A disaster is looming for American men
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Today, it takes nearly 2x the median household income to get something resembling that kind of life. Granted, you're still considered middle class at that level of income...
In some cities. In other cities, that's just not true. Example: in Atlanta, GA, the median income is right over $55k. According to Zillow, that will get you a house in the $227k range. There are tons of single-family houses with yards in that price range (or even half that) in the city.
I ran similar math for Dallas, TX. I'd bet there are a lot of markets where this is true.
Housing is only expensive in the expensive housing markets.
Zillow and other home pushers are interested in selling houses, not in the consequences for the buyers thereafter.
All that said, in Atlanta, 3 BR/2 BA houses are abundant in the under-$150k range. Or under $100k. It's really not approaching necessary to earn 2x the median income in cities like Atlanta to buy a house with a yard.
The point is the OP's math assumes one lives in a high-cost area, which is not the reality where most Americans live.
$1.8k housing, plus $500 for property taxes and insurance, $1,000 for two vehicles (payments, insurance (damned teenage drivers), gas, maintenance), $500 into savings for household emergencies, $800 to feed four, $100 per person for clothing, the occasional ice cream, paying off medical deductables... and you're quickly looking at needing over $5,000 a month gross just to get by.
5,000 / 0.7 * 12 = $85,000
Toss in 10% savings and 10% retirement, and you're well over $100,000.
Sure, you can cut corners and live off a lot less than that, but I'm comparing it to the standard of living had by people 40 years ago.
(Random nitpick: if you're earning the median income, paying a mortgage while contributing to retirement; and have 2 kids, you are not paying anything close to 30% of your income in income taxes.)
Also you are right that if you save ~30% of your median income ($500 + 10% savings + 10% retirement), the month-to-month gets a little tighter. But then you can retire early. :-)
I'm not arguing that everything is roses, just that tens of millions of people live at the median income and own houses, cars, etc.
You'd have done much better here arguing about the costs of childcare or higher education. Those are a bloodbath, no matter where you are.
I think you are off of what you intended by an order of magnitude on that house size. (And a bit high for reality even after correcting for that error.)
Tangentially related: https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf
I don't think it's too high, though. My parents built something on the order of 5,000 sqft in the early 70's for around $15,000 (including the 5 acres of land), adjusted for inflation that's under $150,000. My Mom was able to put herself through 4 years of college by waiting tables part time.
Yeah, we had it good. Why? My dad's blue collar job burying and splicing telephone lines for Ma'Bell.
It really was a different time. That same job today comes with no job security and remarkably similar wages as it was 40 years ago, even as the cost of living and inflation has increased tenfold.
Well possibly. I'm British so my experience may differ but I happen to have read my great grandfather's diary, he was a carpenter during the Great War, spent a lot of time with my grandfather, he was in the RAF. My father was an immigrant, kicked out of Egypt by Nasser.
My life, for all the hours I work and the stress, is a bed of roses compared to anything they went through. In fact, I feel slightly guilty even comparing. My children, who I believe are entering a more difficult world than the one I was born to, can't really comprehend my upbringing let alone their immediate ancestors.
Feudalism 2.0? Maybe. But I'll take it Thank you. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and appreciate what you've got.
Families? In some cities, singles are struggling to keep a crappy one-bedroom apartment roof over their head.
I suspect it's quite possible to raise a family on a single income if you're willing to live like it was the 1950s.
Schooling costs are also way, way, way higher than they were in the 50s, and there are no well paying manufacturing jobs to do if you aren't inclined to go to college.
I really doubt that you would be able to raise a family on a single income these days with the same standard of living you could have back then.
Basically the definition of 'comfort' underwent a huge upgrade without a equivalent upgrade in the perception of costs that would go to afford them. This is largely happening because people are using the term 'working-class' and 'middle-class' to measure to make different measurements in different times.
Yes, we should still be able to afford raising a family of five with one wage earner.
However, due to both me and my wife working, we can't afford to properly raise our own kids, grow a veggie garden (plot size is too small) or sew/mend our clothes.
We have 1400 sqft, don't have air conditioning, don't have cable, and if only one of us had to work, heck, we could do with only one car (bikes were a thing back then and we aimed for a good wike/balk score when purchasing).
I think a lot of the "upgrades to life" are simply the consequence of busier lives, not exactly better ones.
The problem is that policy hasn't evolved with technology. Technology has caused two things: 1) increase income disparity & 2) increase unemployment. The problem is that what worked for American til WW2, a laissez faire economic policy, doesn't handle these two things well. We need to encourage our policy makers to figure out a society that has better wealth distribution and can handle a large % of the population not working.
The masses know that something is very wrong, but they don't know what to do and hence the thrashing around for alternatives. As long as the rich keep the door to upper middle class open to the cognitive elite they are safe.
Not sure that is possible.
The only thing that amazes me is how strategic they were in handling the situation and how they were willing to sacrifice income and power for generations to win the class war. They are certainly being advised by the best minds available.
Second, not even the links he provides support his points. The one to the BLS shows the number of cashiers is expected to grow by 2%, not decline as he states.
Third, "to the extent that non-work is contagious, it is likely to grow exponentially rather than at a linear rate." No citation given. Nothing to substantiate this claim. Again, given Larry's history, I'd advise against taking him at his word. He also cites falling marriage rates as contributors, but only links to evidence of the rates falling, NOT to evidence of a causal effect of declining marriage rates on employment.
Finally, seeing as this [1] was posted on HN today, Larry seems to be living in a world where he doesn't read the news. Companies still need workers.
It's drivel like this written by people like Larry that erode my trust in the media.
[1]U.S. Companies Turn to German Vocational Training Model to Fill Jobs Gap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12584606
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-employment/
You would think by this logic that removing these jobs would have caused a MASSIVE unemployment issue in the USA. Which it did to some degree. I mean farmers were pushed off their land by bigger farmers, and other groups and they went out to find other jobs.
If you look at the Great Depression there were a lot of similar things going on to what is going on now. The wealth is sitting at the top 1%, people end up working crazy hours to make it. Skyrocketing property costs.
The recession was an indicator of this and my question is, where we able to divert disaster or did we just kick the disaster down to the next decade? What political movement will help turn around the disaster that we are currently facing (if we are facing a disaster)? I don't know the answer to this but I personally see that there are a few economic bubbles we're sitting on tech, real estate, government employment. Any one could pop and cause a massive problem.
Does anyone have a place I can go to learn more about this? Specific books, blogs, podcasts or sites that talk about these issues?
https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/014303...
“The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.
One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we."
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."
The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.
And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.”
1) an interesting parallel to the decline of programming classes can be drawn as both have specialized instructor and facility requirements
If American thought leaders such as Larry Summers think that technology destroys jobs and that it's a relatively recent phenomenon, then America is truly screwed.
Space colonies? That or war.
Aren't you doing exactly the same thing as the industrialists who slandered the Luddites? You're reducing the real welfare of thousands of workers and their families to "oh, they're scared of technology, just ignore the silly primitives."
The thing people forget when comparing to past technological advances is that for the largest part of history unemployment was 90%+ at the best of times, ever since a few hundred years into the Roman Empire, if you count subsistence farming as unemployment (and since people didn't do that unless they had to, you should).
I think this is what's really happening. The economy is reverting to it's natural state. Of course for most of us that's not a good description of what's happening. Better would be to say "conditions are returning to what they were in the middle ages".
After hundreds of years of virtually the same argument being made, I think the burden is on you to say why this time is different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#Pre...
2) It's less of unemployment argument than reduced value argument. Unemployment is result from the lower limit for the living wage. People in India can find work for $1 per day even in automated society. If we are willing to reverse wage increases, remove laws regulating working conditions and remove all kinds of welfare, we can keep people employed for very long time.
3) In the past people could just leave menial jobs and pick a new job that required more intellectual capacity. We are reaching the limit where average Joe has no intellectual capacity that would increase their value in economy.
You'd have more rested people being more productive and have more people employed while giving an opportunity for improved work-life balance.
That and on-the-job training seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.
The obvious place to start is the horse: the horse population in the US peaked at 26M in 1917 and had declined to 3M by 1960, almost 1/10th of its peak value [0].
When those horses were unemployed by the automobile, we did not retrain them in new lines of work. They just died. It got so bad that conversation societies were established to protect endangered breeds.
Eventually we created a handful of new jobs in the recreational sector for them, so the population of horses is rising now, but it is nowhere close to the peak value, and of course we did not create those jobs within the lifetime of any displaced horse.
In fact what the historical record shows is that massive technological shocks produce long-term unemployment. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a horse, because of course they're just resources to be exploited in the furtherance of human goals. But then again, so are you.
[0] http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...
Technological disruption is not new. It's been around forever. If your theory stands true, then how come that overall, the global economy is growing? Doesn't it mean that we've created more jobs that we've destroyed?
What about the other important element no one seems to care about in this conversation: the jobs created - very often - require a higher level of skills and specialization.
The number of jobs does not correlate to GDP growth [0]. So whether "the economy is growing" is not terribly related to whether jobs are being created. This is somewhat puzzling under Adam-Smith-Wealth-of-Nations ideas about economics, but it's an empirical fact.
> Technological disruption is not new. It's been around forever.
You seem to be misunderstanding the argument; I'm not arguing for something new. I'm arguing that negative effects of technological shock are well-attested in the historical record: you can look back at historical data and plainly see them.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/business/economy/us-growth...
It's hard to accept because the people hit are not necessarily those that will benefit from the newly created opportunities. But if History is clear on one thing, it's that the number of winners outweighs the losers.
Every economy that resists creative destructions in favor of short term social peace ends up watching prosperity pass by.
As the Wiki page you linked to says, stopping unemployment depends on "compensation effects ensur[ing] there is never a long term negative impact on jobs". So, by default, technology will put people out of work, and there's no guarantee that some counterbalancing factor will always materialize. The amount of meaningful work that humans can engage in is certainly not infinite.
Of course, it's not a guarantee that technology will continue to improve either, at least not at a faster rate than the counterbalancing factor. As it happens, it's very hard to predict the future. But it's not unreasonable to try. And right now, it looks very much like tech will keep marching forward, and jobs outside of tech will not.
A self-driving car, for example, is just a regular car (old technology) with some servos attached (old technology) and a few sensors added (old technology) and a computer (old technology), with self-driving software (new technology).
Put a million drivers out of work with self-driving cars, and you don't open up a million jobs building self-driving cars. The number of cars needed doesn't go up much. The demand for servos and sensors goes up, but making those is largely automated already. Maybe some servo or sensor companies have to add another shift...so they hire a handful of humans to watch the machines on the new shift.
Before, when we replaced a human we were generally replacing him with a new machine. Now we are more just making the old machine that the human was operating operate without the human.
I can't help but think that an article this short can't be anything more than fluff.
1) Women are graduating from college at a higher rate than men.
2) Women are going to college at a higher rate than men.
3) Women have a higher literacy rate than men.
4) Women graduate from high school at a higher rate than men.
These trends are likely to continue. I don't see any possible scenario where men are not worse off in 20 years than they are today, while the higher educated women continue upwards. This is likely especially the case given that trends in education are pointing drastically in favor of women.
If you examine men-heavy trades such as trucking, they are likely to almost entirely disappear in regards to providing plentiful millions of moderate paying jobs to fairly low skill blue collar workers. Nearly all taxi & Uber type jobs will also disappear, those too are dominated by men. Manufacturing will become even further automated by robotics + AI, those jobs are heavily dominated by men. Even military jobs are likely to be meaningfully reduced by leaps in automation and robotics.
It's okay to file a bug report without pointing out the design defect that caused the issue.
Its probably more of a problem for men because the kinds of jobs advancing technology is most likely to eliminate [0] in the near future tend to be male-dominated, especially the jobs that are better quality in the first place. So, men (of particular demographics and skill/education profiles) are going to be losing more quality opportunities that they would otherwise have than women are.
Also, IIRC, there are some indications that a variety of social problems (including certain types of crime and violence) tend to increase with the proportion of long-term unemployed men but not so much with unemployed women, so even beyond the degree to which it is a problem for men, the problem men experience because of it may be disproportionately a problem for society as a whole.
> I can't help but think that an article this short can't be anything more than fluff.
Well, its mostly a call-out to another article of the author's, which is itself a review of a book by a different author. So, yeah, its not exactly intended as much of a full discussion of the issue it points to.
[0] "replace with jobs with very different entry requirements" may be more accurate in some cases, but the net effect is generally similar.
Baristas are a very good example of this. The whole coffee making process can be pretty much automated, but isn't because people like to see a person making their coffee.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-gender-fa...
The disaster is here, fam.
I'm cautious about arguments that rely on a pessimistic expectation that progress will reverse because it's just never continued in the past. If the argument identified some fundamental reasons why progress will slow instead of drawing historical correlations then it would have merit. Then again if we knew those principles then we could correct our society and avoid disaster. Because this argument is flawed and human knowledge and understanding is the only thing that solves human problems, the validity of the argument is lost.
Instead, I think this trend is far more likely to be caused by an increasing share of young women entering the workforce over the same timeframe.
But hourly rates, particularly at the low end, would be lower than now and probably below a livable amount.
Summers's role in the deregulation of derivatives contracts
On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace."[21] On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before the U.S. Congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." At the time Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need."[22] In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying "With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century."[23]
When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous."
At the 2005 Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan presented a paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?". Rajan pointed to a number of potential problems with the financial developments of the past thirty years.[24] The problems that Rajan considered include skewed incentives of managers, herding behavior among traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund operators who suffer withdrawals if they under-perform the market. Rajan also discussed the problems associated with firms that "goose up returns" by taking risky positions that yield a "positive carry."[25] Justin Lahart, writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2009 about the response to Rajan's paper at the conference recounts that "former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, famous among economists for his blistering attacks, told the audience he found 'the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan's] paper to be largely misguided.'"[26]
In February 2009, Summers quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout.[27] On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's "This Week" program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.