That is a really good thread. I hate how clunky reading long stuff is on Twitter, but, that’s beside the point.
The author wrote the same content here with more room to breathe: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv...
The author wrote the same content here with more room to breathe: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv...
“I propose the following Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI): the number of weeks of the median male wage required to pay for rent on a three-bedroom house at the 40th percentile of a local market’s prices, a family health insurance premium [without employer subsidy], a semester of public college, and the operation of a vehicle.”
“To assign an annual cost of college to a family whose tuition payments will be concentrated in a few years, the COTI uses the federal National Center for Education Statistics estimate for half of one year’s tuition, fees, room, and board at a four-year public institution. Two children pursuing four-year degrees would require a combined sixteen semesters of college, so a household preparing for those costs would need to save roughly one semester’s worth of cost per year before the children reached college-going age.”
”In 1985, the COTI stood at 30 [weeks] — the median male worker needed thirty weeks of income to afford a house, a car, health care, and education. By 2018, the COTI had increased to 53 [weeks] — a full-time job was insufficient to afford these items, let alone the others that a family needs. A generation ago, the worker could be confident in his ability to provide his family not only with the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, but also with the middle-class essentials of a house, a car, health care, and education. Now he cannot.“
There is definitely something to his argument. In the past in a majority of families, one person could work and provide for a family. At present in a majority I think both parents must work to be able to cover necessities in New Zealand. Many more hours work just to “live”.
I'm not disparaging women working, I'm just saying wage stagnation is an unforeseen side effect. If 1 of every working couple decided to stop working, our economy would crash, but wage rates would increase dramatically.
With a new significant portion of the workforce able to work, you enable on one side, new economic needs (more transports, more kindergartens, etc) and on the other side you enable more production of goods which in theory should improve the material conditions of a society. Basically a society should be more efficient if it stops excluding half its available workforce.
But a the same time, housewives where not passive actors in the economy, they did had an economic impact (raising children, etc), just that this economic impact was not measured previously. However it was probably not equivalent to a paid job in term of economical impact, and for obvious emancipation reasons, it's definitely not a state to return to.
Just as we consider TV's to have dropped 97 percent in cost and use this in our inflation estimates. I remember seeing similar analysis that was done on US manufacturing output that showed that productivity boom of computers was hiding an enormous loss in US manufacturing jobs in official US metrics.
I feel like some people are starting to wake up to this. Its just so hard for these kind of official metrics to change when those in charge have every incentive to insist the US economy is doing great and just keeps getting better.
I sort of like how the twitter series summarizes the content, but it could have been done as a tl;dr style intro in the article itself.