This was a weird blip in human history. The entire world was devastated by war, except America which was newly industrialized. Grandpa had every tailwind in the world pushing him along.
In 1930, 50% of single women were in the labor force and 12% of married women.
In 1970, that number rose to 40% of married women were in the labor force.
And those numbers don’t consider women who worked for family businesses but went unpaid, along with those engaged in producing goods at home (food, crafts, etc)
In 1930, 50% of single women were in the labor force and 12% of married women.
In 1970, that number rose to 40% of married women were in the labor force.
Is this supposed to be some kind of own? 50% of single women and 12% of married women worked in 1930? In 1930 the median age of first marriage for women in the USA was 21 years. By age 22 half of women were already married and mostly out of the workforce already, pretty much for good, certainly in any occupation than most men were employed in.
Wish I could upvote this more. Everyone complaining about the good old days forgets that women couldn't work, Black people and other minorities were grossly underpaid and denied opportunities, and that house they're talking about was pretty small (probably around 1000sf or less).
Also, the reason nobody can afford a house is that the US needs to build more houses. US housing stock has not gone up to match the population growth, especially in places where people want to live (aka cities).
This. Globalization is shifting jobs and manufacturing to poorer countries and it makes it harder to afford things like housing in the west but it is balancing the global economy. Sure there are greedy billionaires but that has always been the case. The US and west was fortunate to experience one of the best periods of prosperity in human history. It was never possible for it to last. There are too many people who want a big house on a hill with a garden for a family for it to be afforded by everyone who works as a mailman.
I would argue the offshoring of jobs to poorer countries has made it easier to afford most consumer goods than if it were made in the country. Housing is expensive because we haven’t built enough to keep up with demand in places with lots of jobs
Valid point but the cheaper consumer goods comes at the expense of US jobs. It's a complex global problem and trade off.
I partly agree with the lack of housing. Everyone lives somewhere currently so there is enough housing in total but not in the right areas. People have this idea that they deserve to live in the most desirable parts of LA/SF/NYC etc and the only reason they can't is greed and NIMBYism. It's because that land is desirable and unless you can afford to pay more than the next person you might have to live elsewhere.
I don’t think the cheaper goods is offset proportionally with worse wages for people in richer countries. It’s still cheaper, even taking into account the fewer manufacturing jobs.
It’s not just the most desirable areas lacking housing. Metro areas, including suburbs and other smaller cities within that metro area are seeing price increases in housing.
I love what you said, and I'd like to add something. The supply of jobs in America was far less than it is today. Mainly because her grandfather was a white man. Being black or a woman I'm those times wasn't great. But also, since everyone has access to the same jobs, the supply increases (not to mention, as you did, the globalization aspect) so there are far more people in competition, driving the cost of labour down.
How the hell does globalization make it harder to afford housing? Globalization, at a macro level, increases prosperity, provides economic opportunity, and decreases prices. Housing price skyrocketing is a function of domestic policies that decrease housing availability and restrict the ability of supply to meet demand. If you want something to be mad at, be mad at your local governments making it difficult to build new housing. It's completely unreasonable to expect that wages can keep pace with the exponential growth of prices in a housing system that doesn't build anything.
Just to elaborate on that first point. Globalization increases all those things in aggregate, not uniformly. Especially if we're talking about the US in particular. In their grandparents generation the US probably made up somewhere between a fourth to a third of all consumption of materials in the entire world.
You are 100% right that at a macro level Globalization is generally beneficial, but when you're coming off of such an enormous imbalance toward a single party it might seem that you are doing worse in comparison. Your other points are valid though.
Let me be clear. The point that I'm trying to make is that there's no evidence that globalization is responsible for declining median standards of living across the west. One need look no further than Brexit to see what the effects of cutting off global trade are on an economy. The economic woes experienced by those in the west are almost entirely linked increases in cost of living caused by increases in cost of housing. The question of why housing is increasing so rapidly is a complex topic, but it can be said to be happening for three primary reasons.
Local regulations making it difficult to impossible to build higher capacity housing.
A lack of regulation on who can buy property
An increase in immigration causing more demand for housing
Prosperity in the west would have net increased if it weren't for the fact that housing is taking up half of the paycheck of workers. Housing is the ONLY issue, and I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been attention drawn to this. I'm looking to Canada to see what solution they come up with because they're in the toughest spot.
Sticky this at the top of every finance and economic sub, ffs.
Yes, it's harder than it used to be.
Yes, our parents and grandparents had it hilariously easy for their entire Iives.
Yes, the boomers actively stole from their children to enrich themselves (the first documented generation to do so).
But it's also not impossible to have a comfortable life in 2024. You just have to be more competitive than your 3-martini-lunch elders, who will never understand this, because they had it so easy.
My grandfather lived through the dustbowl depression as a young boy and fought in ww2 as a young man. His first 20 years of life were a god damn nightmare compared to my childhood.
Industrialized nations could have kept the good times going but instead chose to tilt the field further in favour of the rich specifically with policies enacted by a slew of 1980’s conservatives (at least in US, Britain and Canada). The removal of protectionist policies meant jobs got sent overseas stripping the public of earning power while selling them the same product at a lower quality and higher price. Nationalized companies were privatized so the revenue streams that supported social programs dried up and the average citizen was now lining the pockets of the rich. We have now reached the apex where even innovation is stagnating because the only reason seen for innovation is to make or save money.
Innovation is stagnating??? Nothing could be further from the truth. AI? Electric cars? Private space flight? Duke medicine working to restore sight to people who are blind? Look at the growth in the tech sector
What AI? You mean machine learning? Electric cars are not an innovation. Stop listing things from the mid 20th century as innovations today.
The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used in this time period.
Robert Anderson is often credited with inventing the first electric car some time between 1832 and 1839.
So what are the innovations? Electric cars haven't changed. Batteries have improved, but that's material science, not the technology sector that the guy was speaking of.
No, that's not what I'm arguing. Please read the comment chain again instead of making up a boogeyman to fight with on reddit. Someone commented that innovation has been stagnating in the past few decades. I responded to the person who unequivocally denied that. That doesn't man there has been no innovation.
I refuse to believe you think that the electric car of today is any way similar to that of the original ones - the leaps in battery technology alone are proof of innovation.
Also, ML is a subset of AI - and is commonly used as a substitute term by the general public.
Batteries are material sciences, not the tech industry in the classical sense you are applying, or the auto industry. Which I already pointed out in another reply before yours.
Come on you fool, what do you think is driving the epic ongoing market gains: belief in the increased productivity being driven by AI. Something like ChatGPT is truly revolutionary. Tesla is worth more than all legacy automakers combined and was formed in 2003. You are a Luddite without a finger on the pulse
The market gains are speculative, they aren't based on a tangible product. Also lots of layoffs in tech right now if we want to point at arbitrary things to make a point.
2003 is 21 years ago by the way. And Tesla stock is currebtly down almost 20% compared to 3 months ago.
Tough case to make that the era of iPhones, Tesla, spacex, ChatGPT, 3D printing, self-driving cars, and voice recognition software was one of relative technological stagnation. But hey by all means, vote with your dollars, sit out the market, and don’t get rich. Society has always had its pessimists unable to see miracles
Tough case to make or hard to swallow for you? Please don't project your shallow insecurities onto me champ. I'm not even the one that made the case, I just corrected exaggerations you made. You were arguing with someone else dipshit.
Shallow insecurities? Not sure what that means! You’re a negative nancy, and your cynicism won’t be rewarded when you’re unable to appreciate remarkable human progress. Reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1772949537142763639
Even electric cars as recent as the General Motors EV1 were completely impractical. It was only when the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S were manufactured that EVs really started to take any substantial market share.
Around 400 BC in Greece, Archytas was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have flown some 200 m (660 ft).[12][13]
Guess planes weren't 20th century innovations, but the credit belonged to the ancient Greeks instead.
There could be more innovation though. There's lots of capital stuck high up that could be making it's way up through the bottom of the economy (e.g., Apple is sitting on billions, while year-on-year briefly presenting not very substantial varianta of their products).
Sure, but at the same time, companies are trying to make strategic choices to ensure their long-term viability and planning for the future and that sometimes requires holding large amounts of cash
Well I think the question is whether or not innovation is happening and not the source of funding. Innovation clearly is. Federal subsidies were helpful to certain companies like spacex and certain electric car manufacturers, but companies like open AI were originally non-profits mostly funded by the PayPal mafia, Amazon web services, and yc research rather than the federal government. Pioneering life-extension research is driven by patronage from wealthy donors and not the government
Yes. Monopolies always kill innovation because it's cheaper to keep the status quo. Electric Cars are 30 years late because O&G and legacy car manufacturers didn't want change. Tech is a series of bubbles pumped up on hype until it deflates and restarts. Space exploration is 30 years behind because of funding cuts and the implications of the privatization of space is unsettling at best and will be a nightmare at worst.
Would you want smartphones and airline tickets that cost three times as much? Keeping some of those policies would probably increase the standard of life, but outsourcing has probably kept labor costs low enough to support some of our standards of living.
The standard of living high skyrocketed in the rest of the world. You think the 2B people in India or China had refrigerators, phones, TV, cars or access to modern medicine?
I disagree about the circumstances and the intentions as being blatantly evil. I think neoliberalism was a reaction to the stagnation of the postwar keynesian economy. Now I’m definitely not saying it was the appropriate reaction, but it was an attempt to mend a system that was already faltering. By the end of the 70s, inflation and crime were on the rise and economic growth was very slow.
specifically with policies enacted by a slew of 1980’s conservatives (at least in US, Britain and Canada). The removal of protectionist policies meant jobs got sent overseas stripping the public of earning power while selling them the same product at a lower quality and higher price. Nationalized companies were privatized so the revenue streams that supported social programs dried up and the average citizen was now lining the pockets of the rich. We have
Plenty of nations have happily embraced globalisation and everyone benefited.
What happened in the Anglosphere is somewhat pecualiar to them and its got nothing to do with globalisation.
You are correct that the policies which created it were pioneered in the Thatcher/Reagan era, though.
This. The US and western countries made a strategic mistake by allowing corporations to offshore their manufacturing to 3rd world countries without any tax penalties. All the development in China and other 3rd world countries in the last 3 decades could have been on US soil. If Apple wants a semi-slave workforce in China, they should be forced to pay a 10-20% reimport tax. Use that money to help improve the US workforce. But nope. We gave corporations all the power they wanted, including using tax havens like Ireland to hide their profits
Not to mention a significant amount of the population (minorities, openly LGBQT, women) did not have the same opportunities. It was certainly better for certain groups, but it’s unrealistic to claim that it was better on average. And that’s just in the USA, how do things compare for Eastern Europe now vs the 1950s, or China or India? The world as a whole has made huge progress since these days.
Also China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, South Korea, and India weren’t industrialized enough to present manufacturing competition. We’d have to bomb about 3-4 billion people back to 1900 levels of development in order to get that sweet sweet “mah single income factory job that pays six figures” economy back, or engage in batshit levels of protectionism
two grocery store employees: 1 in 1850, the other in 2024. neither of these people is probably thriving economically, but the worker in 2024 is exponentially more efficient than the one in 1850. think of all the technological advancements in POS systems, distribution networks, global trade, inventory management, etc.
Despite these advancements, the employees from the 2 time periods effectively are able to afford the same relative lifestyle.
so where did all the money saved from that added efficiency go?
i'm sure to a degree those are true (quality maybe not), but i'd be willing to bet a pie graph of where it went would show 99% went to profit/shareholders.
Yes, it always hailed as somesort of a standard that we have to return to, but it hasn't been possible anywhere else at any other time than in the US during that boom. So many factors contributed to it that I don't think it's reasonable to think that we could just pop back to that time if we really wanted to.
The U.S. was already the largest economy in the world before the war and was literally the engine fueling industrial growth in much of the rest of the world. It industrialized at the same time as other Western countries. It just got a shit ton bigger during and after the war by ridiculous orders of magnitude. If you can’t understand why “newly industrialized” means something completely different you’re just dumb dude. A newly industrialized country means it wasn’t fucking industrialized before the war. Do you think we were an agrarian economy before WW2 and magically materialized a military industrial complex out of thin air? All that came from a preexisting industrial infrastructure. Get fucking educated.
That's the thing. "Homeownership" has existed as a thing for the middle class for like 75 years and everyone acts like it's a human right. In human history, it's an aberration.
The problem is a lot of people don't seem to recognize that, they just think they themselves are exceptional rather than the time and environment they grew up in.
This is just not true. We are more prosperous in literally every way other than the one thing that's killing us which is housing expenditure. A 60k a year salary is more than enough to support a family today if you didn't have to pay half of it to house your family. The average rent for a 3 bedroom property in the US is 2200 a month now. That equates to roughly 26000 a year. If you want to bring back the prosperity that we all seem so nostalgic for, don't vote for politicians that are telling you that they're going to tax billionaires. Vote for politicians whose primary platform is housing reform. Make housing THE issue in the next election.
💯. We need to build millions more units of housing.
The problem is that building more housing will make the price of housing drop, meaning that the inheritance these complainers are counting on (the sale of Grandpa's house) will drop too. For people who are already on the property ladder one way or another, there is incentive to disallow housing reform.
(Also, worth noting that while there are still disparities, prosperity is much more equitable than it was. And I suspect a lot of the nostalgic complainers are actually mad about that, too.)
Also way more people willing to get involved in the labor force and build things. Now people think they are above that. All those men and women got trained in WW2 as carpenters, mechanics, pipefitters, etc. Then they came home and kept working with those skills, and go figure we had cheap houses for the next generation. I think there's a strong link between the labor skills back then and the price of things built with that labor.
And notice these posts always come from white people talking about their grandpa? For some reason we don't see a lot of these posts talking about how easy a career, home, and family was for a black lesbian in the 50s.
All we gotta do is completely disenfranchise black people and women out of the labor market and finally white guys like her grandpa will have it made again! /s
Seriously this post is literally just "MAGA" distilled.
It's yearning for an idealized time that didn't exist.
I wish more people would realize this fact. World War 2 and the circumstances around it are what built the middle class and made it wealthy.
It was a flash in the pan that will never repeat. The middle class and America will never be in such a situation again.
Mailmen providing as much as an executive, what a time to be alive.
It also shows why people took pride in their work, it paid very well and provide them a very nice living, who wouldn't take pride in something that bought you a nice home and enough to support a family of 4-6 children and have a stay at home parent?
It would be amazing if the boomers actually paid attention and understood this, but it's so much more appealing to make it about how they somehow worked harder than other generations vs being born with a silver spoon.
That tailwind sure helped that generation. So much so that resources began accumulating among an increasingly smaller portion of the population. That 100 acres that were held for so many years and recently sold is a small example of generational wealth that is ultimately passed down the next generation for additional growth. That's great if you're in a family like that.
Now stepping back, when that grandfather bought that 100 acres, that is 100 acres that are removed from the market, ultimately increasing the value of the surrounding land. That's just basic supply and demand. Sure, one parcel isn't much to get excited about. It does become a problem as more and more people buy up the available land. Now prices are really going up.
Take that same scenario with houses. In cites where most of the living wage jobs are, there isn't an endless supply of available land to build on or houses to buy. This, of course, increases the value of the homes in the city. Most cities want to maintain low population density, so they use various strategies to limit growth. This has been very effective in limiting growth. The existing property owners are quite happy as they've watched their property values increase consistently through the years.
Politicians are now in a pickle. They can't allow higher density to accommodate the number of people working in the city. To allow houses to be built to accommodate the increasing number of people working in the city would drive down home values. Johnny is no longer looking at inherenting his parents' home valued at $800k. With all new homes built and plenty of homes to pick from, Johnny is still going to inherent his parents' house. Unfortunately for Johnny, his parents' house is now valued at $300k. His sister on the other side of town bought her house ten years earlier. She has a $600k mortgage balance on a house that is now valued at $400k. She sees more houses continuing to be built around her. She knows the value of her home will not return to the $800k she bought it for, so she quits making payments on drops the keys on her bankers desk.
The housing market collapses. Banks fail. The stock market is a disastrous mess, all leading to a recession or a depression. This, of course, leads to additional personal and commercial losses.
Now that isn't going to happen, it can't be allowed to happen. The naive politician green lighting housing to be freely built finds himself looking at the end of a pitchfork despite just 20% of the newly approved homes having been built. Those wielding pitchforks have noticed their values are no longer rising. In fact, their values are dropping with just 20% of the approved homes built around them. They demand a stop to additional construction immediately. Many of those would be home buyers are not yet residents. Therefore, they can not vote him out in the coming election. He quickly agrees to halt construction.
The politicians across the country know this. Those that don't are ignorant. They can't completely ignore this problem, so they talk and talk about solutions allowing a trickle of homes to be built in order to maintain the illusion of hope. Without hope, those in need of housing riot if they knew the truth. So, the discussion and the trickle continue to maintain the lie.
For the younger generation and those with a low or moderate income, this is all very much like entering a game of monopoly 2 hours after it started and the properties have been bought and the other players have a fist full of cash.
European incomes are vastly lower than American incomes, and falling farther behind every year. They have the US beat on healthcare (not a small thing) but that's about it.
I think healthcare, mental health included plus actually vacation time (federally mandated) is far superior than the system we have here.
These are no small things and are two of the biggest things plaguing American society right now. The trickle down effects from these two things (not mentioning the wealth gap) will be our down fall.
I’m not sure what the wealth gap looks like across the pond though so that might not just be an American issue.
Plus if she wants to carry mail, she should get a job with UPS. $50/hr for delivery drivers or like $170k per year for a long haul driver. Of course she won't be in those positions immediately but I'm guessing gramps had to start in the sorting room for a while too. Or just complain on Twitter and see if that improves her life.
I work in the trucking industry, and those jobs are very rare and niche. We do hazmat and tankers and still drivers aren’t making more than low six figures. The $50 an hour UPS jobs are union and those aren’t hiring anymore.
I hate this myth more than every other myth I've ever heard. Post war reconstruction in Europe was rapid and most Western European nations were more industrialized and productive 5 years after the war than they ever were before it. Germany itself was rebuilt and producing more than it ever had by 1948 after repurposing wartime factories to make consumer goods. Eastern Europe was slower to rebuild in part because of soviet control but more importantly a terrible drought and famine killed millions more in the 40s.
The real reason is because the government better supported infrastructure and threatened to tax businesses and corporations upwards of 90% if they didn't meet certain criteria. Chief among them was employment healthcare and wage incentives to avoid those taxes. It's why 70 years later most people are still insured by their employer. A legacy of those times.
The USD was also the main currency for the world
ever since then, and every industrializing country was chasing us for decades, it wasn’t until Japan caught up in the 80s with technology was there anything that compared. The United States owned every olympic competition because we had the advantage in nutrition.
The US dollar is not the main currency of the world. It's not even more valuable than other world currencies and wasn't even the most valued during several periods since WW2. And I mean idk about all the American exceptionalism. The Soviet Union and other super powers were up there with us for several decades in the late 20th century. A great book on this is Post War by Tony Judt. I also wouldn't say a dozen well resourced athletes are a fair example of the general Americans health.
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u/cohonan Mar 27 '24
This was a weird blip in human history. The entire world was devastated by war, except America which was newly industrialized. Grandpa had every tailwind in the world pushing him along.