Why are they mutually exclusive? Blue-collar doesn’t have to mean “uneducated”.
I would suspect that as fewer resources are required to provide the labor for everyone’s needs, you would see a trend towards more socialized services and a higher overall standard of living for even the lowest rungs on society.
Many women who started to work had big issues with child care etc. It was done to maintain a lifestyle, not to improve it. (Since it didn’t for them for the most part.) Sure, those with higher levels of education did it for fulfillment and that was good, but a lot of these jobs were not exactly fulfilling. Having lived through the period, I don’t recall a massive rise in the standard of living you’d forecast if it was done to increase the level of luxury.
Color TVs are a lot cheaper now than then. Sure we didn’t have satellite or cable then, or DVDs, but we did go out to the movies a lot more since you couldn’t watch a movie you wanted to see at home. Back then you paid for every extension phone - both for the phone and for service. Now you have a very cheap phone and relatively cheap landline service - if you even want it. You have to balance the cost of a mobile versus the cost of making calls from payphones. If you want to compare capability, we have a lot more for a lot less.
Sure no one paid for computer service back then - but perhaps the money you save at Amazon etc. on purchases more than pays for your cable or DSL. So you have to look at a global view of things, and count time into the picture also. For instance, counting the value of your time at any reasonable rate, how long did it take for the microwave to pay for itself?
This is what has perturbed me in the past and still somewhat perturbs me…how much we spend on shit. I have talked with wife/kids about this and they really don’t see it.
My wife is pretty good and she did think it was a good idea to sell the 3300 square foot house and get a 1400 square foot townhome (which really has worked out great! - Everyone now thinks this was a good idea - we are closer to the city/more in the center of things - was a winning decision)
However…we still spend per year:
$2520 on cable/phone internet.
$1210 on cell phones
About $5000 on car payment (we have 2 cars - we actually do ‘ok’ here)
About $1000 on insurance.
Gas - heck about $2500 as a guess
I mean…holy crap! Can’t we cut most of this crap out? Would it really be so bad to not have to have a car…to ditch cell phones etc etc?
I mean…if we were to just cut out most of the fluff, it would be close to my wife’s take home salary.
Sigh…I guess I’m an old geezer/Luddite.
I bet your mother wouldn’t have made your clothes if she was working. My mother went to work as soon as we were old enough, and never did. She did it not for luxuries but so that we would have some breathing room - and because she had a college degree, thanks to being able to go to Brooklyn College for free.
We hardly go to restaurants now - because my wife works from home and so can start dinner at a reasonable time. She was able to do that because I made enough money as soon as I got out of grad school to let her stay home, and when the kids were old enough she could ramp up her writing career slowly but surely.
The town I lived in in NJ was heavily populated with people who worked at nearby research centers and made good money. There were a lot of stay at home mothers, and the schools and town had no lack of volunteers. This did not come from sacrificing life styles (or not that much) but from enough income to make it possible. There is a big difference between a wife working to pay the bills and handle emergencies and a wife working in order to get luxury cars and expensive vacations. I’m definitely not saying the second situation is wrong, but that it is a choice, unlike the first.
Yes, this would be a reasonable progression of events, given given reasonable decision making among the government and industrial leaders. But I wonder how likely that is.
There are all kinds of monkey wrenches which might screw this up. How will the resouce owners feel about their property/products being redistributed? ‘Socialism’ is practically a curse word in this country.
Then there an issue of population control. There are already widespread mutterings about poor people having children they can’t afford. China, at least, is enforcing mandatory population controls. There will be a lot of pressure to reduce the population to levels that can be sustained by this future economy. And I don’t mean sustained in terms for providing food/clothing/shelter, I mean it in terms of providing jobs that will allow people to “pay their own way”.
There are at least two ways to describe a time when most everyone can afford to pursue artistic or educational interests because their time won’t be taking up by working to meet their basic needs. One way is to say we are heading toward a techology based utopia. But others might decribe it as a nighmare, the antithesis of the meritocracy that America is supposed to be.
While we have cars, the time we own them has been increasing since at least 1969. Cite.
Of course, when both people work, you often need two cars. I don’t have a cite, but I remember that it was commonly thought that people in the '50s and '60s bought new cars every two years or so. I know my father, who didn’t make as much money relative to the average as I do, bought cars a lot more often. I’m a cheapskate, true, but I learned it from him.
My experience mirrors Broomsticks very closely. 26 years in an industry that has vanished from my state. I’m also scrambling for work and coincidentally also just finished a ditch digging job. I’m fighting for jobs I’m grossly overqualified for and trying to subsist on jobs I’m no longer physically up to.
I recently rehabbed a bathroom that took me a month to complete. It involved ripping out the walls, floor, fixtures, plumbing and electrical. Everything including the exterior window and interior wall was replaced, rewired and replumbed. It was really more than I’m physically capable of doing and it took it’s toll.
Of course. That was part of the stay-at-home-mom deal. With both spouses working, we tend to spend more money. I’m not judging anything-- it’s just a fact.
More like every 4 or 5 years. Planned obsolescence-- car engines didn’t last much longer than that.
I thought a Ford or a Chevy would last ten years, like they should.
No, it doesn’t, but most people working skilled blue-collar jobs do not have college degrees. I don’t see anything wrong with that; taking a one or two year course at a technical school to learn to be an electrician puts a young person out into the workforce more quickly, and hopefully with a lower student loan debt load. It varies by area, of course, but electricians around here make a very good wage and have pretty good job security.
That sounds like a reasonable average, though I couldn’t find any data on it back that far. An exec at one of my mother’s jobs did change cars every two years, and sold his old one to the employees for a good price. We got one.
Who has the personal computer completely put out of work on a grand scale? 
Dad grew up in the '50s, living like that. He hated it. I suspect most people growing up then living like that did, too.
Probably a whoosh, but…all the people who manually did all the tasks that can now be automated using a PC. Of course, like the buggy whip thing that you dislike, it happened over a period of several decades, and mostly people just moved on or actually found work using the new tools and technology.
Pretty much how I grew up, even if I grew up in the 60’s instead of the 50’s. And you are right…I doubt most people would like to go back to that. However, there is no magical wand creates jobs that has salaries to support this lifestyle. People CHOOSE to have this kind of lifestyle (if they are fortunately enough to live in a country where the majority of them can even have the choice).
-XT
In part. But a big part is that some expenses have grown faster than the rate of inflation. Mostly tertiary education, health care and real estate. not only that but the tax burden has become more regressive while wages have stagnated compared to inflation.
The gizmos and gadgets are actually a minor part of people’s debt according to Elizabeth Warren. When in college I had cable TV, a pre-paid cell phone, a landline and DSL internet access. My half of those bills (I paid the pre-paid by myself but split the others) came to about $40/month. It wasn’t a huge expense.
Health care is in many ways better, but in others it is just more expensive. It doubled in 10 years, but is it 2x as good since we pay 2x as much for it? Inflation eats some of that, but by and large I don’t think it is 50-100% better every decade to justify the rising prices.
Also as 2 people enter the workforce, expenses go up. You need a 2nd car and you need to pay for daycare, both of which eat into the take home pay of the 2nd wage earner.
I think we will have to adapt to more multi-generational living in the US. The concept of everyone having their own home or living arrangements starting in their 20s isn’t realistic for many people.
But the point is that while some things have gone up in quality while going down in prices (automobiles, consumer electronics, food) others have gone up in price while quality really hasn’t changed (college, oil) or hasn’t gone up enough to justify the hikes (health care).
Plus property, sales, fuel & payroll taxes, among others, are higher. And those tend to be regressive.
My point is I’m tired of people mentioning “Buggy Whip Manufacturers” whenever people ending up out of work due to changes in technology or society come along. There’s a gigantic difference between a technology that took 60 years to become so niche as to be non-existent, and millions of skilled workers waking up one morning and discovering that A) They no longer have a job and B) The skills they’ve got aren’t obsolete, there’s just not enough positions for those skills.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t choose to live in a country where a townhouse in an average part of town is nearly $400,000, where petrol costs $1.30 a litre, where electricity is something like 18c/kW, and a cup of coffee from anywhere that isn’t McDonalds costs $3.50.
In the '50s people (well, white men) could have a decent life style without being a big executive. My father never went to college (couldn’t afford not to work) and came back from the war and became a security guard at the UN. He eventually did make it into management, but not in the '50s. We drove to relatives for vacation - but we did have a TV, a good record player, and a really nice house in a very good neighborhood. He also had excellent health insurance. Today someone at that level would be struggling, and the right would be ranting about how the UN paid too much.
I don’t think the problem is jobs disappearing. It is that the gentleman’s agreement that you pay workers a decent wage vanished when some companies found they could increase profits and share price by paying the least possible. Look at how Costco gets raked over the coals by analysts for paying more than Sam’s Club. Shipping jobs to India is the same. But now they’ve discovered that if no one gets paid, no one buys, or buys only the cheapest crap available. So they cut more, and it just gets worse. Like most big problems it isn’t a result from anyone being evil, just following policies that work in the short term but lead to long term disaster.
In my 30 years of experience in the computer business, I’ve seen lots of similar situations. Hate to break it to you, but every one of these people has a business model showing them with a decent app market share. There is going to be an inevitable shakeout, and most of those 20,000 people are going to be looking for something else to do very soon. It happened with minicomputers, it happened with PCs, it happened with office apps, it happened with web apps, it will happen with this. Low cost of entry encourages even more to join in. Hope your company has a plan B, or a real killer app.
Thats one area that really should be rethought in terms of what we actually need or will need in the future. Most of the blue collar jobs that people associate with high wage potential , are actually the elite of the blue collar. The one job thats perenially under sourced is tool and die, simply because we simply do not hire kids out of school and apprentice them.
We guide them towards it, give them some form of training in community college and then send them out to a work force thats advertising for five or ten years experience and its a highly methodical job, not everyone has the mindset for it. Then the govt does an industry survey and lo and behold, we need more tool and die people.
Blue collar will always be around as a job, but we definitely need a third alternative. Perhaps even rethinking why we need jobs at all. We need the money to pay the bills, no one is going to argue that, but a job is simply a way of trading time and skills for the money.
Declan
Is the Time Coming When There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?
Yes, 10 years ago. There will probably never be a time where there are enough jobs to go around again.