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I've heard family members talk about easily finding jobs at several factories and mills in the area that paid over minimum wage for basically running a machine or something. A few of them don't even have high school degrees. Today many of these places don't exist and the remaining factories get a ton of applications.
No, I think what you didn't see was people looking for jobs that would go to the employment office at these factories every day for weeks until they got a job with that company--back in the 50-80's and even now. There are plenty of manufacturing companies, probably more than there were in the 70's, with jobs to go with them. Some pay well, some do not, just like back in the 70's.
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Originally Posted by eskercurve
And losing. Private sector representation of workers by unions is at a all time low of ~6%. The myth of unions causing issues today is not valid now that the Big Three came out of bankruptcy and they decertify or companies move to right to work states.
I would concur that the general way of life in the 60s and 70s was simpler and people had fewer things to waste money on. Most families had one car, maybe two by the tail end of the 60s and early 70s. People actually went OUTSIDE and played if they were bored (which also explains why no one ever saw fat kids, well rarely they did, but jesus the kids these days are just little spoiled blobs of fat, all of them).
No cell phones. If you wanted to call someone, you had to make due with a SINGLE line at home. Wasn't till the 80s that multiple phones in a house became common, and even then it was a single line before multiple line calling became possible. People used the post office. People walked places, even a few miles away. People played at parks and forest preserves, had craftwork hobbies, spent time reading the news or working on stuff (their car, their home, etc). They read books. They used far less energy than today on a per person basis though individual tasks like driving or heating a home were woefully inefficient compared to today.
At the same time, their homes were usually smaller than today (average back then was around 1200-1400, today that is tiny and many homes sell for 2000+ sq. ft). We buy more "stuff." We buy video games, use the internet, and have instant video on demand. We pay $120+ bucks a month for cable to simply flip through channels (well I used to till I unplugged cable, best decision I made for my health ever!).
And the blue collar jobs were around to afford relatively simple life pleasures. The self-entitled attitude a lot of young blue collar workers today astounds me. They want fast cars, big homes, video games, and a trip to Disney every year. Gimme a break! My old man never took ME to Disney more than once, and he busted his butt for a year to do it! I even helped out by delivering newspapers, that's another thing that was differnet back then, a BOY on a BIKE delivered newspapers! Today some good for nothing whelp in a dirty car nonchalantly tosses a dirty rag onto your sidewalk.
Really, every single kid is a spoiled blob of fat....you need to get out more...
Back in the 70's, many of our friends had a main phone line and a "kids" line
I grew up in a 4000 sq foot Victorian house...and we had one of the smaller houses around...
Kids delivering papers has gone by the wayside because too many moms think their kid is going to get kidnapped...
No, I think what you didn't see was people looking for jobs that would go to the employment office at these factories every day for weeks until they got a job with that company--back in the 50-80's and even now. There are plenty of manufacturing companies, probably more than there were in the 70's, with jobs to go with them. Some pay well, some do not, just like back in the 70's.
Really, every single kid is a spoiled blob of fat....you need to get out more...
Back in the 70's, many of our friends had a main phone line and a "kids" line
I grew up in a 4000 sq foot Victorian house...and we had one of the smaller houses around...
Kids delivering papers has gone by the wayside because too many moms think their kid is going to get kidnapped...
Maybe I'm stereotyping but that 4000 sq foot sounds about par for a golfgal.
I had paper routes when I was a kid; motor routes replaced them by 1980 when I drove a motor route.
A: Because people view the past with rose colored glasses.
There was another thread on a different forum about the 1950s and 1960s. The general consensus was that it was probably the only time in our history when unskilled laborers could live a middle class lifestyle on one income, albeit a somewhat scaled down version of what we consider middle class today. As one poster aptly put it: One family car (not two). A smallish single family home. Vacations at the local campground. This was generally not attainable if you were unskilled but non-white. Also, not all white unskilled laborers did this well. Many did have wives who worked part time.
The other general consensus from that forum is that people were generally satisfied with less. They had lower material expectations. They had been through a Depression and a horrible war. Anything looked great after you lived through that. Pre-1980, it was also much more difficult to take out a mortgage you couldn't afford or rack up huge consumer debts. Credit cards were not really accepted everywhere until the early 1990s. People were less stressed financially, partly because they did not have so much debt. There is a link between debt and depression.
Also, people were less stressed financially pre-1980 because there was less divorce and out of wedlock parenting. Those two things are major financial stressors and greatly reduce one's chances of getting into and staying in the middle class.
Just another personal anecdote. I rented a room from a woman who raised her kids in the 1960s and 1970s. The dad was an engineer, so a better than average income. One income family. One car. 4 bedroom house, but 4 small bedrooms, only 1200 square feet. She told me this was a pretty normal way everyone lived in the neighborhood, especially in the 1960s. So once again, we see that the pre-baby boom generation had more realistic expectations (landlady was born around 1933). Things started to change in the 1970s.
print this and frame it. I'm so sick of people saying they can't live "comfortably", especially in the area I live in, and then they define what they view as comfortably. owning two luxury cars and being able to send your children to college fully paid for is rich, not comfortable. I have a lot of nice things. I splurge on stuff that I want, but I'm also very frugal in a lot of areas. Yes, I drive an Acura TSX. We easily could have saved a lot of cash and bought a Honda Civic. But....that Acura TSX is a 2006 TSX purchased in 12/2005. People who want new cars every 3, 4, 5 years, it really doesn't matter if they're driving a civic or a 3 series...they're throwing money out the window either way.
if you're smart with your money in some key areas, you can be somewhat wasteful with your money in other areas (by wasteful, i mean you can splurge on things for your own enjoyment).
people just need to realize that either way, you have to live within your means.
I was raised in the 60'-70's and no one we knew that had a reasonable income and kids lived in a house that small. I would say that most of our family friends would have been on par with an "engineer"--some of them were engineers, others had similar paying jobs. I don't know that anyone we grew up with had unreasonable amounts of "stuff"--not like people have today--us included. We certainly didn't have cell phones, etc. to pay for but we all had new clothing a couple times/year, had food on the table and plenty to eat, vacations were mostly driving places, nothing fancy, but we had them. There were people we knew that were far better off financially that did have a lot of fancy things, took fancy vacations, etc. though.
i feel like today, we turn over stuff more frequently too. i dunno if that's true or not, but not only do we buy more stuff, i feel like we dispose of stuff and replace it way sooner than needed.
we also have to spend more money connected to all that stuff.
all those new devices and electronics we buy? well, our electricity consumption is gonna be higher. bigger houses? more to heat and cool and clean.
one thing that always gets me is our gas consumption has stayed relatively flat, but if you really look at the advances we've made, we should be using substantially less today than we did 30-40 years ago. those advances are often used to give more power instead of more efficiency.
i'm keeping certain areas of my spending in check, and when I compare it to other people, they can't fathom why i don't spend more on those categories.
Even back then, high paying jobs didn't simply fall out of trees. Still, folks who really wanted a job could find one or more, if they needed to eat and support themselves. I don't remember many people drawing unemployment for 1-2 years ... until 'suitable' employment simply 'showed-up.'
poverty rates were higher, especially among seniors. malnutrion in children was worse. there were lots of things that weren't great about those periods.
Kids delivering papers has gone by the wayside because too many moms think their kid is going to get kidnapped...
I disagree. I don't receive a newspaper, and neither do most of my neighbors. We read our news on-line. I think that's why young people don't deliver them anymore.
In the fifties, my father collected milk bottles in a wagon he towed behind his bike, returning them to the distribution center for pocket change. Another long-gone job for young people.
As for the '70s, some things were simpler, but it didn't look THAT different from today. I lived in a 4-bedroom/3-bath house. My parents both worked. We had two cars and several phones, although they were tethered to the wall. Horrors! As early adopters, we also had one of the first home computers on the block, a Tandy TRS-80.
Right now, I live in a house that was built in the '70s. It's pretty much just an older version of the circa 2006 house we left behind when we moved: a family room, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen with all the usual appliances, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a handful of closets in about 1800 square feet with an additional two-car garage.
Last edited by randomparent; 01-15-2014 at 10:30 AM..
If basically anyone with a pulse could get a well paying manufacturing job in the Pre-Reagan era, instead of the low paying service jobs less educated people are confined to today, then why do so many middle age or older people recall growing up poor?
I'm assuming this is mostly hyperbole? Because I grew up in the '70s, and I assure you that there were a lot people who wanted good manufacturing jobs, but couldn't get them.
As far as why "middle age" or "older" people recalling growing up poor ...??
Well, older people may have literally grown up during the great depression (My father was born in '27, so through his teens, the country's economy was not great).
I think you're thinking about a pretty narrow time frame - that of the war time expansion ('40s) through perhaps the '60s (because manufacturing started dying during the '70s). Even during that time frame, not every single person could get a "great" manufacturing job.
Even back then, high paying jobs didn't simply fall out of trees. Still, folks who really wanted a job could find one or more, if they needed to eat and support themselves. I don't remember many people drawing unemployment for 1-2 years ... until 'suitable' employment simply 'showed-up.'
All of the jobs were not high paying union jobs with bennies. I do remember when out of work I could find a decent job within 2 weeks.
Well, I didn't golf growing up and big assumptions based on an internet user name with an annual golf membership for a family of 5 of $1300/year
Just happened to live in a town with a lot of old, Victorian houses...
freemkt has a lot of pre-conceived notions he(?) uses to justify his own station in life.
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for a golfgal.
All of the jobs were not high paying union jobs with bennies. I do remember when out of work I could find a decent job within 2 weeks.
