1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)
2. The government went off the gold standard
3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization
Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin.
So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s.
Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed.
So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts.
But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.
> 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)
The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on
The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike.
> 2. The government went off the gold standard
So what?
> Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation.
If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".
The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.
> 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization
I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever.
More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer.
That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.
The economy only needed stabilization because it was running on usury. If you ban usury, as Islam does, then you wouldn't need fake money that can be printed at will, and these crazy periodic cycles won't happen. It's not like today is stable anyway, I've spoken to several people in finance and they admitted to me these things.
If so, my frame of reference for predatory is like 15%, 27%, etc. numbers like that.
Is that what you’re saying? If so can you expand on your thoughts here and link these two elements together better? I generally associate high interest rates with high risk. I’d loan my friend $500 for 0% interest. But some person I’ve never met who is sketchy? That would be a 25% rate with collateral. Ya know?
Are you tying this into the Federal Reserve somehow? Is it interest rates for mortgages that you view as predatory? Small business loans?
Liquidity fits into your world view how? In its most simple form: A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money. Do they go to the Sultan and beg for a loan based on charity?
Why, because most people are not familiar with Islamic history? :)
> A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money.
Engage in a fundrise not dissimilar to what people do today with VCs and startups. The investor(s) contribute money in exchange for a portion of the business. If it succeeds, both parties make money, if it doesn't, the investor loses money, and the business owner loses money and effort he put into it. It's true risk sharing.
There can be cycles due to issues beyond our control, however, the cycles we see today are built into the system because of usury and printing fake money to fuel it. As I said, financial folks I spoke with admitted it.
It compounds. Over the course of 50 years this is ~100% inflation.
WW2 is just where it started, it went from 28% around then to 47% as a percent of labor force, a huge change.
The male labor force doubled in absolute number since then, but the female one increased almost 4X.
One significant source of uncounted labor was removed with the washing machine. Enormous amounts of time were spent manually washing clothes. But automating this likewise had a similar effect to making child care more efficient and increased downward wage pressure elsewhere by allowing more to enter other parts of the workforce.
The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.
I have literally never seen this argument before, and I've been reading economics books for 10 years.
I'm more curious than anything. Please tell me where I can find more.
Things are quite different now. The Unites States makes up less than a quarter of the world's GDP. Those great factory jobs with pensions and benefits are long gone. That dovetails with your #3, globalization.
Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time.
Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.
How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.
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