A living wage
18 Feb 2009 08:36 am
In the context of a discussion about why one low-skilled worker's salary is no longer enough to support a family, MC writes:
Look, there have always been people who could command a wage that could support a family, and people who could not.
In the old days, the people who could not were called women. And various other names related to skin color that I will not include here. That whole notion of earning a family wage with no specialized education or skills only applied to a subset of the population, and the organizations protecting their interests worked to keep it that way.
Nowadays, white men have no special protections. If they want to buy a house and raise a family, they need to learn a trade better than Walmart clerk. And they may need to move away from depressed rural economies.
The gain is that a lot of people who never had a shot at the good jobs in the past do have that shot now. White men are competing with everyone now, and they can't coast.
They are even competing with the entire populations of China and India. Terrifying thought, but you can't get around it.
The 50s were fake, so we can't really use them as our baseline. And even that fake only applied to some people.
It's also worth remembering that companies were not only legally allowed, but expected, to pay married men more that anyone else, and that ordinary people lived much, much more modestly than they do now. Many workers lived with other family members, or in rooming houses--the houses in television and movies from the era are, just as now, abnormally large because average-sized houses would be too small to film. In the popular mind, every blue collar worker in 1950 was pulling down a hefty wage at GM, but union membership peaked at about a third of workers, and most of those jobs were at companies that didn't have the profits, or the freedom from competition, to support those kinds of wages. A lot more blue collar workers were people like the mechanics and pump operators at my grandfather's gas station, who raised families on . . . the kind of money you could generate working at a gas station.
Our memories are distorted by two things: first, the tendency of all cultures to focus on their own outliers (many fewer people work for silicon valley startups in real life than in either our entertainment, or the popular imagination), and second, the fact that the people who have written about the period are abnormally likely to have come from successful families who pushed them through an education. Their memory of a well-appointed blue-collar childhood in a nice suburb on Dad's generous steelworker wages endures; few memories of a straggling blue-collar childhood as the child of a factory janitor do, because those kids were less likely to go to college and become people of letters. The successful and educated are disproportionately likely to be represented in all parts of our written and spoken culture, from man on the street interviews to letters to the editor. History really is written by the winners.
Comments (114)
This is all vitally important to remember--there's an awful lot of selective remembering going on. It's also worth noting that if our per-capita GDP were to fall by 20%, we'd just be back to the 1970s...not exactly the stone age.
Posted by Rich in PA | February 18, 2009 9:24 AM
What wage would one have to earn today to be able to raise a family in the style of the median household of, say, 1955?
The answer is probably, not much. It's not clear that the median family had a car, and if they did, it didn't have air conditioning, any safety features and broke down a lot. So being able to afford a really crappy used car now will suffice. How much does it cost now to rent a very small apartment or house with no dishwasher or air conditioning? How much does it cost now to get 1950's quality medical care? You can't count cost of most drugs because they simply didn't exist then. You get cancer, you die. You don't eat out, even fast food, more than a few times a year. When you eat at home, you eat a lot of very low quality canned food. You get to count for clothing as much as it costs to keep your family warm, which, given Wal-Mart is close to free now, but not then. No expensive sneakers. No cell phone. We don't even have party lines anymore, so count the most basic local phone charge. No cable. In fact, the cost of a black and white TV is basically zero now. No air travel (the median family in the 1950's didn't travel much by car, much less by air.) No pampers. You wash your own cloth diapers. Anything else?
Posted by Chris | February 18, 2009 9:24 AM
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com
I am talking about real wages. The real income of a median family of four in 1950 was close to today's poverty line for that family. Of course, the cost of some things, like housing in certain desireable urban areas, has gone up (but that's coming down now, and at any rate, the housing bubble is hardly Wal-Mart's fault). But the cost of other things, like food and clothing, has plummeted. We romanticize the real, unprocessed food of the era, but that real, unprocessed food was only available in most areas during a fairly short growing season. My parents and grandparents ate canned fruit and vegetables 8 or nine months of the year in Western New York; fresh produce was very limited except in high summer. The reason iceberg lettuce was such a sensation was that it could be grown in California and shipped without rotting, not because people in the 1950s didn't know about other kinds of lettuce.
It's also actually true that many appliances of the era broke frequently--it's just that all that has survived until now is the super-reliable ones, so we say "they don't make things like they used to". Ditto furniture, houses etc . . . the cheap crap didn't make it to the current era, which is why, for example, we have this illusion that the Victorians all lived in marvelously well-built homes, because the only Victorian houses around are the mansions of rich people.
Posted by Megan McArdle | February 18, 2009 10:02 AM
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com
Goof topic, Megan.
I had this same discussion with my sister a few months back.
If people wanted to live "like back in the 50s", they need downgrade their lives and slow the hell down.
Go find that 1200-1500 square foot, 2-bedroom house with one bath. Put one modest car in the driveway, chop your possessions in half or more, get basic, basic cable, put one TV in the living room with nothing attached to it, throw the cell phone away, keep just a few simple toys for the kids and keep their clothes for hand-me-downs and eat in 6 days per week and you'll be on your way to that nice, cushy, middle-class life-style....not even the level of the lower classes of the time.
Do all that and watch your disposable income and savings soar....even on a lower-middle class wage.
The problem is not one of empirical indicators of well-being and wealth. The problem is human nature. People don't judge their life style on some static scale. They judge it relative to those around them and those "doing better". It's the classic case of "keeping up with the Jonses'"
And yes, I'm sure we had this same problem back then as well. I find it hard to believe that most people were sitting around marveling at their own life. They were looking at what others had and always feeling like they could and should have more than actually do. It's human nature and it's never going to change.
Posted by John V | February 18, 2009 12:09 PM
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com |
