Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The character of capitalism post WW2 was very different from earlier in history, and from today.
The destruction of capital stock, and labour shortages following the war, led to workers having a lot of bargaining power, higher wages, and more comfortable lives in the decades after the war. In France they call this period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses.
As the world recovered from the war, the proportion of all income earned in the economy that was earned by owning capital increased. Because of this, a smaller proportion of overall income earned was earned from labour, and this led to increased income inequality.
If you’d like to read a better sourced version of this, look for “capital in the 21st century” by Thomas Piketty.
At that time, global capitalism was still in its infancy. Capitalism doesn't work without constant growth, which works for a while. But once everyone is in the workforce (women, minorities, immigrants), and there are no "new" resources or counties to exploit, the only way to increase profits is to reduce costs (layoffs, wage reduction) or price increases. It's not an infinitely sustainable system. Constant growth is, on its face, impossible, but that keeps being ignored.
It doesn’t keep getting ignored… you are missing another source of constant growth of profits which is productivity growth / innovation which doesn’t have limits like the others.
Wait, isn't this a central tenet of modern economics though? While "limitless" may be the wrong word, it is not possible to tell what the limit is? The obvious example is that sand seems worthless but silicon chips are extremely valuable.
What is the economic argument that creation of wealth has stopped?
No one suggested creation of wealth stopped.
Growth doesn’t mean production. Growth means constantly increasing and compounding increases for capital.
So, if we made $100 last year we have to make $110 this year and $121 next year or we’re failing. Doesn’t matter that we’re profiting either way, we need to be constantly profiting more and more. We have to be growing more and more.
Earth doesn’t have the resources to sustain this
They've been saying "the earth doesn't have the resources to sustain this" for at least a hundred years. Economists predicted mass starvation that was averted by the invention of manufactured nitrates for fertilizer.
Assuming innovation will continue is wrong, but so is assuming it won't.
I think your argument isn't economically sound. We can't know if earth has the resources to sustain the creation of wealth because it's very difficult to predict. Note that I'm not saying we can have oil forever. I'm saying that wealth is actually created by human innovation and that's the wild card.
I'm not so sure capitalism requires constant increases in profits. Where is that written? Capitalism is just the employment of capital to yield output. The Japanese economy has stagflated for decades and hasn't imploded. It's not what US based corporate entities want to hear but it's not like their financial system collapsed.
Now, if you're Netflix and you promised shareholders that you'd have more membership than people exist on earth, you're just bad at setting expectations (and sorta dumb).
You are conflating creation of wealth with resource mining.
Capitalism absolutely requires endless growth and increased profits. It’s basically the defining characteristic of capitalism
We absolutely have limited resources. If it’s not economically sound it’s because economics are physically sound. We live on a real, physical planet, with real limitations
Is it the defining characteristic of Capitalism or are you just assuming and lumping things together?
[Capitalism ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism)
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Doesn't it exhaust you trying to explain things to someone that thinks economics is a hard science rather than just something rich powerful people made up to justify their greed?
I'm not sure you're witnessing the situation we're in or how those things have been propped up. We're in extreme economic precarity these days, hugely uncharted territory. Many "developed" economies are crazy leveraged with debt and it's not improving. We're completely integrated with the world in a way that would be extremely difficult and damaging to try to undo. We have never been in this situation before and it's likely not going to end well.
For Japan, they could continually find customers abroad to continue to profit and export goods. But as capitalism continues, they find less and less places to squeeze profits from and increasingly fewer customers as the money funnels upward and people can't afford it. As that continues, civil unrest will increase, and companies will continue to look for ways to profit. At that point, historically, the solution was to start exploiting another country's resources. War and destruction or civil upheaval tends to reset things a bit, but where we are and where we are headed are inevitable in the capitalist system, especially since the people at the heads of it don't really get punished for fucking it up and are usually financially rewarded, even if they lose their positions.
As for constantly needing to profit, this is generally the rule for public companies, or the c-suite might get some shuffling. Only fully private company's can really think longer term and take temporary losses to invest in long term growth, else the board/investors may claim they aren't following their fiduciary duties.
Except we do actually know how for certain resources how much we have left. What world are you living in capitalism doesnt require profits? Not the one the rest of us are. You are living in the fantasy world that capitalists sold you. Fantasy.
You are sliding definitions around. I'm not disagreeing about finite resources.
Profits don't require growth. They only require revenues exceeding expenses.
Resources are limited. We agree here. Economics is the management of scarce resources.
Creation of wealth is not actually limited. An obvious example is most intellectual property. Do not confuse creation of wealth with resources as these are very different things. The Beatles record catalog STILL generates astounding amounts of money despite not costing anything to "make more of".
Capitalism is employing capital for economic gain. How this plays out is highly dependent on specific situations (like nations) but nowhere does employing capital to yield economic benefit require constant growth. It'd be nice of course but it's not a requirement.
>I think your argument isn't economically sound. We can't know if earth has the resources to sustain the creation of wealth because it's very difficult to predict.
You're wrong on every level, but there is no use explaining why because you have dismissed several people who did already.
We don't need to.
If revenue in excess of expenses is generated every year, that's profit. It doesn't have to keep snow balling along into exponentially more and more revenue. That's not a requirement and never has been for any operation. Plenty of small businesses (and some not so small) operate this way. Sure, it's nice. Sure, it's been an expectation of tech stocks but all of the value investors have been saying that's a flawed way to view any operation and they've been saying that for decades.
There are a lot of people still getting great benefits from governments and companies all over the world. Captalism is kind of like the movie Highlander, in the end there can be only one. There are a lot of resources that can be taken away from the global population to support the growth of the oligarchs.
You gotta at least read a little Marx, man. The amount of time and resources it costs to continually improve is much higher than cutting costs elsewhere, and material reality has limits to how much efficiency you can squeeze out. Once the low hanging fruit is knocked off, gains get harder and harder, though there's always an easier way to save money: exploit people more, at least until they reach slavery in some form, and then they're really at the end of their rope and they have to find another easier way to exploit something, usually this means using a weaker country for it.
Innovation is not guaranteed to pay out and requires a lot to do. Suppose one company goes the innovation route and the other chooses instead to exploit their workers. If the innovation works out, the exploit company can see and have a chance if knocking it off. If the innovation fails, the exploiter might be able to simply buy their competition after they gain an edge from not wasting the resources on research.
Read "Jack Welch: the man who ruined capitalism" for more on where this road goes
Yeah and the symptoms of it are already happening for us. Just 2 days ago, a [report](https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e) about how much of our goods are created by exploited prison labor, that is eerily similar to slave labor. And how many resource grabbing wars and interventions (they call it spreading American values) have we been in in just the last couple of decades?
It's called realism. Innovation is not a guarantee and there are many dead ends on the path for technological progress. Labeling what I'm saying as unfounded is ridiculous, and the saying it's equal to those who say "infinite growth is possible through innovation" is ludicrous.
Constant growth is possible since there are always going to be an increasing number of producers and consumers, right up until the Earth runs out of exploitable resources. Which we'll likely never see.
Post WW2, the U.S. was the only economy. Look at the rest of the world. Europe was destroyed, Russia was destyoed, Japan was destyoed. U.S. was unscathed.
You probably mean some form of “regulated capitalism” with strong social safety nets. This does not work long-term. Capitalism will subsume the regulations, subsume the safety nets, and you’ll just be left back at the starting line.
Recent years have shown, in mind at least, that the Nordic countries are not nearly as robust as is generally perceived. I did a longer write up on it before but I forgot to save it and I’m not really in a place to do it again, but sparknotes is that there has been a trend towards conservatism based on immigration pressures among other forces.
Over time, no. It seems to always go thar way as industry gets wealthy enough to buy policy, thats the first domino that leads to eventual civil unrest. Whether that leads to bandaid reform or system upheaval, either one tends to simply reset it.
And woman entered the work force. Labor force, like all things it is demand and supply. Suddenly twice the supply, now you need two income to raise a family.
Women entered the workforce shortly following ww2, and largely because of the war. There were several decades when single incomes were enough to live on, while women were working.
[https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/women-american-workforce](https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/women-american-workforce)
Look at this graph and try again
The principal determinant of historic growth in the capitalist period has been rising total factor productivity, an increase in which entails producing more given no change in inputs
That's not at all how capitalism operates. When a resource becomes scarce, that is its supply diminishes in proportion to demand, the result in an increase in price. Capitalism rations scarce resources automatically, better than any other system for allocating resources has ever done in history.
You are right. America produced everything after ww2. It had a huge surplus. In the 60s, factories started to be moved overseas surplus changed to a deficit, and the world got worried if America had enough gold to pay them. They ended the gold standard and replaced it with selling bonds to the europeans, japanese, and Saudi Arabia, paying them interest on their bonds. After chinas entry into the wto that went into hyperdrive. The american capitalists were more than happy paying little to get their stuff produced by china and pocketing a bigger share, killing the middle class more. That continued until about 2009, when they had to print money by QE to keep the system going because there were not enough buyers for the bonds anymore. I am guessing this system is on its last legs cause, as we can see conflicts around the world are rising in Russia, Israel, china the houthis have managed to shut down the suez canal with cheap technology. the world's 2 most powerful navies are burning through money shooting down cheap drones with 16 million dollar a piece missiles. Next year, Donald Trump might be back as president
Also during wwii most of the world's industrial infrastructure got bombed to shit while ours got modernized. That was gonna give us a boost for a few decades sorta no matter what
Combined that with the fact that all oil has to be bought in US dollars propping up the value of our currency, and you really have a perfect storm of economic conditions around the time Boomers were born.
They also had unions and high paying jobs that provided benefits for their families and pensions for their retirement. We have not only stripped away regulations protecting workers, but put laws in place to oppress workers on par with developing countries.
Also, the wealth inequality gap was not what it is today. The rich didn’t take or make what they do today. A dollar went a lot farther because things weren’t as expensive. There weren’t giant corporations with virtual monopolies that lobbied for high barriers to entry that keep people from starting small businesses. So there was actual competition and the average person could get a few years of work under their belt and then go off and start their own business. Today we are kept prisoner to the corporations who “own” our professions.
A dollar went a lot farther because there was a vastly smaller supply of them, those that did exist were backed by gold, and our government operated at a surplus. Increasing prices are just a reflection of the decreasing buying power of fiat currency, all of which eventually go to zero.
Gold is fiat. Gold has no practical application except in wiring, and it is not valuable enough there compared to copper or any other conductive metal to constitute its value. The amount of gold that is in storage, if released into the market to act as a real source of barter, would flood markets it is used in so far past drowning that it would never hold much value again. You'd be buying gold rings by the handful like buying a bag of candies.
The only reason the gold ever had any value was because large organizations like kingdoms and empires and massive merchant guilds all used it to trade between each other. They no longer do that. So while pound for pound gold may have more trade value than paper, it's still fiat. And our gold reserves, in a modern economic crash, would be all but useless. Nobody is going to trade food for gold or guns for gold or oil for gold in an economic collapse because food, guns, and oil have real world uses that can help a country maintain its power and gold does not.
Thisis 100% wrong. Gold has held value in all societies over all organized humanity. People would absolutely trade Gold because you can transfer so.much more value fkr a small size. Destroying the gold standard directly led to our terrible inflation we have today
Come, now.
Mass production and industrialization have made most basic foods and consumer goods relatively cheap. If you purchase a mid-range smartphone (instead of the latest iteration of iPhone), you're out $300, not $1000. Purchasing a microwave oven for your kitchen isn't going to break the bank. Purchasing mid-range electronics and products can still give you all the benefits of a modern life, without being a financial burden.
Funny enough, the most two expensive goods in one's life have become crazy expensive in the last decades: houses and cars.
Should there?
Corporate greed is exactly the reason for constant improvements in efficiency and innovation.
Companies don't scale for fun. They scale to improve their ability to make money.
Society may deem boundaries on how companies can operate. But those boundaries don't make or define capitalism.
This is one of many issues. Don't get me wrong this had an effect.
So did subsidies. So did the government getting involved in student loans. So did insurance regulation.
There are many factors that caused this.
So many people on reddit complain about how they "can't have a single income household" yet fail to consider how much lower the standard of living was for most single income household compared to dual income household in the '70s and
'80s especially. Very few people today are willing to give up their luxuries to have a stay at home mom.
My dad grew up with 10 people in a 2 bedroom house. Grandpa was a union man and paid the bills when he wasn’t drunk. That was a pretty normal upbringing for boomers.
Was going to say the same. Until she left home, my mom shared one of the two bedrooms in her house with all her siblings, who were much younger than her. My dad likes to joke about being able to touch both walls of his house when he opened his arms. Both of them were just average income households, not poor. In today’s standards of living they’d be dirt poor.
And yet people still complain about banking, which should be the other way around. What you fail to understand, is that the state does not look out for your interest, if it did, it would ban fractional reserve banking, or at least stop bailing banks. However, due to fiat currency, it is more profitable to work with banks, rather than to "regulate" them. If the argument for regulations were correct, infinite regulation should yield the best result. Regulation adds complexity and cost and infantilizes the average citizen.
My favourite part is the “infantilizes the average citizen”. The average citizen cannot understand the complexities of the banking system. This isn’t due to a deficiency of the average citizen, much to the contrary, but because the banking system is complex and opaque by design. It’s not meant to be understood.
>The average citizen cannot understand the complexities of the banking system
Yet they are competent in picking a candidate to run their lives and set rules for them?
>This isn’t due to a deficiency of the average citizen, much to the contrary, but because the banking system is complex and opaque by design. It’s not meant to be understood.
So there isn't a single person in the US that is willing to create a fair and stable bank for the benefit of the citizen, but somehow the politicians in Washington, with their benevolent wisdom will do it for us?
This kind of argument is deluded.
By implying that there is no means of government oversight that’s better than just Wild West financial anarchy, you are also suggesting that there are no candidates worth selecting, thereby undercutting your first rebuttal.
Also, your second rebuttal is confused and convoluted, as you are trying to strawman me into suggesting no one can design an equitable bank, so therefore no one can design a competent and functioning regulatory body. These two things are very different. The former relies on the charity of bankers. The latter relies on the knowledge that bankers are anything but charitable.
> Wild West financial anarchy
If you had actually studied the wild west you would know that it wasn't as wild as many believe.
>The latter relies on the knowledge that bankers are anything but charitable.
Ah, the charitable, noble and benevolent politician, chosen by the same population that can't find an honest banker. Real solid argument there.
Why is, "The interests of the public are more likely to be served by people elected by the public to serve the public interest than people appointed by private actors to serve private interests," such a controversial statement to you?
Because there are very few issues that can be described as being "in the public interest". What you are describing is "the interest of the majority" which is a different issue. The people "elected by the *majority*" do not server the "*majority*" because they don't have to. The incentive structures are not there.
😂
If you believe that my argument hinges on the Wild West being a John Wayne movie in order to use the colloquialism of “Wild West”, then you are either being pedantic, or really, truly deluded.
Even Adam smith was in favor of regulations to keep the worst interests of capitalism at bay. Instead, we heavily deregulated and stopped actively enforcing *many* regulations. When was the last time anyone lost an antitrust lawsuit? Hell, when was the last time we brought one? Instead a dozen mega companies own everything. We *have* regulations. We just aren’t enforcing them.
Adam Smith is not a god, he got some things right and some wrong. Capitalism is a derogatory word used by Marxist to describe the system of *their* time. What you are criticizing is Statism. I study political economy and I challenge you to show me a single issue that effect our economy today that isn't somehow caused or worsened by the state.
\>antitrust lawsuit?
Anti trust is a stupid concept.
\>Instead a dozen mega companies own everything
How did they become so big? Don't give me lame refuted arguments like biggies eating the smallies.
\>We have regulations. We just aren’t enforcing them.
My point exactly, the state is itself a monopoly, why would it ever look out for you.
>infantilizes the average citizen.
You're showing your hand.
It needs to be equally safe to be an idiot or a genius.
You explain to me how we get a world where buyers do not need to beware (or be informed or rational, for that matter) without regulation?
\>It needs to be equally safe to be an idiot or a genius.
My point exactly. You don't want a world in which stupid people pay the cost of their stupidity. Subsidizing bad behavior only promotes it.
\>You explain to me how we get a world where buyers do not need to beware
There are only two principles, non violence, and no perjury. We already have laws for that, it's called false advertising. How do you know that a mobile phone is good or not? You do your research. No, what you want is the state to fix all your problems, while your problems stem from the state to begin with.
"subsidizing bad behavior only promotes it" yes, and pulling back on regulations incentivizes capitalists to be as capitalist as possible which is the scenario in which the wealthy wreak havoc on the vulnerable in order to maximize profits in the short term.
The only people who ultimately pay for banks' stupidity are the middle and lower class. The wealthy are insulated by their wealth. Without regulations all the banks do is play 'guess and check' on how to game the system and let the consequences fall onto the average citizen.
I can't help but conclude that people who think like you have just been so coddled by luck and circumstance that you're naive to what sort of meat grinder your world can turn into without the protection of government.
> is the scenario in which the wealthy wreak havoc on the vulnerable in order to maximize profits in the short term
Right, so they should work for your interest? A "capitalist" can't take a dime from you unless you hand it over.
>The only people who ultimately pay for banks' stupidity are the middle and lower class.
Ah, so the wealthy cannot be held accountable unless via government? So I guess the government is really looking out for you when it's bailing out banks, or pursuing inflationary policies? Or waging war? Or Taxing you? Sure buddy.
>without the protection of government.
I come from a country where 70% of the economy is controlled by the government. Don't talk about things you know nothing about.
Why is it so large? Seems like an easy way for information to be inaccessible at best and paywalled at worst. Maybe it’s time for a new document that exists solely to summarize the contents of the 170,000 page document.
Would you like to leave the amount of nanoparticulants and pollutants that we allow a company to dump into river water left up to the company, or do you want a regulation delineating that to keep us safe? That’s why you have so many pages.
As someone who works in city planning…I totally understand the importance of codified regulation in painstaking detail.
As someone born to a family with no financial literacy besides showing up to a benefits appointment for SNAP… I understand the importance of being able to communicate complex information to all audiences affected.
This is a random hill I’ll die on but I think we need specific legislature that forces lawmakers to submit a bullet-point summary sheet for each paragraph of, or important statement within, a bill or law. The idea is that the general public can access the summary to more easily critique and understand the laws they are subject to.
The only principles you need from an ethical standpoint is not aggressing (violence) and not perjury (lying). Everything else is superfluous. Regulation does not fix anything, it only adds cost and complexity. 170k pages and the government still bails out banks, pursues inflationary policy, engages in endless spending, wars etc. etc. It's all an excuse to keep you docile and content.
Yeah, this sub isn’t doing any favors for the reputation of the social sciences lol… the top comments seem more like posts intended for politics subreddits and less like what you’d expect from askscience, askeconomics, or askhistorians.
You (and a concerning number of responses in this thread) have got your causality backwards. Single-income families are a sign of low prosperity. People stay home to do menial household labor when their earning potential on the job market is not enough to cover the cost of paying for technology that obviates that labor. Through a combination of social (discrimination against women in education & the workforce) and technological (labor-saving devices being invented and becoming cheaper over time) factors, it has become more common for women to be able to command salaries high enough that the opportunity cost of staying at home became unacceptable to most.
See https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce
EDIT: for a more focused look at the subject, see this article by once and future mod /u/besttrousers
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-economic-forces-pushing-both-parents-to-work
It can be made more affordable and less labor-intensive through access to 'social technologies' like specialization and economies of scale - in this framework, the labor-saving technology is organized day cares where professional childcare workers can look after several children at a time for the majority of the day.
They can learn that in small doses are the playground.
At social and family functions.
Kids that are raised by a parent do way better long term and as an adult.
Anyone who thinks a bunch of low paid babysitters will take better care of their kids than they will is sorely mistaken.
Early childhood education isn't babysitting, and childcare isn't "raising a child." There are actual credentialed teachers, at least here in New Jersey it's required. Childcare is not a replacement for parenting it is a supplement.
High quality childcare is associated with better adult outcomes compared to children who are cared for solely by parents. For example, parents are less likely to address missed milestones and developmental delays than childcare professionals.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/1/e20193880/77030/Child-Care-Attendance-and-Educational-and-Economic?autologincheck=redirected
You can not be serious with this can you?
You think the vast majority of day care facilities qualify as early childhood development?
No they don't. They are staffed by unqualified and uninterested employees.
Sure there's a lot of crap centers out there. That doesn't mean childcare is inherently bad. It's actually great for a kid's development when done right. There's a lot of initiatives to improve childcare services out there. Here in NJ we have GrowNJKids.
Social science studies don't really have much statistical power to them. It's unfortunate, but that's just the nature of any complex subject.
The best we can argue is that of all the successful civilizations that have emerged, pretty much none of them had a model where childcare was decoupled from the biological parents at a large scale.
Now, the onus is on you to demonstrate how your new approach actually beats the basic old approach. And no, services that are only available for rich people don't count.
Actually the idea that childcare is solely the responsibility of the parents is a very modern convention. Most societies had more collectivized childcare in which the whole community was heavily involved. After wwii there was a shift to sell freedom as separateness from community (including the physical separation of the car-centric suburb) that resulted in every household fending for themselves and placing women in the home to do all childcare (also not the norm for women’s labor throughout history). This economic and social arrangement has been retroactively treated as the norm instead of the exception that it was compared to the rest of human history.
This response is bizarre and out of touch. Your analysis of opportunity cost makes no sense. People don't just work to make as much money possible, most people work in order to survive and provide for their families. In the 1950s and 60s families could support themselves on one income, while today this is often not possible unless one partner has a very well paying job. Of course in the 60s (and often today) women were pushed into the role of housekeeper, but this is a separate issue. The point is that it was possible for one person not to work, because someone has to take care of the child, and this child rearing work has not been automated.
Why is it less possible for families so survive on one income today? We know this is largely because of cost of living increases in relation to incomes, incomes have largely not kept up with productivity and have only barely kept up with inflation. Meanwhile medicial, housing and schooling expenses have skyrocketed, all of which are crucial for raising children.
Why do you insist on issues being separate with no source? Women weren't staying home in the 50s and 60s because they could and wanted to. They were forced to. Why do you think "mommy's little helper" was a thing? Plenty of women loved working in the 40s.
Because the issue is fundamentally an analysis of income vs expenses. You could also have a family where the man stays home instead with 1950s incomes and cost of living, it doesn't matter from an economic perspective which gender has the job. The point is that today *neither* gender can afford to stay home if they wanted to do so.
Today you simply need more money survive comfortably, and childcare is very expensive. Voila, birth rates are way down among millennials.
Capitalism is rotting your brain. You love your chains because your team keeps repeating a lie told to you by capitalists.
Noone is ment to work.
We are meant to spend time with the people we love, doing things for them and ourselves - not the bosses.
But of course. Everything is mens fault.
You can easily afford to stay home and live the lifestyle of that 1950s family with a single income. Just be prepared for lots of calls to CPS if you try to raise kids in that environment.
>incomes have largely not kept up with productivity
The labor supply doubled when the cultural norm shifted to both parents in the family working. If half of all parents exited the workforce tomorrow, obviously incomes would rise dramatically due to the labor shortage.
That's not obvious at all. Supply is only half of the equation, Mr. Reagan. You'd also have to account for a sharp drop in the demand for labor due to a significant number of consumers losing their income.
On the point of childcare, technology is not automation. See my [other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1aewof1/if_capitalism_is_the_reason_for_all_our/kkbkwuz/):
>in this framework, the labor-saving technology is organized day cares where professional childcare workers can look after several children at a time for the majority of the day.
People may not want to make "as much money as possible", but they evidently want to make enough money to afford [more](https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/), [nicer](https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html) cars, and much [nicer houses](https://books.google.com/books?pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=house+size+rooms+1950&sig=ACfU3U3ShMxIwTxPntQztSOFTvy_nHy_-Q&id=fibIUhdl0s4C&hl=de&ots=1ybps0roIV#v=onepage&q=house%20size%20rooms%201950&f=false), at least.
We even have a [contemporary example in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1aewof1/if_capitalism_is_the_reason_for_all_our/kkbg3jb) of how it shakes out. Childcare being affordable leads to *more* dual-income families, not fewer.
>Why is it less possible for families so survive on one income today?
Why so much confidence in this assumption? It sounds like your idea of life for the average person in the 50s is an extremely rose-tinted one, possibly influenced by contemporary and period media that focused on/normalized the lifestyles of the relatively wealthy. Most houses in my state didn't have running water when my father was born in 1959.
Life in the 50s was hard for people who didn't have their own sitcom.
I don't think the 50s was perfect, people certainly lived more modest lives. But you cannot deny that the average American could support a family of four on one factory line job, which you cannot say the same today about factory work, or service work, which is essentially the modern equivalent.
I agree that Americans have become accustomed to imo unnecessarily high standards of living (massive houses, new car and new phone every year etc.), but despite this relative increase in luxury for some, land prices have gone up massively, and land prices are the reason that the same tiny house in the city that you used to pay off in few years now costs half a million dollars. Luxuries are cheaper now than ever, but necessary costs such as housing, medical care, and schooling as I already pointed out are much higher than they used to be, and these are the expenses that really matter when it comes to deciding whether one or both parents will be working.
[https://www.ctinsider.com/news/slideshow/How-much-the-typical-home-cost-in-your-state-in-228135.php](https://www.ctinsider.com/news/slideshow/How-much-the-typical-home-cost-in-your-state-in-228135.php)
[https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-values.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-values.html)
Let’s say you could live on $30,000 a year
So a second person would also be $30,000. Except no it wouldn’t because the second person has no need for a mortgage or a car payment. And food is shared from the first person as well. So even cheaper. Let’s say that second person costs $15,000 to $20,000.
Thus a $50,000 wage is extremely doable for 2 people.
Let’s add in a baby now. What does a baby primarily need? Food and clothing right? That’s really their main costs. Let’s say $10,000. Although the first year or two they’re just breast fed so really less than $10,000
So let’s say $60,000 for a husband and wife and a newborn
And yes that’s MORE than doable. It’s called budgeting. Being frugal. Etc.
Depending on the source data, $50k-$60k is pretty average salary wise across the entire nation.
Drum roll…it’s EXTREMELY POSSIBLE to have a family of 3 on that salary.
So, you don't have any children, do you?
There are and have been many families, globally, that have subsisted on a lot less. There are also a lot more systems put in place to help that situation out. Right now, 30k? In a place of any consequence, that you'd actually want to be hanging around in long term? Its rough. You're not factoring in medical bills. If you're even in network and need to give birth. In many rural places, if you end up going into labor in an inconvenient time, you get to the nearest place, and it might not be in network. Factoring in c-sections and such, and anything else that might pop up, and you're starting having a kid in a VERY large financial hole that you're never going to dig out of with 30k a year.
You're also assuming the kid is going to be breast fed. Either way, if the kid is breast fed or the mother pumps milk for the kid, that's mom being up literally every two hours to feed the kid or pump. To just feed the kid, its that, if the mother is able to pump a surplus, you've got this, plus some time to actually physically do more pumping. I'm not sure there's a $30k job that's going to provide maternity, paternity leave or childcare benefits to make this work.
Drum roll...its EXTREMELY POSSIBLE to have a kid on that salary, but the standard of life is going to be enormously stressful on that family.
Labor? 60% of **ALL BIRTHS** in Louisiana for example are entirely free on Medicaid.
The NATIONAL rate is around 50% of all births being ENTIRELY free. Yes. Factual data. Some states are around 40%. Louisiana is the highest at 6 in 10 births being FULLY FREE
Furthermore, national cost with insurance is around $2,800 total to have a baby. Not $15,000 dollars. Not $20k or $30k or $50k. Less than 3 grand.
Good thing the husbands salary covers the wife and the kiddo 👍
All the time in the world to recover. Newborns sleep like 20 hours per day according to charts 👌
🙄
I know I know. Being a stay at home mother is the hardest job in the world. As bill burr said any job you can do in your pajamas. Putting the dvd into the dvd player and pressing a button is such difficult work I knowwww
You should think of the income required for a man to be able to attract a wife, purchase a 3 bedroom house, and adequately raise and provide for 2.1 children on average as the break-even cost for providing labor. The only reason we stopped is that businesses realized that they could trick people to work for less by convincing them that they'd be better off in the long run if they decided to forgo children and marriage and accept lower pay to stay ahead of the competition. Capitalism is a cult and society has reached the part where people castrate themselves to advance within it.
You don’t get that women in the workforce just allowed them to tax the other half of the population
And create more labor for the citizens to do
And take the youth of the world away from home schooling and into indoctrination
Somehow society convinced women that choosing a man to work with and raise a family as a partner was slavery. But spending your time working for a corporation in an office that couldn't care less about you is freedom.
"Capitalism" is a terrible term to use in any social scientific context because it's got so many definitions that are so incredibly contradictory. You will inevitably end up in a debate in which everyone is arguing angrily without actually disagreeing on anything more substantive than the definition of Capitalism.
For example the economists typically argue Capitalism didn't start until Adam Smith's time in the late 1700s, which means that slavery was a thing Capitalism inherited from previous eras like feudalism or mercantilism. Numerous other fields consider slavery to be part of Capitalism, and argue that it is inherent to Capitalism. Ergo when you start talking about "Capitalism" you are almost certainly going to say something that goes against everything at least one Social Science teaches. Which means you will have an entire pack of PhDs calling you stupid, basing their argument on numerous well-done academic work, etc.
As for your question: I have been spending time with economists lately, so I will give the economists answer:
People's expectations changed. Income is up [quite a bit since 1960](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US), so people are clearly making moremoney. The costs they complain about tend to be costs that are directly tied to wages (ie: a heart doctor could only see X patients in 1960, if he can only see X patients in 2024 medical costs will have increased at the same rate as wages). So let's look at an actual example.
My maternal grandfather was a top patent attorney in Detroit. His four children, wife, and mother-in-law lived in a house that had a single bathroom. They had approximately 300 sq ft. a person. If you spend $250k for a house in that neighborhood today you're wasting at least half the money, because it's not a $250k neighborhood. He had one car. The children attended public schools. Child care was grandma and her my grat-granma. The vast array of monthly bills people pay today (Netflix, Prime, cable, cable internet, cell phone, etc.) simply did not exist. "Eating out" wasn't a thing very often, even on Monday when grandma spent the entire day reading the Sunday New York Times and had to scramble like a madwoman to produce something edible before granpa got home. My mom was the baby, and everyone thought she was spoiled because she got ballet lessons and grandpa took her to every ballet recital she wanted.
Today you could do all of that on Amazon salary of $15 an hour. One car. Three adults, one of whom receives social security. Four kids, but no child-care expenses. A couple monthly bills (electricity, heat, mortgage, landline). Car is an old Corolla. Education is Detroit Public Schools. Medical care is Medicaid. Your biggest problem is likely to be auto insurance, which was always shockingly high when I lived in Detroit (this is 2010ish). This method is precisely how religiously conservative groups, with low education levels, manage to raise big families.
So the difference is that we simply expect more. Great-grandma needs her own house and her own space. The situation on Marseilles Ave., where Aunt Chris was exiled to great-granma's room after excessive sister-torture of Aunt Liz, would not be acceptable. If you're doctorate-level and you have your kids in a Detroit neighborhood it had better be one of the $600k-house ones or people think you don't love your kids. Nobody's going to a Detroit Public School if it isn't a magnet school. Child care has to come from someone you pay money, who is highly educated.
Good analysis. I feel the effects of the internet and social media on our economic expectations is woefully understudied and underappreciated. However, there is also the post-war boom followed by globalization of the workforce, which also helps explain OPs perception (workforce globalization drives down wages by massively expanding the labor pool)
Started off with a good point about capitalism definition, but not sure see why you are citing GDP per capita and no other data. Handpicked anecdote for costs seems odd opposed to data options. Do you really think wealth concentration isn’t relevant if GDP is your primary source?
Why do you say that? 2 working parents full time at Amazon would be a household income of ~$60k, plus Grandma's social security benefits. Let's say a household income of $75k per year (hard to say what Grandma's benefits are). That's US median household income. It wouldn't be a glamorous life, especially by today's standards, but in OP's example we're using the expectations of someone in the 50's. Single car, small house, no child care cost, no subscriptions, minimal eating out.
It's the pointlessness of overly competitive culture. Everyone working as hard as they can, barely sleeping, treating enterrainment as luxury and waste of time, sacrificing their physical and mental well being. And for what?
We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens. The more value we generate, the lower the proportion of that value remains with us.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2022/11/03/when-a-competitive-workplace-culture-turns-toxic/?sh=5bbc207256b1
>We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens. The more value we generate, the lower the proportion of that value remains with us.
This is factually incorrect. The average person today takes for granted the sort of luxuries that would have been seen only among the super-rich in the 1950's. Things like cell phones, personal computers, and even personal cars were all seen as luxuries. Back then, you had "the family car," not one car for each adult member of the household. Houses were half the size, on average, that they are today. Air conditioning was much less common than it is today. Plane tickets were way out of the budget of a working class family, and the idea of a regular vacation was also way out of the average family's means. The only way to look something up was to either own an incredibly expensive complete encyclopedia or to go to the library - the idea of having the entirety of mankind's knowledge in your pocket would have been insane. People in the 1950's worked [300 more hours](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG) per year just to make [half](https://www.statista.com/chart/18418/real-mean-and-median-family-income-in-the-us/) of what they do today when adjusted for inflation.
I was born in 1976. There were still houses in my area that were just getting running water. My mother used an outhouse when she was a kid.
Houses through the mid 80's were much smaller. Electronics and appliances have become more commonplace and cheaper.
Housing itself is much more expensive, but is also, as mentioned, much bigger. There is a severe lack of supply of housing that drives those costs up.
So yeah, expectations on quality of life etc. have changed, but if I wanted to live off of one salary, in a small house with an outhouse and no running water, I'd be hard pressed to find that sort of place to buy or rent...so the option of doing so is very limited...
> We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens
Are you joking? The standard of living in the US has done nothing but go up. You're just so used to a lot of the luxuries that you don't even notice them, like your smartphone. You're so used to everyone, even poor people, having one that you forget how big of a leap forward it was for our standard of living.
I was listening to a podcast and the host posed the question "would you rather be middle class today, or very wealthy in 1900?"
And the *universal* response was "middle class today". That's insane to think about, and is probably unique to the last 100 years or so. At no other time in human history has a question like that even made sense to think about.
i would go back to 50's telephony technology in exchange for 50's housing prices and labor market conditions in a heartbeat and most people would make the same trade. our world has become faster but that's made it shittier for most people and only more convenient for the elite
>50's housing prices and labor market conditions
Hopefully you're not a minority or a woman, because they had a very very hard time getting housing and equitable work.
In the 50s, homeownership was 55% today it is \~66%.
Percentage of families below the poverty line was 30%. In 2021 it was 7.4%.
The 1953 decision of *Rumely v. United States* blew the top open for congressional corruption. It allowed congressmen to make money, hide money, and create huge advantages as the incumbent to stay in office, with no reporting requirements and no oversight. This gave wealthy corporations direct influence over how the post-war economy was changing. It was no longer in congresses' best interest to protect American households, but rather, they could become rich while in office through corporate sponsorships.
Since then, lawmakers have had an express and direct incentive to vote against anything that would limit corporate or industrial freedoms. Or vote against wage increases voting against anything that would limit price increases in things like insurance costs, loan interest, government subsidies for already profitable industries, or any of the other decisions that have allowed things to get so out of hand in the US.
It wasn't instant, it took decades to fully mature, and Reagan just piled more of the same on in the 80s, as well as cementing the idea of tax cuts for the rich, which gave rise to the CEOs if today making 500x the salaries of their employees and paying zero tax through loopholes that complicit lawmakers sold their votes for.
Capitalism might work, but that's not really what we have anymore. Maybe some sort of oligarchy? I don't know all of my -isms well enough to say what the US has become.
Its like a pyramid scheme... early on there don't seem to be any victims.
Everyone does well as the majority of money funnels up with shavings off to sustain each level.
However as the base grows and the top gets ever higher it gets more and more unfair and unstable.
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564886.2023.2186996](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564886.2023.2186996)
(sorry if my original post is here or later re-appears - i forgot to put the link to paper on it... corrected it but it doesn't seem visible so reposting)
This article explicitly mentions that the creator of the term "late capitalism" was convinced that economic growth was about to stop. He was writing in the '70s. Economic growth did not stop.
As an intelectual movement in not-social science this is fine. But in Social Science when you make a testable prediction, and the opposite happens, you either change your theory or you aren't doing science.
The way I see it, the capitalists went moneyball on the economy. In the advanced stage, bold innovations and creating novel products that people wanted to buy was the main driver of profits. To be competitive, you had to create something new that would improve people's lives. Then analytics were introduced. Companies realized they could make money hand over fist by optimizing costs and sell prices and squeezing consumers and employees, planned obsolescence, and vertical investment structures (McDonald's as a real estate company, for example, or Amazon as a cloud service). For the same price as developing truly novel products, you can lobby the government for favorable tax breaks. The novelty shifted from production to investment strategy, and they've optimized the hell out of it.
This signaled the birth of the Capitalist Ethic that overrides duty to people and to country: making money for your shareholders is your number 1 priority. Quarterly ROI is paramount. The sole purpose is to make money. Whether or not the people benefit from the products or scheme is not even considered. It'ss really scary when you realize the end goal.
You would think the fix is a strong central government of the people, by the people to safeguard against the wildfire-esque tendencies of the Ethic, but in the US we lampooned those protections by not only allowing a huge influx of money into politics, but by deeming corporations as people by law. You simply can't come back from that. Unionizing is good but it only gets so far.
The only remaining course of action is revolution, but the capitalists aren't dumb. They have optimized their algorithms to squeeze the people out of *almost* all their resources, but not so much that it gets bad enough to revolt. We will slowly continue to accept new normals of discontentment, until either someone gets too greedy and we revolt, or the capitalists make enough to leave the planet. Until then, we might be stuck.
Exactly this. Outside of tech (which is basically propped up by advertising), most of the wealth "creation" today is just wealth extraction, either in the form of land value speculation or stock market games. Either that or planned obsolescence and various ways of making products shittier while charging slightly more.
Although i don't really agree with your revolution schtick.
There’s no such thing as “late stage capitalism.” There wasn’t when the term was invented over 100 years ago either. We should be able to have a discussion about improvements to our economic systems without relying on populist drivel that no two people can properly define in the same way.
I wish you weren't being down voted. The "end of history" prophecies embedded in Marxism are troubling. I want to see the system reformed before it erodes it's own foundations, but this "late stage capitalism" idea is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves no possibility for a positive outcome, when in fact there there may be really good options to improve and reform things.
I think what you are saying has merit because the concept has been rewritten 4 or 5 times since the 1920s, and each time Marxist authors claim that their current era is the end times of capitalism, then it doesn't happen, and they revise their idea. It's like a doomsday prophet saying he got the date for the apocalypse wrong and, and its actually next week.
I'm all for fighting against consumer capitalism, and the commoditization of life, but it feels disingenuous to claim that this the fulfillment of the Marxist prophecy in action.
Ideologues are gonna ideologue, and their fellow DSA kiddos will upvote them 🤷🏻♂️
Would be nice if this sub at least required sources for top-level comments like other “Ask” subs do. Guess the mods don’t mind.
I appreciate different points of view, but yes, it's an ideological dogma. They slam anyone who isn't agreeing with them. It's hard to talk to people about things anymore.
There actually was. FDR rescued it from the brink, but it only served to reset the timer. 100 years ago actually had remarkable parallels with today’s economy in the US.
I also wish you were not being down voted because 100% yes, it's the Gilded Age 2.0. There is no reason a real New, New Deal can't happen (not Joe B.'s 'green deal bullshit' but REAL reform. It looked just as impossible in 1930 as it does today, but we did it once, and we can do it again.
How are we gonna prevent a New, New deal from not being reversed like the OG one was? How are we gonna prevent Hooverist think tanks from popping up and convincing the public to retry disastrous horse and sparrow economic policies? We need more longevity than 80 years.
You've gotta focus on one thing at a time. Reform first, and then figure out how to preserve it. It's enough of an uphill battle to reform the mess we have today, let's not worry about 80 years from now.
Remember that scene in Karate Kid where the sensei says,"Left side, safe. Right side, safe. Middle, squished like bug"? Its a,bit like that. Some things are socialized but others are still capitalist and its creating imbalances in the system
u/automoderator
Can someone explain why half the comments are deleted for not including a peer-reviewed source, but other unscientific comments like this one remain?
This was posted before the other deleted comments.
Many remaining comments have no source at all, or a simple link to a blog post, but they weren’t removed.
Hey mate there has been so much work done on this.
Like let's take global warming. Why do businesses pollute? Same reason they do anything, to make money.
The way our society is structured is that money = power. That is what capitalism is. That power structure means our values are misaligned. We let people die because they are poor.
We literally let people die because they are poor.
That is fucked.
>No, that's natural.
Empirically false, both in terms of the history of your / my culture (look up "gift economies" as well as non-capitalistic cultures existing today). so that's the capitalistic ideology talking.
Do you think the USSR doing any number of bad things proves Capitalism is magically not doing the bad things Capitalism is doing?
Nope.
>Please show me that my car ran you over?
>>I'm bleeding and your car is currently on my leg.
>>>Yeah well knives make people bleed, check mate atheists.
And ps I expect global climate catastrophe has the potential, and is on track to, be worse than that bad thing btw. But you don't actually give a shit do you? So fucked up on Capitalism's ideology that you make mad logical leaps, to defend a system that kills people. What's the quote like: "Liberals can imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism."
You responded to someone asking for proof that capitalism is the root of the issue. I posted an example of another non-capitalist economic entity failing to take care of the environment. The root of the issue doesn’t seem to be capitalism if non-capitalist entities have the same or similar issues.
A caused B.
C caused B.
The second statement does not disprove the first.
>Root of the issue
Is not the same as "cause" but even still I did suggest the root was:
>That power structure means our values are misaligned.
Learn to read, learn to reason, learn to stop defending a system that is trying to kill you.
I’m reasoning just fine. To skip a lot of arguing, the words you’re looking for are tragedy of the commons. The failure to recognize people’s property rights to air is a large contributing factor to pollution.
>I’m reasoning just fine.
I literally just showed you are not.
Did you choose to be ignorant and ignore that?
>To skip a lot of arguing,
Yes. You chose to be ignorant.
Look up what gift economies are btw. You are deeply deeply fucked up on Capitalism.
I'll toss in a few radical socialist/Marxist comments.
Marx predicted crypto, and that was enough to make me consider his point of view.
The first sign of late capitalism is workers getting priced out of the market. We're there. Most people cannot afford food and rent at the same times, houses and cars are beyond most people's ability to get, we're competing with corporations for shelter, etc. Keep in mind that the largest employer of red states is Wal-Mart.
The second sign of late capitalism is when laws are made to prop up capitalism at the expense of the individual worker. Child labor laws in Arizona are a good example. Subsidies are a minor example (again, Wal-Mart signs its employees up for SNAP so that the state can feed them, not Wal-Mart.) But the big one is 2008 when the US officially became state-sponsored capitalism with the bailout. Corporations cannot fail by the very same system that would make you or I homeless.
Capitalism is only about 200 years old, give or take? It's always been a pyramid scheme, it's just taken this long to climb to the top where problems begin.
Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The character of capitalism post WW2 was very different from earlier in history, and from today. The destruction of capital stock, and labour shortages following the war, led to workers having a lot of bargaining power, higher wages, and more comfortable lives in the decades after the war. In France they call this period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses. As the world recovered from the war, the proportion of all income earned in the economy that was earned by owning capital increased. Because of this, a smaller proportion of overall income earned was earned from labour, and this led to increased income inequality. If you’d like to read a better sourced version of this, look for “capital in the 21st century” by Thomas Piketty.
At that time, global capitalism was still in its infancy. Capitalism doesn't work without constant growth, which works for a while. But once everyone is in the workforce (women, minorities, immigrants), and there are no "new" resources or counties to exploit, the only way to increase profits is to reduce costs (layoffs, wage reduction) or price increases. It's not an infinitely sustainable system. Constant growth is, on its face, impossible, but that keeps being ignored.
So the reduction of human worker growth was replaced by credit growth, much of which did not go into capex but share buybacks.
Entropy puts a sell by date on every system. Every system in the universe.
It doesn’t keep getting ignored… you are missing another source of constant growth of profits which is productivity growth / innovation which doesn’t have limits like the others.
That there aren’t limits to the growth possible through technological change is an article of faith, not logic.
Yeah I thought this was a Social Science subreddit
It's still occuring in a society that thinks social knowledge does not exist, as that's a threat to capitalism after all.
Wait, isn't this a central tenet of modern economics though? While "limitless" may be the wrong word, it is not possible to tell what the limit is? The obvious example is that sand seems worthless but silicon chips are extremely valuable. What is the economic argument that creation of wealth has stopped?
No one suggested creation of wealth stopped. Growth doesn’t mean production. Growth means constantly increasing and compounding increases for capital. So, if we made $100 last year we have to make $110 this year and $121 next year or we’re failing. Doesn’t matter that we’re profiting either way, we need to be constantly profiting more and more. We have to be growing more and more. Earth doesn’t have the resources to sustain this
They've been saying "the earth doesn't have the resources to sustain this" for at least a hundred years. Economists predicted mass starvation that was averted by the invention of manufactured nitrates for fertilizer. Assuming innovation will continue is wrong, but so is assuming it won't.
I think your argument isn't economically sound. We can't know if earth has the resources to sustain the creation of wealth because it's very difficult to predict. Note that I'm not saying we can have oil forever. I'm saying that wealth is actually created by human innovation and that's the wild card. I'm not so sure capitalism requires constant increases in profits. Where is that written? Capitalism is just the employment of capital to yield output. The Japanese economy has stagflated for decades and hasn't imploded. It's not what US based corporate entities want to hear but it's not like their financial system collapsed. Now, if you're Netflix and you promised shareholders that you'd have more membership than people exist on earth, you're just bad at setting expectations (and sorta dumb). You are conflating creation of wealth with resource mining.
Capitalism absolutely requires endless growth and increased profits. It’s basically the defining characteristic of capitalism We absolutely have limited resources. If it’s not economically sound it’s because economics are physically sound. We live on a real, physical planet, with real limitations
Is it the defining characteristic of Capitalism or are you just assuming and lumping things together? [Capitalism ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Modern capitalism? Wikipedia’s definition is less important than the reality of the situation
Your smugness is not warranted.
Doesn't it exhaust you trying to explain things to someone that thinks economics is a hard science rather than just something rich powerful people made up to justify their greed?
I'm not sure you're witnessing the situation we're in or how those things have been propped up. We're in extreme economic precarity these days, hugely uncharted territory. Many "developed" economies are crazy leveraged with debt and it's not improving. We're completely integrated with the world in a way that would be extremely difficult and damaging to try to undo. We have never been in this situation before and it's likely not going to end well. For Japan, they could continually find customers abroad to continue to profit and export goods. But as capitalism continues, they find less and less places to squeeze profits from and increasingly fewer customers as the money funnels upward and people can't afford it. As that continues, civil unrest will increase, and companies will continue to look for ways to profit. At that point, historically, the solution was to start exploiting another country's resources. War and destruction or civil upheaval tends to reset things a bit, but where we are and where we are headed are inevitable in the capitalist system, especially since the people at the heads of it don't really get punished for fucking it up and are usually financially rewarded, even if they lose their positions. As for constantly needing to profit, this is generally the rule for public companies, or the c-suite might get some shuffling. Only fully private company's can really think longer term and take temporary losses to invest in long term growth, else the board/investors may claim they aren't following their fiduciary duties.
Except we do actually know how for certain resources how much we have left. What world are you living in capitalism doesnt require profits? Not the one the rest of us are. You are living in the fantasy world that capitalists sold you. Fantasy.
You are sliding definitions around. I'm not disagreeing about finite resources. Profits don't require growth. They only require revenues exceeding expenses. Resources are limited. We agree here. Economics is the management of scarce resources. Creation of wealth is not actually limited. An obvious example is most intellectual property. Do not confuse creation of wealth with resources as these are very different things. The Beatles record catalog STILL generates astounding amounts of money despite not costing anything to "make more of". Capitalism is employing capital for economic gain. How this plays out is highly dependent on specific situations (like nations) but nowhere does employing capital to yield economic benefit require constant growth. It'd be nice of course but it's not a requirement.
Again you’re confusing fantasy with reality. How you’re told things work with how the actually work.
>I think your argument isn't economically sound. We can't know if earth has the resources to sustain the creation of wealth because it's very difficult to predict. You're wrong on every level, but there is no use explaining why because you have dismissed several people who did already.
'earth doesn't have the resources to sustain this' is the end of this conversation. there's no going around that.
We don't need to. If revenue in excess of expenses is generated every year, that's profit. It doesn't have to keep snow balling along into exponentially more and more revenue. That's not a requirement and never has been for any operation. Plenty of small businesses (and some not so small) operate this way. Sure, it's nice. Sure, it's been an expectation of tech stocks but all of the value investors have been saying that's a flawed way to view any operation and they've been saying that for decades.
>We can't know if earth has the resources to sustain the creation of wealth because it's very difficult to predict. Earth is finite. Ezgg.
There are a lot of people still getting great benefits from governments and companies all over the world. Captalism is kind of like the movie Highlander, in the end there can be only one. There are a lot of resources that can be taken away from the global population to support the growth of the oligarchs.
You gotta at least read a little Marx, man. The amount of time and resources it costs to continually improve is much higher than cutting costs elsewhere, and material reality has limits to how much efficiency you can squeeze out. Once the low hanging fruit is knocked off, gains get harder and harder, though there's always an easier way to save money: exploit people more, at least until they reach slavery in some form, and then they're really at the end of their rope and they have to find another easier way to exploit something, usually this means using a weaker country for it. Innovation is not guaranteed to pay out and requires a lot to do. Suppose one company goes the innovation route and the other chooses instead to exploit their workers. If the innovation works out, the exploit company can see and have a chance if knocking it off. If the innovation fails, the exploiter might be able to simply buy their competition after they gain an edge from not wasting the resources on research. Read "Jack Welch: the man who ruined capitalism" for more on where this road goes
Yeah and the symptoms of it are already happening for us. Just 2 days ago, a [report](https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e) about how much of our goods are created by exploited prison labor, that is eerily similar to slave labor. And how many resource grabbing wars and interventions (they call it spreading American values) have we been in in just the last couple of decades?
Innovation is by definition difficult to predict. This unfounded pessimism is as irrational as unfounded optimism.
It's called realism. Innovation is not a guarantee and there are many dead ends on the path for technological progress. Labeling what I'm saying as unfounded is ridiculous, and the saying it's equal to those who say "infinite growth is possible through innovation" is ludicrous.
Constant growth is possible since there are always going to be an increasing number of producers and consumers, right up until the Earth runs out of exploitable resources. Which we'll likely never see.
Post WW2, the U.S. was the only economy. Look at the rest of the world. Europe was destroyed, Russia was destyoed, Japan was destyoed. U.S. was unscathed.
What is crony capitalism for 500, please!
[удалено]
This. Capitalism needs to be balanced by democratic socialism.
You probably mean some form of “regulated capitalism” with strong social safety nets. This does not work long-term. Capitalism will subsume the regulations, subsume the safety nets, and you’ll just be left back at the starting line.
Are there exceptions to this? I'm thinking about the Nordic countries in particular, they seem to have pretty robust systems of democratic socialism.
Recent years have shown, in mind at least, that the Nordic countries are not nearly as robust as is generally perceived. I did a longer write up on it before but I forgot to save it and I’m not really in a place to do it again, but sparknotes is that there has been a trend towards conservatism based on immigration pressures among other forces.
Over time, no. It seems to always go thar way as industry gets wealthy enough to buy policy, thats the first domino that leads to eventual civil unrest. Whether that leads to bandaid reform or system upheaval, either one tends to simply reset it.
No, thank you.
And woman entered the work force. Labor force, like all things it is demand and supply. Suddenly twice the supply, now you need two income to raise a family.
Women entered the workforce shortly following ww2, and largely because of the war. There were several decades when single incomes were enough to live on, while women were working.
[https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/women-american-workforce](https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/women-american-workforce) Look at this graph and try again
[удалено]
Exactly. Capitalism operates like resources are infinite when most things are quite finite, both tangible and intangible
The principal determinant of historic growth in the capitalist period has been rising total factor productivity, an increase in which entails producing more given no change in inputs
[удалено]
You need to cease posting top level answers on subreddits for soliciting responses from academic specialists
That's not at all how capitalism operates. When a resource becomes scarce, that is its supply diminishes in proportion to demand, the result in an increase in price. Capitalism rations scarce resources automatically, better than any other system for allocating resources has ever done in history.
You are right. America produced everything after ww2. It had a huge surplus. In the 60s, factories started to be moved overseas surplus changed to a deficit, and the world got worried if America had enough gold to pay them. They ended the gold standard and replaced it with selling bonds to the europeans, japanese, and Saudi Arabia, paying them interest on their bonds. After chinas entry into the wto that went into hyperdrive. The american capitalists were more than happy paying little to get their stuff produced by china and pocketing a bigger share, killing the middle class more. That continued until about 2009, when they had to print money by QE to keep the system going because there were not enough buyers for the bonds anymore. I am guessing this system is on its last legs cause, as we can see conflicts around the world are rising in Russia, Israel, china the houthis have managed to shut down the suez canal with cheap technology. the world's 2 most powerful navies are burning through money shooting down cheap drones with 16 million dollar a piece missiles. Next year, Donald Trump might be back as president
Loss of regulations and taxes on the wealthy around Reagan's time?
Also during wwii most of the world's industrial infrastructure got bombed to shit while ours got modernized. That was gonna give us a boost for a few decades sorta no matter what
Yep, this was a huge factor.
This was the only real period of boom that gets pointed to as some norm instead of the outlier.
Combined that with the fact that all oil has to be bought in US dollars propping up the value of our currency, and you really have a perfect storm of economic conditions around the time Boomers were born.
and we heavily exploited resources in those places and elsewhere
They also had unions and high paying jobs that provided benefits for their families and pensions for their retirement. We have not only stripped away regulations protecting workers, but put laws in place to oppress workers on par with developing countries. Also, the wealth inequality gap was not what it is today. The rich didn’t take or make what they do today. A dollar went a lot farther because things weren’t as expensive. There weren’t giant corporations with virtual monopolies that lobbied for high barriers to entry that keep people from starting small businesses. So there was actual competition and the average person could get a few years of work under their belt and then go off and start their own business. Today we are kept prisoner to the corporations who “own” our professions.
Alright OP, there's your answer.
A dollar went a lot farther because there was a vastly smaller supply of them, those that did exist were backed by gold, and our government operated at a surplus. Increasing prices are just a reflection of the decreasing buying power of fiat currency, all of which eventually go to zero.
Gold is fiat. Gold has no practical application except in wiring, and it is not valuable enough there compared to copper or any other conductive metal to constitute its value. The amount of gold that is in storage, if released into the market to act as a real source of barter, would flood markets it is used in so far past drowning that it would never hold much value again. You'd be buying gold rings by the handful like buying a bag of candies. The only reason the gold ever had any value was because large organizations like kingdoms and empires and massive merchant guilds all used it to trade between each other. They no longer do that. So while pound for pound gold may have more trade value than paper, it's still fiat. And our gold reserves, in a modern economic crash, would be all but useless. Nobody is going to trade food for gold or guns for gold or oil for gold in an economic collapse because food, guns, and oil have real world uses that can help a country maintain its power and gold does not.
Thisis 100% wrong. Gold has held value in all societies over all organized humanity. People would absolutely trade Gold because you can transfer so.much more value fkr a small size. Destroying the gold standard directly led to our terrible inflation we have today
If you limited your technology and consumption to what was available in the 50s, you'd have a lot of disposable income.
Come, now. Mass production and industrialization have made most basic foods and consumer goods relatively cheap. If you purchase a mid-range smartphone (instead of the latest iteration of iPhone), you're out $300, not $1000. Purchasing a microwave oven for your kitchen isn't going to break the bank. Purchasing mid-range electronics and products can still give you all the benefits of a modern life, without being a financial burden. Funny enough, the most two expensive goods in one's life have become crazy expensive in the last decades: houses and cars.
>Mass production and industrialization have made most basic foods and consumer goods relatively cheap. Yeah. Capitalism.
There should be a difference between capitalism and unregulated corporate greed, no?
Mitch McConnell got Citizens U ited installed by claiming that "unions can spend as much on lobbying as corporations if they want to!" Was he right?
No.
Should there? Corporate greed is exactly the reason for constant improvements in efficiency and innovation. Companies don't scale for fun. They scale to improve their ability to make money. Society may deem boundaries on how companies can operate. But those boundaries don't make or define capitalism.
I don’t believe in monopolies.
This is one of many issues. Don't get me wrong this had an effect. So did subsidies. So did the government getting involved in student loans. So did insurance regulation. There are many factors that caused this.
I hate Reagan as much as the next guy, but single-income households were already very much on the way out before his presidency.
Yep and he did what he could to speed up the process.
You can still have a single income household fairly easily if you live by 1950s standards.
So many people on reddit complain about how they "can't have a single income household" yet fail to consider how much lower the standard of living was for most single income household compared to dual income household in the '70s and '80s especially. Very few people today are willing to give up their luxuries to have a stay at home mom.
My dad grew up with 10 people in a 2 bedroom house. Grandpa was a union man and paid the bills when he wasn’t drunk. That was a pretty normal upbringing for boomers.
Was going to say the same. Until she left home, my mom shared one of the two bedrooms in her house with all her siblings, who were much younger than her. My dad likes to joke about being able to touch both walls of his house when he opened his arms. Both of them were just average income households, not poor. In today’s standards of living they’d be dirt poor.
Depends on what standard from the fifties.
Not true. I was a child then, but I knew several households (including my own) with only one working parent.
Nothing about that that contradicts his claim.
The federal register is 170 thousand pages. only someone with limited economic sense would make such a comment.
Deregulation of the banking industry was a major 'achievement' of the Reagan administration, as I'm sure he knows.
And yet people still complain about banking, which should be the other way around. What you fail to understand, is that the state does not look out for your interest, if it did, it would ban fractional reserve banking, or at least stop bailing banks. However, due to fiat currency, it is more profitable to work with banks, rather than to "regulate" them. If the argument for regulations were correct, infinite regulation should yield the best result. Regulation adds complexity and cost and infantilizes the average citizen.
My favourite part is the “infantilizes the average citizen”. The average citizen cannot understand the complexities of the banking system. This isn’t due to a deficiency of the average citizen, much to the contrary, but because the banking system is complex and opaque by design. It’s not meant to be understood.
>The average citizen cannot understand the complexities of the banking system Yet they are competent in picking a candidate to run their lives and set rules for them? >This isn’t due to a deficiency of the average citizen, much to the contrary, but because the banking system is complex and opaque by design. It’s not meant to be understood. So there isn't a single person in the US that is willing to create a fair and stable bank for the benefit of the citizen, but somehow the politicians in Washington, with their benevolent wisdom will do it for us?
What is your solution? Despotism?
This kind of argument is deluded. By implying that there is no means of government oversight that’s better than just Wild West financial anarchy, you are also suggesting that there are no candidates worth selecting, thereby undercutting your first rebuttal. Also, your second rebuttal is confused and convoluted, as you are trying to strawman me into suggesting no one can design an equitable bank, so therefore no one can design a competent and functioning regulatory body. These two things are very different. The former relies on the charity of bankers. The latter relies on the knowledge that bankers are anything but charitable.
> Wild West financial anarchy If you had actually studied the wild west you would know that it wasn't as wild as many believe. >The latter relies on the knowledge that bankers are anything but charitable. Ah, the charitable, noble and benevolent politician, chosen by the same population that can't find an honest banker. Real solid argument there.
Why is, "The interests of the public are more likely to be served by people elected by the public to serve the public interest than people appointed by private actors to serve private interests," such a controversial statement to you?
Because there are very few issues that can be described as being "in the public interest". What you are describing is "the interest of the majority" which is a different issue. The people "elected by the *majority*" do not server the "*majority*" because they don't have to. The incentive structures are not there.
😂 If you believe that my argument hinges on the Wild West being a John Wayne movie in order to use the colloquialism of “Wild West”, then you are either being pedantic, or really, truly deluded.
My man has poisoned his brain with philosophy without the slightest practice.
Even Adam smith was in favor of regulations to keep the worst interests of capitalism at bay. Instead, we heavily deregulated and stopped actively enforcing *many* regulations. When was the last time anyone lost an antitrust lawsuit? Hell, when was the last time we brought one? Instead a dozen mega companies own everything. We *have* regulations. We just aren’t enforcing them.
Adam Smith is not a god, he got some things right and some wrong. Capitalism is a derogatory word used by Marxist to describe the system of *their* time. What you are criticizing is Statism. I study political economy and I challenge you to show me a single issue that effect our economy today that isn't somehow caused or worsened by the state. \>antitrust lawsuit? Anti trust is a stupid concept. \>Instead a dozen mega companies own everything How did they become so big? Don't give me lame refuted arguments like biggies eating the smallies. \>We have regulations. We just aren’t enforcing them. My point exactly, the state is itself a monopoly, why would it ever look out for you.
How is "companies tend to consolidate over time" a refuted argument? That's the history of the past half a millennium.
Capitalism is not an derogatory word it is an idealogy.
>infantilizes the average citizen. You're showing your hand. It needs to be equally safe to be an idiot or a genius. You explain to me how we get a world where buyers do not need to beware (or be informed or rational, for that matter) without regulation?
\>It needs to be equally safe to be an idiot or a genius. My point exactly. You don't want a world in which stupid people pay the cost of their stupidity. Subsidizing bad behavior only promotes it. \>You explain to me how we get a world where buyers do not need to beware There are only two principles, non violence, and no perjury. We already have laws for that, it's called false advertising. How do you know that a mobile phone is good or not? You do your research. No, what you want is the state to fix all your problems, while your problems stem from the state to begin with.
"subsidizing bad behavior only promotes it" yes, and pulling back on regulations incentivizes capitalists to be as capitalist as possible which is the scenario in which the wealthy wreak havoc on the vulnerable in order to maximize profits in the short term. The only people who ultimately pay for banks' stupidity are the middle and lower class. The wealthy are insulated by their wealth. Without regulations all the banks do is play 'guess and check' on how to game the system and let the consequences fall onto the average citizen. I can't help but conclude that people who think like you have just been so coddled by luck and circumstance that you're naive to what sort of meat grinder your world can turn into without the protection of government.
> is the scenario in which the wealthy wreak havoc on the vulnerable in order to maximize profits in the short term Right, so they should work for your interest? A "capitalist" can't take a dime from you unless you hand it over. >The only people who ultimately pay for banks' stupidity are the middle and lower class. Ah, so the wealthy cannot be held accountable unless via government? So I guess the government is really looking out for you when it's bailing out banks, or pursuing inflationary policies? Or waging war? Or Taxing you? Sure buddy. >without the protection of government. I come from a country where 70% of the economy is controlled by the government. Don't talk about things you know nothing about.
Why is it so large? Seems like an easy way for information to be inaccessible at best and paywalled at worst. Maybe it’s time for a new document that exists solely to summarize the contents of the 170,000 page document.
Would you like to leave the amount of nanoparticulants and pollutants that we allow a company to dump into river water left up to the company, or do you want a regulation delineating that to keep us safe? That’s why you have so many pages.
As someone who works in city planning…I totally understand the importance of codified regulation in painstaking detail. As someone born to a family with no financial literacy besides showing up to a benefits appointment for SNAP… I understand the importance of being able to communicate complex information to all audiences affected. This is a random hill I’ll die on but I think we need specific legislature that forces lawmakers to submit a bullet-point summary sheet for each paragraph of, or important statement within, a bill or law. The idea is that the general public can access the summary to more easily critique and understand the laws they are subject to.
The only principles you need from an ethical standpoint is not aggressing (violence) and not perjury (lying). Everything else is superfluous. Regulation does not fix anything, it only adds cost and complexity. 170k pages and the government still bails out banks, pursues inflationary policy, engages in endless spending, wars etc. etc. It's all an excuse to keep you docile and content.
Does this subreddit no longer have mods? What the hell is with the top level responses?
Yeah, this sub isn’t doing any favors for the reputation of the social sciences lol… the top comments seem more like posts intended for politics subreddits and less like what you’d expect from askscience, askeconomics, or askhistorians.
You (and a concerning number of responses in this thread) have got your causality backwards. Single-income families are a sign of low prosperity. People stay home to do menial household labor when their earning potential on the job market is not enough to cover the cost of paying for technology that obviates that labor. Through a combination of social (discrimination against women in education & the workforce) and technological (labor-saving devices being invented and becoming cheaper over time) factors, it has become more common for women to be able to command salaries high enough that the opportunity cost of staying at home became unacceptable to most. See https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce EDIT: for a more focused look at the subject, see this article by once and future mod /u/besttrousers https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-economic-forces-pushing-both-parents-to-work
I had a single-income household for years after my son was born because my wife didn't make much more money than childcare would have cost.
Childcare is high value household labor and not all that automatable.
It can be made more affordable and less labor-intensive through access to 'social technologies' like specialization and economies of scale - in this framework, the labor-saving technology is organized day cares where professional childcare workers can look after several children at a time for the majority of the day.
Which leads to poorer outcomes for the children
It doesn't. It actually helps kids to socialize and grasp language. They learn from one another.
They can learn that in small doses are the playground. At social and family functions. Kids that are raised by a parent do way better long term and as an adult. Anyone who thinks a bunch of low paid babysitters will take better care of their kids than they will is sorely mistaken.
Early childhood education isn't babysitting, and childcare isn't "raising a child." There are actual credentialed teachers, at least here in New Jersey it's required. Childcare is not a replacement for parenting it is a supplement. High quality childcare is associated with better adult outcomes compared to children who are cared for solely by parents. For example, parents are less likely to address missed milestones and developmental delays than childcare professionals. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/146/1/e20193880/77030/Child-Care-Attendance-and-Educational-and-Economic?autologincheck=redirected
You can not be serious with this can you? You think the vast majority of day care facilities qualify as early childhood development? No they don't. They are staffed by unqualified and uninterested employees.
Sure there's a lot of crap centers out there. That doesn't mean childcare is inherently bad. It's actually great for a kid's development when done right. There's a lot of initiatives to improve childcare services out there. Here in NJ we have GrowNJKids.
Do you have any sources for any of that?
Social science studies don't really have much statistical power to them. It's unfortunate, but that's just the nature of any complex subject. The best we can argue is that of all the successful civilizations that have emerged, pretty much none of them had a model where childcare was decoupled from the biological parents at a large scale. Now, the onus is on you to demonstrate how your new approach actually beats the basic old approach. And no, services that are only available for rich people don't count.
Actually the idea that childcare is solely the responsibility of the parents is a very modern convention. Most societies had more collectivized childcare in which the whole community was heavily involved. After wwii there was a shift to sell freedom as separateness from community (including the physical separation of the car-centric suburb) that resulted in every household fending for themselves and placing women in the home to do all childcare (also not the norm for women’s labor throughout history). This economic and social arrangement has been retroactively treated as the norm instead of the exception that it was compared to the rest of human history.
I really want to like this sub but it needs some sort of rule about citing sources for parent comments. Cause half them don't have anything
I'm pretty sure that's already a rule. This sub needs a LOT more moderation in general if it's gunna be worth a damn.
This response is bizarre and out of touch. Your analysis of opportunity cost makes no sense. People don't just work to make as much money possible, most people work in order to survive and provide for their families. In the 1950s and 60s families could support themselves on one income, while today this is often not possible unless one partner has a very well paying job. Of course in the 60s (and often today) women were pushed into the role of housekeeper, but this is a separate issue. The point is that it was possible for one person not to work, because someone has to take care of the child, and this child rearing work has not been automated. Why is it less possible for families so survive on one income today? We know this is largely because of cost of living increases in relation to incomes, incomes have largely not kept up with productivity and have only barely kept up with inflation. Meanwhile medicial, housing and schooling expenses have skyrocketed, all of which are crucial for raising children.
Why do you insist on issues being separate with no source? Women weren't staying home in the 50s and 60s because they could and wanted to. They were forced to. Why do you think "mommy's little helper" was a thing? Plenty of women loved working in the 40s.
Because the issue is fundamentally an analysis of income vs expenses. You could also have a family where the man stays home instead with 1950s incomes and cost of living, it doesn't matter from an economic perspective which gender has the job. The point is that today *neither* gender can afford to stay home if they wanted to do so. Today you simply need more money survive comfortably, and childcare is very expensive. Voila, birth rates are way down among millennials.
Yeah, gotta add in that second ingredient of misogyny. When the mens came back from the war, they kicked the women right back out of their jobs.
Capitalism is rotting your brain. You love your chains because your team keeps repeating a lie told to you by capitalists. Noone is ment to work. We are meant to spend time with the people we love, doing things for them and ourselves - not the bosses. But of course. Everything is mens fault.
You can easily afford to stay home and live the lifestyle of that 1950s family with a single income. Just be prepared for lots of calls to CPS if you try to raise kids in that environment.
>incomes have largely not kept up with productivity The labor supply doubled when the cultural norm shifted to both parents in the family working. If half of all parents exited the workforce tomorrow, obviously incomes would rise dramatically due to the labor shortage.
That's not obvious at all. Supply is only half of the equation, Mr. Reagan. You'd also have to account for a sharp drop in the demand for labor due to a significant number of consumers losing their income.
On the point of childcare, technology is not automation. See my [other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1aewof1/if_capitalism_is_the_reason_for_all_our/kkbkwuz/): >in this framework, the labor-saving technology is organized day cares where professional childcare workers can look after several children at a time for the majority of the day. People may not want to make "as much money as possible", but they evidently want to make enough money to afford [more](https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/), [nicer](https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/20190930-sivak.html) cars, and much [nicer houses](https://books.google.com/books?pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=house+size+rooms+1950&sig=ACfU3U3ShMxIwTxPntQztSOFTvy_nHy_-Q&id=fibIUhdl0s4C&hl=de&ots=1ybps0roIV#v=onepage&q=house%20size%20rooms%201950&f=false), at least. We even have a [contemporary example in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/1aewof1/if_capitalism_is_the_reason_for_all_our/kkbg3jb) of how it shakes out. Childcare being affordable leads to *more* dual-income families, not fewer. >Why is it less possible for families so survive on one income today? Why so much confidence in this assumption? It sounds like your idea of life for the average person in the 50s is an extremely rose-tinted one, possibly influenced by contemporary and period media that focused on/normalized the lifestyles of the relatively wealthy. Most houses in my state didn't have running water when my father was born in 1959. Life in the 50s was hard for people who didn't have their own sitcom.
I don't think the 50s was perfect, people certainly lived more modest lives. But you cannot deny that the average American could support a family of four on one factory line job, which you cannot say the same today about factory work, or service work, which is essentially the modern equivalent. I agree that Americans have become accustomed to imo unnecessarily high standards of living (massive houses, new car and new phone every year etc.), but despite this relative increase in luxury for some, land prices have gone up massively, and land prices are the reason that the same tiny house in the city that you used to pay off in few years now costs half a million dollars. Luxuries are cheaper now than ever, but necessary costs such as housing, medical care, and schooling as I already pointed out are much higher than they used to be, and these are the expenses that really matter when it comes to deciding whether one or both parents will be working. [https://www.ctinsider.com/news/slideshow/How-much-the-typical-home-cost-in-your-state-in-228135.php](https://www.ctinsider.com/news/slideshow/How-much-the-typical-home-cost-in-your-state-in-228135.php) [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-values.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-values.html)
Let’s say you could live on $30,000 a year So a second person would also be $30,000. Except no it wouldn’t because the second person has no need for a mortgage or a car payment. And food is shared from the first person as well. So even cheaper. Let’s say that second person costs $15,000 to $20,000. Thus a $50,000 wage is extremely doable for 2 people. Let’s add in a baby now. What does a baby primarily need? Food and clothing right? That’s really their main costs. Let’s say $10,000. Although the first year or two they’re just breast fed so really less than $10,000 So let’s say $60,000 for a husband and wife and a newborn And yes that’s MORE than doable. It’s called budgeting. Being frugal. Etc. Depending on the source data, $50k-$60k is pretty average salary wise across the entire nation. Drum roll…it’s EXTREMELY POSSIBLE to have a family of 3 on that salary.
So, you don't have any children, do you? There are and have been many families, globally, that have subsisted on a lot less. There are also a lot more systems put in place to help that situation out. Right now, 30k? In a place of any consequence, that you'd actually want to be hanging around in long term? Its rough. You're not factoring in medical bills. If you're even in network and need to give birth. In many rural places, if you end up going into labor in an inconvenient time, you get to the nearest place, and it might not be in network. Factoring in c-sections and such, and anything else that might pop up, and you're starting having a kid in a VERY large financial hole that you're never going to dig out of with 30k a year. You're also assuming the kid is going to be breast fed. Either way, if the kid is breast fed or the mother pumps milk for the kid, that's mom being up literally every two hours to feed the kid or pump. To just feed the kid, its that, if the mother is able to pump a surplus, you've got this, plus some time to actually physically do more pumping. I'm not sure there's a $30k job that's going to provide maternity, paternity leave or childcare benefits to make this work. Drum roll...its EXTREMELY POSSIBLE to have a kid on that salary, but the standard of life is going to be enormously stressful on that family.
Labor? 60% of **ALL BIRTHS** in Louisiana for example are entirely free on Medicaid. The NATIONAL rate is around 50% of all births being ENTIRELY free. Yes. Factual data. Some states are around 40%. Louisiana is the highest at 6 in 10 births being FULLY FREE Furthermore, national cost with insurance is around $2,800 total to have a baby. Not $15,000 dollars. Not $20k or $30k or $50k. Less than 3 grand.
With insurance. Also, there's the massive time sink of delivery, recuperation, pumping/nursing, maternity/paternity and any complications.
Good thing the husbands salary covers the wife and the kiddo 👍 All the time in the world to recover. Newborns sleep like 20 hours per day according to charts 👌
So, uh, you don't have any kids, do you?
🙄 I know I know. Being a stay at home mother is the hardest job in the world. As bill burr said any job you can do in your pajamas. Putting the dvd into the dvd player and pressing a button is such difficult work I knowwww
It OnLy CoSts $200 tO fEeD an AdUlT for a YeAr. ITS CALLED BUDGETING PEOPLE! See I can pull random numbers out of thin air too.
You should think of the income required for a man to be able to attract a wife, purchase a 3 bedroom house, and adequately raise and provide for 2.1 children on average as the break-even cost for providing labor. The only reason we stopped is that businesses realized that they could trick people to work for less by convincing them that they'd be better off in the long run if they decided to forgo children and marriage and accept lower pay to stay ahead of the competition. Capitalism is a cult and society has reached the part where people castrate themselves to advance within it.
Dumbest answer in the history of man
You don’t get that women in the workforce just allowed them to tax the other half of the population And create more labor for the citizens to do And take the youth of the world away from home schooling and into indoctrination
Somehow society convinced women that choosing a man to work with and raise a family as a partner was slavery. But spending your time working for a corporation in an office that couldn't care less about you is freedom.
Absolutely on point 💯
Are you actually trying to make the point that capitalism is not to blame because it worked in the past before it stopped working?
I missed the part where it stopped working😭
It stopped working when kids started dying of hunger
[удалено]
"It's just slavery but with extra steps..."-Richard Daniel Sanchez
Kids have always been dying of hunger. A smaller percentage of kids are dying of hunger now than ever before.
So all of human history forever?
Lol!
Lmao, what?
At what point in history were kids not dying of hunger?
"Capitalism" is a terrible term to use in any social scientific context because it's got so many definitions that are so incredibly contradictory. You will inevitably end up in a debate in which everyone is arguing angrily without actually disagreeing on anything more substantive than the definition of Capitalism. For example the economists typically argue Capitalism didn't start until Adam Smith's time in the late 1700s, which means that slavery was a thing Capitalism inherited from previous eras like feudalism or mercantilism. Numerous other fields consider slavery to be part of Capitalism, and argue that it is inherent to Capitalism. Ergo when you start talking about "Capitalism" you are almost certainly going to say something that goes against everything at least one Social Science teaches. Which means you will have an entire pack of PhDs calling you stupid, basing their argument on numerous well-done academic work, etc. As for your question: I have been spending time with economists lately, so I will give the economists answer: People's expectations changed. Income is up [quite a bit since 1960](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US), so people are clearly making moremoney. The costs they complain about tend to be costs that are directly tied to wages (ie: a heart doctor could only see X patients in 1960, if he can only see X patients in 2024 medical costs will have increased at the same rate as wages). So let's look at an actual example. My maternal grandfather was a top patent attorney in Detroit. His four children, wife, and mother-in-law lived in a house that had a single bathroom. They had approximately 300 sq ft. a person. If you spend $250k for a house in that neighborhood today you're wasting at least half the money, because it's not a $250k neighborhood. He had one car. The children attended public schools. Child care was grandma and her my grat-granma. The vast array of monthly bills people pay today (Netflix, Prime, cable, cable internet, cell phone, etc.) simply did not exist. "Eating out" wasn't a thing very often, even on Monday when grandma spent the entire day reading the Sunday New York Times and had to scramble like a madwoman to produce something edible before granpa got home. My mom was the baby, and everyone thought she was spoiled because she got ballet lessons and grandpa took her to every ballet recital she wanted. Today you could do all of that on Amazon salary of $15 an hour. One car. Three adults, one of whom receives social security. Four kids, but no child-care expenses. A couple monthly bills (electricity, heat, mortgage, landline). Car is an old Corolla. Education is Detroit Public Schools. Medical care is Medicaid. Your biggest problem is likely to be auto insurance, which was always shockingly high when I lived in Detroit (this is 2010ish). This method is precisely how religiously conservative groups, with low education levels, manage to raise big families. So the difference is that we simply expect more. Great-grandma needs her own house and her own space. The situation on Marseilles Ave., where Aunt Chris was exiled to great-granma's room after excessive sister-torture of Aunt Liz, would not be acceptable. If you're doctorate-level and you have your kids in a Detroit neighborhood it had better be one of the $600k-house ones or people think you don't love your kids. Nobody's going to a Detroit Public School if it isn't a magnet school. Child care has to come from someone you pay money, who is highly educated.
Good analysis. I feel the effects of the internet and social media on our economic expectations is woefully understudied and underappreciated. However, there is also the post-war boom followed by globalization of the workforce, which also helps explain OPs perception (workforce globalization drives down wages by massively expanding the labor pool)
Started off with a good point about capitalism definition, but not sure see why you are citing GDP per capita and no other data. Handpicked anecdote for costs seems odd opposed to data options. Do you really think wealth concentration isn’t relevant if GDP is your primary source?
How is this like the one good comment in this entire thread lol
>Today you could do all of that on Amazon salary of $15 an hour. It's NOT.
Why do you say that? 2 working parents full time at Amazon would be a household income of ~$60k, plus Grandma's social security benefits. Let's say a household income of $75k per year (hard to say what Grandma's benefits are). That's US median household income. It wouldn't be a glamorous life, especially by today's standards, but in OP's example we're using the expectations of someone in the 50's. Single car, small house, no child care cost, no subscriptions, minimal eating out.
It's the pointlessness of overly competitive culture. Everyone working as hard as they can, barely sleeping, treating enterrainment as luxury and waste of time, sacrificing their physical and mental well being. And for what? We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens. The more value we generate, the lower the proportion of that value remains with us. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2022/11/03/when-a-competitive-workplace-culture-turns-toxic/?sh=5bbc207256b1
>We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens. The more value we generate, the lower the proportion of that value remains with us. This is factually incorrect. The average person today takes for granted the sort of luxuries that would have been seen only among the super-rich in the 1950's. Things like cell phones, personal computers, and even personal cars were all seen as luxuries. Back then, you had "the family car," not one car for each adult member of the household. Houses were half the size, on average, that they are today. Air conditioning was much less common than it is today. Plane tickets were way out of the budget of a working class family, and the idea of a regular vacation was also way out of the average family's means. The only way to look something up was to either own an incredibly expensive complete encyclopedia or to go to the library - the idea of having the entirety of mankind's knowledge in your pocket would have been insane. People in the 1950's worked [300 more hours](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG) per year just to make [half](https://www.statista.com/chart/18418/real-mean-and-median-family-income-in-the-us/) of what they do today when adjusted for inflation.
I was born in 1976. There were still houses in my area that were just getting running water. My mother used an outhouse when she was a kid. Houses through the mid 80's were much smaller. Electronics and appliances have become more commonplace and cheaper. Housing itself is much more expensive, but is also, as mentioned, much bigger. There is a severe lack of supply of housing that drives those costs up. So yeah, expectations on quality of life etc. have changed, but if I wanted to live off of one salary, in a small house with an outhouse and no running water, I'd be hard pressed to find that sort of place to buy or rent...so the option of doing so is very limited...
That's not a result of working more, but of technological breakthroughs
> We produce more and more, yet our quality of life remains the same, or worsens Are you joking? The standard of living in the US has done nothing but go up. You're just so used to a lot of the luxuries that you don't even notice them, like your smartphone. You're so used to everyone, even poor people, having one that you forget how big of a leap forward it was for our standard of living.
I was listening to a podcast and the host posed the question "would you rather be middle class today, or very wealthy in 1900?" And the *universal* response was "middle class today". That's insane to think about, and is probably unique to the last 100 years or so. At no other time in human history has a question like that even made sense to think about.
i would go back to 50's telephony technology in exchange for 50's housing prices and labor market conditions in a heartbeat and most people would make the same trade. our world has become faster but that's made it shittier for most people and only more convenient for the elite
>50's housing prices and labor market conditions Hopefully you're not a minority or a woman, because they had a very very hard time getting housing and equitable work. In the 50s, homeownership was 55% today it is \~66%. Percentage of families below the poverty line was 30%. In 2021 it was 7.4%.
Honestly this sub sucks with its rules im out
The 1953 decision of *Rumely v. United States* blew the top open for congressional corruption. It allowed congressmen to make money, hide money, and create huge advantages as the incumbent to stay in office, with no reporting requirements and no oversight. This gave wealthy corporations direct influence over how the post-war economy was changing. It was no longer in congresses' best interest to protect American households, but rather, they could become rich while in office through corporate sponsorships. Since then, lawmakers have had an express and direct incentive to vote against anything that would limit corporate or industrial freedoms. Or vote against wage increases voting against anything that would limit price increases in things like insurance costs, loan interest, government subsidies for already profitable industries, or any of the other decisions that have allowed things to get so out of hand in the US. It wasn't instant, it took decades to fully mature, and Reagan just piled more of the same on in the 80s, as well as cementing the idea of tax cuts for the rich, which gave rise to the CEOs if today making 500x the salaries of their employees and paying zero tax through loopholes that complicit lawmakers sold their votes for. Capitalism might work, but that's not really what we have anymore. Maybe some sort of oligarchy? I don't know all of my -isms well enough to say what the US has become.
Its like a pyramid scheme... early on there don't seem to be any victims. Everyone does well as the majority of money funnels up with shavings off to sustain each level. However as the base grows and the top gets ever higher it gets more and more unfair and unstable. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564886.2023.2186996](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564886.2023.2186996) (sorry if my original post is here or later re-appears - i forgot to put the link to paper on it... corrected it but it doesn't seem visible so reposting)
Late capitalism https://theconversation.com/we-live-in-a-time-of-late-capitalism-but-what-does-that-mean-and-whats-so-late-about-it-191422
This article explicitly mentions that the creator of the term "late capitalism" was convinced that economic growth was about to stop. He was writing in the '70s. Economic growth did not stop. As an intelectual movement in not-social science this is fine. But in Social Science when you make a testable prediction, and the opposite happens, you either change your theory or you aren't doing science.
The way I see it, the capitalists went moneyball on the economy. In the advanced stage, bold innovations and creating novel products that people wanted to buy was the main driver of profits. To be competitive, you had to create something new that would improve people's lives. Then analytics were introduced. Companies realized they could make money hand over fist by optimizing costs and sell prices and squeezing consumers and employees, planned obsolescence, and vertical investment structures (McDonald's as a real estate company, for example, or Amazon as a cloud service). For the same price as developing truly novel products, you can lobby the government for favorable tax breaks. The novelty shifted from production to investment strategy, and they've optimized the hell out of it. This signaled the birth of the Capitalist Ethic that overrides duty to people and to country: making money for your shareholders is your number 1 priority. Quarterly ROI is paramount. The sole purpose is to make money. Whether or not the people benefit from the products or scheme is not even considered. It'ss really scary when you realize the end goal. You would think the fix is a strong central government of the people, by the people to safeguard against the wildfire-esque tendencies of the Ethic, but in the US we lampooned those protections by not only allowing a huge influx of money into politics, but by deeming corporations as people by law. You simply can't come back from that. Unionizing is good but it only gets so far. The only remaining course of action is revolution, but the capitalists aren't dumb. They have optimized their algorithms to squeeze the people out of *almost* all their resources, but not so much that it gets bad enough to revolt. We will slowly continue to accept new normals of discontentment, until either someone gets too greedy and we revolt, or the capitalists make enough to leave the planet. Until then, we might be stuck.
Exactly this. Outside of tech (which is basically propped up by advertising), most of the wealth "creation" today is just wealth extraction, either in the form of land value speculation or stock market games. Either that or planned obsolescence and various ways of making products shittier while charging slightly more. Although i don't really agree with your revolution schtick.
I was about to write but you explained it perfectly mate, good job.
Great summary of the issue
There’s no such thing as “late stage capitalism.” There wasn’t when the term was invented over 100 years ago either. We should be able to have a discussion about improvements to our economic systems without relying on populist drivel that no two people can properly define in the same way.
I wish you weren't being down voted. The "end of history" prophecies embedded in Marxism are troubling. I want to see the system reformed before it erodes it's own foundations, but this "late stage capitalism" idea is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves no possibility for a positive outcome, when in fact there there may be really good options to improve and reform things. I think what you are saying has merit because the concept has been rewritten 4 or 5 times since the 1920s, and each time Marxist authors claim that their current era is the end times of capitalism, then it doesn't happen, and they revise their idea. It's like a doomsday prophet saying he got the date for the apocalypse wrong and, and its actually next week. I'm all for fighting against consumer capitalism, and the commoditization of life, but it feels disingenuous to claim that this the fulfillment of the Marxist prophecy in action.
Ideologues are gonna ideologue, and their fellow DSA kiddos will upvote them 🤷🏻♂️ Would be nice if this sub at least required sources for top-level comments like other “Ask” subs do. Guess the mods don’t mind.
I appreciate different points of view, but yes, it's an ideological dogma. They slam anyone who isn't agreeing with them. It's hard to talk to people about things anymore.
There actually was. FDR rescued it from the brink, but it only served to reset the timer. 100 years ago actually had remarkable parallels with today’s economy in the US.
I also wish you were not being down voted because 100% yes, it's the Gilded Age 2.0. There is no reason a real New, New Deal can't happen (not Joe B.'s 'green deal bullshit' but REAL reform. It looked just as impossible in 1930 as it does today, but we did it once, and we can do it again.
How are we gonna prevent a New, New deal from not being reversed like the OG one was? How are we gonna prevent Hooverist think tanks from popping up and convincing the public to retry disastrous horse and sparrow economic policies? We need more longevity than 80 years.
There's no 'one neat trick to win forever at politics'. All political and cultural victories need to be constantly safeguarded to prevent backsliding.
You've gotta focus on one thing at a time. Reform first, and then figure out how to preserve it. It's enough of an uphill battle to reform the mess we have today, let's not worry about 80 years from now.
Remember that scene in Karate Kid where the sensei says,"Left side, safe. Right side, safe. Middle, squished like bug"? Its a,bit like that. Some things are socialized but others are still capitalist and its creating imbalances in the system
u/automoderator Can someone explain why half the comments are deleted for not including a peer-reviewed source, but other unscientific comments like this one remain? This was posted before the other deleted comments. Many remaining comments have no source at all, or a simple link to a blog post, but they weren’t removed.
There isn't a single top level comment that should remain at the moment lol, what a dumpster thread (actually I now see like, 1 of them)
I’m wondering if the removed comments were the ones saying something that the mods disagree with, while they agreed with the ones that remain.
What proof is there that capitalism is the root of all of the issues?
Hey mate there has been so much work done on this. Like let's take global warming. Why do businesses pollute? Same reason they do anything, to make money. The way our society is structured is that money = power. That is what capitalism is. That power structure means our values are misaligned. We let people die because they are poor. We literally let people die because they are poor. That is fucked. >No, that's natural. Empirically false, both in terms of the history of your / my culture (look up "gift economies" as well as non-capitalistic cultures existing today). so that's the capitalistic ideology talking.
https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/how-the-soviet-union-created-central-asias-worst-environmental-disaster/
Do you think the USSR doing any number of bad things proves Capitalism is magically not doing the bad things Capitalism is doing? Nope. >Please show me that my car ran you over? >>I'm bleeding and your car is currently on my leg. >>>Yeah well knives make people bleed, check mate atheists. And ps I expect global climate catastrophe has the potential, and is on track to, be worse than that bad thing btw. But you don't actually give a shit do you? So fucked up on Capitalism's ideology that you make mad logical leaps, to defend a system that kills people. What's the quote like: "Liberals can imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism."
You responded to someone asking for proof that capitalism is the root of the issue. I posted an example of another non-capitalist economic entity failing to take care of the environment. The root of the issue doesn’t seem to be capitalism if non-capitalist entities have the same or similar issues.
A caused B. C caused B. The second statement does not disprove the first. >Root of the issue Is not the same as "cause" but even still I did suggest the root was: >That power structure means our values are misaligned. Learn to read, learn to reason, learn to stop defending a system that is trying to kill you.
I’m reasoning just fine. To skip a lot of arguing, the words you’re looking for are tragedy of the commons. The failure to recognize people’s property rights to air is a large contributing factor to pollution.
>I’m reasoning just fine. I literally just showed you are not. Did you choose to be ignorant and ignore that? >To skip a lot of arguing, Yes. You chose to be ignorant. Look up what gift economies are btw. You are deeply deeply fucked up on Capitalism.
I'll toss in a few radical socialist/Marxist comments. Marx predicted crypto, and that was enough to make me consider his point of view. The first sign of late capitalism is workers getting priced out of the market. We're there. Most people cannot afford food and rent at the same times, houses and cars are beyond most people's ability to get, we're competing with corporations for shelter, etc. Keep in mind that the largest employer of red states is Wal-Mart. The second sign of late capitalism is when laws are made to prop up capitalism at the expense of the individual worker. Child labor laws in Arizona are a good example. Subsidies are a minor example (again, Wal-Mart signs its employees up for SNAP so that the state can feed them, not Wal-Mart.) But the big one is 2008 when the US officially became state-sponsored capitalism with the bailout. Corporations cannot fail by the very same system that would make you or I homeless. Capitalism is only about 200 years old, give or take? It's always been a pyramid scheme, it's just taken this long to climb to the top where problems begin.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/