Made in America, Again
theatlantic.com
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That's $40K per year at best. Hardly a middle-class salary in contemporary United States. In fact, it's barely above minimum wages in many other countries.
With all due respect, you are ignorant of the economics of many parts of the US. You can live quite well in South Carolina (briefly lived there) and Mississippi on $40k per year. In many regions, you aren't struggling for money unless you make less than $20k. The United States is a diverse country and I have lived in much of it.
In many parts of the US, the cost of living is extremely low and a dollar goes quite far. Believe it or not, there are large swaths of the US where you can buy a house for much less than $100k (cheapest house in a town I've seen in the last decade was something like $12k, out in flyover country, for an actual house, albeit small). You might not want to live there, and I certainly do not, but many people do. If you like the environment, you can live a satisfactory middle-class life on $40k in those parts of the country. Housing is cheap, food is cheap, fuel is cheap, entertainment is cheap, and if your tastes are simple it is easy to save enough money to comfortably retire in those communities.
$40k would definitely be on the low side if you live in a place like Silicon Valley or New York City. And I've lived there too. But the article specified South Carolina and Mississippi. And I've actually lived on less than $40k in Silicon Valley. Down in Mississippi, no one is going to be complaining about a $20/hour manufacturing job. That's a good living for modest effort.
Unemployment was a big problem. While the textile jobs weren't all that well-paying (often it was piece-work), at least it was something that put food on the table.
When BMW Manufacturing arrived it was a tremendous boon to the regional economy. Not only were there new jobs at BMW, but new jobs at both local suppliers and newly arrived "feeder" firms. And these were good-paying jobs, even if they weren't always union. A production associate there starts around $15.50/hr, which is $33k a year. More if there's overtime. This is good money for the area. And then there's the benefits - the employees can buy a BMW at cost every few years. That's like a dream come true for them - being able to drive a European luxury car that's brand new.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
- There's a huge range to "middle-class". Consider whether your idea of "middle-class salaries" is in fact upper-middle-class. Remember that most of the middle class cannot afford to drive Priuses and BMWs.
- In a lot of the United States, cost of living is a hell of a lot lower than the Bay. When your rent is $350/month for a two-bedroom flat and your car cost $5k, $40k might not be so bad after all.
- The figure quoted is starting wage. It goes up from there, and twenty-year-olds don't yet need quite as much to live comfortably as they will later.
I live in the heart of the "cheap, low cost" Midwest and there is nothing within 200 miles of me that rents below $650/month -- and even at $650, your talking about old, poorly maintained, single bedroom or studio flats.
Yes, there are lots of cheap 50k-100k houses. But what everyone forgets is the upkeep on those houses is enormous. You might have a $800/month mortgage payment on a 3 bedroom house, but also have to pay another $500-$1,000/month upkeep on that house.
My "cheap" Midwest home in Michigan (2br, 1350sqft) costs $1700/month in mortgage+upkeep. An luxury apartment in a downtown Seattle (2br, 850sqft) can be had for $1800/month. 40% higher wages on the coast, and only an extra $100/month in housing costs. (Zillow: http://bit.ly/1sx9LH2)
You won't save a lot of money on rent/living expense in the Midwest, you'll just get a lot more empty house space "for free". That's great if you need lots of empty space (for kids and such). But otherwise, the cost of living difference is not nearly as large as people pretend it is.
Yes, the literal dirt a building sits on is cheaper away from the coasts (land value). But that's literally the only difference in cost -- nearly everything else is more-or-less the same price (including home and building expenses, professional services, food, clothing, electronics, etc).
Some are even more expensive in the Midwest (home repairs and maintenance, nearly all utilities, etc)
(I was elated, because housing here is half as expensive as where I was from!)
In US in 2011, that meant a household making between about 20k and 100k. So yes the middle class is huge (60% of the population by definition), and 40k is right in the middle quintile (between 38k and 62k). Not upper-middle-class, but not "minimum wage working class" either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find...
You can surely get by on $40k a year. With my Master's Degree in Social Work from one of the best schools in the country, my best paying jobs were about $33k, but 2 bedroom apartments for $350 are gonna be hard to come by.
$40k is middle class for that part of the country.
The water here is cheap no matter how many people are connected. If it weren't, you'd just dig a modest hole in the ground and suck out what you need.
So having two household members earning $40k puts the household in upper-middle-class category.
No. The sexism is what made it work. If society permits both spouses to work then couples where both spouses work can afford to pay more for a house which increases the price of housing (and likewise for everything else). As more two income families come to exist it thereby becomes more difficult to sustain a family on a single income, which further exacerbates the problem by increasing the incentive to become a two income family (and thus the number of two income families inducing price inflation).
The only way to prevent that is for society to somehow discourage couples from both working full time jobs. And since employers have no way to tell what an employee's spouse is doing all day, the most effective social enforcement method is sexism. (Obviously the math doesn't care which sex is inhibited from working but existing culture is a different matter.)
Probably the closest you could get to it without the sexism is to provide everyone with a basic income.[1] A spouse who didn't work full time would still receive the basic income which would significantly reduce the income inequality between single income and dual income families, thereby reducing the pressure for both spouses to work and making single income families more practical.
> The sexism is what made it work.
Recent innovations in medicine and fertility control such as condoms have -- to a certain extent -- made obsolete (some of) these sex-based social expectations. However, social expectations evolve slowly, more slowly than technological progress. Moreover, it is entirely unclear if the new orthodoxy, that it is unanimously better completely to abolish sex-based divisions of labour, and modern society is currently in a fierce struggle over this question.
Marx, in "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859) claimed that revolutions occur when technological development has moved so far ahead of (and hence made obsolete) the social expectations that govern propery relations, that revolution must occur:
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces
of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms - with the property relations within the framework of which
they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic
foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole
immense superstructure.
At a certain stage of development of the contracteption technology,
the division of labour between the sexes come into conflict with
the existing relations between the sexes or - this merely expresses
the same thing in legal terms - with the property and entitlement
relations within the framework of which they have operated
hitherto. From forms of development of the reproductive forces
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of
sexual revolution. The changes in the socio-sexual foundation lead
sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense
superstructure.
It's interesting to see how this will play out in the long run.
Somewhere in your argument is the notion that sex, unlike e.g. race, is actually based on a biological difference that matters in practice, and is therefore a legitimate criterion on which to base socioeconomic behavior. But that doesn't make it not sexism, it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative.
As to "it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative", sure, that's right. But in day-to-day English, "sexism" is pejorative, and that is not going to change any time soon. Therefore it is confusing to use the term when describing the biologically-based division of labour that was for 99.9999% of human history the only game in town. Calling this division sexist is therefore misleading to casual readers.
OP wanted a society in which only one member of a couple is expected to work a full time job. That type of society was historically a consequence of sexism and would be difficult to achieve otherwise for the reasons I explained above. The causes of that sexism have nothing to do with it.
> As to "it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative", sure, that's right. But in day-to-day English, "sexism" is pejorative, and that is not going to change any time soon. Therefore it is confusing to use the term when describing the biologically-based division of labour that was for 99.9999% of human history the only game in town.
Statements that are accurate but confusing are inherently necessary as a precondition to identifying and eliminating the confusion.
AnthonyMouse: 2+2 = 17
mafribe: saying 2+2 = 17 is confusing
AnthonyMouse: we need to keep saying 2+2 = 17 so point out that a world where 2+2 = 17 holds is problematic.
In other words, sexism.
This sits uncomfortably with the everyday meaning of the term.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/du...
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/11/going...
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-feminismhappiness-axis...
In other words, do something sufficiently similar to providing a basic income.
The only way to sustain a "one worker per household" system is to have some kind of force preventing more than one worker per household- be it social, legal, or otherwise. Without that, some folks will try to get ahead, and we will wind up right back where we are.
In short, it just doesn't seem to be something we can have a mix of. Either everyone has one worker per household, or everyone has two (or more).
One of the upsides to the old gender roles is it enabled heavy specialization. Men studied business, women studied domestic work. Without those roles, you either have to gamble on one of the two studies, or learn both and in the process sacrifice specialization.
Also community college costs have stayed pretty darn reasonable amidst the inflating costs of four-year degrees.