Half of US Employees Earn Extra Cash on the Side, Survey Finds
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If you consider that most of these could be two income households, then that's a drastic difference from the post WWII era US where a single wage earner could support a household (2 adults, 2.3 kids, and a large dog, in a house with a white picket fence) with a low-skill job (eg shoe salesman), to now a possible max of 3 jobs (1.5 * 2) to support that single household living in a smaller shitty apartment. While I think women should absolutely have the right to work, in whatever field they want - civic progress since the 1950's, one can't help but wonder if we possibly lost something in the transition to two wage earner households. If we're not somehow being taken advantage of by that. Sure we're roughly twice as productive as a national if we ignore technological progress, but are we twice as happy? twice as fullfilled? twice as able to enjoy twice as much leasure time with our loved ones (whom we love twice as much)?
Quality of life probably needs to be considered and compared between the time periods. I'm too young and history-ignorant to do that but I wonder if these two, in terms of QoL, coincide with your sentiments or not. My suspicion is that they don't.
- a household (2 adults, 2.3 kids, and a large dog, in a house with a white picket fence)
- single household living in a smaller shitty apartment
The QoL might still actually be better in the smaller, shitty apartment depending on your priorities?
It's just there are priorities that society could prioritize to reduce overall misery compared to where we are today. Why are infants going unfed, children going hungry? Why is medical bankruptcy even a thing? What is the average number of leisure hours per week across the whole economy? Sure, if I work extra hard and guess the right (tech startup) lottery numbers, I could retire and have a 0 hour work week, but for the unlucky masses, what's that average number when less than half the (American) people don't have $500 saved up for an emergency? There's no question that the GDP as a whole, but even per-capita is way up since the 50's *. But is happiness (as a measure as the opposite of misery) also way up? If the World Happiness Report ** went back to the 1950's (or even the pre-Internet 1990's), would we see similar trends? Of course everyone's welcome to their own priorities, but happiness per-capita, as impossible it is to measure, seem entirely reasonable to prioritize for the country/world's economy. What makes a given individual happy won't be uniform, obviously. (I like my small shitty apartment and chose to live there because of the location but I'm fully aware it's also not for everyone.) But the number of hours of leisure (Europeans laugh at the fact that it's measured by hours in the US and not counted by days) or the number of hours per week spent dealing with assholes (boss, co-workers, or customers) would be great things to optimize the economy for.
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...
** https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Homemaking is labor.