Yes and no. What puzzles me is that people seem to have to work more and more to make ends meet. Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner, now both parents have to work. Social welfare is always under attack (speaking of Germany), which doesn't seem to make sense - why could we afford these things a couple of decades ago, when today the industry should be much more efficient? We should have an easier time than our parents, but do we?
I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation. I am not even sure if it is a conspiracy or just human nature or what not. However I found it interesting that apparently 40h work weeks were established because industrialists noticed they yielded optimal output. That is already that principle: squeeze as much work from workers as possible, so in their spare time they have no energy left to produce, only to consume.
No small part of it could be that our parents generation did not have the means to spend $1mm in resources to keep an old man alive for 8 months longer coupled with the dangerous idea that everyone might be entitled to those last 8 months no matter what they did in their lives leading up to that point.
This seems to me like the huge, looming problem our generation will have to solve.
"Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner, now both parents have to work."
The causality might go the other way. When feminism became popular and women entered the workforce, it's not as if more homes got built, more oil was pumped from the ground, more land was discovered, more cars were manufactured, etc. Women did not enter construction and manufacturing trades in large numbers, and the production of homes and natural resources are bounded by natural conditions and regulations, not by labor. So when women enter the workforce wages are pushed down as they compete with men, the price of housing is bid up by two earner families, but production of housing does not go up accordingly. So prices rise and then all households need to have two earners to keep up. The modern economy is primarily not labor bound, it is natural resource and regulation bound, so more labor just results in an arms race where other people need to work harder to keep up. Legislation that mandates maximum work weeks, minimum vacation amounts, and mandatory retirement, might make a lot of sense to avoid the sort of work-hours-prisoners-dilemma we seem to be stuck in.
Further, I think if you compared the same basket of goods, you'd discover that it's actually quite easy to make ends meet 1970's style. You'd live in a house that is tiny (by modern standards), drive one car/family, and give up all sorts of expensive medical treatments invented more recently than 1970 (MRI, chemotherapy, viagra, most prescription drugs). Not to mention all sorts of labor saving devices in the home (e.g., a dishwasher, washer/dryer or roomba).
The right question to ask: is all the stuff we've gained since 1970 worth an extra 1-2 hours/week of paid labor?
[edit: an earlier version of this post asserted working hours didn't rise at all. That was incorrect - I compared the endpoints. After the fact I spotted the fallacy, and put my third graph in the post.]
This is what someone said about why the times don't seem to get easier despite everything being seemingly more advanced:
> Die kapitalistische Produktion strebt beständig, diese ihr immanenten Schranken zu überwinden, aber sie überwindet sie nur durch Mittel, die ihr diese Schranken aufs neue und auf gewaltigerm Maßstab entgegenstellen. Die wahre Schranke der kapitalistischen Produktion ist das Kapital selbst, ist dies: daß das Kapital und seine Selbstverwertung als Ausgangspunkt und Endpunkt, als Motiv und Zweck der Produktion erscheint; daß die Produktion nur Produktion für das Kapital ist und nicht umgekehrt die Produktionsmittel bloße Mittel für eine stets sich erweiternde Gestaltung des Lebensprozesses für die Gesellschaft der Produzenten sind.
(Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Bd. 3, S. 260)
> Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. (Karl Marx: Capital, Volume III, p. 249)
"I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation."
In theory, work and leisure time both are goods that you can choose to consume with varying degrees of flexibility. In theory, they are both subject to the usual decrease in marginal utility as you have more of one or the other. In theory, on a marginal basis you will choose to do one or the other as it has more value to you, so if you face an hour in which you could work for $40 or experience leisure time you value at $45, you will not do the work.
I've larded that entire paragraph up with "in theory" because it is a massive oversimplification and we all know that. However, I think in the end the point it leads to is still significantly true, which is that as society has advanced, an hour of work produces more value to the user. Even if the gain is flat in purely monetary terms, in terms of subjectively-experienced wealth the value can still be rising, per all the advances mentioned in the article. (No amount of 1980-money will bring you Minecraft, etc.) Therefore, it is easy for leisure time to get crowded out through perfectly rational decisions by the worker.
Due to diminishing marginal advantage, it's not a linear process; one may work a 55-hour week instead of a 45-hour week, but this process is not capable of producing someone who works a 120-hour week who would have chosen a 30-hour week. The value of the next hour of work goes down too fast and the value of the leisure time goes up too quickly. But it is an effect that shows how an increase in productivity can actually be a cause of longer work hours, not a bizarre inexplicable side effect.
"Our parents could finance a home and family with one earner"
Homes were much smaller and had many fewer amenities. In the U.S. home sizes have doubled since the 1950s, at the same time the family sizes have declined. My house as originally built in 1949 was about 800 square feet and had one bathroom (of a size that would qualify as a "3/4 bath" now). That was for a husband, wife, and three kids. It's had some additions over the years that bring it up to 1100 square feet, but no one would consider it a "large" house. It's okay for just me, though.
Families had one car at most. Kids in previous generations didn't need thousands of dollars in electronics and sports gear to keep themselves entertained, nor did they have (e.g.) orthodontics or other expensive (but elective) medical procedures. Vacations didn't involve trips to Hawaii.
I'm not saying that these are bad things (in fact they're largely good), but neither are they cheap.
People have been lamenting the difficulty of making ends meet for as long as humanity has been around and I'm not so sure that today it is truly any less possible to finance a home and family with just one earner than it was a generation ago. I certainly don't think it was easily affordable on one income a generation ago as seems to be the perception. A lot of the reason for two earner families today is because of the fact that more women are able to work due to a more equitable marketplace for jobs. Perhaps the people of a generation ago would have liked the extra income but that just was not an option. Now two inomes is often seen as a necessity but that could be because people's expectations of what kind standard of living they should have, as well as what is possible for the average person to have today, has risen along with their incomes. As for the 40 hour workweek, if I read the same source, that amounted to a reduction in hours for the average person.
This is exactly my feelings as well. I just compare my situation with my parents and see that they had it ridiculously easy compared to what my situation is like now, while the lifestyle is basically the same in every way.
It's like my parents asking me if I want to be just like them, only work a lot harder and get a lot less for it. Um, no thanks.
I think a lot of it has to do with who benefits most from efficiency and where that benefit is allocated after.
For example, if I'm expected to work a 40 hour work week but I figure out a way that everyone at the company with my job can do their job twice as fast, I don't suddenly get to work 20 hours a week and get paid the same--I get half the other employees fired because the company doesn't need them anymore--and maybe I get a pat on the back and some extra paid vacation.
The company gets a tremendous benefit, they take that money and invest it in software and robots that will help eliminate more jobs and make a small startup's founders rich in the process. The people that got laid off take whatever money they happen to have (which is probably a negative value) and try to get another job in a similar scenario and continue the cycle of being expected to do "more with less"
And what do people do with their savings if they're lucky enough to have managed to save something sizable? They buy houses, cars, TVs, and other stuff that has little likelihood of building more wealth.
I don't think anyone designed it this way on purpose, it just works out this way and will continue to until people start building value for themselves and escape from 9-5 prison (or 8-6 since no one actually works 40 hours anymore, or 7-7 if you include a decent commute)
For the lower and lower middle classes the standard of living has been about the same since the 70s. But what you expect to see is life get easier for some segments of the population, and harder for others. You might be stuck in a population where life got harder. In particular, I remember seeing a paper (wish I could find the link) that claimed, specifically, white lower class individuals are worse off, whereas most population cohorts are better off today than decades ago.
Avoid Marxist conspiracy theorizing: though it might be useful and easy to think about the capitalist class as a class, trying to reify them as a coordinated conspiracy of exploiters creates a lot of conflict but offers little in the way of explanatory power and little in the way of working solutions. Aside from the philosophical argument, you can see this is also historically true.
I think what happened was that more and more women entered the workforce, either out of necessity or out of personal desire (I think largely the latter) and the market adjusted accordingly. Because the work pool roughly doubled, the wages decreased over time. Add to that the fact that one of the two largest expenses a family typically has, a car, doubled because both parents work, and also the fact that we generally live in houses that are larger and better equipped than the previous generations, and I think it makes sense that we have adjusted our lifestyles to using up the full capital we receive when both parents work.
It would be interesting to calculate cost of living per square foot, adding in changing monthly technology costs and commute costs.
In the U.S., all three keep expanding: living space per person keeps growing, as do monthly tech costs, e.g. cable, mobile phone, etc. and there are more and more people choosing long commutes.
These are just the things that occur to me off the top of my head, making me think comparing the past to the present over generations is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The thing is, this article leaves a lot out. Per capita GDP has been rising. What has been happening to the inflation-adjusted hourly wage? It is below what it was in the early 1970s.
I look at the Forbes 400 and heirs like the Koch brothers, or the Waltons or the Mars family are doing well. Or entrepreneurs like Amway's Richard DeVos. Or upper middle class sons of lawyers and congressmen like Gates and Buffett, with rumored screwy mothers of the type that the sons don't kick back and relax once they hit $20 billion, they have to go on.
The majority of people are worse off. I don't primarily look at it as a "moral" thing, I see it as a broken system which will eventually collapse in some manner due to its internal contradictions - just as feudalism did, just as slavery in the US south and ancient Rome. This article is an example of this. Why not just tell the truth, that according to the government, the real hourly wage was better in the early 1970s, that things have gotten worse since then?
Stratification means the white, upper middle class, college educated Americans reading this have no idea what I mean. They are living in their own bubble of VC, congratulatory back-slapping etc. Born on third base and thinking they hit triples.
The point is, why are lying articles like this necessary? Why can't they just tell the truth? The fact that lying and propaganda, which the average wage worker believes no less than Russians believe Pravda, shows the weakness of the system. People don't buy these lies any how. They know. The majority of people - not the SF bay white upper middle class bubble of people.
It's not some conspiracy perpetrated by the rich that our wages have been going down over time, it's simple economics. In this country, women are now just as likely to work as men, so the labor pool has roughly doubled. Wages decline accordingly. There are also more and more people in other countries willing and able to produce goods and services we desire but at a lower wage.
I don't see what the problem is. I like the fact that women work as much as men do. I also like the fact that people in other countries are so productive. It means my family can buy better stuff than they could 40 years ago for a much cheaper price, and someone halfway across the world can put food on their table because of it.
One thing that I, as an older person, don't understand is the pervasive negative world view that so many young people today seem to have. I grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation, burning cities, race riots, out of control crime, etc, etc. All that has passed. Things are so much better but the younger generations seem to see things in a much more negative light than when I was young. Why is this?
I had 5 good friends when I was in high school. They were all extremely intelligent, and motivated people. Right now, 1 is a security guard at a fireworks factory, another works in a print shop loading stacks of paper, another just dropped out of college to join the army (due to financial reasons), the fourth works 4 part time jobs to live in a crappy apartment, and the 5th is unemployed.
Why do they have a negative outlook? Because none of them are doing what they went to school to do, or even want to do.
I feel lucky, i've been programming since I was 13 years old. I love my job, and i get paid extremely well to do it. Sometimes it can be hard to understand why all of my friends have so much trouble, its easy for me to think of all the things they could have done differently. But the point is, life for non techies is not really great right now, and if you're young with no experience its even worse.
All those things have gotten better, but for a lot of people economic security has gotten worse, and economic security tends to override a lot of other views when it comes to perceptions. Median incomes are roughly flat, and security of those incomes is on a significant downward trend. My dad, for example, graduated with an engineering degree in the '60s, and landed basically a "good job for life": good income, defined-benefits pension, full health coverage, informal understanding that as long as you didn't do anything absurdly bad, the company would find a continued place for you. Also, workweeks were 40 hours, vacation 6 weeks/yr, and there was only quite rare overtime or weekend work. That kind of secure employment is much less common today.
As far as war goes, I'm personally not hugely disconcerted by terrorism, but a lot of people seem to be. Osama bin Laden is certainly less of an existential threat than nuclear war was, but people are in a way almost more on edge about it: the possibility that the whole U.S. might get vaporized is one of those things almost too apocalyptic to worry about on a daily basis, while people do worry (often irrationally) that their subway train might get bombed.
We (in the US) have a political system where the other side isn't just portrayed as being wrong.. but being immoral monsters looking to destroy: people, businesses, society, women, families, gays, religion, etc, etc.
When everyone claims those are the stakes, everything looks like it's life or death.. and every little loss is monumental.
Did both of your parents have to work to support the family? Then if one of them lost their job did you have to wonder if you were going to lose the house? Or if someone in your family got sick would you have to worry about losing your house or going bankrupt?
Did you have to take out large amount of debt as soon as you reached adult age to go to college in hopes that you chose the right major so that you could have some hope of paying that back before the interest started compounding against you?
Did you ever witness an attack on your country's largest city on live TV while sitting in a classroom with no idea why someone would do this? Then in response have your government send people you know to fight in a war to destroy wmd's that didnt exist and had nothing to do with the attack?
People have really bad infodiet. They eat junk information rather than analyzing if their information is wholesome. On local news, you hear about the latest shooting or the latest robbery or the latest bad thing that happen, all of which doesn't mean anything until you aggregate them into statistics and analyze them.
+1 I am in my early 60s. I think that the world was a much more dangerous place during the 'cold war' but few people seem to realize that. Part of this is marketing by special interests ("Orange terror alert today!") motivated by profit.
Younger generations didn't grow up through "real" crises. Their frame of reference is different, and through that lens, mountains are made out of molehills.
Nuclear war didn't happenand really after Cuba it should have been clear that it wouldn't happen.
As for crime being higher -- what matter is the _perception_ and in that regard, crime has gotten a lot worse, because there are now so many news papers competing to tell how bad the world is.
As for race riots -- well they happened (in places like LA) and that must have been bad, but really are they worse than the riots in Canada or London?
And you are entirely forgetting terrorism, unemployment and the fear of the government. You didn't have the TSA and the NSA wiretapping everything (granted, properly only because they couldn't do it, technically).
I'm a fervent believer in the notion that despite short-term setbacks, humanity as a whole is improving on all fronts - social, political, technological, and economical. However, there is tremendous inequality in where the real improvements are occurring, especially when compared to segments that experience turmoils.
While your generation faced a real, visible threat of political violence, the next few generations face gradual, hidden threats that the current generation has no solution to:
1. Low-skill jobs are going away - be it outsourcing, migrant workers, logistical improvements, advanced software or robots. Imagine the spike in unemployment when Big Box stores automate shelf stocking and implements RFID checkouts. Sure, you will need humans to make, sell, and maintain the robots and new tech. but they will be skilled jobs and most likely fewer in number. You will still have servers and cooks at restaurants but when 50 year olds get laid off from Walmart and Target, they will vie for the same jobs that teenagers trying to support themselves through school do.
2. American Dream is getting harder to achieve - because of global competition, decreasing assistance (from family, society, government), and requirement for higher skill sets. 30 years ago a person could get a college degree with good high school grades and government grants, buy a house with down-payment assistance from family, and have a steady job for decades with a promise of social security and pension. That is rare today, though not impossible. There may be more college graduates today but they are no longer valued as they were a few decades ago. So while blacksmiths and farmers could buy a five acre plot of land and build a house with a barn in 1970s without taking out huge loans, their kids cannot do the same today. If you're 30 and don't make enough to rent a place on your own because of student loans and car payments, things will start to look gloomy. Of course there is a choice of going to cheaper college and buying an $800 car but 30 years ago college graduates had a better standard of living.
3. New problems that the current generation cares about that past didn't as much - Climate change and global equality. I know environmentalism started decades ago and anti-war protests are nothing new. But today's generation no longer considers dictatorship and oppression in distant lands as something you can ignore. I'm not saying every kid with an iPhone in US is actively fighting Kony or Morsi but today they are more aware than ever of injustices happening around the world. Knowing that a thousand people were just killed or imprisoned in a country you want to visit next year makes things look pretty gloomy. Similarly realizing that climate change is happening and is not being addressed by those in power is enough to scare those who hope to be alive in 2050.
I'm not saying world is getting worse. I am saying there are things happening that aren't outright frightening and abrupt like global wars but are still severe enough to worry those who expect to inherit them.
I'm sure your parents' generation would ask why you were so negative. They vanquished Hitler and saved the world. So what's there to complain about?
It's that these damn kids just don't understand everything I had to struggle for. Or maybe, just maybe the older generations have forgotten what it's like being handed a world with unsolved problems.
We are trying to fix things that your generation gave us. Things like an increasingly warming planet, awful race relations, a failed and unjust war on drugs, lack of LGBT rights, and a huge aging entitled population who feel it's my responsibility to pay for their medical expenses. I'm sure my children's generation is going to deal with the issues we haven't solved and will (rightfully) be pissed at us about it.
But on the flip side of that coin, my life is easier than almost any other human's in the history of this planet. I live the life of a king from 80 years ago. I have the sum of human knowledge in my pocket. I can communicate with people across the globe for like no money. I have access to art and information and entertainment that my parents could only dream of. It's important to keep perspective on what's really going on.
We're starting to see these kind of pieces in the mainstream press... from the "I'm glad I'm not dead" pablum in the NYT to this. Why? Whose interest is served by trying to convince people that the worst economy and employment situation in most people's lifetimes is "really not so bad ... be glad you're not dead."
AFTER EDIT: I am curious about the initial pattern of upvotes and downvotes in this thread. I'm especially curious about whether anyone disagrees with any of the factual points of view I have expressed here, and particularly if anyone has any authoritative source to prove me wrong about anything I have said here. I like to learn. I'll leave the rest of this comment just as it was when it was first posted, and invite everyone's learned comments.
The article notes, "Many Americans, for instance, are convinced that 'half of all marriages end in divorce,'" but that was somewhat of an exaggeration even at the time of peak divorce rates. The statistical fallacy that prompted that mistaken belief was comparing the rate of new divorces each year to the rate of new first marriages each year, ignoring the tens of millions of people who were already married and who stayed married.
A federal government survey, "First Marriages in the United States: Data From the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth" (March 22, 2012)
which may or may not have focused particularly on this issue, projects,
"In 2006–2010, the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 10 years was 68% for women and 70% for men. Looking at 20 years, the probability that the first marriages of women and men will survive was 52% for women and 56% for men in 2006–2010. These levels are virtually identical to estimates based on vital statistics from the early 1970s (24). For women, there was no significant change in the probability of a first marriage lasting 20 years between the 1995 NSFG (50%) and the 2006–2010 NSFG (52%) (Table 5). The remainder of first marriages that ended within a 20-year period were dissolved by divorce, separation, or rarely, by death."
The study also notes that marriages have a higher probability of lasting longer if both members of the couple have higher levels of education rather than lower, and were married a year or more before the birth of their first child.
Here is an article that explains the commonplace statistical fallacy:
"Divorce Rate: It's Not as High as You Think" New York Times (April 19, 2005)
". . . . In 2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
"But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will."
On other points mentioned in the article and other comments here, work hours have certainly not gone down to the level predicted when I was a child, when rising productivity was predicted to cut the typical work week to as few as twenty hours per week. Instead, personal consumption has gone up to levels unimaginable in the 1960s, with many people flying on jets to vacations in foreign countries, and houses being larger than they have ever been, and cars more powerful and luxurious (and fuel-efficient) than ever before. Americans still work a lot to keep up with the Joneses, and workers in other countries still work almost as much as what has long defined "full-time" employment in law, but people now regard as routine daily spending purchases that once would have been deemed luxuries.
From the article: "The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events -- though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain's propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies." This probably is the most economical explanation for why many people don't notice much of the gradual progress they have enjoyed in their lifetimes. Human cognitive biases run in the direction of noticing and focusing on problems (for good evolutionary reasons), and lack of problems fades into the background and is not noticed.
"I'm especially curious about whether anyone disagrees with any of the factual points of view I have expressed here, and particularly if anyone has any authoritative source to prove me wrong about anything I have said here."
Perhaps the down votes are because you're quoting a study that samples 20 year increments when marriage is supposed to be a lifetime event.
Many marriages stay together, rather unhappily, until the last child is out of the household. This study pretty much ignores that segment of the issue. And issues beyond that. That it's almost 50% within 20 years actually makes the issue seem worse.
Stopped reading at the point he names anti depressants as a life improving discovery. Author obviously forgot this is supposed to be journalism not creative writing.
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
I feel that some force is trying to extract as much work from "us" as possible, sometimes even selling it to us as a liberation. I am not even sure if it is a conspiracy or just human nature or what not. However I found it interesting that apparently 40h work weeks were established because industrialists noticed they yielded optimal output. That is already that principle: squeeze as much work from workers as possible, so in their spare time they have no energy left to produce, only to consume.
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
This seems to me like the huge, looming problem our generation will have to solve.
[+] [-] bokonist|13 years ago|reply
The causality might go the other way. When feminism became popular and women entered the workforce, it's not as if more homes got built, more oil was pumped from the ground, more land was discovered, more cars were manufactured, etc. Women did not enter construction and manufacturing trades in large numbers, and the production of homes and natural resources are bounded by natural conditions and regulations, not by labor. So when women enter the workforce wages are pushed down as they compete with men, the price of housing is bid up by two earner families, but production of housing does not go up accordingly. So prices rise and then all households need to have two earners to keep up. The modern economy is primarily not labor bound, it is natural resource and regulation bound, so more labor just results in an arms race where other people need to work harder to keep up. Legislation that mandates maximum work weeks, minimum vacation amounts, and mandatory retirement, might make a lot of sense to avoid the sort of work-hours-prisoners-dilemma we seem to be stuck in.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|13 years ago|reply
I don't know about Germany, but in the US we work less than before.
Hours worked per employee is down, while the employment to population ratio isn't up enough to compensate:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO
Employment per capita was up a bit during the peak of the 90's bubble - by 2 hours/week over the 1970's.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=d5P
Further, I think if you compared the same basket of goods, you'd discover that it's actually quite easy to make ends meet 1970's style. You'd live in a house that is tiny (by modern standards), drive one car/family, and give up all sorts of expensive medical treatments invented more recently than 1970 (MRI, chemotherapy, viagra, most prescription drugs). Not to mention all sorts of labor saving devices in the home (e.g., a dishwasher, washer/dryer or roomba).
The right question to ask: is all the stuff we've gained since 1970 worth an extra 1-2 hours/week of paid labor?
[edit: an earlier version of this post asserted working hours didn't rise at all. That was incorrect - I compared the endpoints. After the fact I spotted the fallacy, and put my third graph in the post.]
[+] [-] rmk2|13 years ago|reply
> Die kapitalistische Produktion strebt beständig, diese ihr immanenten Schranken zu überwinden, aber sie überwindet sie nur durch Mittel, die ihr diese Schranken aufs neue und auf gewaltigerm Maßstab entgegenstellen. Die wahre Schranke der kapitalistischen Produktion ist das Kapital selbst, ist dies: daß das Kapital und seine Selbstverwertung als Ausgangspunkt und Endpunkt, als Motiv und Zweck der Produktion erscheint; daß die Produktion nur Produktion für das Kapital ist und nicht umgekehrt die Produktionsmittel bloße Mittel für eine stets sich erweiternde Gestaltung des Lebensprozesses für die Gesellschaft der Produzenten sind. (Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Bd. 3, S. 260)
> Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. (Karl Marx: Capital, Volume III, p. 249)
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
In theory, work and leisure time both are goods that you can choose to consume with varying degrees of flexibility. In theory, they are both subject to the usual decrease in marginal utility as you have more of one or the other. In theory, on a marginal basis you will choose to do one or the other as it has more value to you, so if you face an hour in which you could work for $40 or experience leisure time you value at $45, you will not do the work.
I've larded that entire paragraph up with "in theory" because it is a massive oversimplification and we all know that. However, I think in the end the point it leads to is still significantly true, which is that as society has advanced, an hour of work produces more value to the user. Even if the gain is flat in purely monetary terms, in terms of subjectively-experienced wealth the value can still be rising, per all the advances mentioned in the article. (No amount of 1980-money will bring you Minecraft, etc.) Therefore, it is easy for leisure time to get crowded out through perfectly rational decisions by the worker.
Due to diminishing marginal advantage, it's not a linear process; one may work a 55-hour week instead of a 45-hour week, but this process is not capable of producing someone who works a 120-hour week who would have chosen a 30-hour week. The value of the next hour of work goes down too fast and the value of the leisure time goes up too quickly. But it is an effect that shows how an increase in productivity can actually be a cause of longer work hours, not a bizarre inexplicable side effect.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
Homes were much smaller and had many fewer amenities. In the U.S. home sizes have doubled since the 1950s, at the same time the family sizes have declined. My house as originally built in 1949 was about 800 square feet and had one bathroom (of a size that would qualify as a "3/4 bath" now). That was for a husband, wife, and three kids. It's had some additions over the years that bring it up to 1100 square feet, but no one would consider it a "large" house. It's okay for just me, though.
Families had one car at most. Kids in previous generations didn't need thousands of dollars in electronics and sports gear to keep themselves entertained, nor did they have (e.g.) orthodontics or other expensive (but elective) medical procedures. Vacations didn't involve trips to Hawaii.
I'm not saying that these are bad things (in fact they're largely good), but neither are they cheap.
[+] [-] gcheong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captobvious|13 years ago|reply
It's like my parents asking me if I want to be just like them, only work a lot harder and get a lot less for it. Um, no thanks.
[+] [-] dave_sullivan|13 years ago|reply
For example, if I'm expected to work a 40 hour work week but I figure out a way that everyone at the company with my job can do their job twice as fast, I don't suddenly get to work 20 hours a week and get paid the same--I get half the other employees fired because the company doesn't need them anymore--and maybe I get a pat on the back and some extra paid vacation.
The company gets a tremendous benefit, they take that money and invest it in software and robots that will help eliminate more jobs and make a small startup's founders rich in the process. The people that got laid off take whatever money they happen to have (which is probably a negative value) and try to get another job in a similar scenario and continue the cycle of being expected to do "more with less"
And what do people do with their savings if they're lucky enough to have managed to save something sizable? They buy houses, cars, TVs, and other stuff that has little likelihood of building more wealth.
I don't think anyone designed it this way on purpose, it just works out this way and will continue to until people start building value for themselves and escape from 9-5 prison (or 8-6 since no one actually works 40 hours anymore, or 7-7 if you include a decent commute)
[+] [-] cynicalkane|13 years ago|reply
Avoid Marxist conspiracy theorizing: though it might be useful and easy to think about the capitalist class as a class, trying to reify them as a coordinated conspiracy of exploiters creates a lot of conflict but offers little in the way of explanatory power and little in the way of working solutions. Aside from the philosophical argument, you can see this is also historically true.
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumGood|13 years ago|reply
In the U.S., all three keep expanding: living space per person keeps growing, as do monthly tech costs, e.g. cable, mobile phone, etc. and there are more and more people choosing long commutes.
These are just the things that occur to me off the top of my head, making me think comparing the past to the present over generations is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison.
[+] [-] wavesounds|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wissler|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdelsonVLandis|13 years ago|reply
The thing is, this article leaves a lot out. Per capita GDP has been rising. What has been happening to the inflation-adjusted hourly wage? It is below what it was in the early 1970s.
I look at the Forbes 400 and heirs like the Koch brothers, or the Waltons or the Mars family are doing well. Or entrepreneurs like Amway's Richard DeVos. Or upper middle class sons of lawyers and congressmen like Gates and Buffett, with rumored screwy mothers of the type that the sons don't kick back and relax once they hit $20 billion, they have to go on.
The majority of people are worse off. I don't primarily look at it as a "moral" thing, I see it as a broken system which will eventually collapse in some manner due to its internal contradictions - just as feudalism did, just as slavery in the US south and ancient Rome. This article is an example of this. Why not just tell the truth, that according to the government, the real hourly wage was better in the early 1970s, that things have gotten worse since then?
Stratification means the white, upper middle class, college educated Americans reading this have no idea what I mean. They are living in their own bubble of VC, congratulatory back-slapping etc. Born on third base and thinking they hit triples.
The point is, why are lying articles like this necessary? Why can't they just tell the truth? The fact that lying and propaganda, which the average wage worker believes no less than Russians believe Pravda, shows the weakness of the system. People don't buy these lies any how. They know. The majority of people - not the SF bay white upper middle class bubble of people.
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
I don't see what the problem is. I like the fact that women work as much as men do. I also like the fact that people in other countries are so productive. It means my family can buy better stuff than they could 40 years ago for a much cheaper price, and someone halfway across the world can put food on their table because of it.
[+] [-] rmah|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|13 years ago|reply
Why do they have a negative outlook? Because none of them are doing what they went to school to do, or even want to do.
I feel lucky, i've been programming since I was 13 years old. I love my job, and i get paid extremely well to do it. Sometimes it can be hard to understand why all of my friends have so much trouble, its easy for me to think of all the things they could have done differently. But the point is, life for non techies is not really great right now, and if you're young with no experience its even worse.
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
As far as war goes, I'm personally not hugely disconcerted by terrorism, but a lot of people seem to be. Osama bin Laden is certainly less of an existential threat than nuclear war was, but people are in a way almost more on edge about it: the possibility that the whole U.S. might get vaporized is one of those things almost too apocalyptic to worry about on a daily basis, while people do worry (often irrationally) that their subway train might get bombed.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|13 years ago|reply
When everyone claims those are the stakes, everything looks like it's life or death.. and every little loss is monumental.
[+] [-] wavesounds|13 years ago|reply
Did you have to take out large amount of debt as soon as you reached adult age to go to college in hopes that you chose the right major so that you could have some hope of paying that back before the interest started compounding against you?
Did you ever witness an attack on your country's largest city on live TV while sitting in a classroom with no idea why someone would do this? Then in response have your government send people you know to fight in a war to destroy wmd's that didnt exist and had nothing to do with the attack?
[+] [-] kiba|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jayschwa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|13 years ago|reply
Nuclear war didn't happenand really after Cuba it should have been clear that it wouldn't happen.
As for crime being higher -- what matter is the _perception_ and in that regard, crime has gotten a lot worse, because there are now so many news papers competing to tell how bad the world is.
As for race riots -- well they happened (in places like LA) and that must have been bad, but really are they worse than the riots in Canada or London?
And you are entirely forgetting terrorism, unemployment and the fear of the government. You didn't have the TSA and the NSA wiretapping everything (granted, properly only because they couldn't do it, technically).
[+] [-] chime|13 years ago|reply
While your generation faced a real, visible threat of political violence, the next few generations face gradual, hidden threats that the current generation has no solution to:
1. Low-skill jobs are going away - be it outsourcing, migrant workers, logistical improvements, advanced software or robots. Imagine the spike in unemployment when Big Box stores automate shelf stocking and implements RFID checkouts. Sure, you will need humans to make, sell, and maintain the robots and new tech. but they will be skilled jobs and most likely fewer in number. You will still have servers and cooks at restaurants but when 50 year olds get laid off from Walmart and Target, they will vie for the same jobs that teenagers trying to support themselves through school do.
2. American Dream is getting harder to achieve - because of global competition, decreasing assistance (from family, society, government), and requirement for higher skill sets. 30 years ago a person could get a college degree with good high school grades and government grants, buy a house with down-payment assistance from family, and have a steady job for decades with a promise of social security and pension. That is rare today, though not impossible. There may be more college graduates today but they are no longer valued as they were a few decades ago. So while blacksmiths and farmers could buy a five acre plot of land and build a house with a barn in 1970s without taking out huge loans, their kids cannot do the same today. If you're 30 and don't make enough to rent a place on your own because of student loans and car payments, things will start to look gloomy. Of course there is a choice of going to cheaper college and buying an $800 car but 30 years ago college graduates had a better standard of living.
3. New problems that the current generation cares about that past didn't as much - Climate change and global equality. I know environmentalism started decades ago and anti-war protests are nothing new. But today's generation no longer considers dictatorship and oppression in distant lands as something you can ignore. I'm not saying every kid with an iPhone in US is actively fighting Kony or Morsi but today they are more aware than ever of injustices happening around the world. Knowing that a thousand people were just killed or imprisoned in a country you want to visit next year makes things look pretty gloomy. Similarly realizing that climate change is happening and is not being addressed by those in power is enough to scare those who hope to be alive in 2050.
I'm not saying world is getting worse. I am saying there are things happening that aren't outright frightening and abrupt like global wars but are still severe enough to worry those who expect to inherit them.
[+] [-] rizzom5000|13 years ago|reply
That could be one reason.
[+] [-] benihana|13 years ago|reply
It's that these damn kids just don't understand everything I had to struggle for. Or maybe, just maybe the older generations have forgotten what it's like being handed a world with unsolved problems.
We are trying to fix things that your generation gave us. Things like an increasingly warming planet, awful race relations, a failed and unjust war on drugs, lack of LGBT rights, and a huge aging entitled population who feel it's my responsibility to pay for their medical expenses. I'm sure my children's generation is going to deal with the issues we haven't solved and will (rightfully) be pissed at us about it.
But on the flip side of that coin, my life is easier than almost any other human's in the history of this planet. I live the life of a king from 80 years ago. I have the sum of human knowledge in my pocket. I can communicate with people across the globe for like no money. I have access to art and information and entertainment that my parents could only dream of. It's important to keep perspective on what's really going on.
[+] [-] arjunnarayan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaemon|13 years ago|reply
Flying should be the ultimate fun thing ever to do!
That's great!
I randomly take flights somewhere and back just for that fun!
[+] [-] chm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] charleshaanel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
The article notes, "Many Americans, for instance, are convinced that 'half of all marriages end in divorce,'" but that was somewhat of an exaggeration even at the time of peak divorce rates. The statistical fallacy that prompted that mistaken belief was comparing the rate of new divorces each year to the rate of new first marriages each year, ignoring the tens of millions of people who were already married and who stayed married.
A federal government survey, "First Marriages in the United States: Data From the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth" (March 22, 2012)
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf
which may or may not have focused particularly on this issue, projects,
"In 2006–2010, the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 10 years was 68% for women and 70% for men. Looking at 20 years, the probability that the first marriages of women and men will survive was 52% for women and 56% for men in 2006–2010. These levels are virtually identical to estimates based on vital statistics from the early 1970s (24). For women, there was no significant change in the probability of a first marriage lasting 20 years between the 1995 NSFG (50%) and the 2006–2010 NSFG (52%) (Table 5). The remainder of first marriages that ended within a 20-year period were dissolved by divorce, separation, or rarely, by death."
The study also notes that marriages have a higher probability of lasting longer if both members of the couple have higher levels of education rather than lower, and were married a year or more before the birth of their first child.
Here is an article that explains the commonplace statistical fallacy:
"Divorce Rate: It's Not as High as You Think" New York Times (April 19, 2005)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html
". . . . In 2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
"But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will."
On other points mentioned in the article and other comments here, work hours have certainly not gone down to the level predicted when I was a child, when rising productivity was predicted to cut the typical work week to as few as twenty hours per week. Instead, personal consumption has gone up to levels unimaginable in the 1960s, with many people flying on jets to vacations in foreign countries, and houses being larger than they have ever been, and cars more powerful and luxurious (and fuel-efficient) than ever before. Americans still work a lot to keep up with the Joneses, and workers in other countries still work almost as much as what has long defined "full-time" employment in law, but people now regard as routine daily spending purchases that once would have been deemed luxuries.
From the article: "The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events -- though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain's propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies." This probably is the most economical explanation for why many people don't notice much of the gradual progress they have enjoyed in their lifetimes. Human cognitive biases run in the direction of noticing and focusing on problems (for good evolutionary reasons), and lack of problems fades into the background and is not noticed.
[+] [-] brandall10|13 years ago|reply
Perhaps the down votes are because you're quoting a study that samples 20 year increments when marriage is supposed to be a lifetime event.
Many marriages stay together, rather unhappily, until the last child is out of the household. This study pretty much ignores that segment of the issue. And issues beyond that. That it's almost 50% within 20 years actually makes the issue seem worse.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucian303|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucee054|13 years ago|reply
The term working class was invented for a reason.