, marriage
being forever, or any of those other old clich�s. It is the marriage
of Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s. Lots of them, with the
women not getting much except a name.
Note how happy the current President is now that he
has found the same war metaphor as the past. Business was also
uncomfortable with the Clinton success in spite of their shared
prosperity. He was "licentious." It wasn't
"sustain the marriage or family at all costs" but sustain the Hollywood image of
"love" leading to another marriage and another and another. On a TV
law show tonight I heard "Republican" being used as a synonym for marital
faithfulness. Can you imagine the howl from a thoroughly
compromised private media if Democrat was a synonym for social justice and
compassion?
So, in 2002, when there does seem to be a real need
for "work" in the sense that, in America, leisure is synonymous with
laziness and breeds chaos and that the extrinsic motivation for work is so
buried in the culture of the West that intrinsic motivation is viewed with
suspicion and considered neurotic, we have a real metaphorical
problem. Or as Mike Hollinshead would probably say, we have a
problem of mythological proportions. But, how else can you
provide the jobs necessary for social cohesion than the current system given the
culture?
I've been watching another possibility in the "Life
of the Pharaohs" series on public television. Egypt had an
incredible run for a civilization with a high degree of stability and affluence
even amongst the commoners. The life of the Kingdom was longer
than all of the various little Nation States put together, that Keith, Harry and
others like to rail against. 3,500 years. Longer than
Rome all the way to the present. Now that is a serious
society. Of course, they didn't have "Freedumb."
Next to Egypt, Greece and Rome were amateurs and the current crop doesn't
even qualify as in the running. Not even
England.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 10:47
PM
Subject: RE: Very gentle reminder to Ed
(was Re: community and money
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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