It was the norm for a brief period after World War 2, and only for the US, largely because it was the only country to get out of WWII without sustaining any real damage.
Pre-WWII was the great depression, where a large fraction of people without a high-school education were out of work. Life was miserable. People who were kids during the great depression and are in their 80s / 90s now might still stash food around the house because they’re still afraid of going hungry. This eventually resulted in the New Deal which completely transformed the country.
Pre Great Depression, jobs were dangerous, housing was crowded, widows moved in with their adult children, old people moved back in with their families, people paid 1/3 of their salaries just for food (and the food sucked). Women might have only rarely worked outside the house, but the housework they did was extensive: no washing machines, no dishwashers, no refrigerator, no running water, many homes didn’t even have a stove. Making or mending clothes was a near constant job. Clothing was also very expensive by modern standards, and was built for durability, not comfort. And that’s for the lucky “white” people. Non-white people had it much worse.
A good life with only one breadwinner is not typical, and never has been. Maybe it should be, but don’t think that the post-WWII US experience is typical.
If you go back far enough the primary occupations become gathering edible plants and killing animals. The US didn’t get less productive per hour of labor between 1950 and 2024 the wealthy just started accruing a lot more of the benefits of our productivity.
That was probably a good period, though it could sustain only a few % of the current world population. Now that we have billions (due to tech development, though mostly of tech you would call very-very low tech, like plow), only mass production is capable of supporting the population. And that means all kinds of things, including the extreme wealth concentration, which is only getting worse with further tech advances. Inequality is quite likely to become the real reason of the new world war that would trim population to more sustainable levels, and a new “golden age” of recovering. For these who survived. Fucking cycles…
The US didn’t get less productive per hour of labor between 1950 and 2024
The point is that post-WWII is not the “normal” state of things. It was largely the result of a war that devastated every other major economy in the world, reducing competition from other countries. That gave the US a huge advantage. In addition there were strong government reforms from the pre-war depression-era time and reforms from during the war that curbed the excesses of the ultra-rich. The depression-era policies and the war-time policies also had the government playing a much more active role in the economy. Finally, this happened in a period where the world was much less “globalized” and relied on exploiting developing countries to a much greater extent than today.
Unless there’s another devastating war that destroys every other major economy in the world, the US is never going to get the post-WWII advantage back. That was a big part of the reason a guy with a high-school education could support a family of 5 immediately after WWII. (Also, that mostly was the case for white guys, because the US post-WWII was a very racist country where the things like the GI Bill, which allowed veterans to get very cheap houses, was unavailable to non-whites.
The post-war period was one when the United Fruit Company convinced US presidents to orchestrate a coup in Guatemala in 1954 to remove the democratically elected president and install one who was more friendly to US international businesses. This meant cheap bananas for the US, big profits to US companies, and political violence and instability for Guatemala. So, the high-school educated guy supporting a family of 5 on his own was partially made possible by the exploitation of other countries by US-based businesses. I don’t think anybody on the left wants that era to come back again.
But, it’s possible to get the government to play a more active role in the economy again. For instance, in 1946 the top tax bracket was effectively 91%. Today it’s 37%. Then there’s enforcing anti-competitive statutes, going after all the monopolies, duopolies and cartels currently squeezing every American resident. Ideally, there would also be reforms to copyright laws that removed power from the entertainment cartel and handed it back to artists, or shortened copyright terms handing the fruits of copyright to the people.
A (white) guy with a high school education supporting a family of 5 in reasonable comfort was a historical anomaly. It relied on some good things like the government acting in the interest of regular people, taxing the super rich, and regulating large businesses. It relied on some shitty things, like the government helping out US-based businesses by orchestrating coups in other countries and otherwise aiding in the exploitation of developing countries. And it relied on some historical quirks, like the US being the only major participant to escape from WWII unscathed.
Increasing productivity per labor hour invested is sufficient for everyone to have a 1950s life because we are in fact many times more productive per hour invested than 1950. This more than balances the unusual characteristics of the 50s
Increasing productivity per labor hour invested
How are you measuring that?
for everyone to have a 1950s life
Does this mean no Internet, no computers, no TV, or maybe a small black and white TV with only 3 channels, no washing machine, probably no refrigerator, one telephone for the entire family to share, etc.?
This is the true answer none of these forum sliding wall of text class traitors will address.
They supported a family of 5 and a whole additional secret family in the city, somehow!
Wait…we are supposed to support our secret families? Shit, I thought you just got married had kids, and then moved to another state and changed your name when it got too hard lol.
Here’s what’s changed
- The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
- Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing “corporate charity” to try and keep employees from unionizing. They’ve lost that fear.
- Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
- Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
- Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that’s been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
- Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.
Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
In that case, once a company sold stock to investors, they could never recoup it then? The only way for that to happen would be a single person or group organized to buy up a lot to get a controlling stake?
Effects ofWW2
Immigration
Lack of training in general.
Offshoring.
People buying loads if crap. Like seriously how many coats did your grandparents have in their adult life. Probably about the same you have in your closet right now, maybe less. Not to mention TV, phones, exotic food.
The housing market is fucked because land is undervalued.
Oil? (I might be wrong on this)
Somethings need to change but there are some things missed here.
Coats, and devices for that matter, used to be built to last and be repairable. But if your
customerconsumer never needs to buy another product from you now that wouldn’t make much business sense would it?It would if you stole everyone else’s business and that’s what businesses used to compete on.
But consumers want fast fashion. They want cheap clothing and it doesn’t matter if it only last 5 years instead of 30 because they are going to throw it out after 1 anyway.
Consumers have forced the hand of businesses in this case. People want cheap more than they want anything else.
Personally I don’t feel that way, but my personal experience isn’t a particularly large sample size.
Consumers may want various things, but those wants aren’t created in a vacuum. Otherwise advertising would be pointless.
Great summary of how things suck. Also, Severely Weekend would make a great band name.
We’re all sacrificing life experiences so that a very, very, very small percentage of people can live like kings.
Pretty much, it’s the very natural consequence of a deregulation and the an-cap philosophy. We’ve seen this before in america during the 1900s. It’s the whole reason Teddy and FDR ended up getting elected.
So we need another FDR. Can we do it without a preceding depression this time around?
You’re about to elect Trump again. I shouldn’t worry about there not being enough bad economic news.
We can’t because we have corporate
propagandanews outlets that will work tirelessly to frame this “new FDR” as a fascist communist racist woke elite conman.Pick your outlet and that will determine the words chosen to disparage them.
Hell just look at the supposed “liberal media” treating Bernie Sanders when he looked to be taking the lead in the primaries, suddenly every story was “Bernie loves Castro! Bernie loves Cuba! Be afraid! He likes communist stuff! Boo! Ahhh! Oh no it’s Bernie!”
In addition to this, the government is working to ban any news outlet that disagrees with them. They’re starting with “foreign” outlets like RT and TikTok, but they’ll soon move to anything that doesn’t toe the party line.
Democracy is dead.
I can understand literal propaganda outlets, government run news from countries we know have their orgs run with specific orders to run whatever stories would be an obvious thing to want to curtail here. I used to check into RT and all I’d see are anti-american stories or even using Americans to tell an anti-american government story from someone like Abby Martin. I can’t imagine we’d be getting any news from say North Korean news outlets that isn’t specifically meant to manipulate foreign countries citizens.
Tiktoc isn’t really news, it’s more like YouTube. If anything I’d say assholes like Zuckerberg lobby the government to kill foreign competitors in our market which is a whole nother issue that also sucks :(
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews literally said if Bernie was elected him and his rich buddies would be executed in Central Park.
Chris Matthews’ Wild Rant Connects a Bernie Sanders Win With Public Executions. The MSNBC host talked about socialist-led “executions in Central Park” while tying those fears to Bernie Sanders
Don’t forget the low blow campaign tactic of the “Bernie Bros” - and how I cannot be a feminist if I don’t cast my vote for Clinton. I couldn’t believe how biased NPR was in their coverage and framing of that primary. It caused me to stop being a supporter.
I’m still proud to be considered a 21 year old russian man named Vladimer online!!! (I am not even close to any of those but my twitter replies insist i’m wrong about that actually)
While I agree with all of that and more, the world has gotten much more complex over the years. It’s not a bad thing to try to raise the bar on minimum education for everyone.
Also, for the part of it due to global outsourcing … there’s only so much protectionism can give you without ruining importer/exporters. A better approach is to try to bring a more educated workforce than offered by cheap third world labor
First and foremost you should mention the corporate tax cuts. How can corporations afford consolidation and other malicious shit they do? Their tax bill was cut in half. And their executive income tax rate was cut dramatically.
Rather than paying their employees, they give massive bonuses to their executives and save the rest for buying out competitors or attracting suitors.
It’s not so much the corporate tax rate that did it, it’s capital gains tax (and especially how it’s implemented) that’s the big problem.
The fact that capital gains isn’t treated as regular income tax creates all sorts of really bad incentives. It means that executives are generally primarily paid in stock which means they are incentivized to push the value of that stock up. And since everyone making those decisions are also primarily paid in stock they’ll authorize things like stock buybacks to boost their own personal wealth.
5 regulations I’d make to fix this problem.
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No executives can be paid with equity.
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The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
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Tax capital gains as regular income.
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Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
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Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
100 percent for every dollar over a billion, at least for individuals. No single person needs that much wealth.
Has the way capital gains tax works changed over the years?
Not really, it’s mostly the rates that have changed. It used to be much higher.
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So, republicans happened.
Edit- before you tar and feather me, democrats went along. But all of those have been articles of faith in the GOP.
I mostly blame Reagan and Nixon. They were the harbingers of modern republican governmental stupidity. Nixon courted the racists out of the democrat party and Regan push dumbass deregulation. Bigotry + being the whipping boys for rich people is basically the only principles republicans stand on today.
Civil Rights happened.
Once it became clear to racist whites that Black Americans would have full access to the social programs that they enjoyed, they decided that they’d rather burn all those social programs to the ground before they’d share them. This is the basis of the modern Republican party, so you weren’t wrong.
Incidentally, the scenario in this original post was never true for almost all black Americans.
Aren’t there a lot more social programs today than there were in the period the OP refers to?
While all of this is true, I’ll also add that this was an unrepeatable condition: WWII gutted Europe and the US was untouched. All of perks of the past society were part of an unsustainable economic bubble. USA citizens have never quite realized that.
The only part I would disagree with you on is that in the past 80 years productivity has grown by a huge margin, and if that translated into increased wages (as opposed to increased corporate profits) as it once did I think that quality of life would not be so unsustainable.
The richest 1% own almost half the world’s wealth. The hoarders have mostly dug in and ensured that their hoarding is legal, will stop at nothing, is easier than ever, and is well defended and unopposed.
We live in the joke where the billionaire takes 99 cookies from the table, leaves one and says “Careful, peon, the [member of the minority you dislike] is after your cookie”.
at least they found the time to ban tiktok today
This but unironically. Tiktok is contributing to the brain rot in our nation.
I liked the OK Boomer dances.
Ha ha I have you all beat. I am living in the future with a three income household.
NFT’s?
Their kid is a burgeoning youtube star.
All he does is unboxing videos
Okay look this needs to stop.
First, the economic success has become overstated at this point. There was a relatively brief period in US history where this could happen. Being an adult during that period required living through both the great depression and WW2. The only people who truly got a free lunch were boomers born before 1955.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
Even for that subgroup, life could have a million difficulties. You know how a lot of seemingly successful boomers talk about how money isn’t everything? There’s a reason for that. All but the most privileged had to deal with shit like this:
- A culture where it was not acceptable to show emotion as a result of millions of men trying to collectively repress their massive PTSD
- Marrying (for life) the first woman you date.
- Having kids by 22
- having all the stress and responsibility that comes with being the sole provider with that, again at an extremely young age
- Coming home every day (until you get married) with the knowledge that there might be a Vietnam draft card in the mailbox
It feels like 90 percent of online discourse revolves around oppression, trauma, and marginilized groups. Yet everyone still pretends that the boomers all lived some super easy life.
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Baby boomers are exclusively those born between 1946 to 1964. 55% of the living boomers are presumably females safe from the draft and 45% are male. 95% of the draft was over by 1971 whereas only 38% of boomers were of draft age by then. Of the draft pool about 8% were drafted.
On net 1.3% of boomers were drafted for Viatnam. 0% went through the great depression 0% went through WW2.
These times were also marked by extreme bigotry. Anyone who wasn’t a straight white neurotypical cisgendered man faced comical levels of oppression.
In case you hadn’t noticed 99.99% of the whining is from straight white neurotypical cisgendered men. Comical levels of oppression or not they on average came out of it with houses that ballooned in value 8x over and now enjoy the same degree of freedom from oppression as you and I along with their money and house and are steady trying to reinstate that comical level of oppression at the hands of the dictator they intend to give our democracy to.
Okay before I go off on you how old are you?
I’m 43. Statistically the people that are whining are themselves extremely privileged who on average came of age after Vietnam. They don’t get to use other people’s suffering as a fuckin excuse.
You sound like a petulant teenager.
So you look at people today demanding more and say “this has got to stop” and launch into some malarkey about how the worst generation actually honest had a real hard time and you believe other people are petulant. Alrighty then.
You have extremely limited empathy for boomers because they were the authority figures growing up. You still treat them like a teenager would treat their parents, as opposed to how an adult would approach the situation.
This tweet is alluding to some golden era of America that never really existed in the way that the Internet implies
Why would I have empathy for boomers? This is essentially a generational conflict. You don’t win by having empathy.
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Nearly all of those situations didn’t overlap.
Housing wasn’t cheap because people were racist, housing was cheap because the American dollar was strong from a well developed manufacturing base, net exports, and wartime technology innovations.
All those situations overlapped in that they were all things boomers had to deal with.
That’s why you will never come to a meaningful answer, the assumption that because a and b existed at the same time, that they were interrelated.
informal fallacy.
My point was in regards to general online discourse around Boomers having it easy. As such, I listed the struggles they had.
That being said the ability to support a family on one income probably had a lot to do with taboos about women in the workforce.
Just stop
Man this place is really worse than reddit.
Yeah, were a lot less nice to people who obstinately refuse to understand basic logic
“Oh but boomers had hard lives in other ways” isn’t the point at all and those things have nothing to do with the post.
But line must go up!
Oh shit yeah sorry. I forgot.
For any country that has benefited from exploitation of foreign resources “stolen” is a bit rich.
So all nations?
there are a lot more yachts and compounds… and private jets to get you from your yacht to your compound…
and those families used to take long road trips together for weeks as a vacation. and their clothes lasted decades.
I get the point they are making but using 5 was stupid. There was never a time when any salary worker would be able to support a family of 5. This is unnecessary hyperbole.
It never was, if you lived it. TV isn’t a reliable history book
I lived it for a few brief years in the 70s then Reagan fucked us all
It was absolutely true. The only families not on single income were hard laborers or non-managerial retail/fast food and even then a carpenter could easily feed a family of 5.
“It was true for me because I was from a moderately wealthy area and family therefore it was the norm”
Lol no, not even close. My dad was a construction worker and my mom was a housewife until 1985, and we lived in the deep south. She took up data entry, and that’s how I got my start on computers.
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Did you have an iodine deficiency growing up? His whole fucking point is that he WASN’T POOR. Despite having only one parent working in manual labor.
Do you understand the context here? Don’t seem like it.
The context of you being a total dick for no apparent reason? Yeah, that context is loud and fucking clear. Maybe don’t refer to people as “it” in the future and people might take your argumentation a little better.
Eh, I think it was, for a certain type of person:
A middle class white male. Now even working couples with no children can have trouble making ends meet.
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So my parents didn’t go to college for the wages of a job worked only during the summer?
They didn’t walk straight into jobs?
My grandfathers didn’t provide for 6 kids each on a solo income in the post war era?
Buddy. We have the history. The records, the paperwork, the video evidence.
Nope. You have vague stories from two generations back of a generation noted for not mentioning the hard parts.
Lmao. No. It really is all documented. This isn’t the dark ages where entire populations drop off the record and reappear 100 years later.
That was almost before my time too and I was born in 1959. Around that time the industrial sector began requiring more and more education and people were more motivated to go to school for longer periods. Also about that time, because of the bolstered economy after the war, prices started going up and inflation really took hold.
Now having a college degree doesn’t even guarantee you’ll make enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment. There is something out of whack about that. I don’t know how people in upcoming generations will even be able to afford to buy food, let alone to have a roof over their heads. And it isn’t any one president at fault for it, it’s been going on since I was a kid, and that was decades ago.
I would be content with not having the housing market cannibalized by AirBnB and real estate companies, a paycheck that isn’t eaten up by greedflation and a passable healthcare (I live in Europe, so we have public healthcare, at least nominally).
Oddly enough both of my grandmothers had full time jobs along with their husbands. It’s never been a thing for me, although I know this is odd.
My grandmother was a telephone operator and then a nurse, my grandfather owned a neighborhood deli and later sold it and worked at a factory.
Paternal side Grandmother worked in a factory, grandfather was a mechanic.
Maternal side Grandmother was a nurse, grandfather worked in a factory and farmed.
It’s true, women worked many jobs in the past especially if they were poor. Feminism is mainly a tool to normalize the femme CEO, the femme worker is as old as England.
