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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Our immigration policies pretty strongly indicate we still need those less educated people doing work, we just don’t want to pay anything resembling reasonable wages for such.

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I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor.

However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family.

That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.

It’s likely that automation is about to turn the world on its ear vis-a-vis low skilled employment. The cost of human sustenance and care is surprisingly high compared to electricity, steel, carbon fiber, and silicon.

While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.

A single income family in US with the husband working at a factory in fifties and sixties could afford a home with washing machine, dish washer, TV and a phone. Surely the home was smaller, but it was easier to clean, the TV screen was tiny, but then the family can go to a cinema. There was no internet, but for information one could go to the library. So how it was far below what people in US could accept today?

There are certainly a few people that would accept it, look at the whole "tiny home" and "van life" phenomena. It's possible that more would, if smaller houses were available. Builders make much more profit on larger houses though.

I guess apartment living is closer to what people had post-war, but everybody wants to buy a house to get in the real estate gravy train.

>While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s

I'm not even sure that is true. Poverty in the US was higher in the fifties and sixties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...

Depends how you measure, surely. They had less TVs and computers and prepackaged food, the same amount of sunlight, and more freedom (as measured by average income to rent ratio).

Not true, the share of income going to living necessities has steadily dropped. Even not true for sunlight - the air quality was so much worse that you couldn't see much of the sun anyway

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