You stated that what used to take one wage earner now takes two. I was simply pointing out that the fifties single wage earner supporting a whole family is not consistent with the rest of the history of this country. It's a one decade situation that everyone wants to cling to as a norm (so they can understand why they are unhappy now?). The advent of small, cheap, mass produced suburban housing and subsidized government mortgages made it possible. Most people wouldn't consider the housing that was built back then as even liveable now.
Go back and look at pictures of some early 1800-1900's manufacturing plants, especially textile plants. You'll see a lot of women and children. Anyone who grew up on a farm or ranch knows full well it was never the labor of a single individual but the whole family that supplied the family income. Also stores and small businesses almost always included family members as workers (paid or unpaid) and still do. Before WWII, there were more people self-employed then there were employed by others. It was the families who owned these small businesses (farms, ranches, stores, funeral homes, doctors, lawyers, etc) that made up the bulk of families who owned their own homes. The city wage earners were mostly renters.
There was not only the labor of one or two family members but the labor of several but if you examine tax records it might only show one wage earner, this is because a great deal of the labor performed by women and children wasn't documented even when they received wages. If you had asked my Italian grandmother if she ever had to "work" she would say no, yet this is far from accurate because she and my aunts made and sold lace tablecloths. Sometimes bringing in more income then my grandfather's job. This income was hidden even while it put food on the table and paid the rent. It was never talked about because it was considered shameful for the women to engage in any commercial enterprise. My father and my uncles on the other hand were expected to bring in wages from age nine onward to support the family. When my mother worked to help put my father through night school in the fifties my grandmother thought it was the worst thing she'd ever heard of and complained bitterly to my mother for years even though he clearly made more money because of the added training.
The whole family working was the norm in anything but the most affluent families prior to WWII. The child labor laws stopped city families from sending their children off to work at a factory at an early age, but even people who grew up in the fifties on a farm or ranch worked from an early age. I've lived in several rural communities where children were given time off from school to help with the harvest.
i'm sure other areas are less expensive... and for good reason.
I've spent a great deal of time in California over the years. I used to live there, have numerous family members and friends who still live there and while I enjoy visiting there, I have to say if there is a "good reason" why home prices are so much more expensive there I have yet to discover it. But if people are willing to pay so much more it must be so, right!? But then there are ugly suburbs in NJ and Long Island where house prices are equally over-priced so using your logic there must be a "good reason". Maybe a good explanation but that explanation has little to do with intrinsic value.
If there is nothing else that the stock market has to teach, it is that price and value aren't always correlated, in fact they are almost never directly correlated. At least in the case of stocks they can frequently have an inverse relationship. |
