Lol, why would you want the system of the past? You know how it turned out
we can have the economic prosperity without the racism, in fact I’d argue if we recreated the economic effects of the 50s, high tax rate on the rich, local manufacturing and being a net exporter, that diversity would only make us more competitive.
Not sure what you are talking about with the edit. This meme is conservative thinking. My point is simple “The millions of US families” who had this, which was never a majority and never non-whites, their kids are us. Well not me, these people who enjoyed this prosperity actually destroyed Iran where I’m from. We know how that system turned out, thus I don’t want to go back to the system that enabled that. I’d like to go to a new system.
Agreed, that’s why I’ve spent the last few years working on a different economic system that turns attention into currency, and makes manufacturing a race to the top powered by people who love what they do.
From looking at jobs recently I would suggest getting into nursing or surgery tech at your local community college. Travel nurse jobs are paying $2500/ week.
Surgery tech has less dealing with asshole patients, but more dealing with asshole surgeons. Make of that what you will.
The message was lost with the example chosen.
TL;DR - the world sucks for most people nowadays who want to buy a house.
The idea was that at one point in America, a single earner could afford to buy a home and upgrade the quality of their life if they:
- had a decent job
- saved money
- did not procreate themselves into poverty
Now, even with two-earner families, it is not enough to afford even a basic starter home without being house poor and in debt for the entirety of your life without ever really “owning” anything (other than the payments).
The reason for this change in home ownership experience is what is always hotly debated. Those with general wealth or an entrepreneurial spirit will argue that it is still possible. The working class who just wants to do a job, earn a paycheck and leave work behind at the end of the day will disagree. The poor worry more about how to pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed themselves to worry about a house.
There are a lot of factors in my opinion on what has changed to make it so hard today but no reason greater to me than when a house became an investment instrument instead of a place to raise a family. Something left to your heirs to give them a leg up in their future and that was how upward mobility worked.
However, now that a house is not just a home but an investment tool, more and more people are finding the “American dream” is no longer achievable. How the value of a house was derived hasn’t really changed all that much. What has changed is how much that value is.
It used to be that a single earner making 100k a year in a big city could afford to buy a home and with more kids (aka tax breaks) could afford to upgrade homes from the starter home to one in the suburbs. Then came the two-earner households. People could afford more so the real estate industry started charging more for the same things … and people paid it because they could. The single earner was left behind because two is always going to be bigger than one.
Then came the real estate agent get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be … (oh wait, that’s the informercial sales pitch). There was money to made for no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that you income was more than your expenses and boom, sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed by competition from the small investor. This drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if he could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to rent when they couldn’t afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.
As is typical, it wasn’t long before corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up. They also had local political and financial influence to ensure property values would go up. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home price kept going up (and inventory going down).
Finally, we come to modern day times, where publicly traded companies like the Zillow and Redfins of the world buy up whole markets in an effort to control supply and pricing. Houses are unaffordable for everyone except the upper middle class and above because shareholder interests demand that housing costs keep rising regardless of the impact. What impact is that you say?
People are forced to rent, delay starting a family and find other ways to make money besides working for a living. Some try to do it through investments in the stock market where there are always more individual investor losers than there are winners. The same place the Zillows and Redfins of the world go to get their money so they can afford to try and manipulate said markets you can no longer afford to buy in.
If you ask me, this is capitalism at its finest so long as you are on the right side of the finalcial wall. If your main focus in life is not to make money, then you will be supporting someone who does make it their focus. Welcome to modern serfdom.
“Serfdom, condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord.” - Encyclopedia Brittanica
there are a lot more yachts and compounds
One major factor: women entered the workforce. Labor supply doubled, and two incomes per household became normalized. Our current economic system fails to account for the work of raising children which was implicitely built into the “traditional family” model.
That’s a double whammy for workers. The value of labor is halved. Both partners are expected to work to achieve a similar standard of living. And, without one partner doing household and child-rearing labor, those costs are borne by the workers.
Wrong. Women in the US entered the workforce in great numbers because of the 1972 Arab Oil Boycott. The price of gas and energy in general tripled overnight, and families were struggling to maintain. No wages fell. If Dad was making $5,000.00 a year in 1971 he was making the same salary after the prices went up. It was just that $5,000.00 no longer covered the basic expenses.
One major factor: women entered the workforce. Labor supply doubled, and two incomes per household became normalized.
I think that may be a case of putting the cart in front of the horse. For one, the labor supply did not double, and a significant amount of women have been in the workforce since the 40’s.
In 48’ a little over 30% of women worked, today it’s only 58%. So, I really doubt a gradual 25% increase in labor supply spread over 60 years is really responsible for the rapid decrease in livable wages we saw from the late 80’s on.
Also, an increase in labour supply only equates to a reduction in labour value if production value stagnates or decreases. This is the opposite of what happened post 80s, production has skyrocketed, but labour value has stagnated. This typically means that companies are transferring excess profits to shareholders rather than employees.
Cite your sources on this economic theory of yours, that is if you can find any that didn’t come out of some MRA’s ass
Yeah, the entire premise requires that women entering the workforce didn’t cause any new jobs to come into existence.
Childcare alone is a huge industry.
Both working parents often means two vehicles, that’s an increase in manufacturing.
It also ignores that women were already part of the workforce but their options were restricted.
Two household incomes exist because it’s the only way to survive the past 40 years of wage stagflation. We have an increase in multi-generational households because two incomes is no longer enough.
What part do you disagree with?
Obviously women should have the same labor opportunities as men, but do you really think doubling the pool of workers would have no impact on the labor market?
It only becomes MRA bullshit when you stop there and say “see, feminism was a mistake!” instead of arguing for all workers to be better compensated.
but do you really think doubling the pool of workers would have no impact on the labor market?
Why are you talking about hypotheticals?
Some women worked before then, some still didn’t work after.
It was a lot closer to a 10% increase than 100%
I’m not talking about hypotheticals; women generally didn’t work, and a couple decades later they did. The effective labor pool expanded.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2021/home.htm
I’d quote a part, but you should really read the whole thing.
The value of labor was wrecked because Reagan crushed the unions and factory jobs were outsourced to third world countries, not because more women entered the workforce. That was a symptom, not a cause.
That was almost before my time too and I was born in 1959. Around that time the industrial sector began requiring more and more education and people were more motivated to go to school for longer periods. Also about that time, because of the bolstered economy after the war, prices started going up and inflation really took hold.
Now having a college degree doesn’t even guarantee you’ll make enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment. There is something out of whack about that. I don’t know how people in upcoming generations will even be able to afford to buy food, let alone to have a roof over their heads. And it isn’t any one president at fault for it, it’s been going on since I was a kid, and that was decades ago.
Okay look this needs to stop.
First, the economic success has become overstated at this point. There was a relatively brief period in US history where this could happen. Being an adult during that period required living through both the great depression and WW2. The only people who truly got a free lunch were boomers born before 1955.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
Even for that subgroup, life could have a million difficulties. You know how a lot of seemingly successful boomers talk about how money isn’t everything? There’s a reason for that. All but the most privileged had to deal with shit like this:
- A culture where it was not acceptable to show emotion as a result of millions of men trying to collectively repress their massive PTSD
- Marrying (for life) the first woman you date.
- Having kids by 22
- having all the stress and responsibility that comes with being the sole provider with that, again at an extremely young age
- Coming home every day (until you get married) with the knowledge that there might be a Vietnam draft card in the mailbox
It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life.
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Nearly all of those situations didn’t overlap.
Housing wasn’t cheap because people were racist, housing was cheap because the American dollar was strong from a well developed manufacturing base, net exports, and wartime technology innovations.
All those situations overlapped in that they were all things boomers had to deal with.
That’s why you will never come to a meaningful answer, the assumption that because a and b existed at the same time, that they were interrelated.
informal fallacy.
My point was in regards to general online discourse around Boomers having it easy. As such, I listed the struggles they had.
That being said the ability to support a family on one income probably had a lot to do with taboos about women in the workforce.
Just stop
Man this place is really worse than reddit.
Yeah, were a lot less nice to people who obstinately refuse to understand basic logic
“Oh but boomers had hard lives in other ways” isn’t the point at all and those things have nothing to do with the post.
Baby boomers are exclusively those born between 1946 to 1964. 55% of the living boomers are presumably females safe from the draft and 45% are male. 95% of the draft was over by 1971 whereas only 38% of boomers were of draft age by then. Of the draft pool about 8% were drafted.
On net 1.3% of boomers were drafted for Viatnam. 0% went through the great depression 0% went through WW2.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
In case you hadn’t noticed 99.99% of the whining is from straight white neurotypical cisgendered men. Comical levels of oppression or not they on average came out of it with houses that ballooned in value 8x over and now enjoy the same degree of freedom from oppression as you and I along with their money and house and are steady trying to reinstate that comical level of oppression at the hands of the dictator they intend to give our democracy to.
Okay before I go off on you how old are you?
I’m 43. Statistically the people that are whining are themselves extremely privileged who on average came of age after Vietnam. They don’t get to use other people’s suffering as a fuckin excuse.
You sound like a petulant teenager.
So you look at people today demanding more and say “this has got to stop” and launch into some malarkey about how the worst generation actually honest had a real hard time and you believe other people are petulant. Alrighty then.
You have extremely limited empathy for boomers because they were the authority figures growing up. You still treat them like a teenager would treat their parents, as opposed to how an adult would approach the situation.
This tweet is alluding to some golden era of America that never really existed in the way that the Internet implies
Why would I have empathy for boomers? This is essentially a generational conflict. You don’t win by having empathy.
I’ve pointed this out before-
On TV in the 1980s, Tom and Roseanne were out of work constantly, but they owned a house and they never lost it.
On TV in the 1980s, Al Bundy supported his housewife and two kids on a shoe salesman’s salary.
You know what the criticism was? It wasn’t that they owned a house. It was “their house is too big for what they make.”
I don’t remember anyone thinking it was ridiculous that Al Bundy was a homeowner. Because of course he would own a home.
Even renting and even in the 90s… no one said that it would be impossible to live in Manhattan and work in a cafe like on Friends. The criticism was that the apartment was too big. The idea that it was something you could do was not in question.
Yes, it’s all TV and it’s all fantasy, but the public reaction to it should show you something.
Simpsons did it too. That was part of Frank Grimes’ (Or Grimey, as he liked to be called) criticism of Homer.
I should hope that a technician at a nuclear power plant could afford that house. Sure, he was an idiot, but he still did the job.
@┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)depending on which episode you see grandpa either won the home in a crooked game show or he sold the farm to help Homer pay for it
Hey I know a nuke and he does have a house. He’s had it for at least 40 years but yeah…
Bundy was my first thought too, they were dirt poor with a clunker of a dodge, but they had a big house.
Because of course he would own a home
This hits hard. It was pretty much accepted that as long as you generally had your life together enough to work a full time job, you could save up and buy a home.
sacrifice the quality of everything for maximum corporate profit
This will sound ridiculous to most people:
I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.
Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.
Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.
Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a shift. Even 5 years ago I hardly ever saw the college degree requirement for software development, and if it ever came up my yea experience nipped the question in the bud. These days, with over a decade of experience, I am getting automated rejections because I don’t have a diploma. I have been contacted and actively turned down over the phone after clarifying that I do not have a degree (many AI systems read my resume as having a degree in “degree” for some reason.)
I’ve put out hundreds of applications, and have had a handful of interviews.
The degree means nothing. Someone going to school for development doesn’t make them a good developer, it means they test well. My decade+ in the industry with multiple completed projects however…
It’s more than “you need a degree” now. Some jobs require a undergraduate “business” degree, as if that means anything. This by definition excludes people who get harder degrees.
So you will see entry level financial roles going to people who have taken a few “leadership” (handshaking) courses and basic accounting. While someone with an English or Sociology degree (who might actually know how to write an email) is rejected.
Don’t get me started on internships. Getting coffee every day, handing out mail, and doing a 2 week office furniture inventory are not indicators of a promising future.
The main problem is, businesses literally don’t know how to hire. If you know what skills you need, you can find someone in a day. You can literally set up a folding table at the metro entrance and find 5 good interview candidates.
Thank you for sharing :)
I think many will agree the bureaucracy and corporate life is killing a lot of things, because of absolute assholes in management positions. But without written out experiences like yours, it is just unsubstantiated ideological hate.
Something to ponder upon:
After World War Two there were a large number of demobilised men who were weapons trained and battle tested and they’d been promised ‘sunlit uplands’ when the war ended.Not really for this.
The big change after WW2 was civil rights. Black soldiers from the South went to Europe where (especially in France) a bunch of white people treated them not only as equals, but saviors.
Even if the white people in their own armed service didn’t.
When they came back, they understandably didn’t want to go back to how it was.
I think you’re thinking of the WW1 Bonus Army
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – 17,000 veterans of U.S. involvement in World War I, their families, and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service bonus certificates. Organizers called the demonstrators the Bonus Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.), to echo the name of World War I’s American Expeditionary Forces, while the media referred to them as the “Bonus Army” or “Bonus Marchers”. The demonstrators were led by Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant.
Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier’s promised payment with compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.
On July 28, 1932, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors, and two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers’ campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt administration was defused in May with an offer of jobs with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) at Fort Hunt, Virginia, which most of the group accepted. Those who chose not to work for the CCC by the May 22 deadline were given transportation home.[2] In 1936, Congress overrode President Roosevelt’s veto and paid the veterans their bonus nine years early.
Just like when Caesar had to promise land to his veterans to avoid a full scale revolt
This was never the norm it’s a myth that never actually existed even when it was supposedly the norm most people struggled
It was in NZ when I was a kid and I know the US had always had a higher standard of living than us
Ha ha I have you all beat. I am living in the future with a three income household.
NFT’s?
Their kid is a burgeoning youtube star.
All he does is unboxing videos
Back when this was a real thing, billionaires didn’t exist. I say we try very hard to go back to this economic era.
We can’t. Unless you want another world war, kill tens of millions, and destroy most of Western Europe, have Nazis, and nuke a country. Not to mention billions less on the planet.
This is what eventually pushed for the Marshall Plan that did help Europe and fuel the reconstruction that followed in the USA and elsewhere. Like the boomers lived through a period of time that was quite far, far from ‘normal.’ Only because it happened it does not mean that it was historically normal, nor does the remove the nuances of the time period, both the so-called good along with the horrible.
Problem seems to be that the lady on OP’s post has the Historical knowledge and nunace of a toddler. Is that the average education system in the USA? Because if so, holy shit.
Back then there was this thing called the marginal tax rate which taxed the extremely wealthy 90%.
Current proposals for a marginal tax rate on anyone making over 10 million dollars is 70% and the billionaires of this country are using their wealth to convince the stupidest of the lower classes that such a thing will hurt them and not just the billionaires.
Sure we can, eat the rich. It’s that simple.
Sure. We’ll just have to make sure that women and minorities can’t get good jobs, and we’ve gotta get most of Europe leveled by war. Then we also need a wildly progressive president
But then it’s easy.
Also anything electrical beyond heating this thing or spinning that thing needs to go.
Imagine having a lucrative career as a comptometer operator.
Imagine hearing ad nauseum about the pending healthcare and manufacturing crisis that will be caused by the retirement of the boomers and thinking there won’t be anything for people to do for work in the future because some things are automated.
This time it has to be China also, not only Europe (and mostly not Europe, actually). Then, if the retaliatory nuke does not destroy everyone, you can again have the privilege of feeding off the rest of the world for a decade or 2 with no competition. I wonder if any kind of tech breakthrough can lead to the same advantage that could be shared by a nation and not only a few rich. Seems the answer is no. And the minorities issue is unlikely to fly again, as white people are no longer the overwhelming majority, the mix is way more diverse.
They were called millionnaires!
When it really hit me was when I found out how much my girlfriend’s parents paid for their house a few miles from the beach in San Diego on blue collar salaries. It was 1/5th the cost adjusted for inflation that it is now. If houses were still that price I could easily afford 2 on my salary, but instead I can’t afford 1
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I don’t get it how this post is behing downvoted: understating Offical Inflation mathematically yields bigger Official GDP numbers due to how the Offical Inflation is used to deflate Nominal GDP to produce the supposedly inflation-free Real GDP which is the official one.
It doesn’t take much to find politicians boasting about growing GDP, so there is huge political pressure to make that number high in ways which aren’t obvious (and tweaking the basket of good and services used to calculate inflation is quite a subtle way to do it). It’s not by chance that some countries (for example the UK) some years ago - basically since the house price bubble in there started going - even started using and Inflation Index that doesn’t include house prices (I’m not quite sure if that’s the case in the US).
It also fits the observeable effects: a salary in the 2020s that can barelly pay for a small appartment and food, which using the inflation indexes is inflation adjusted to produce a supposedly equivalent salary in the 60s, yields something that back then paid for a house, a car and all the expenses of family of 5, something that can only be explained by the inflation adjustment being wrong (if it was right, it would roughly buy the same now and back then) hence the inflation indexes are wrong and over the years have been much more wrong on the side of understating inflation than on the other side (and always erring in the same direction cannot be explained by the normal error in the method).
Mind you, this is not massive rigging of inflation with 10%+ “adjustments”, it’s more 1% here, 0.5% there, which over decades adds up to a 100%+ cummulative error.
