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Comment by maratc | Hacker News Reader

One thing that might be missing from your calculation is that "one median-family-year of work" meant "about one person working" in 1940 but means "about two persons working" in 2022.

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The difference isn’t quite that large as many households are just single people and while the female labor force participation rate increased (34% 1945 vs 57% now) the male labor force participation rate declined ( 83% 1948 vs 68% now). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

Similarly there where a great deal of households in the 1940’a with two working adults.

The share of dual income households has more than doubled. Your statistic seems likely to be biased by people retiring.

https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2019/CES-WP-19-19.pdf

I'm guessing the rise of dual income houses is much more visible in the median than are retirees dropping down the labor force participation rate.

You read that statement incorrectly, the share of dual incomes among married couples doubled.

Married-couple households however have dropped dramatically over time, 76% of households in 1940, 55% of all U.S. households in 1990, and 46% in 2020. “In 1940, married couples with children represented 43 percent of all households; married couples without children represented 33 percent of households”

Sort of interesting, but I think does not negate the point. A dual income household is not necessarily a dual income married couple. For the purpose of calculating dual income households, you have to consider non married romantic partners and even just relatives and roommates. And again, retirees dropping things down.

I cannot find stats going back, but a majority of current households today are dual income. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...

This effect of the median family being dual income is likely true for now, and false for 1940. It is much stronger if you subset down to "families", but this nuance doesn't likely appear in the "median household income".

That’s not 54.4% as dual income households that’s 54.4% as more than 1 income.

In the 1940’s multi generational households with multiple income earners were common. In 1940 only 7.8% of all households had a single person vs 26.7% by 2010. Working adult children would frequently stay at home until marriage and sometimes past that point.

This is one of those things you need actual data based on similar definitions to compare.

Female labor force participation near the end of a major world war was already probably much higher than just a few years before.

It's also discounting workplace efficiency gains. Both white and blue collar jobs are far more efficient than ever before.

OTOH, an interesting point is that the Manhattan project cost 0.4% of GDP in 1940, and Apple buyback ($110B) is 0.4% of 2023 GDP ($27T).

Apple gets its money from all around the world, so every country pays a part of those buybacks.

The USA in 1940 were a smaller empire than they are now so, I might be wrong, but the Manhattan project money came mostly from inside the country.

This means that it's easier for Apple to find and spend those money than it was for the USA in 1940.

Population of US was also only 132 million in 1940. Today it is 333 million.

This take ignores the unpaid work performed for the family and community, largely by women. When two people in a family are employed, more of their household labor (cooking, caring for the young and the old, etc) is purchased instead of provided by a family member.

Housework productivity has gone through the roof since the invention of dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, etc. My grandma used to actually work hard the whole day to run the houshold. My family today manages with maybe two or three hours of light work per day.

If only we did the same with other work, we’d also all only be working a few hours a day rather than 8–9 still.

People don't actually want this. We sell ourselves on the Jetsons-like idea of automating away our daily tasks so we can just live our lives, but that scares us.

Most people don't actually seem to want to have mist most of their waking hours free to do whatever they want.

I do think so as well. "But what would I do with all this time?"... I find this so sad.

I do get the fear of having all that time. I assume it gets back to people not really having the time to deeply know themselves and being afraid of what they'll find. Day to day life is a whole lot easier with distractions, even if those distractions are frustrating or miserable in the moment.

Sorry to hear. I hope you'll get past that fear one day and discover how rich your life can be without work filling most of your days and taking up most of it (potentially for someone else's profit.)

Oh sorry, I didn't phrase that well. I'm not in that position but do think I understand when people are stuck by that fear.

Personally I work part time on software projects and have a small farm/homestead. I usually don't know what day of the week it is and have the freedom to take each morning yo decide how I want to spend my day. I wish everyone could experience that freedom, even if they find they don't like it.

But how would Jeff Bezos swim in money if his underpaid parcel couriers would be able to financially survive on working four hours a day?

It's utterly ridiculous how much of the productivity increases of the last decades ended up not distributed to the workers either in terms of wage/salary hikes or reduced working hours. Something like billionaires rarely existed for a long time, usually it was the royal family and that's it - and now, alone in the last 20 years the amount of billionaires is 6x higher than at the start of the millennium. All of that wealth has been looted from the lower classes and in quite a few cases the taxpayers.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/220002/umfrag...

Add sewing, making and repairing clothes, curtains, sheets and covers, etc. We buy them now.

To be fair, they were buying those in 1940 too.

Yes, but they cost much more than now so it was very common to have a sewing machine in every house and use it. If you're 30 and have a sewing machine at home now, chances are that you're a cosplayer.

Well. The partner staying home in the 1940s also rendered services to the family. Services that now need to be purchased from outside. So really, it’s always two people spending their waking hours. Only I suspect that in the 1940s, things were a little less stressed out. Judging from today’s bestseller lists and all those productivity and hack your body / marriage / x podcasts.

The wife still needed to eat and get cloth. That one person needed to feed her. Also, female employment was 28% not 0 in 1940.

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