It just means it's now harder for families to make it on a single income that used to be the responsibility of the father. This drives wages lower as we're seeing and makes it harder on everyone.
Logically speaking, it doesn't make any sense. It should be easier to start families because families earn twice as much.
Practically speaking, people will spend their money on limited resources like land and basically lose out on most of the gains. That's the primary way "housing as an investment" earns money, by extorting the wages of future workers. If there are more workers (women and men) then you get to earn even more despite doing absolutely nothing to deserve the money.
Except that they’re not earning twice as much. This also fails to consider the uncounted domestic labor that previously was completed by a stay at home spouse, but still needs to be completed/paid for.
Starting families was never limited by women not working. If anything, women not working (outside the home) makes it easiest to start families, since adult supervision’s time is the most expensive part of raising young children, and if one adult in a family is not working then they have no opportunity cost for raising the kids.
Part of the story is that doubling the size of the workforce does depress wages; and it does cause inflation on assets that do not see an increase in production with an increase in workforce size (such as land).
The other issue is that "women entering the workforce" is not really an accurate description of what is going on. Women have been entering the formal workforce. This means that family now need to pay for what was once done for free by the wife. The most significant expense here is childcare (the cost of which is often cited as a major barrier to women "entering" the workforce); however there are all sorts of little expenses that could be avoid at the cost of additional time, so not heaving an unpaid homemaker increases your living costs in a bunch of little ways.
Owning property, like rental property is not free money. Loan interest, property taxes, landscaping, and cleaning up after tenants. The maintenance expenses are constant. Due to the number and the declining standards of very many things put into houses now. Fixing things approaches a part time job.
> It should be easier to start families because families earn twice as much.
In practice, it doesn't translate to immediately doubling the effective income. You hear many accounts of people whom their father was working a single job in a gas station, yet they afforded a house and car and other amenities. Today that doesn't happen anymore. Furthermore, the children will suffer when both parents are working.
> It should be easier to start families because families earn twice as much.
This is only true for DINKs, families with access to free childcare, or families in which both parents work schedules that can be arranged to make childcare possible, such as having non-overlapping workdays.
The cost of child care where I live in MD is slightly greater than my wife's maximum post-tax earning potential, so we've chosen for her to stay home with the children.
Moving back near family in NJ for the free childcare would reduce my income enough to negate any extra earned income from my wife working.
Not necessarily, is selling your body on prostitution websites more freedom? I think not. It's known what women face in a secular captialism-first economy.
Yes, having the freedom to sell your body on prostitution websites is more freedom. I do not know what the rest of your comment means, but mine is pretty clear that not having to rely on a man to earn money and then give it to them is more independence and freedom than depending on a man to give them money.
PS Isn't it funny that a women "selling her body" on prostitution websites is bad, but a man (or woman) selling their body doing back breaking work for menial wages is OK?
Of course selling one's body doing prostitution is bad, I don't know how that's even an arguing point. Not all "freedom" is good, some of it is destructive, like the example above.
> but a man (or woman) selling their body doing back breaking work for menial wages is OK?
More "independence and freedom" is just an illusion. She's simply a slave to the desires of men looking at her body. Only a secular capitalistic society can believe that any good can come out of it.
It's a straw man because no one brought up the issue of "selling your body doing back breaking work", or whether that is acceptable or not.
It is harder to support families because the required wages have increased. It's fully possible we'd be in the same situation if women didn't see those relative gains.
> Note: Each observation represents the median earnings of men of a particular age in a particular year. For example, the 1957 cohort is represented by an Age 25 observation in 1957
Thanks, that’s what I missed. Was not clear to me it was for that year.
For chart 1
“ Each marker/observation represents the median lifetime earnings of a cohort that turned age 25 (entered the labor market) in the year indicated on the x-axis. Values are displayed in thousands of 2013 US dollars. Earnings are deflated by the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator.”
Chart 1 doesn't make sense to me. It seems everything else is about the median YEARLY earnings, and the word lifetime in the context of this doesn't make sense. Maybe it means the median yearly wage for each individual? Like if I worked exactly 3 years in my entire life and I made 25k at 25, 40k at 40, 60k at 60, my median earnings would be 40k. That's the only way I can make sense of that.
I was hoping to see how much people earn in their lifetime. And how that changed over time.
I was wondering the other day other how many years are high earners are actually earning a very high income. In-equality wise it is very different if people in the 2 percentile of income stay there for a decade or more or if they are in that income bracket only for a few years while doing a specific job and drop down to lower income again when they change their job.
Assuming for instance an average work-life of 40 years (25-65), and anyone in the 2 percentile income bracket stays there only for 5 years, that means 16% of the population will be high-income at some point in their life (and stay there for 5 years), or up to 32% of households. This means that in this scenario up to a third of the population (maybe more if kids are taken into account?) would benefit sooner or later from an exceptional boost in disposable income.
That picture would be very different if high-earners stayed high earners for a longer time as they would truly form an elite that is clearly separated in income wealth from the rest of the population.
Obviously what you do with this income determines a lot about your actual wealth. So this is a different question than how absolute wealth is distributed.
I would be very much interested in pointers towards data and/or studies about how runaway elite incomes actually are in different parts of the world.
High income brackets are vastly higher incomes so people at low incomes (~30k) rarely reach that level. In 2020, the top 1% was $531,020.00 / year, that’s rare, 2% is $387,116.00 again a huge jump for most people.
However, some people very briefly enter high income status via a windfall. But, even here it’s mostly people with high incomes rather than poor people winning the lottery etc.
I think that most high income earners stay at that stage for the majority of their career after reaching that level.
While I know there are exceptions and odd examples, IMO people in general have little desire to take a large pay cut, so if you manage to get yourself to the point you are in the top 2% of earners, why would you step back?
If I had to guess, I agree most people probably continue to earn high wages once at that level.
But I don't think it's a question of how often people decline high wages to take a lower paying job (although this obviously happens as well). It's whether they can continuously be offered high wages as their career continues.
At least part of that is probably a function of how hard the work is on one’s body. A hard labor worker with a high income in 30s/40s is presumably more likely to lose that income in 50s/60s/70s than a non hard labor worker (e.g. office job).
Highly paid, older office workers are first in line when layoffs happen. Those people then face age discrimination trying to get new positions. Can really derail your earnings.
Yes, there is dramatically increase probability of obsolescence for anyone after 50, but from my experience, the office workers tend to have a much better network to fall back on.
Either way, one should definitely be investing in passive income sources for their 50s and up.
Good point. In my experience, the higher earning potential can be maintained, though overall salary growth is lower, as you start to hit a bit of a theoretical earnings ceiling. Though, that is generally of limited consequence when you're at those levels.
Another issue not addressed is lack of employment flexibility. If you are in the top 5% of earners, by extension you are likely limited to the top 5% of all available positions. Whereas someone with a more "mainstream" income can likely switch employers or industries, or even locations, with less impact (or maybe even positive impact, moving into a region with a better pay:cost-of-living ratio).
If you are in the top 5% of earners, you have the ability to save enough money so you can switch to whatever level of employment you want. Someone with a more "mainstream" income barely or never saves enough money to have the kind of security to just try out other employers or fields or regions.
I am willing to bet a top 5% earner would be able to land a top quintile job just by asking people in their network.
That was exactly my motivation of asking this question. If you have a substantial disposable income available year-on-year, you have the option to decide whether to just pay-off your mortgage and then work in something of high personal value, but potentially with lower pay closer to the median. This will still leave you with considerable disposable income compared to your median-income peers at that point.
Alternatively, so I thought, high earners could continue to optimize for high pay to afford more luxuries.
My expectation was then that a considerable amount of high-earners would choose to trade income with work they value personally. Triggering social mobility by allowing someone else to take their place.
Reading these threads, I am thinking now that maybe this is not so much relevant. If it is true, as others have suggested, that high-earners have more chances to get into positions that are well paid almost by default, than the choice for high earners is not between high income or valuable work. They can do both, because even when they start working for an NGO or take government position, their income would be expected to be high.
> If you are in the top 5% of earners, you have the ability to save enough money so you can switch to whatever level of employment you want.
I’m skeptical. My peers and I are in the top 1% of earners. We cannot save enough money to just opt out of our 1% incomes. Real estate is too expensive. (Bay Area)
I suspect many people in the top 5% are wage slaves as much as anyone else and have very little available in terms of viable options to continue the same lifestyle.
I’m in the top 1% but I still live in a 400sqft inlaw unit. Real estate is very expensive where you get those high incomes.
I suspect many people in the top 5% of earners aren’t my age though (30) and have generational wealth going on if not wealth from buying their home a long time ago when things were cheaper.
For your second question see [1]. Average income tops out for most people around age 40 and they stay at that level for most of the rest of their main career.
This data is pretty much what you're asking about[1].
In summary, people in the top income quintile have a 70% chance of staying there. In other words, less than one third of the top income bracket are "new" people every decade.
40% of people also escape the bottom income quintile every decade.
Overall, the diagonal on the chart shows that you are pretty likely to stay in the same quintile over time, but there is still lots of mobility.
Is there any explanation for why in Figure 4, the aggregate line is so much higher than the two lines that are supposed to the same thing for the two groups that the population described by the aggregate line neatly partitions into?
EDIT: I may have answered that to myself by drawing some income distribution curves. I guess it's a plausible outcome if the P90 for "all" is closer to the male P90 while the P10 is closer to the female P10 with the two curves being significantly different (which is increasingly the case as one goes to the past).
At the same time as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which essentially opened up immigration to anyone in the world instead of just people from North Western Europe.
Given that immigrants who aren’t from north western Europe are often subject to discrimination and treated as second-class citizens it should come as little surprise that inequality increased as immigrants became more diverse.
The chart you linked to doesn't support your own point. Immigrants as a percentage of population is no higher after the rise in absolute number of immigrants shown there. In fact for the first few years there, it's signifcantly lower. What I get from that chart is that as a proportion of the population immigration has been relatively constant except for the baby boom period, where local demographics were briefly enough to supply the labour force.
As for your second link, I have no idea what you're trying to get at, but it frankly sounds a bit racist.
Given that for the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century immigrants could basically get off a boat in New York and enter the US or Canada without much restriction and get citizenship quite easily compared to now, this is beyond silly. Literal boatloads of eastern Europeans and Italians (not "north western Europe") arrived in the first part of the 20th century. And built the backbone of the US and Canadian economies in that period.
Finally, northwestern Europeans stopped wanting to _come_ to North America after the early 60s. There was no need for them to emmigrate. My own father's economic fortunes would have been far better off if he'd just stayed in Germany.
A boxplot conveys more information about the distribution, but makes it harder to tell a concise story about comparing trends between multiple groups over time. Both are appropriate here.
Who knew such an admiral goal: "having women entering the workforce en mass" would have such a depressing result: "it is now much more difficult for a family to survive on one income"
What is the solution? Obviously, we would like to keep moving forward and allow anyone that is willing and able to do the job they want, but if anyone would like to be with their children, or take time off while a spouse works, that should also be able to be done.
The solution to me seems to forcing the gains in production and efficiency to the people. With what mechanism I am not sure, but a society that increases output while the lifestyle of average people decreases is not a successful society. Obviously, companies are not going to do this on their own, so I think this should be governments main role, to ensure companies act in the people's best interest and fill in the gaps where companies fail or are not efficient.
It seems to me the increases of efficiency should allow all people a minimum quality life(i.e. a place to live, something to eat, a doctor, education), no matter their contribution to society. I think this can turn people that are a strain on the system to contributors (and if not, we should still do it. What is the point of society, if not to take care of people and give them a better life?)
An idea that I really like is to do what countries like Singapore and the Scandinavian countries do: create a public sovereign wealth fund, and then do what States like Alaska do: divert the dividends from the fund directly to the people.
The thing I worry about Universal Income, which the Alaska situation seems to be, is that there will be a bifurcation of people who need the UI and spend it every month and the people who put it into an investment. I guess if the checks keep coming it is not an issue, but if there is an event where the UI has to stop there will be a lot of pain. I think some sort of forced savings, that is only able to drawn upon at a certain age or for certain catastrophes is required. I guess you can only prevent people from being stupid so much, but what sometimes seems stupid is just people doing what the have to, to survive.
I think the sovereign wealth funds have a lot of the same problems the social security has. Politicians will borrow against it and never pay it back. From what I have heard some middle eastern countries had a sovereign wealth fund that was mismanaged, I guess if you have a competent government it is fine, but you don't always get to decide that.
Overall, I agree with you that both of these are a good way to distribute society's prosperity to the people.
Totally agree that the devil is in the implementation details which can make or break the idea as a whole.
One potential way to mitigate these risks is to have the fund be set up with a strict breakdown, say, 20% of the dividends can go into a pot that the government can use for discretionary spending, and 80% goes to the people equally divided as a dividend, and the only way to change this percentage is with a 2/3s majority. The percentage split and the consensus threshold are certainly debatable.
Where have we done that? Keep in mind that we're talking about sovereign wealth funds funding a universal dividend; the closest we have to that is Alaska's fund, which provides an equal dividend to everyone regardless of income.
I agree. I would go even farther. I think that governments should be funded by investment funds that are financed by revenue from resource utilization. Ideally, the investments are in local businesses and resource development. I am from Alaska. If Alaska had also set up a government fund at the same time to finance government the state would not be in financial trouble now. Alaska didn't do that and oil revenue was directly used to fund government. Now that oil revenue has decreased substantially there is nothing to fall back on.
The greatest tool for building wealth is time. That is an asset that organizations have that individuals do not. Look at the endowments of top tier universities. There is no reason that governments can't do the same and benefit from the long lifespan of a non-human entity.
This has the benefit of aligning government interests with the interests of the people. It also makes government more supportive than punitive as revenue only increases by cultivating an environment for business to flourish.
>> Who knew such an admiral goal: "having women entering the workforce en mass" would have such a depressing result: "it is now much more difficult for a family to survive on one income"
That's kind of expected. Our society/economy/marketing are designed to get people to spend 100 percent of their income or more. So when families get 2 incomes it causes inflation or enables people to buy more stuff (iPhones) or whatever until they're spending the same percentage. Aside from not actually saving the extra income, the obvious downside is to screw single people by raising prices without raising their income.
No idea what the solution is. I think in general we need better ways to save for retirement and also need to reduce the cost of living/rent. Doing both those things together seems to go against nature - if people have it they will spend it. BTW by "people" I mean in general, there are obviously individuals who live differently.
>That's kind of expected. Our society/economy/marketing are designed to get people to spend 100 percent of their income or more. So when families get 2 incomes it causes inflation or enables people to buy more stuff (iPhones) or whatever until they're spending the same percentage. Aside from not actually saving the extra income, the obvious downside is to screw single people by raising prices without raising their income.
I do not think this has much to do with it.
The much larger sources of volatility would be massive increase in labor supply due to other countries coming "online", women entering workforce (this might be overstated), immigrants entering workforce. And all of that was coupled with huge advances in automation, namely computer software, and then the internet. Although advances in farming and manufacturing automation cannot be overstated either.
Both labor supply and labor demand curves shifted the price of labor down for "unskilled" labor.
The other societal impact that is large is women gaining independence, therefore impacting the couples markets. Due to our biology or sociology or whatever, typically, people are going to seek out mates in equal or higher socioeconomic classes with more economic stability. This results in high earners pairing with high earners, competing with other dual high earning couples.
Finally, birth control reduces need to form families while still satisfying biological urges. I know quite a few people sitting out the family thing because they were unable to find an acceptable partner per their requirements. I think this is being seen in general in all developed countries via the plummeting birth rates.
All in all, people have a lot more information available than they used to, and a lot more control of their bodies, and the conclusion for many is the cost:benefit:volatility ratio of starting families is not worth it.
It's hard to convince people to spend responsibly when the government spends irresponsibly, spirals into debt and lets the money printers run overtime.
The cost of living went up because households with two incomes outbid households with one income for scarce goods like housing.
I'm not sure how it could have played out differently. Women have always, always worked to support themselves and their families. But the invention of household labor saving devices freed up enormous amounts of time that would have been spent primarily in the household. Of course those women would look for additional opportunities to support their families. It's the same story as men moving from farm labor to factory labor as farm labor became increasingly mechanized.
> Who knew such an admiral goal: "having women entering the workforce en mass" would have such a depressing result: "it is now much more difficult for a family to survive on one income"
Is it clear that the causation is only in that direction? I am not familiar with economic history back into the 40s and 50s when a lot of women started entering the workforce (note more than 25% of the civilian workforce were women already in 1945 [1]), but could it have been that it's partly the other way around?
In other words, how much of "it is becoming more difficult for a family to survive on one income" caused the need for "more women entering the workforce en mass"?
> It seems to me the increases of efficiency should allow all people a minimum quality life(...), no matter their contribution to society. I think this can turn people that are a strain on the system to contributors
How would they be contributors? I'm thinking maybe you mean that they will participate economically (buying stuff and making more babies). Is that really a good thing though, to have people who do nothing to contribute besides consume things--especially from a climate standpoint? It seems unnatural to me, because nature rewards competition, survival of the fittest, etc..
no, I mean if someone doesn't have a place to live it will be harder for them to get a job or go to school to get skills to get a job. There is still competition if there isn't people dying in the streets
Ah ok, I misunderstood your point then. I had seen other discussions on HN about UBI and people proclaiming that it should be ok if people don't want to work at all
Did the lifestyle of people actually decrease from the 60s to today? I don’t think that is possibly true. Pretty much no American man would choose to go back in time and live in the 1960s (at the age of 25) given the extra purchasing power... or any intervening time in between.
There are some rose-colored glasses involved, of course, but there are plenty of people who would trade some extra purchasing power for a better pace of life, more social cohesion, and the status that sibling-post mentions.
Studying income inequality in the US by gender and age group while completely ignoring race feels wrong when it's such an impactful variable, especially considering it's getting worse over time.
In 2016, the median net worth of non-Hispanic White households was $143,600. The median net worth of Black households was $12,920. Between 1983 and 2013, White households saw their wealth increased by 14%. But during the same period, Black household wealth declined 75%. Median Hispanic household wealth declined 50%.
In regards to the Federal Reserve page, it seems disingenuous to lump so many different people into “Other.” Even if there’s no mal-intent, it seems it could cause one to wonder if there’s a motive behind doing so.
Focusing on race income inequality perpetuates the division of society by race.
There are wealthy families and poor families of every race. Focusing on race as the reason for income disparity is detrimental to the success of the whole. When race is marked as the reason for income inequality we get programs targeted at a specific race. It encourages building "institutional racism".
Any report directly calls data discrepancy as "inequality" cannot be trusted. Anybody is entitled to own political leaning, but bluntly giving up impartiality in data reporting indicates the whole process of your data selection / analysis / report cannot be trusted.
What does this show? Are people earning less or more?
I see it says men are earning less, but women earned more, which I mean makes sense. But is it saying that men earning less is due to women earning more?
And if I understand, it also says women earned more but have started to stagnate as well?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] threadPractically speaking, people will spend their money on limited resources like land and basically lose out on most of the gains. That's the primary way "housing as an investment" earns money, by extorting the wages of future workers. If there are more workers (women and men) then you get to earn even more despite doing absolutely nothing to deserve the money.
The other issue is that "women entering the workforce" is not really an accurate description of what is going on. Women have been entering the formal workforce. This means that family now need to pay for what was once done for free by the wife. The most significant expense here is childcare (the cost of which is often cited as a major barrier to women "entering" the workforce); however there are all sorts of little expenses that could be avoid at the cost of additional time, so not heaving an unpaid homemaker increases your living costs in a bunch of little ways.
In practice, it doesn't translate to immediately doubling the effective income. You hear many accounts of people whom their father was working a single job in a gas station, yet they afforded a house and car and other amenities. Today that doesn't happen anymore. Furthermore, the children will suffer when both parents are working.
This is only true for DINKs, families with access to free childcare, or families in which both parents work schedules that can be arranged to make childcare possible, such as having non-overlapping workdays.
The cost of child care where I live in MD is slightly greater than my wife's maximum post-tax earning potential, so we've chosen for her to stay home with the children.
Moving back near family in NJ for the free childcare would reduce my income enough to negate any extra earned income from my wife working.
PS Isn't it funny that a women "selling her body" on prostitution websites is bad, but a man (or woman) selling their body doing back breaking work for menial wages is OK?
> but a man (or woman) selling their body doing back breaking work for menial wages is OK?
Straw man fallacy.
The post script is a humorous observation of what “selling your body” is used to refer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It's a straw man because no one brought up the issue of "selling your body doing back breaking work", or whether that is acceptable or not.
> Note: Each observation represents the median earnings of men of a particular age in a particular year. For example, the 1957 cohort is represented by an Age 25 observation in 1957
For chart 1
“ Each marker/observation represents the median lifetime earnings of a cohort that turned age 25 (entered the labor market) in the year indicated on the x-axis. Values are displayed in thousands of 2013 US dollars. Earnings are deflated by the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator.”
Leaves that particular part out.
I was wondering the other day other how many years are high earners are actually earning a very high income. In-equality wise it is very different if people in the 2 percentile of income stay there for a decade or more or if they are in that income bracket only for a few years while doing a specific job and drop down to lower income again when they change their job.
Assuming for instance an average work-life of 40 years (25-65), and anyone in the 2 percentile income bracket stays there only for 5 years, that means 16% of the population will be high-income at some point in their life (and stay there for 5 years), or up to 32% of households. This means that in this scenario up to a third of the population (maybe more if kids are taken into account?) would benefit sooner or later from an exceptional boost in disposable income.
That picture would be very different if high-earners stayed high earners for a longer time as they would truly form an elite that is clearly separated in income wealth from the rest of the population.
Obviously what you do with this income determines a lot about your actual wealth. So this is a different question than how absolute wealth is distributed.
I would be very much interested in pointers towards data and/or studies about how runaway elite incomes actually are in different parts of the world.
However, some people very briefly enter high income status via a windfall. But, even here it’s mostly people with high incomes rather than poor people winning the lottery etc.
While I know there are exceptions and odd examples, IMO people in general have little desire to take a large pay cut, so if you manage to get yourself to the point you are in the top 2% of earners, why would you step back?
But I don't think it's a question of how often people decline high wages to take a lower paying job (although this obviously happens as well). It's whether they can continuously be offered high wages as their career continues.
Either way, one should definitely be investing in passive income sources for their 50s and up.
Another issue not addressed is lack of employment flexibility. If you are in the top 5% of earners, by extension you are likely limited to the top 5% of all available positions. Whereas someone with a more "mainstream" income can likely switch employers or industries, or even locations, with less impact (or maybe even positive impact, moving into a region with a better pay:cost-of-living ratio).
I am willing to bet a top 5% earner would be able to land a top quintile job just by asking people in their network.
Alternatively, so I thought, high earners could continue to optimize for high pay to afford more luxuries.
My expectation was then that a considerable amount of high-earners would choose to trade income with work they value personally. Triggering social mobility by allowing someone else to take their place.
Reading these threads, I am thinking now that maybe this is not so much relevant. If it is true, as others have suggested, that high-earners have more chances to get into positions that are well paid almost by default, than the choice for high earners is not between high income or valuable work. They can do both, because even when they start working for an NGO or take government position, their income would be expected to be high.
I’m skeptical. My peers and I are in the top 1% of earners. We cannot save enough money to just opt out of our 1% incomes. Real estate is too expensive. (Bay Area)
I suspect many people in the top 5% are wage slaves as much as anyone else and have very little available in terms of viable options to continue the same lifestyle.
I’m in the top 1% but I still live in a 400sqft inlaw unit. Real estate is very expensive where you get those high incomes.
I suspect many people in the top 5% of earners aren’t my age though (30) and have generational wealth going on if not wealth from buying their home a long time ago when things were cheaper.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t03.htm
In summary, people in the top income quintile have a 70% chance of staying there. In other words, less than one third of the top income bracket are "new" people every decade.
40% of people also escape the bottom income quintile every decade.
Overall, the diagonal on the chart shows that you are pretty likely to stay in the same quintile over time, but there is still lots of mobility.
[1] https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publication...
EDIT: I may have answered that to myself by drawing some income distribution curves. I guess it's a plausible outcome if the P90 for "all" is closer to the male P90 while the P10 is closer to the female P10 with the two curves being significantly different (which is increasingly the case as one goes to the past).
Terribly off numbers for illustrative purposes of course.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...
At the same time as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which essentially opened up immigration to anyone in the world instead of just people from North Western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
As for your second link, I have no idea what you're trying to get at, but it frankly sounds a bit racist.
Given that for the last part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century immigrants could basically get off a boat in New York and enter the US or Canada without much restriction and get citizenship quite easily compared to now, this is beyond silly. Literal boatloads of eastern Europeans and Italians (not "north western Europe") arrived in the first part of the 20th century. And built the backbone of the US and Canadian economies in that period.
Finally, northwestern Europeans stopped wanting to _come_ to North America after the early 60s. There was no need for them to emmigrate. My own father's economic fortunes would have been far better off if he'd just stayed in Germany.
Poor data visualization is such a pet peeve...especially for a university.
What is the solution? Obviously, we would like to keep moving forward and allow anyone that is willing and able to do the job they want, but if anyone would like to be with their children, or take time off while a spouse works, that should also be able to be done.
The solution to me seems to forcing the gains in production and efficiency to the people. With what mechanism I am not sure, but a society that increases output while the lifestyle of average people decreases is not a successful society. Obviously, companies are not going to do this on their own, so I think this should be governments main role, to ensure companies act in the people's best interest and fill in the gaps where companies fail or are not efficient.
It seems to me the increases of efficiency should allow all people a minimum quality life(i.e. a place to live, something to eat, a doctor, education), no matter their contribution to society. I think this can turn people that are a strain on the system to contributors (and if not, we should still do it. What is the point of society, if not to take care of people and give them a better life?)
Alaska's Permanent Fund is only allowed to invest in Alaskan companies and is "only" $75B in size (https://www.alaskajournal.com/2021-02-24/fund-continues-bull...), and even then an Alaskan resident would have received $2,000 in 2015 simply for existing: https://pfd.alaska.gov/Division-Info/Summary-of-Applications...
By scaling up the size and scope of the fund, you can conceivably get to a place where the dividend can work out to $10k+ per person per year.
I think the sovereign wealth funds have a lot of the same problems the social security has. Politicians will borrow against it and never pay it back. From what I have heard some middle eastern countries had a sovereign wealth fund that was mismanaged, I guess if you have a competent government it is fine, but you don't always get to decide that.
Overall, I agree with you that both of these are a good way to distribute society's prosperity to the people.
One potential way to mitigate these risks is to have the fund be set up with a strict breakdown, say, 20% of the dividends can go into a pot that the government can use for discretionary spending, and 80% goes to the people equally divided as a dividend, and the only way to change this percentage is with a 2/3s majority. The percentage split and the consensus threshold are certainly debatable.
We've done that, except the dividends to go to a few rich families instead of to everyone.
The greatest tool for building wealth is time. That is an asset that organizations have that individuals do not. Look at the endowments of top tier universities. There is no reason that governments can't do the same and benefit from the long lifespan of a non-human entity.
This has the benefit of aligning government interests with the interests of the people. It also makes government more supportive than punitive as revenue only increases by cultivating an environment for business to flourish.
That's kind of expected. Our society/economy/marketing are designed to get people to spend 100 percent of their income or more. So when families get 2 incomes it causes inflation or enables people to buy more stuff (iPhones) or whatever until they're spending the same percentage. Aside from not actually saving the extra income, the obvious downside is to screw single people by raising prices without raising their income.
No idea what the solution is. I think in general we need better ways to save for retirement and also need to reduce the cost of living/rent. Doing both those things together seems to go against nature - if people have it they will spend it. BTW by "people" I mean in general, there are obviously individuals who live differently.
I do not think this has much to do with it.
The much larger sources of volatility would be massive increase in labor supply due to other countries coming "online", women entering workforce (this might be overstated), immigrants entering workforce. And all of that was coupled with huge advances in automation, namely computer software, and then the internet. Although advances in farming and manufacturing automation cannot be overstated either.
Both labor supply and labor demand curves shifted the price of labor down for "unskilled" labor.
The other societal impact that is large is women gaining independence, therefore impacting the couples markets. Due to our biology or sociology or whatever, typically, people are going to seek out mates in equal or higher socioeconomic classes with more economic stability. This results in high earners pairing with high earners, competing with other dual high earning couples.
Finally, birth control reduces need to form families while still satisfying biological urges. I know quite a few people sitting out the family thing because they were unable to find an acceptable partner per their requirements. I think this is being seen in general in all developed countries via the plummeting birth rates.
All in all, people have a lot more information available than they used to, and a lot more control of their bodies, and the conclusion for many is the cost:benefit:volatility ratio of starting families is not worth it.
I'm not sure how it could have played out differently. Women have always, always worked to support themselves and their families. But the invention of household labor saving devices freed up enormous amounts of time that would have been spent primarily in the household. Of course those women would look for additional opportunities to support their families. It's the same story as men moving from farm labor to factory labor as farm labor became increasingly mechanized.
Is it clear that the causation is only in that direction? I am not familiar with economic history back into the 40s and 50s when a lot of women started entering the workforce (note more than 25% of the civilian workforce were women already in 1945 [1]), but could it have been that it's partly the other way around?
In other words, how much of "it is becoming more difficult for a family to survive on one income" caused the need for "more women entering the workforce en mass"?
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/facts-over-time/women-i...
How would they be contributors? I'm thinking maybe you mean that they will participate economically (buying stuff and making more babies). Is that really a good thing though, to have people who do nothing to contribute besides consume things--especially from a climate standpoint? It seems unnatural to me, because nature rewards competition, survival of the fittest, etc..
A 25-year-old American man in 1960 had more status in society than a similar man today.
In 2016, the median net worth of non-Hispanic White households was $143,600. The median net worth of Black households was $12,920. Between 1983 and 2013, White households saw their wealth increased by 14%. But during the same period, Black household wealth declined 75%. Median Hispanic household wealth declined 50%.
https://inequality.org/facts/racial-inequality/#racial-incom...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
It has huge impact on both income and wealth.
There are wealthy families and poor families of every race. Focusing on race as the reason for income disparity is detrimental to the success of the whole. When race is marked as the reason for income inequality we get programs targeted at a specific race. It encourages building "institutional racism".
What does this show? Are people earning less or more?
I see it says men are earning less, but women earned more, which I mean makes sense. But is it saying that men earning less is due to women earning more?
And if I understand, it also says women earned more but have started to stagnate as well?
https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2019/10/28/explaining-...