Economic & Political Discusson From: Fred on Everything

Life Dating & Relationships
1

That’s a misconception. In rural areas women work. The change in perception came about during Victorian times and post WWII when a man could support a family on his salary. In traditional society that is not possible unless one is very wealthy. Women, men, children, everyone works, though yes, there may be a division of labour, but not always in ways you would think. In fishing villages in taiwan for example it was traditional for women to handle all the money. In modern times this has translated to a lot of female accountants handling the books.

I think one reason Taiwan has gone fairly smoothly into a pretty equitable society is that there wasn’t a nonsense period where women stayed at home and did nothing but make themselves pretty. Unless you count the last 10 years of course with the under 30s. :laughing:

Edit: looks like Yuli got to the same point when I was typing.[/quote]
It is interesting how after societies become affluent, that affluence is unintentionally wasted in a sense. I think a situation in which a lot of families are able to have one parent working as a full time parent is a generally positive, albeit luxurious, practice, though the sexism that accompanied this in post-WWII North America was undesirable. Aspects of stability in the home that were the norm in middle class families in the US from the late 40s until the 70s began to erode when both parents began to work, and unlike in “traditional” societies, began doing work that separated them from their children to a greater degree. It is now received wisdom that putting women to work full-time (as if managing the home and family, or working on the family plot was not full-time work) has been a great contributor to increased economic output. What has not dawned on a lot of people is that in a socio-cultural sense, this economic growth has been a wash for a lot of people. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US, most husbands and wives seem to agree that both need to work in order to do things like own a home, send the kids to school and save for retirement. Not many people seem to make the connection that the cost of things like homes and education for the kids has been inflated precisely because of the extra money put on the table by households with two working parents. This extra money has fed two things: higher standard of living expectations, and simultaneous cost inflation for all the things that are a part of that standard of living. Classic chicken and egg.

2

exactly, Turkey 先生. As msleft just said, women at home don’t sit on their asses fiddling with their makeup. Looking after home and kids is bloody hard work. The modern obsession with ‘jobs’ has been artificially created by governments who saw women’s demands for rights as an ideal opportunity to boost the tax take. The only practical result has been to move work that was being done well and efficiently by “housewives” (did that word have such negative connotations before the politicians seized on it, I wonder?) to less-efficient service industries who don’t care about your home or your child the way you do. Financially, banks now allow you to leverage two incomes to secure a loan, which means that house prices are now much more expensive (with respect to salary) than they used to be - simply because people can afford it. Families with two incomes also have two cars - not because there’s any benefit, but because both people have to get to different workplaces. People now have less real disposable income, but work much harder, than they ever did. Most governments have taken great care to provide only pisspoor education in mathematics to ensure the great unwashed can’t calculate why that’s the case.

3

Jive Turkey: I agree with everything you wrote except the first sentence. In affluent societies, waste is not unintentional. It’s both necessary and intentional. Last year, I met a woman who had studied fashion but was disgusted with the industry. She said that the average garment in the fashion industry is worn seven times. Of course, one might wonder how exactly they came to that figure, but even if it’s anything less than a couple of hundred times (if not a thousand times) it’s a bloody disgrace. I have a pair of hand made shoes I bought over a decade ago and they’re still going. Other shoes I literally wear until they’re falling off my feet. Yet the entire economies of developed nations are built upon such things. Houses have doubled in size in the U.S. since 1950. Accordingly, they require more energy to heat and cool, plus more effort to clean. Look at car sizes. Pretty much look at every industry. Everyone is hooked on growth and everyone is hooked on conspicuous consumption. Other than a small fringe, those in Western societies are hardly going to go back to living as their grandparents did. In Asia it’s even worse because what took hundreds of years in the West has happened/is happening in one or two generations. They literally have gone/are going from rice paddy to international jetsetter in a lifetime and they sure as hell don’t want to go back to where their grandparents were.

finley: The education system is a joke in general. Also, related to JT’s comments and my responses to them, there’s a really massive contradiction right at the heart of Western societies. On the one hand, kids are taught what I call soft environmentalism (i.e. all the hippy shit without any real depth to their scientific understanding of it, in much the same way they’re taught soft multiculturalism in that it’s all the PC shit without any understanding of any culture, history, etc., especially their own), yet they’re the most rapacious generation of consumers of resources in the history of the planet. They think that just because they put a Coke can in a recyling bin occasionally that they’re so much better than previous generations, who, tut tut, supposedly didn’t recycle (although they did, and they also didn’t buy ten pairs of sneakers each year).

4

:thumbsup:

5

That’s just a bunch of conspiracy theory gobbledygook, with respect to the good Mr. Finley. Women demanded equal access to education and equal opportunities in the workplace. That’s why there are more women working, not because of some fiendish government plot to increase tax revenue. I think the whole post-WWII American Dream thing is a bit of a myth anyways. Even in the boombing 50s plenty of middle class women worked at least some of the time. My grandmother taught short hand and typing, or practiced those trades to supplement the family income when it was required. I know the percentage of women working full time was less then than now, but it’s just as easy for women to stay home today if they want to. Several posters here are stay at home moms or have wives who are. I think in most cases women work because they want to. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course.

6

The government had to do something about the men returning from the war, so women were pushed back out of industrial jobs that they had filled when the men were abroad. Popular magazines at that time extolled the virtues of houswive life, emphasizing the importance of women being at home - coincidence? Anyway, that seems to be how the myth came about… but it is also true that there was a large number of middle class families that could live well enough on one income - this is now history: the material standard of living in the US started dropping in the 70s and has been declining since for several reasons (one reason for the initial drop being that the propserity of the 50s and 60s had been artificially propped up by the US$'s fixed - and high - exchange rate with many other currencies, which had helped syphon wealth off other countries - this ended in the early 1970s).

7

There’s no conspiracy; but you can’t deny that governments are up to their eyeballs in debt, having spent shitloads of money on stuff that nobody needs, wars that nobody wanted, and on bailing out the landed gentry after their little slip-up in 2008. The western world has been steaming along on a massive raft of credit for the last 50 years, and it wouldn’t have been possible without full employment. There’s no economic reason why women have to work - or to be less sexist, why more than 50% of us need jobs. I see no reason why a high standard of living can’t be attained in exchange for (say) 3-4 hours a day, on average, from each adult; or alternatively 6-8 hours a day from half of the adult population. The idea that we have to spend our entire lives, each and every one of us, at the office, is a complete fiction. Whether it was governments who created that fiction is irrelevant; let’s call them “the powers that be”, if you prefer.

And what exactly is this ‘equality’ you speak of? The right to be enslaved in a pointless, busywork job, in exchange for enough money to own a Fiat Punto and pay for a babysitter, so that you can continue to faithfully serve your employer in his call centre? Sure, there are a few women who are doing important, special, or even heroic work; most of them are just feeding the state machine. You’re right, of course, that women work by choice. They usually justify this by saying, for example, they like the social atmosphere of the workplace; but what a miserable little species we’ve become, if we can’t even socialise together without dressing it up as “work”. It’s surprising how many of the ‘voluntary’ choices we make are simply ideas planted in our heads by others.

8

How about we make that statement gender-neutral: “It’s just as easy for one out of every two married people (with children if you will) to stay home today if they want to.”
Do you believe that? It seems to me that it is definitely possible in lower cost areas, but is much more difficult in high-growth urban areas.

Doesn’t seem to be a very representative sample. People posting on this board are anything but typical. Many of us earn incomes well above average for the locale, and many of us are also the kind of oddballs (you probably included) who have the combination of self-discipline and flexibility required to say “screw that, I’m not buying this/living there/sending my kids to school there just to keep up with the Joneses.”

Again, make this statement gender-neutral, and modify it a bit: “I think in most cases both parents work because they want to.”

Do you think this modified statement is true? It would actually be difficult to get honest answers from a lot of people seeing as how we are somewhat socially conditioned by current practices to assume that having two parents in full-time work is the right or acceptable way of doing things. I do, however, know some people in my peer group who would jump at the chance to have one parent at home with the kids, but are unable to because of economic circumstances. Some of these circumstances are controllable by them, but some are not.

I can also attest that it is socially quite difficult for a family to live on one income in the big city where we live (Hong Kong). We live within our means and save a reasonable portion of our income. We are fortunate enough to be able to send our son to a very good (and very expensive) kindergarten, and we manage this by living in a much smaller flat than those of people around us with similar occupations and levels of education. A lot of the non-local families around us also have one parent at home, but they are generally able to do this because of generous expat allowances. Among local middle-class families, it is essentially unheard of for a parent to stay at home; most of these people, regardless of income level, are leaving their children with a domestic helper rather than with a grandparent.

Telling these sorts of people that we don’t do iPhones, iPads, and fitness club memberships, and telling them that our son will go to a cheap local primary school rather than an expensive international school, along with telling them that we live in a flat half the size of theirs and that we - two people with post-graduate degrees - do our own cooking and cleaning is about like if we were to tell them that we are from Mars. Some of these people make more money than us but save much less of it, while some of them surely make and save far more than we do, but perceptions of economic class do not seem to be the main reason they think we are weird. It is more that they live in a totally different material and social world, and living in that world over a period of time tends to cause one to develop particular values; in this sense we have very little in common with them. It seems the average person just does not have the independence to decide to stray from this kind of herd, and will instead do whatever creative math or make whatever economic choices that are necessary to follow it. Friends with families and values similar to ours and who have lived in other big cities like London, New York, Sydney or San Francisco all describe similar situations in those places.

9

In the absence of credible evidence, yes. I’m not denying there was strong social pressure for women to leave the workforce and make room for men. My point is that the massive re-entrence of women to full-time work in the 70s and 80s was their choice, not a government initiative/conspiracy.

That’s simply not true. Middle class families can and do live well on single incomes. I was hired into the current firm I work at three years ago as a technical writer, and we started living solely on my income since my first paycheck. My wife still chooses to work and we’re happy to save that money, but she can quit tomorrow with zero impact on our standard of living. Granted, we don’t have children, but we have co-workers, friends, and family that do have kids and still live on one income. It’s just a matter of spending wisely and saving whenever possible.

10

I agree.

I think that Jive Turkey is right that we should shift to gender-neutral language here. Not out of some aspiration to political correctness, but for the sake of accuracy. Middle class women work for the same reason middle class men do; mostly money, of course, but also, hopefully, because they find their work interesting and challenging.

11

Where do you live? I am going to go out on a limb and guess that it is a place with a combination of low cost of living, fairly low or no state taxes, decent public schools, and choices of cheap property that do not come at the expense of safety in the neighborhood and access to decent public schools…i.e., not in a large urban area. More power to you if your work and life choices have allowed you to live in this sort of situation; God knows if I could do the same work and provide similar opportunities to my son in the low tax, low cost of living southern state where I grew up, I would definitely move back. However, I doubt your description applies to large urban areas.

12

Yes, of course. But again, I think it’s mostly a question of will. My wife and I bought a house 20 miles outside of town in a rural area to keep our costs down. I realize that’s not possible in Hong Kong, but like yourself, people can simply rent smaller flats, live more simply, etc.

I am making no claim whatsoever that my anecdotal evidence constitutes a statistically valid sample. You make a lot of good points, but I don’t think we’re really disagreeing. It is possible to live on a single income, whether you’re in rural Alabama or Hong Kong. It’s just a matter of priorities.

13

My cousin is a fitness trainer in Austin and his wife is a stay at home mom. They prioritize. Again, that’s not representative, just another anecdotal observation. As far as my own living situation, you’ve described it exactly. :thumbsup:

14

Gao Bohan: It’s practically impossible to live on one (average) income in Melbourne these days. My cousin has three kids. Her husband runs his own business and makes more than the average person. She helps him with the books. Her mother and siblings (none of whom has a child) help with the kids too. They live in an area that even just a decade ago would have been considered fairly shit (I still think it’s shit). The median house price there is now almost twelve times the median national income. There are plenty of other areas of Melbourne where the house prices have tripled or quadrupled or more in the past two decades. The (somewhat) affordable areas are bad areas with shit schools (I taught at some and they’re awful). Housing alone is the biggest, unavoidable issue right now. The government reports a CPI of somewhere in the vicinity of 3-4%, yet if, historically, median house prices were about 3-4 times median incomes, yet they’re now 8-9 times median incomes, and houses have doubled in less than a decade, CPI simply can’t be 3-4% and the government is fudging the figures. Add to that things like utility bills (which have apparently gone up 20% in the past year), petrol (which has more than doubled in the past decade), and food (I have no idea how much that has gone up, but it is by a lot), and people are struggling just to deal with the necessities.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have one high income earner who can afford to have the other adult stay at home. This is not a choice. Most people would like to have kids, and most people would like to be able to remain at home with their kids until they hit school. It’s simply not possible. This began back in the 70s or 80s. My grandparents’ generation were able to live quite comfortably on one income (sure, they didn’t have overseas trips and some other things people have now). Back then, everyone knocked off work at 5pm on the dot. My father used to talk about the 6 o’clock swill when he started working in the 60s. Apparently, pubs used to close at 6pm back then, and so at 5:55pm, there would be men overflowing onto the street with four or five beers each. Australians supposedly work the longest hours in the industrialised world now. My parents have always been very frugal. They would have liked to have a third child, but simply couldn’t afford it. My mother worked shift work (often on the weekends) when we were little so she could pick us up from school (her friend used to take us to school) and try to get some time off during the holidays. It wasn’t a choice. It was a necessity. Unless my wife and I were to move to somewhere like Tasmania (and even then, things such as utilities, food, petrol, etc. are just as expensive, or even more expensive), there’s no way we could afford to live in Melbourne and not both be working our arses off, probably with kids in daycare (which costs a fortune). Over here in Taiwan, she doesn’t have to work, but I’m going to start paying tax next year (despite the fact that the pay scale hasn’t increased since 2006), and when we have kids, it’s going to be very expensive and we probably won’t save that much. There’s no way we could do this in Taipei or any of the other major cities here, and we are very frugal. The average people I know here are royally screwed and can’t be saving that much, if anything.

There’s going to be a middle class revolt at the ballot box at some point within the next decade or so in many developed nations.

15

There’s no conspiracy; but you can’t deny that governments are up to their eyeballs in debt, having spent shitloads of money on stuff that nobody needs, wars that nobody wanted, and on bailing out the landed gentry after their little slip-up in 2008. The western world has been steaming along on a massive raft of credit for the last 50 years, and it wouldn’t have been possible without full employment. There’s no economic reason why women have to work - or to be less sexist, why more than 50% of us need jobs. I see no reason why a high standard of living can’t be attained in exchange for (say) 3-4 hours a day, on average, from each adult; or alternatively 6-8 hours a day from half of the adult population. The idea that we have to spend our entire lives, each and every one of us, at the office, is a complete fiction. Whether it was governments who created that fiction is irrelevant; let’s call them “the powers that be”, if you prefer.

And what exactly is this ‘equality’ you speak of? The right to be enslaved in a pointless, busywork job, in exchange for enough money to own a Fiat Punto and pay for a babysitter, so that you can continue to faithfully serve your employer in his call centre? Sure, there are a few women who are doing important, special, or even heroic work; most of them are just feeding the state machine. You’re right, of course, that women work by choice. They usually justify this by saying, for example, they like the social atmosphere of the workplace; but what a miserable little species we’ve become, if we can’t even socialise together without dressing it up as “work”. It’s surprising how many of the ‘voluntary’ choices we make are simply ideas planted in our heads by others.[/quote]

Don’t do your sex down, Finley. There are a few men who are doing important, special and even heroic work, too.

16

Some people seem to be having different conversations here. It’s possible for SOME people to have only one person working. It depends upon your salary/salaries. AND, upon the cost of living where you live.

ALSO, your cost of living depends upon how much you CHOOSE to spend. In college, I knew I guy who was in the process of having several kids, with one set of student loans(no wife working). They made their own food, and things like that, and visibly spent very little.

I’m an existentialist, so EVERYTHING is a choice to me. So, if a couple DECIDES to have one wage earner in a family, the family will have less to spend on luxury items like iPhones AND necessities like food.

A couple with one wage is also less financially stable. Jobs come and go a lot faster than 40 years ago. If the family’s entire income is gone, that is a bigger problem. If one of two wage earners still has their job, maybe they can still pay rent.

17

OK … that was badly phrased. I referred to ‘women’ specifically because that was the theme of the thread. My point was, a big slice of human activity is a complete waste of time. The human race would be a lot happier if most of us would just stay at home scratching our bollocks and watching sports on TV. Or whatever the female equivalent is. People spend waaaay too much time doing things in the firm belief that what they’re doing is important. 3% of the population are doing important things. The rest of us are just getting in the way.

It’s a problem because things are arranged to make sure that it is a problem. Otherwise, the hoi polloi might (gasp) decide they want some time off now and then. F’rinstance, if you buy a house, you take out a loan with monthly repayments. Why? Because the guys who have the right to magic money into existence say that you must. There’s no practical reason why payments couldn’t be paid yearly or deferred at random times (They make it seem like they’re doing you an enormous favour if you want/need to take a payment holiday, even though it has no real repercussions for Them). As for the other necessities of life - food, water, energy, transport - we’ve made a global choice to produce and distribute these in a very inefficient manner, and we’re stuck with the consequences. There’s no physical law that says we have to be chained to a desk to avoid starvation and homelessness.

18

Yearly mortgage payments wouldn’t work. People would spend the money before then. I think that’s the whole issue. People are often quite irresponsible. I agree with you that the system often means everything goes too far in the opposite direction in trying to force responsibility on them though.

19

oh sure … I just meant that the rules are all set by the party who doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have the bargaining power to do so … yet in this parallel universe in which we live, that’s how it works. Missed your mortgage payment last month? Doesn’t look good, son - better get us that money damn soon or you’re in deep trouble. What’s that? You lost your job? oooh, the manager’s not going to like that. Maybe we should just take your house back right now, eh, save everyone some trouble. That “cash” they give you to buy a house doesn’t even exist - the bank does, quite literally, have a license to print money. Yet because they’ve sent a certain set of numbers from this computer to that computer, you enter into a contract with them that says that, until you’ve paid them 20% of your salary for 20 years, your home is their property. And we all think that’s a great deal, and we queue and grovel to get a slice of the action. Most Mafias make better offers than that.

But I guess I’m drifting waaaay off topic here… and I should really throw this soapbox in the trash, it’s getting a bit old and battered.

20

[quote=“spitzig”]Some people seem to be having different conversations here. It’s possible for SOME people to have only one person working. It depends upon your salary/salaries. AND, upon the cost of living where you live.

ALSO, your cost of living depends upon how much you CHOOSE to spend. In college, I knew I guy who was in the process of having several kids, with one set of student loans(no wife working). They made their own food, and things like that, and visibly spent very little.

I’m an existentialist, so EVERYTHING is a choice to me. So, if a couple DECIDES to have one wage earner in a family, the family will have less to spend on luxury items like iPhones AND necessities like food.

A couple with one wage is also less financially stable. Jobs come and go a lot faster than 40 years ago. If the family’s entire income is gone, that is a bigger problem. If one of two wage earners still has their job, maybe they can still pay rent.[/quote]

Or you could try to have say $30,000 US before one of the partners quits working to give you a cushion if the working spouse loses his or her job.