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Comment by beqcq | Hacker News Reader

It's because of femi nism: now every household has two wage earners, so it makes sense for wages to split in half.

I always find this very interesting. You feel strongly enough about your point that you need to say it (albeit using a throwaway account). My reaction to your point as well as some comments above about an influx of immigration is that I think it is worth discussing. Instead of discussing it though, you make a quick remark that intends to blame wage stagnation solely on the enfranchisement of women when the issue is very likely more complex and can perhaps can be resolved without alienating and stripping the rights and agency of 50% of the population.

But the quick remark and the way you phrased it makes it seem like you just have something against women in the workplace, I'm guessing you feel threatened in some way. I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that you think the abolition of slavery also affected wages similarly.

This is not what the data show if we overlap female participation in labor markets with the graph of the article.

https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply

At 1948 the US had around 25% women in the work force. By 1973 that number is around 50%. The article say that wages increased proportionally with production between 1948 to 1973, and only after 1973 started to drop.

There is just no relation between those two graphs that support the claim that that one caused the other.

Because one wage earner cannot do housework or child rearing or other behaviors now(as they are working another job), wouldn't that cause a roughly 1:1 ratio of missing worker to demand for a new job to take care of the labor necessary? e.g. No time to cook, so buy more food on the go, no time to clean, so buy labor to clean, no time to organize home, buy labor to organize, etc.?

That's correct, but none of those three people would then make as much money as the original single wage earner. And the couple wouldn't be getting ahead nearly as much as one would hope, since they have to pay for all that extra labor.

This does not mean the conclusion drawn: that wages are split in half?

This is a good point. It's simple economics. If there is a sudden rise in worker supply, but not a corresponding increase in demand for those workers, wages must fall to accommodate the influx.

No, it's not a good point. Do you think women were just shuffling their feet at home before they became wage earners? Technological improvements that reduced the total domestic workload for a household made it feasible to have two earner households (as a side note it didn't eliminate domestic work which working women continued to do disproportionately to men to this day).

So the total labor required to live and work successfully in industrialized nations dropped but instead of that leading to more individual wealth it just meant that households now had allocated more of their labor to wage labor compared to before where half or more of the labor of a household was simply unacknowledged and unpaid.

And it should be noted that poor women had been working. For less compensation than men, while performing domestic labor. Middle class and upper class women getting jobs was another story.

Boo, hiss. Feminism. What an odious little comment thread.

> What an odious little comment thread.

Why? You're the one who injected the "Boo, hiss".

wages are drawn from the output of workers labor, not the other way around. At most, wages are an advance on the return a worker would expect from their labor. Subjugating half the population into not being part of the labor force is not an aspect of a free market in my opinion.

While I wouldn't be surprised that having two wage earners, and introducing a glut of new workers into the pool would certainly increase job competition, I really think that blaming feminism is pretty simplistic - it could be that culturally our desire for more required that we needed the spending power of two adults (not knowing that would hamstring our later earning potential), or it could be that due to a drop in birth rate due to modernization and standard of living increases women simply had less reason to stay home and more time for out of home activities.

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