Man goes to work, wife looks after home and kids, sometimes 4+ kids, and the man had job security.
Now society is dog eat dog with no job security and all having to work and have smaller families.
Was this planned or just how things worked out due to population growth?
Basically, fifty years ago wages were close to an all-time high, and the cost of living was at an all-time low. Frankly, I think it was planned, and that the 1% has been systematically chipping away at things like wages and benefits, breaking unions, pushing for increased international trade so they could use ten year old 3rd worlders in manufacturing instead of adult union members, etc. Frankly, the economy is heading towards where it was at the end of the 19th century, if it's not already there.
I am not sure if the insanely rising cost of real estate is part of this, is due to increased population, or what. But it's making all of the above that much worse.
50 years ago the Republican party declared war on the working class thinking that they would be better off with more money if they gave them starvations wages, and not thinking about the country as a whole. They exported most of our economy to countries full of corruption and tyrants, and no one ever talked about how that would effect our country, They knew it would destroy things - that was their goal, they just didn't talk about it.
Only political scientists that wrote books about it talked about it, but no-one reads books and few report on them, and the mainstream media represents the views of the 5 or 6 multinational companies owned and controlled by billionaires, and the government is pretty much the same now as well.
Some short, clear, simple books that explain this without a lot of extra padding and words are Thom Hartmann's series of books. They are inexpensive, do not waste your time, and are backed up with facts and serious theories about how and why. I recommend them highly.
Lyndon Johnson was a democrat. He's responsible for the downfall.
shareNo facts or evidence to support that.
shareThe Impact of the 1964-64 Civil Rights Acts and Immigration Acts speak for themselves. U.S.A. is now a third world sh*t hole. Who would have thought handing over a country built by hard working, industrious, intelligent Western Europeans would turn to trash once they started letting in third world scum, who've had every opportunity and hand out given to them and still cant achieve anything of merit because location, money, and opportunity doesnt change DNA. The same reason those countries they came from were trash and will always be trash.
shareFifty years ago would have been 1971. Not long after that inflation became a problem. The interest rates on mortgages also shot up during that decade.
The cost of living is constantly rising but wages are not keeping up.
for many items, the cost over the last 50 years has dropped. most common appliances, electronics, are cheaper than they used to be, at least for ones that existed 50 years ago.
it's actually very interesting to break prices out by varieties of goods & services. the chart in the link below only goes back to 2000, but it's very telling in how costs of some items have collapsed or stayed constant, while others have increased.
not surprisingly, or at least it's not surprising to me, the areas with the greatest among of government regulation have the highest cost increases.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-5/
This is interesting, but I wish it also listed some categories like insurance and fuel which are at least absent from graph. Gas cost under $1 20 years ago in the US and now it is between $3-$4. Medical insurance costs have become rampant. It also shows that some of the most basic necessities such as housing and food are overinflated. It's interesting that appliances and electronics have dipped, but quality has certainly dropped. My old water heater lasted 30 years. My brother got a new one and it lasted 10 years, most only come with a 5 year warranty.
I think the most surprising stat to me is that new cars have remained the same. I don't remember new trucks costing 50-70k 20 years go. Seems like even smaller vehicles today that are new are listed around 30k which seems much higher.
Very cool data to look at.
"It's interesting that appliances and electronics have dipped [in price], but quality has certainly dropped. My old water heater lasted 30 years. My brother got a new one and it lasted 10 years, most only come with a 5 year warranty."
I would rather pay the higher price and have a reliable appliance that lasts 30 years. And I can do without all these refrigerators, dryers, etc. that now come with the so-called "smart technology." I don't need some silly gadget telling me how to dry my clothes. It's just another added feature that can break down.
And those warranties are a joke. The manufacturer knew the water heater would last maybe ten years, so they made sure that the warranty expired after only five years.
The problem is today's "throw-away mentality." A power surge damaged my water softener, which is a must-have for me due to the high iron content in the local water. The repairman (a trusted guy I've done business with for years) found damage to the timer's motherboard and said he could either (1) replace it for $300-400 dollars, or (2) replace the entire unit for a couple hundred more. This guy, who has been in the business for over 40 years, was telling me how he's seen companies make appliances more difficult to repair over time; instead of having affordable replaceable parts the appliance is designed to require replacement of entire components. It becomes cheaper then to just purchase a whole new unit rather than to attempt fixing the old one. These companies are happy with just throwing away a product; it means they can sell more new ones. There's a term for this: planned obsolescence.
I would pay the higher price too for a longer lasting appliance. It's nice to see you can still buy a fridge without all the smart tech.
I had my water pressure tank replaced about 4 years ago. I had never hooked one up so I hired it out. I asked the guy how long do these normally last and he says don't expect newer models to last more than 5 years. We'll see what happens next year!
Totally agree. And the pollution of all those discarded appliances in landfills must be pretty significant. That's why, when big companies boast about their green-ness, I just roll my eyes.
shareI bought a new Kenmore washer and dryer combo almost 13 years ago that was the cheapest one I could find. It has held up like a champ all these years with never so much as a hiccup. It is true that appliances and technology are getting better, but that is often because the strata that profit from them are the distributors like Walmart and Amazon, and they force prices down over time, but not their profits.
The way to bleed the people is with fees, charges and rents.
Here is an small excerpt from "The Hidden History of Monopolies" by Thom Hartmann:
Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US. Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.1 Why is this? Monopoly. The average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax”—in additional costs for pretty much everything—of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon*. And things are steadily getting worse as monopolistic concentrations continue to tighten their grip on every American industry from banking to telecom to food.2
Another book that explains all of this is:
"The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power" by Steve Fraser
This is a really well written book that explains in details the financial games that have been played on us, and never investigated by the government because the government is captured by money.
A longer broader overview that covers all of human history is "The End Of The Megamachine" by Fabian Scheidler that looks at the broad patterns of human culture going to after we stopped hunter-gathering and took up war.
The U.S. is becoming a one-party oligarchy. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
share"One Party Oligarchy" is kind of redundant. I don't think there is such a thing as a multi-party oligarchy. ;-)
If that is to change it has to be from all of us ... the 99%, 90% or whatever and that doesn't seem likely because of either we are divided and fragmented to the point where there is no real political force behind the demands of the people, and therefore no demand, OR we have been convinced that we are fragmented and divided and trained to react that way ... in a kind of Borderline Personality Disorder or a society, a "borderline society disorder" where we are hyperemotional, trigger-ready, paranoid, and over-worked.
I was reading about this a few months ago and thinking, it seems like something that is or has gone beyond just the personal.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is an illness characterized by marked difficulty maintaining a stable emotional state. Sufferers experience atypically wide swings in their moods, their feelings about themselves and others, and in their behavior. These swings can be extreme and can last for up to days at a time.
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share"...and not only are those people doing the best, but they're marrying each other. this trend makes up the central premise of murray's coming apart. so now, we are in a segregated world, not segregated by race but rather by iq. because if those educated, high iq people are all married and living in separate rich areas"
This sounds very suspect to me, because human beings have always, ALWAYS, married within their peer group. The wealthy have always married the wealthy, professionals or artisans have married within the professional or artisan class, peasants marry other peasants, etc. Of course there have always been exceptions, but people have always mixed with their peers, and typically marry fairly close to their own social and economic level.
If education has become concentrated, it's a failure of the national school systems more than anything else. The poor, the working classes, even some of the middle classes, aren't getting the educations they need to develop their cognitive abilities.
actually, in reflecting on what you've said, i think i may have confused some of murray's points that deal more with shared culture and how we've segregated along those lines and mixed them up with economic arguments.
i've deleted my post.
oil and gas were dirt cheap as were other inputs.
shareIn America the 'Titans Of Industry' sent most of our manufacturing jobs overseas, specifically to Asia
We are outpaced in putting together automobiles, household appliances and electronics
They work for peanuts over there
Used to be a fellow could work his ass of in a factory line here in The States and keep a wife happy, put a kid or two through college, take on a mortgage for a cute little house with a lawn, a driveway and maybe a veggie garden
This clusterfuck will bite the free world in the ass very soon, it's a pitiful shame
Taking care of 4 kids is a lot easier if one parent is at home. If both parents are working then the costs of childcare are roughly proportional to the number of children. Nannies are also expensive and often don't do as much as a stay-at-home-mom (I used to be friends with a nanny), partly because of the liability, partly because they don't feel they have the authority, because they aren't willing to do several jobs (care for children + be housekeeper + cook for family) for the salary of one job, etc.
So both parents working is one factor.
Also I think expectations for living standards and for childcare standards have changed. When my husband was 5, he walked home from school with his friends. When my children were 5, an adult had to either pick them up at school or be present at the bus stop or else the bus driver would not allow them off the bus. In my state, you could not even legally be on your back deck with a closed door between yourself and your child in the house until they were age 8. These examples are a microcosm of what is expected of parents now. Childcare is very labor intensive, the legal pressure on parents (to never make a mistake) is high, and children are expected to be closely supervised 24/7/365 for such a long time that it is hard for a family to make the whole jigsaw puzzle work with more than a couple of kids.
Companies had a George Washington mentality back then, and now they don't. I'm not really sure what this means, but it's the first thing that popped into my head, and I'm sure it makes some kind of sense somehow.
shareCredit reports definitely don't help. Before the late 80s, as long as you had a job with a steady salary you could get a mortgage no problem. Now, there are so many credit checks and reasons to refuse the applicant that more and more people are forced into renting (and paying more than the mortgage would be) which then makes it impossible to save any spare cash as there's none left.
shareYes, I feel sorry for the kids today.
share