|
One
element to put into the equation, for the US at least, is that beginning in the
early 70s, a growing feminist movement embraced the right and desirability of
women to work, and indeed tens of millions of women entered the work force, and
I believe now constitute a majority of college undergraduate students. This was
done not of necessity (leaving single mothers aside) but because of desire to
not be 'cooped up' at home, to develop their own intellectual and professional
interests. Thus couples developed a very high income potential, and many fell
into the trap of spending it all on 'stuff' or in bad high risk/high return
investments. Fueled by this cash-rich wealth, housing took off and these young
couples signed into big mortgages which turned into big burdens for
many.
So, at
least for the US, I don't think the situation is one in which a single adult
cannot support a family. Rather, women decided they wanted in on the
professional life and, fueled by an up-market advertising blitz, the two income
family began to think of their expenditure rate as normal and necessary. It was
a trap set for them, but one into which they willingly walked. That second
income could easily have been put into savings and investments, and life-styles
maintained modestly. And we haven't even begun to discuss the impact all
this has had on raising children....
Lawry
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.
|
