Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
That job market only existed in a handful of countries for a ~40 year period on all of human history.
Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable basis for a society.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
right here is the problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
More people = more economy = higher wages. Otherwise killing people and stopping other people from having children would increase your pay.
As for the middle class, most of the reason for the decline is people moving into the upper class.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
Thats not what I get from the source you provided.
It shows that middle (and lower class) are massively losing income share: Ine 1971, you have 88% of population in middle class or below, with 72% of total income.
81% of population remain in that bracket, but now they only get 51% of total income. That is massive, and also bad for the economy as a trend because rich people spend less of their income.
The conclusion I draw from this is that middle-class (and below) is in decline because the rich "upper-class" is soaking up much of their income.
See page 3 on https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/goldin-lecture-sl... for an illustration.
I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.
Surely you're not suggesting...
> Surely you're not suggesting...
Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.
And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.
That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.
It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.
Stability in that you had jobs that lasted a lifetime and paid a pension once you retired, not layoffs every couple years. Dignity in that anyone could get a real, important, meaningful (and very rough, once you take off said rose-tinted glasses) job as a factory worker, farmer, coal miner, whatever, instead of what, working at Walmart or 7-11?
I do agree with you though, especially your last paragraph.
The typical romanticized coal miner is a masculine figure, a breadwinner, the representative of an industry that might have been core to the family and town for generations. A Walmart stocker is a guy in a T-shirt. Walmart itself is famous for... pricing out local businesses whenever it comes to a small town.
I'm not at all denying that it's a culture and glorification thing. I just think this is a factor people sometimes miss when looking at how a lot of the country is nostalgic for the 20th century economy, and why people keep wanting (mostly via vibes) to reindustrialize America.
Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are competing against double income no kids kind households?
The second one will have more money in the modern context so they're better off. At some times in the past, they wouldn't have been better off because their expenses would increase more than their income. Basically it's about cost of childcare.
But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids
If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.
Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.
> Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing the need for full time childcare.
But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones. Households where people both work 40hrs = 80hrs will be ahead of those that work only 40hrs total. So everyone will descend to working 80hrs too.
Of course, taking mine and GPs logic to it's conclusion is silly - people will have a point where they stop comparing with others and tradeoff less money for less hours. But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high! And it only happens at an already very high salary. A 40hrs/week SWE might not go to a high finance 70hrs/week job, because they're already comfortably paid. However these two are top 1% jobs in the world, and the quality of life is probably not too different. But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung, which entails a much better quality of life (as a % increase)
Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.
Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.
> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung
While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.
It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.
> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.
If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.
A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.
I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a week of a man's labour. This is important for people who really just want some employment and don't want to die. But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder. Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you go down the executive route.
> "That's what you do"
That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing. I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour laws.
It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests this is any kind of norm?
1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in half.
2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs, I suppose, but...
3. The data also suggests that those working long hours are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical. Most people will either stay on the same rung or find themselves heading lower.
What's not okay is that only they have to accept the short end of the stick and the others can profit from that.
People want to have their cake and eat it, too. And that obviously doesn't work.
What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
This (socalled "luxury space communism") is impossible insofar as a good lifestyle includes positional goods and social status. Demand is infinite, even your own demand, and you have to be able to outrun it.
The best technology I know for this is Ozempic. If there was a way to ban yourself from getting loans that would also help, but you wouldn't like it.
If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have lost capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really the world you want to create?
It’s not just a “ChatGPT will replace you”. Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Username checks out.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract...
And I’m not really as concerned about the super intelligence. I’m more concerned about the impact on our culture as humans.