> Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men.
This one is a PC-friendly thing to say, the opposite point of view is not. If you haven't read it, I must urge you to check out the excellent "Is There Anything Good About Men?" essay by Roy Baumeister:
Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents. Things like that. Definitely check out Baumeister's essay.
> In any arena you look — education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities and so on — it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history.
At the risk of being controversial, I would point out unhappiness, depression, and suicide are all massively up in those countries among women. I think - I'm hoping - that we're in a transition phase while society gets acclimated to having women as equal participants in the labor market. For a while, being traditionally feminine (focusing on beauty, kind temperament and disposition, managing a household, and raising children) was out of fashion and seen to be a lesser choice, despite the fact that women who act in that traditional role actually have higher happiness levels, lower depression levels, and lower suicide levels than women who are working in so-so positions. As the risk of being controversial, I'll say I firmly understand why a woman would give up these traditional pursuits of being a good wife and mother in order to be an excellent scientist, architect, artist, or entrepreneur, but I have no idea why a woman would rather be a low level middle manager or a clerk instead of being a wife, mother, and active member of the community. Motherhood seems to me like it'd be more enjoyable and more rewarding than all but the most satisfying and self-actualizing of professions. I know this is controversial, but I'm hoping society will adjust to a point where traditional femininity can peacefully coexist as a respected choice for women on how to live their lives, because I think it can be a suitable, powerful, happy, and meaningful for choice for many women, and it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days.
>>>but I'm hoping society will adjust to a point where traditional femininity can peacefully coexist as a respected choice for women on how to live their lives, because I think it can be a suitable, powerful, happy, and meaningful for choice for many women<<<
That's the linchpin you see. The truth is that femininity and masculinity are a continuous spectrum of variation and almost all such statements tend to prescribe something or the other. To tell you the truth I fulfill the stereotype you are proposing in quite a few ways, but most women don't. Just as most males aren't the fist beating cavemen they are made out to be. Why can't we let people just be?
Why do we need to box them into little boxes, so that they conveniently fit into our tiny little realities? Why do we need to make statements like, it's tough to be a man/woman/american/indian/african american/whatever category you can come up with?
It is shocking just how ingrained this is into our consciousness and even though I can articulate it I still can't get it out of my head. I still box people in.
Look earlier women who had it in them to become scientists were told explicitly that they should become housewives. Take a look at Joan Feynman; her thesis adviser told her the only geometry she needed to learn was the geometry of the cobwebs she should be cleaning at home. Imagine what would have happened if she would have given up. We would have lost a great mind to something as abhorrent as prejudice.
The same lesson still exists. Let the kid be. Let her grow up into who she wants to be. Not who society thinks she ought to be. She will be depressed if you take the fight out of her so that you can squeeze her into a housewife. She will be depressed if you force her onto a stage against her wish. She will be depressed in all the cases where you push her into becoming something she isn't. I think that this is what you were trying to say.
On the other hand, what boggles my mind is why aren't more males taught to exit their boxes and give a hand in raising their kids. Raising a human being isn't a full time job if it's a shared responsibility and I think expecting anything other than that is just another small box.
No, I am sorry it is not. Anybody can stay at home. Not anyone can start up a company, or work at a senior level, or even work at a technical level. There are plenty of people who could never achieve that level of competence, they can stay at home.
I know a lot of terrible parents, and they aren't all dead-beats or alcoholics, they're just assholes who treat their families like shit. If one of the parental figures is an emotionally abusive person, then it'd probably be a net benefit to the family if that person were a workaholic who doesn't spend much time with the kids. Sure, they probably shouldn't have had a family in the first place, but it doesn't always work out that way. Not just anyone can stay at home and raise the family.
This poster didn't say that anyone could be good at staying at home. They said anyone can stay at home. I think this is true and don't understand the downvotes.
Saying 'no' to making it more socially acceptable for a man to be a stay-at-home dad, and then going on about how 'not everyone can do X' seems to make the following statement indirectly:
Only men are capable of (starting up a company | working at a senior
level | working at a technical level). There are plenty of people who
could never achieve that level of competence (namely women), they
can stay at home.
Unless the poster is making that (very sexist) statement, then I fail to see how he/she is in disagreement with the poster they were responding to. Saying that it shouldn't be socially acceptable for people with great skills to let them languish by becoming a stay-at-home dad is not the same as saying that it should not be socially acceptable at all for a man to be a stay-at-home dad. [ Though in general, the idea that society should pressure people to make decisions that are only in society's best short-term interests. Who's to say that someone working at the 'senior level' is making a larger contribution to society then someone that stays at home to raise the next generation? ]
While I agree that we shouldn't put people into boxes (figuratively or literally), the problem with what you're suggesting is that people become depressed when they don't know what society expects of them. This may be inconvenient, but it's true. Telling someone, "You can do whatever you want with your life; we're not going to tell you what to do" is effectively telling them, "We're not going to tell you what society values and expects from you; you won't get any guidance from us." It can be almost as bad to have too much choice as it is to have too little.
Actually, this is a fallacy that you start believing the traditional parenting point of view. I think that a parent's role is basically teaching the kids how to make the right choice. Not making the choice for them.
It's true that early on you need to nurture and protect them by taking stuff into your hands, but by the age they need to start thinking about stuff like this. They should be mature enough to do that, because you can't be there for them all their life telling them what to do, can you? It's just that your role as a nurturer needs to evolve with time as the dynamics of the relationship changes, and you need to respect that. Not fight it.
The problem is that there are an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to what to do with one's life. Parents need to at least make it clear that there's a relatively small subset of these choices which are acceptable. (Not a handful of choices, but maybe a couple dozen or so.)
> it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days.
The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places.
And if you don't have children and your spouse is out working you might as well go to work yourself, rather than to hang around the house all day, and increase your expendable income.
edit: Yet another factor, it makes you feel good to not be a dependent but to bring in your own share of the household money.
Funny. An assistant at my Dad's work figured she was paying almost her salary in babysitting costs and other expenses for things she could do herself if she had time. So she quit.
My dad calls it the pay-your-neighbor-so-he-can-pay-his-neighbor phenomenon. Uncle Sam makes the most money in that relationship. He makes nothing when you babysit your own kid; he makes plenty when you hire someone to do the same thing(and someone hires you to do their thing).
Now why would that get modded down, it is a well known joke that school is 'cheap daycare' amongst people that have both parents working full time. Once the children hit school age they are in school for the same amount of time that they would have been in daycare otherwise, and schooling costs much less than daycare. Which is weird, because daycare effectively is a school (one adult supervising a bunch of youngsters) without any obligation or license to teach.
Huh? I'm not even joking. I don't look at school as day care, but whether you think that or you don't, you're not paying for someone to watch the kids while they're there.
This isn't politics. It's a simple fact. You stick out 5 years or so with very expensive child care (maybe 4, for many families, where someone stays at home for the first year), and then two-income families make sense again.
Oh. You still need to pay for after-school child care; that's what I was referring to. School here gets out at 3:00PM; we get home from work around 6:00PM.
None of those things are scheduled so consistently and tightly that they replace an after-school sitter; they mostly make life harder for parents, not easier.
Generally the ideal is co-op; that's what my parents did. I know it's somewhat a radical idea, but you can make friends with other parents. Even with two or three families your individual responsibilities become much more manageable. Each parent can take off early once a week and 7-8 children come over to hang out. You do it right and they won't even really need supervision.
And since you've fostered relationships with the parents of your friends' children (or fostered your childrens' relationships with your friends' children) odds are there will be enough overlap in after-school activities that rides home are equally simplified.
Of course, this sort of stuff does take planning and relationship building, but generally it will be a lot less trouble than having a single-income household.
I'm on a first-name, share-an-occasional-beer basis with every parent on my block (and there are many), and my perception is that this kind of arrangement is not as common or simple as you're making it out to be.
It seems fraught; taking care of someone else's children is a serious commitment. If you screw up your schedule, people lose half a day of work. After-school child care just isn't expensive enough to be worth this hassle.
This isn't meant personally, but from a wide anthropological perspective, I suspect "giving certified professionals money to take care of your children" is farther from the norm than "having trusted friends in your community take care of your children". Just a small aside, possibly worth some thought.
Yes, that also happens quite a lot, the cost of having someone look after your children is substantial. I've heard school be referred to as the cheapest child minders that could be found.
We chose daycare because of the long-term implications. Some careers are harder to rebuild, so we took the hit for a few years in order to be in a better place (career wise if not financially) later.
High taxes have a tendency to mean cheaper child care. In general countries with high taxes have subsidised child care.
I believe that high taxes would rather put a stop to the one-earner household since marginal effects on two incomes at X is usually a lot less than the tax on one income of 2X.
A society without children is called dead the next generation. Not that I'm pro-subsidies (never used any) but I can see why there would be some collective advantage about the previous generation having had children (that's why you're here...) and we extend that to the next. This also benefits those without children because they end up getting a pension from other people's working children. (your pension typically isn't money that you put in the bank, contrary to what most people seem to think).
Someone at my office had a kid not long ago, and after he and his wife weighed daycare options versus her returning from maternity leave, they realized it was pretty much a wash.
It's certainly not a wash once you factor in the opportunity cost of sitting at home and letting your skills and contact network fall to the wayside. It's a lot easier to find a job (or get your old job back) if you start working as soon as your child is old enough for daycare than if you wait 6 years for your child to start school. In addition your salary after having worked those years will probably be quite a bit higher than your starting salary after having stayed at home for those years.
Agreed, it's a whole different lifestyle. My own family's culture is such that the kids are expected to grow up and support the parents. So when you grow up, the parents don't need a job. My friends in the US find this super odd but that is pretty standard in many Indian cultures.
Also, as you are growing up, the parents typically make a bigger investment than an average parent. I never have to "repay" my Dad any loan. Nor does he need to repay me. Does it all balance out in the end? It may or may not; it's pretty irrelevant.
My mom gave up practicing medicine after her first kid. She never really had to worry about not being able to return because she didn't plan to.
The money is not the only factor that can make it a wash. The practicalities of where suitable day care is located and the hours they operate mean that for many people returning to work just isn't an option, even if you can afford it. My wife worked freelance in TV before having our daughter. The unsociable hours alone meant that it was going to be unlikely she could return to work, despite being desperate to work again. Add the fact that no local childcare is able to offer 5 days a week without a year or more's notice. Then add the fact that her salary would pay only about 50% of the childcare costs. Add the fact that my own work + commute means I'd never be able to drop off or pick up my daughter in time. It doesn't add up. Maybe we need to move country :)
The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places.
Which places?
The fact is, plenty of people survive and overfeed themselves in spite of working less than 27 weeks/year (80% of the poor fall into this category). If a person can't feed their family working full time, they need to move out of Manhattan.
Because everybody lives in Manhattan? The world is a lot larger than just the US, and even in the US if you've moved out of Manhattan (say to one of those suburbs) and you have a family of four to feed you'll be surprised how much month there is left at the end of your money as a single earner.
Overfeeding is more related to what you eat than the money you spend on it, in fact it is easier to overfeed on cheap food than it is on better grade food.
Well, of course it's easier to overfeed on cheap food; you don't run out of money as quickly, and unsurprisingly, the food with the most calories per dollar is also the food that contains the most calories per gram: pure fats and carbohydrates. (Pure alcohol and protein are a bit more expensive, I'll admit, but even pure gluten is pretty cheap.)
Food in the US is much more expensive in the majority of the world. I imagine that in the Netherlands it's even more expensive. Still, home-cooked adequate nutrition in the US costs a great deal less than junk food. McDonald's, Popeye's, and Frito-Lay can't even come close to competing with dried corn, dried beans, dried brown rice, soybean and canola oil, potatoes, squash, onions, collards, carrots, ramen, eggs, multivitamins, oranges, bananas, molasses, oatmeal, and the occasional spinach, lettuce, tomato, and cucumber.
(This was even true when I lived in a poor inner-city black neighborhood in Dayton, where everything in the supermarket cost more, and you couldn't take the carts out into the parking lot. Supermarket prices were a lot cheaper in the rich neighborhoods, and I went to Aldi maybe once a month to stock up on the stuff that was cheap there.)
You have to be smart and fairly industrious to cook. If you can't hold down a job, odds are you can't cook well enough to make it a serious value proposition over pre-packaged and restaurant fare.
No, you don't have to be smart to cook. I don't know if you even have to be smart to cook well. I suspect not, because I learned to cook good food pretty quickly; someone who was even dumber than I am might take a little longer, but it still wouldn't be a substantial fraction of a human lifespan.
It does take work, but not a huge amount of work, especially if the aim is to feed your family, not to cook well. Oranges and bananas, you don't even have to cook. A peanut-butter sandwich is two minutes if you already have bread and peanut butter. Cooking brown rice or lentils involves dumping a measuring cup into a pot three or four times and setting a timer. Same thing's true of eggs, oatmeal, polenta, ramen, and grits. Other beans, you have to dump into a pot of water the night before, and you probably ought to sort them so you don't bite a rock, which might take five or ten minutes for a big pot. A big pot of beans and a big pot of rice can satisfy the caloric and protein needs of a family of four for a few days.
And if you dump garlic, onions, butter, soy sauce, salt, pepper, mayonnaise, and hot sauce on any random barely-edible non-sweet crap, you can get it up to the level of McDonald's or Popeye's pretty quick.
There are some cheap foods that require a lot of work. Collards are a pain. Baking your own bread may be cheaper than buying it in a store‚ but it's a lot of work. And about any vegetable you use in a dish is gonna need some slicing. But it doesn't require you to be "industrious" at the level of digging a ditch for eight hours, or working overtime at the bubblebath factory they can't afford to heat.
Now, it's true you aren't born knowing this stuff. You have to learn it, and even if you know it in theory you may not be in the habit of putting it into practice. The soft-drink aisle and the potato chips are pretty tempting. Stopping in at McDonald's on the way home from school is a lot more immediate than stopping at Jewel Osco for a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, even if you evade the peanut butter. And if you've just gotten off your split shift at the call center and you have a couple of kids to feed before you start in on your homework, it's pretty hard to motivate yourself to cook. I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being poor in the US.
I'm just saying the problem with food is not that good food is out of reach.
I'm just saying you have to be able to hold down a job well enough that food is not the primary cost driver for your living expenses. You don't have to be at a HN-level of intelligence/industriousness to do that either, but you do have to be reasonably intelligent.
If you can't hold down a decent job, odds are you aren't going to be much use in the kitchen.
Yup. Food has never in history been cheaper as a proportion of total income. Especially if one person stays home to cook all meals, you can feed a family of four with amazing food for $200 a month.
Yes, you need to move out of Manhattan, and give up non-essentials, but a single person on full-time minimum wage can easily feed and house a family of four. Now if that person actually makes an _average_ wage, they can also afford a car, vacations, and college for the kids (they will get good financial aid at that income level).
It's not the finances, it's the societal expectation.
"...a single person on full-time minimum wage can easily feed and house a family of four."
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not "societal expectations" that cause lots of gainfully employed people in the United States to be part of the working poor and hungry.
As an example, the minimum wage in DC is $8.25, which yields $1320/month. The actual amount would be even lower after taxes, but let's even forget about that.
About the absolute rock bottom price you'll pay for a room in this city is $600/month and that's assuming you're in a group living situation or a pretty bad neighborhood. Since a family of four will need two rooms to be even reasonably comfortable, maybe you luck out and grab a similarly crappy two-bedroom for $900/month. So now, you pay your rent, somehow keep your utilities hovering around $120/month (good luck with that) and you've got $300/month left.
But wait, now you've got to get to work (and to the grocery store, etc.). Minimum bus fare in this city is $1.50. If you (and just you, not your kids or spouse) make a round trip every day plus, say, three extra trips a month, you will spend about $100.
So now you've got $200 per month left to feed and clothe four people. But what about insurance? Savings? Unforeseen expenses? Doing something nice with your kids every now and again?
At what point does any of this sound easy to you?
If you want to be ignorant, that's your business, but please try not to peddle this BS to others who don't know any better. It's really irresponsible to further the notion that those less fortunate than us are having a difficult time making ends meet because of societal expectations. Ugh.
You've got a great theory. And yet, it somehow does not fit the data.
As of 2001 (the most recent data I've seen), more than 2/3 of poor households had at least 2 rooms/person, and only 6% were overcrowded. Just under 3/4 owned a car.
In the same year, 80% of the poor neither had nor were looking for a job, so bus fare is irrelevant to most of them. (This number hasn't changed much up to 2008, I haven't seen 2009 data.)
The Heritage Foundation study assailed the Census Bureau's definition of poverty. My point made no comment about that; I was just debunking the idea that a family of four can live "easily" on a single minimum wage income, which is preposterous.
I agree - which is why MOST low-income families of four have a parent who works two minimum wage jobs, which pushes them just above the 'cant make it' threshold (hopefully).
These must be low income families above the poverty line. Below the poverty line, the typical household is supported by 800 hours of work/year (the 8 hour work week).
" I was just debunking the idea that a family of four can live "easily" on a single minimum wage income, which is preposterous."
An idea that you made up yourself to fight with, and was never supported by anyone else. If karma points were made of straw, you'd be the undisputed champion.
My quotation was "a single person on full-time minimum wage can easily feed and house a family of four". This you confirmed, and it says nothing about other desirable expenses, such as savings, nice clothing and health insurance. The straw man you made out of it is
"I was just debunking the idea that a family of four can live "easily" on a single minimum wage income".
Either you can't read and understand an argument, or you haven't paid attention to the context and the point I was making. I never claimed you're going to live a happy and fulfilling life on minimum wage, that's just a straw man that you chose to put up. Engaging in such "tactics" for a couple of karma points is BS at best and dishonest at worst.
The grand-parent claim for my post is "a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places". (By "feed" most people understand food and housing, not insurance, savings and unforeseen expenses.) My point, which you didn't bother to even read completely before coming here and yelling slogans, was that _even on minimum wage_ one person can pay for housing and food for a family of four (and you have yourself proven this point even for a relatively expensive location such as DC); therefore, _on average wage_, it's possible to do OK with such an arrangement (assuming one person to stay at home and cook). Since financially it works out for the _average_ family, it's social norms that cause the typical situation to be different.
You should really work on your reading comprehension.
I never claimed you're going to live a happy and fulfilling life on minimum wage, that's just a straw man that you chose to put up.
Actually, I didn't claim you said that. I simply quoted you saying that "one can easily feed and house a family of four" on a minimum wage income. That's an actual statement you made and I rebutted ... I'm looking at those exact words from you on the screen right now. So where's the strawman? Or the lack of reading comprehension? Or are you actually claiming that you didn't say it?
Your post, which I quote below, shows that in DC, on minimum wage, you can cover rent, utilities and bus fare for a family of four, and still have about $200 a month left for food. It's exactly my claim, plus I claim that the said $200 are enough to buy ingredients if you cook at home. Is it a great life? No. But it would be OK if you had an _average_ salary for the working person instead. If the person staying at home cooked, did groceries and spent time with the kids, those kids would probably have an even better life than one based on the XBox and microwave dinners.
"As an example, the minimum wage in DC is $8.25, which yields $1320/month. The actual amount would be even lower after taxes, but let's even forget about that.
About the absolute rock bottom price you'll pay for a room in this city is $600/month and that's assuming you're in a group living situation or a pretty bad neighborhood. Since a family of four will need two rooms to be even reasonably comfortable, maybe you luck out and grab a similarly crappy two-bedroom for $900/month. So now, you pay your rent, somehow keep your utilities hovering around $120/month (good luck with that) and you've got $300/month left.
But wait, now you've got to get to work (and to the grocery store, etc.). Minimum bus fare in this city is $1.50. If you (and just you, not your kids or spouse) make a round trip every day plus, say, three extra trips a month, you will spend about $100.
So now you've got $200 per month left to feed and clothe four people. But what about insurance? Savings? Unforeseen expenses? Doing something nice with your kids every now and again?"
The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places.
Is this true? Surely the cost of living has decreased over the last 100 years, so it must be easier for a single breadwinner to feed a family than it was back then.
Not where I live and this is a pretty rich country. Between your rent/mortgage, your energy bill, public transportation costs, taxes, mandatory health insurance and food a single person income is not enough to make ends meet. And that's when you don't own a car. Typically a single person income is about 1700 euros net take home, and your costs will be slightly above that (for the above mentioned family of four).
The breakdown: mortgage 500 (no paying towards the principal, so you're stuck with the debt) food 350 (yes, it's that expensive), health insurance 280 to about 320 depending on the coverage, energy 100 to 250 (depending on season and insulation), commute 150 or more, clothing, various taxes (on top of your income tax) and 'unforeseen' will easily eat up the remainder.
If you live in 'subsidized housing' it gets a bit better.
What you listed adds up to about 1400 on average. If you can't pay the principal, mortgage seems like unnecessary debt. Also, I'm not familiar with supermarket prices in Europe, but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.
You'll have to because affordable housing is so rare that you end up buying a house because the mortgage roughly equals the rent elsewhere. Of course then you do have to pay for the maintenance.
> but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.
That's from direct experience and believe me I don't throw money around if I don't have to. A very basic bit of shopping for 3 or 4 days costs you 50 bucks easily, if you're careful you can whittle that down a bit but not by much. And then of course I still have to get to the cheap supermarket and back, which is 20 km by car, if I bought it in the one around the corner I'd pay quite a bit more. No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.
Please note that I left things like cell phones, internet connection and TV subscription, newspapers etc out because they're not strictly speaking 'needs'.
> No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.
Can you install a loft bed and put the freezer under the bed? Do you have any space outdoors where you could put a freezer? Have you tried buying dried foods only in bulk?
You have to pay 200-300€ for health insurance in .nl (or is this just a tax taken out up front)? Wow, my complaints about the UK are ratcheting down a notch, I don't pay a bean, except for dental (as and when).
Increasing the size of the workforce will tend to put downward pressure on wages. So if you double the workforce I expect you'd see pretty serious downward pressure on wages, maybe to the point where previously one partner working could support the family (historically the norm), but now you need both partners working. Though of course adding women to the workforce has had lots of positive effects, so maybe the overall improvement in the economy cancels out the downward pressure on wages. I am not an economist.
Exactly right. Having both people working not only increases the work force, it increases peoples disposable income driving prices above what a single income can afford. I.e. either through downward wage pressure or upward price pressure, buying power goes down.
"Increasing the size of the workforce will tend to put downward pressure on wages."
I am also not an economist, but you're only covering the supply of workers. Do more workers = more money being spent = more products/services demanded = increased demand for workers? In other words, does it even out?
I have read that wages have decreased in the last few generations while dual income houses became normal, but I don't know whether those are cause and effect or have common causes.
I'm not an economist either, but heuristically I'd expect the precise opposite to be true: the products/services with elastic demand curves (that is, luxuries) tend to require time to consume in addition to money. Simply having more money available will not necessarily increase demand for these things.
If you wanted to make this argument, I think a better way to approach it would be from the supply side. The supply of goods and services should increase, because well, that's what workers produce. This should theoretically lower the prices of existing goods and services, because increased supply of a commodity puts downward pressure on pricing.
That's all in theory. I highly doubt it's anywhere near that simple. The thing about macroeconomics is that it's somewhere between cargo cultism and ancient mythology: people compare situations that superficially resemble each other, and then invent models that explain several situations but are entirely untestable.
This is what people somehow don't get. If cost of living goes down, so do the salaries. How do you think those decreases are paid for? For most any business you can name the biggest item in the budget will be human resources. If you want to cut prices this is where you have to cut to have any real effect.
In absolute terms the cost of living (when comparing with a constant standard of living though!) has decreased significantly vis-a-vis median salaries over the last 30 years. Most of the gains were made in increased production efficiencies. I think you severely underestimate the amount of gains that have been made there over that time. Total food budget is 5 to 10% of middle class household income in most of the West; it was a multiple of that only 100 years ago!
What I'm saying is that (inflation-adjusted) cost of living has been going down for the last couple of decades, and that salaries have gone up in absolute inflation-adjusted terms. You can argue that this trend won't hold for the future for a myriad of reasons but I wouldn't support such a view.
I think that's a little trickier to pin down than that. Yes food costs less. Housing? Maybe. But now things you didn't have 100 years ago are requirements. For example, if you don't have a phone today you're going to have a hard time finding and keeping a job. Keeping someone from 100 years ago alive would certainly cost less than it did then but you have to also consider if they could function in today's society on that money, otherwise it's not a realistic comparison.
Yes this is true, but only to a certain extent. It's why I put in the "when comparing with a constant standard of living though", but that is trickier than just that one line of course, as you correctly point out.
Still many of the factors that are considered 'requirements' today aren't in my book, but of course this can be subject to discussion. To take your telephone example, here in the Netherlands (an advanced Western country by all measures) I don't know of many jobs that one wouldn't be able to get or keep without a phone. For those where you're on-call, you are provided with one.
Similarly, cost of living statistics by our national statistics institute changed their household budgets a few years ago - the tv has been a 'basic necessity' for decades (in these statistics), but the budget was upped several hundred euros because now LCD tv's are the norm. Still I think it's stupid to budget 800 euros every 5 years for a TV into a 'basic necessity' budget.
I remain convinced that even after accounting for an adjusted lifestyle to the level of a 'basic lifestyle', and where 'basic needs' have evolved to match societal progress, the increase in income has outpaced the rise of cost of living.
There are efficiency explosions now and again that create huge shifts, but mostly you just get little tweaks here and there (e.g. increase factory output by 5% or even 50%). Not numbers that can touch sacking half your staff or replacing all of them with a production provider in e.g. China.
Completely wrong. If that were the case then the cost of developing 10k cheap electronic gadgets would be the same in the US vs. China. The US workers would cost more but make more in the same time.
This is not the case at all. The Chinese can produce vastly more items than the US can for the same price/time. Do you have any examples where some US company can produce things as such an improved production speed compared to China?
You are right that richer countries are not more productive in all sectors. E.g. a Swiss hair cut won't be as superior to a Somalian one, as the differences in wages suggest.
My guts tell me that the US is more productive than China in, say, software development and probably finance. But don't trust my guts. Do some research yourself.
One has to be careful how one measures these things. It's easy to get into tautology land ("Who is more productive? The more expensive one. How do you know they're more productive? Because they're more expensive").
I agree - if anything, being a stay-at-home mother is seen as a luxurious option these days. Most of the mothers I know dream of the time they can quit their job and just be a mother, instead of having to juggle work and kids.
>Most of the mothers I know dream of the time they can quit their job and just be a mother, instead of having to juggle work and kids.
I'm a bloke, but we (my wife and I) share running of our business and care of the children (one toddler, one infant) pretty close to 50-50.
Effectively between us we're SAH parenting.
How?
Those who say they envy us aren't prepared to live in poverty in order to look after their own kids. We four now live on about 40% of what we two lived on - less than a single minimum wage. It's very hard work particularly with no nearby grandparents.
Well I'm in the same boat as you - living on a reduced (and uncertain) income and both SAH running the business (though it's more like 95% me, 5% her).
I should have qualified my statement - it's a luxury to stay at home and be a mother and maintain the same standard of living. Ie, having a husband with a high income.
As the risk of being controversial, I'll say I firmly don't understand why a man would give up these apparently non-traditional pursuits of being a good husband and father in order to be an excellent scientist, architect, artist, or entrepreneur, and I have no idea why a man would rather be a low level middle manager or a clerk instead of being a husband, father, and active member of the community. Fatherhood seems to me like it'd be more enjoyable and more rewarding than all but the most satisfying and self-actualizing of professions.
All of that, but particularly the last line certainly applies to me, and I feel I'm fairly well along the line of self-actualizing professions.
you make an interesting point and clearly not everything about the modern situation for women (or men for that matter) is a clear gain over the past. However taken as a whole you have to ask whether or not the life of an average woman is better due to additional education, legal and voting rights...
I would say it probably is, i don't think increased suicide rates or depression rates are high enough to actually effect the average experience. though that is obviously just an opinion and could do with some data
I think that additional education, legal and voting rights, and all of the other benefits of modern society are a net good for women. That said, I think that society's support systems for women are still playing catch-up.
In general, young people need some form of emotional support and mentoring as they grow up. Young men and women need to be protected from the emotional and sexual depredations of other men and women. I'm not saying to lock them away in single-sex institutions, but there is an actual function performed by the over-protective father and mother in traditional society. Truth and decency should be the order of the day. There is room for that and freedom. In fact, I would say that without truth and decency, one only has a false freedom.
> "by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men." ... the opposite point of view ... Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents.
Having children generally makes your life rougher. Across history, women have rarely had the choice to opt out of that, while men often have. Furthermore, women have generally borne the brunt of the enormous workload of childraising. The statistic you cite, therefore, supports the point you claim it to undermine.
Having children makes your life rougher if you have to drive them places and arrange for their entertainment or detainment every hour of the day for fear of being arrested for child abuse.
It's a bit different if they're going to be with you on the farm and, within a few years, helping out.
I don't see why being a house-husband couldn't be a suitable, meaningful, and happy occupation neither. You made some interesting remarks but didn't push it to its logical end.
> Well, to me that's a reason not to read the essay, because it sounds quite like a naturalistic fallacy to care whether someone had offspring.
I think you'll find it a thought-provoking essay regardless of your personal ethics. It's well-written, has lots of numbers, and brings up a lot of counterintuitive/counter-cultural points. I found it through Hacker News originally, actually.
Frankly life is pretty shitty for (e.g.) rural peasants of both genders, and while in general in the past men had more independence and ability to choose their life direction, etc., I’ve always been pretty skeptical of attempts to rank the two in any absolute way. Men got killed in high numbers in war. Women got raped by invading armies. Men worked extremely physically demanding jobs that made their muscles and bones give out by age 40. Women worked differently physically demanding jobs that resulted in terrible repetitive stress injuries. Men often had legal rights over their wives, but of course had all kinds of ways of exerting their own influence and control. In some societies, many men were stuck as lonely bachelors while women were forced to become bottom-of-the-totem-pole second or third wives. Etc.
There is absolutely an important and in many ways terrible impact on a society from having one gender mostly in charge of the official hierarchies of social and political control. But it’s also the easiest thing to examine and understand from afar, and so it can overshadow other (maybe just as important) parts of the culture.
[edit: I skimmed the essay under discussion and part of it makes loosely the same point as this latter. One thing it does which I find annoying is that in using Larry Summers’s sacking as an example it ignores that the faculty wanted Summers out long before his famous comments, for completely unrelated reasons. His misdeed was not “to think thoughts that are not allowed to be thought” and to characterize it that way is quite misleading. I also am annoyed at the analysis of histograms of grades, test scores, and salaries as implying more about innate ability than they do about cultural assimilation.]
Men worked extremely physically demanding jobs that made their muscles and bones give out by age 40
Yes, this is kinda the little secret of Feminism. They see that men have "good" jobs like CEOs and want some of that for themselves, and who wouldn't? But they overlook that men are also collecting the garbage, working in the mines, and generally doing all of society's dirty, dangerous jobs. Where're the calls for "equality" in those industries?
"When you think of a sanitation worker — riding on a garbage truck and dumping trash can after trash can — most people would picture a big, tough guy in their minds. But out of 7,000 uniformed city workers nicknamed "the strongest," 200 of them are women. In honor of women's history month, the department celebrated some of the the first females to suit up in green. Verilyn Gallo was only the third woman in the department. Now, 21 years later, she says when people see her drive the largest Sanitation truck there is they still can't believe it:
GALLO: I drive "the wrecker" — any piece of equipment that the department of sanitation has — I could pick it up. I have people in the truck - who say, you don't drive that big truck and I say, "oh yes I do."
REPORTER: Sixty-year-old Gallo says she still enjoys her job and the physicality of the work and is no hurry to retire."
The original claim seemed to be that women were hypocritically wanting equality only for the good CEO-type jobs.
How the original poster missed the many women who have chosen to be (and often fought hard against the same prejudice they meet in "prestigious" careers to be accepted as) police officers, firefighters, soldiers, nightclub bouncers, oil rig workers and do various other dangerous, dirty or under appreciated jobs I have no idea.
But I thought the example presented summed up the issue quite well given the obvious enthusiasm the worker had for her job.
There is certainly an argument to be made that "feminism" is not the best name for itself, but regardless, that is its name and it certainly is true that that is what feminism is. It is not about trying to get more rights for womyn while ignoring the areas of society where men are oppressed. That's total nonsense and completely ignoring the real problem. But that's not what feminism is. Feminism exists to challenge and ultimately destroy the mental programming we've been subjected to that causes us to assign specific roles and rights to people based on what we perceive their gender to be in the first place. This idea of gender is something that oppresses all of us, male, female or whatever, and feminism is a movement to destroy it. Seriously, that really is what it's about, regardless of the impressions you might get from the name.
If `civil rights' means `equal (to whites) rights for non-whites' and `gay rights' means `equal (to straights) rights for gays', then the civil rights and gay rights movements are both `equalism'.
A group which sees itself as oppressed can't just wishy-washily campaign under a banner of `equalism' if it wants to effect change. It must first identify itself as a group of people with something in common, and which is somehow oppressed according to that something. This way it can articulate the problem it sees, and what needs to change. After that change has come about, then we can all just be equal people.
Ah whoops - that was a mistake. But my point still stands that to advance equality can require that a group organise under the banner of an -ism or of x rights.
My comment has nothing to do with ethics. Your prime example sounds like a common logical fallacy, which is independent of my ethics and raises my suspicions about the contents of the essay. I don't understand why I'm being downvoted into oblivion.
If I had downvoted you it would have been because your reason not to read the essay seemed a poor one.
However this assessment that it was a poor reason would have been itself post hoc, since I have already discovered that it's a fairly good essay. In fact the quote about number of descendants doesn't represent the essay well and I'm not sure why your parent chose it. So it's more that you turn out to have made a bad decision, than that your reasoning was unsound.
> Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men.
This one is a PC-friendly thing to say, the opposite point of view is not. If you haven't read it, I must urge you to check out the excellent "Is There Anything Good About Men?" essay by Roy Baumeister:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents. Things like that. Definitely check out Baumeister's essay.
> In any arena you look — education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities and so on — it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history.
At the risk of being controversial, I would point out unhappiness, depression, and suicide are all massively up in those countries among women. I think - I'm hoping - that we're in a transition phase while society gets acclimated to having women as equal participants in the labor market. For a while, being traditionally feminine (focusing on beauty, kind temperament and disposition, managing a household, and raising children) was out of fashion and seen to be a lesser choice, despite the fact that women who act in that traditional role actually have higher happiness levels, lower depression levels, and lower suicide levels than women who are working in so-so positions. As the risk of being controversial, I'll say I firmly understand why a woman would give up these traditional pursuits of being a good wife and mother in order to be an excellent scientist, architect, artist, or entrepreneur, but I have no idea why a woman would rather be a low level middle manager or a clerk instead of being a wife, mother, and active member of the community. Motherhood seems to me like it'd be more enjoyable and more rewarding than all but the most satisfying and self-actualizing of professions. I know this is controversial, but I'm hoping society will adjust to a point where traditional femininity can peacefully coexist as a respected choice for women on how to live their lives, because I think it can be a suitable, powerful, happy, and meaningful for choice for many women, and it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days.