The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
It's only a fluke because we've allowed the resources that once enabled this period to accumulate at the top so that it's not feasible on a broad scale any more.
It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.
This explanation seems lacking to me. The same time period had a single-earner home-owning, baby-boom-raising middle class in places like Germany and Japan where entire cities had been completely obliterated by war. They didn't have as many cars or televisions as the Americans but they could pay their mortgage. And blowing up a whole bunch of productive infrastructure and capital worldwide is not the kind of thing you'd expect to contribute to gross material wealth. And gross wealth should be much higher now anyways, since we have so much more technology and better infrastructure.
The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?
Because all accumulated wealth was destroyed. The playing field was leveled by bombing it. That's why it's a fluke, an anomaly, it took years of worldwide destruction. No spring without winter.
As much as I’d like to agree with this, India was literally in the trenches of its own civil war and independence movement AND impacted by the world wars AND figuring itself out as a new country in the early 50s.
Yet Indian middle class was still very distinctly one-income driven.
> There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels.
This has been the dream since the dawn of time (agriculture is automating food production to some extent). The gains in increased productivity is rarely if ever distributed back to the workers though. We have concrete data on wage stagnation when productivity has been increasing in the past few decades. What makes you think it's different this time?
This is dead wrong. For all of human history through say 1800 gains in productivity flowed back to the general population in the form of more kids (but no per capita growth), this was the Malthusian equilibrium. Since 1800 not only has the typical person’s standard of living exploded but the typical person works in both paid and nonpaid labor far fewer hours. Roughly the typical person worked 4000 hours a year in paid and domestic labor in 1800 compared to less than 2000 hours a year today.
I make 5 times more than my SO and I can realistically have 3/4 families if I wanted.
I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.
I had a similar financial situation. Difference is we already had two kids. My wife gladly gave up her career to be a stay at home mom. She’s still independent, though. The “contract” is that I make the money, she takes care of home stuff and kids, and she gets to do whatever else she wants.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
It is a bit more complicated, but long story short she works in a bank and leaves the house at 7 am and is back at 7.30 pm which makes it very difficult to have a life like that, she's always tired and stressed, let alone children.
I see her situation as a blocker, but other than proposing her to move part time I don't know what to do really.
I wasn't implying it was bad, just saying that it ain't as simple as "once men could feed a family of four alone". Even if you do, women have progressed past that point.
Saying it was a fluke discounts the hard work and sacrifice it took. It didn’t happen accidentally. It took raw will and courage to wrestle the social fabric into something more equitable. And without continued effort from those who came later it’s being unwound.
Hard work had little to do with it. A unique set of factors generated a historic economic boom that was briefly able to sustain a uniquely prosperous lifestyle for some Westerners. It came unwound because it was never sustainable.
The cause and effect might be the other way around. When capital relaxes its grip on your neck a bit and when it loosens its fingers just a bit, people naturally produce more and there's more surplus for everyone. The economy is just human sweat and no one wants to sweat just to see their output go overwhelmingly to people who, basically by fluke and moral flexibility, control capital.
It came unwound when we allowed mass immigration to destroy the wages of the lower end and stopped building to respond to the housing demand. That can be easily undone, if the powers to be allowed it.
It came unwound when we allowed enterprises to destroy the wages of the lower end and stopped building to respond to the housing demand. That can be easily undone, if the powers to be allowed it.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
You're talking about the widely known concept called the "demographic transition" and it has slowed, not accelerated, the death of the single-income household in the West because it's more affordable to support smaller families and to start families later in life.
Nah I don't believe it was a fluke, I believe it is still possible today if not even more so if our economic system wasn't focused purely focused on maximizing capital generation and maximizing profit margins. People are working more today than ever and have never been more productive.
Also in 1950 the population of the US was 151 million, today it's 341 million. it has more than doubled, and the amount of space has stayed the same. More people competing for the same amount of property will always lead to inflated housing costs beyond what inflation would predict.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.