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Walk down a suburban street at 2 PM knocking on doors--there is nobody home. All adults are gone to work. What the hell do they do all day?
Fifty years ago, one person working a full week from each household of five, created all the goods and services needed for national productivity. Now, it takes two workers from a family of three. What are they doing?
Walk in a store, there are no clerks. Self service items on the shelf, but no American is making them. No checkouts, they're automatic scan. The bank doesn't tally my accounts and send me a statement, it's done by a machine. Phone any office, there's nobody there to talk to you on the phone. Nobody repairs anything, everything you buy is disposable, replace it with something taken off a ship from China, by a robot, no stevedores. No agricultural worker, one farmer can work 400 acres driving his machinery by himself. No laundry workers, machines are automatic in every home. Nobody even slicing McDonald's onions, they come in a plastic bag, already sliced by a computer-controlled machine in Indiana.
Those jobs you listed are low-skill jobs which have been exported (or replaced with robots). That is why the unemployment rate is high in the inner city (24% here in Detroit) where most low-skilled workers reside.
However, the higher skilled jobs still exist. Office workers, machine shops, licensed residential services, etc.
Fifty years ago, one person working a full week from each household of five, created all the goods and services needed for national productivity. Now, it takes two workers from a family of three. What are they doing?
Close.
Now it takes TWO workers to earn the same **purchasing power** as what ONE salary used to earn.
Remember the cries for equality? They got it.
Now *everyone* can get paid crap.
They are sitting in Incident centers (similar to a call center) watching computer screens for glitches in the system. And then there are the people who are watching more computer screens watching these computer screens verifying they are doing their jobs and responding to issues in a timely manner. Then there are the people who carry PDA's and each time an incident occurs, it gets transmitted to that PDA and get to watch it too.
Did you really think that each time to swipe your credit card, that there isn't a group of people somewhere watching for the transactions to flow to their correct locations (servers)?
However, the higher skilled jobs still exist. Office workers, machine shops, licensed residential services, etc.
But what do they do in offices? People in offices used to sit at high desks with rubber bands around their sleeves, writing things with pens dipped into inkwells. What takes all their "highly skilled" time now? Machine shops? Every part of every machine used to be made by hand, in America. How many people now work in machine shops? What do licensed residential services do? Cut grass? It takes ten minutes now to cut a lawn with a 6-foot wide mower with an airplane engine running it. Did you ever mow a lawn with a push mower with a cylindrical blade? "Highly skilled"?
Fifty years ago, one person working a full week from each household of five, created all the goods and services needed for national productivity. Now, it takes two workers from a family of three. What are they doing?
You are speaking as if the standard of living is the same today as it was 50 years ago, but its not. People made due with much less 50 years ago than they do today.
Today a single income family can have a better standard of living than they would 50 years ago, so it doesn't "take" two incomes instead people decide they want more. They want a bigger home, they want two cars, they want more toys for their kids, they want more expensive vacations, etc.
You are speaking as if the standard of living is the same today as it was 50 years ago, but its not. People made due with much less 50 years ago than they do today.
Your argument has merit but it jumps too many steps. To maintain even the more modest standard of the past still requires more hours being worked than it used to. A lot more hours.
Once the commitment is made (collectively or family by family) to give up all the other benefits of having only one wage earner that creates a desire or even need to be compensated extra for that loss. But it still doesn't happen.
To maintain even the more modest standard of the past still requires more hours being worked than it used to. A lot more hours.
Except that it doesn't. Real wages have increased over the last 50 years so on average family would actually be wealthier with the same number of hours being worked.
The real issue here is that people tend to inflate the standard of living from 50 years ago, if one truly lived like they did 50 years ago you could easily duplicate it.
50 years ago average folks:
- Raised 2~3 kids in homes that were around 1,000 sf.
- Had one TV
- Had one car
- Had no computers, no extra gadgets.
- Washing machines and especially driers were a luxury
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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It sounds like the OP has not had a real job or would know what people are doing. Go to any downtown medium-large city and you will see hundreds of multi-story office buildings filled with every kind of job from lawyers to administrative people, sales staff, marketing people, accountants, engineers,
business managers, real estate professionals, and so on. These are the people living in the suburbs that are not home during the day.
You are speaking as if the standard of living is the same today as it was 50 years ago, but its not. People made due with much less 50 years ago than they do today.
Today a single income family can have a better standard of living than they would 50 years ago, so it doesn't "take" two incomes instead people decide they want more. They want a bigger home, they want two cars, they want more toys for their kids, they want more expensive vacations, etc.
Bingo.
You take a middle-class American family today, get rid of expenses for internet, cell/smart phone, cable/sat TV, netflix, give them one simple car, a smaller house, eating out becomes the rare exception, no buying computers, no video game console and the $60/pop games for it, etc. they'd make it on a single income just like people did in the 50s and 60s.
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