In the 50’ and 60’s we were constantly told that in the year 2000 we would all be on easy steet because factories would all be automated and turn out a conucopia of products at low cost and we wouldn’t have to work very long or hard to live the good life. Well, we all know that didn’t happen. Families now have two breadwinners instead of two and people put in outraeous hours. Our consumption is really not that much greater. Oh sure, a few toys like vcr, computers, and the like. Computers should have made all the accounting and clerical functions of society easier and require fewer bodies, but we all know that an extaordinary number of people spend their lives keeping track of money and selling existing goods rather than producing anything. And it seems that the trend keeps accelerating. Nobody has much time for a personal life anymore.
My questions are (1), why does this situration exist and,(2), will the trend continue and if so, how long can it continue before people are stretched to the limit, whatever that is?
For one thing, I don’t recall being told anything like that in the 50’s and 60’s. Oh, sure some folks made silly predictions like everyone having personal helicopters and such, but silly predictions are pretty much inevitable.
For another, my experience in terms of being on easy street is different from yours - I think I am on easy street, at least as compared to my parents. My wife any I both work, but so did my mother and father - and we have things lots easier than they did.
(If the factories were all automated and computers did most/all of the clerical and white/pink collar work as well, we’d all be out of jobs, not on easy street.)
Comparatively, we are living a life of ease. Women, especially. No more hanging out the laundry, order groceries from your home computer, no wax floors, riding lawnmowers, foods cook faster, or you can go out and get the food pre-cooked - just heat and eat. Vacumn cleaners, no more beating the rugs. It’s just that with the time we have saved with these wonderful new inventions, we hae filled our lives with other stuff, which cost more money, which in turn causes us to work more.
Personally, I’m still waiting to take delivery of my flying car.
Me, I’m sitting here surfing the Internet, eating Good N Plentys, I’ve got a kitchen full of factory food that I didn’t have to grow or slaughter or process myself, I’ve got a gas furnace in the basement that never needs stoking, I’ve got a gas stove in the kitchen that doesn’t need wood chopped and toted to feed it, I’ve got electricity to run the lights that don’t need whale oil to keep them lit, I’ve got a washer and dryer that run on electricity, so I don’t have to lug laundry tubs full of water and sozzle the dirty clothes on a washboard and hang them out to dry, I can do a load of laundry while I’m sitting here eating Good N Plentys and posting on the SDMB, and I can stick the clothes in the dryer and PermaPress will iron them for me.
And if I want a drink of water, or to wash dishes, I go out to the kitchen and turn a handle and pure drinking water comes gushing out. And if I want to take a bath, this being Saturday, instead of heating water on the stove, I turn a couple more handles and nice hot bath water comes out, and when I’m done, instead of emptying the tub by hand, I pull the plug and the water goes away.
I’ve got an extra bag of Good N Plentys, if ya wanna come over and share the Good Life.
P.S. The only place I’ve seen a chamber pot is in a museum, and the only place I’ve seen a privy is at some of our more rustic state parks. All Hail Progress!!
I’m sorry, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. It is not that I’m suffering. I work four days a week. I have a three day weekend every week. My income is in the top 20% or so of wage and salary workers. My wife doesn’t have to go to work. No, what I am talking about is the existance of most other people. The necessary tasks of life take more of a household’s time than they did a few decades ago. Pretty much all the conveniences which DDG and other posters refer to existed in the 50’s and 60’s.
WillGolfForFood claims that if all factories were automated, we would all be out of work and therefore poor. Not so. The promise was that we could divide up the necessary work and work very short hours and be creatures of leisure.
It’s true that more gadgets make more work, but the work itself is easier.
Kind of like… majoring in liberal arts means you have more stuff to do, but the stuff is easier.
Laundry is easier to do, but you have so many clothes that you wear so few times between washings, that laundry still takes a while. Food is easier to prepare, but people want to make complicated gourmet dishes, so it takes a long time. Etc etc etc.
Not to point out the obvious or anything, but when you automate a factory, you just sort of shift work to other areas. First you need new factories to make the automated machinery components, then you need technicians to keep the automated machines at both factories functioning, etc. If a company automates, usually they increase production and move the employees around rather than downsize. A factory with 100 line employees might make 100,000 widgets a year. They automate and now the 100 line employees make 500,000 widgets per year. New jobs are created to transport, distribute, and market these additional widgets, and the price of the widgets goes down a bit. Assuming there is a limited need for widgets, and only 400,000 per year could in any concievable way be used, rather than send 20 employees home the factory will shift it’s additional production capacity to a new product, such as something that the people making the predictions about additional leisure time never considered.
Basically, instead of additional leisure time we have new products and services available, which most people percieve as giving us a higher “quality of life”. If you worked only enough to hold yourself to only maintaining a “quality of life” similar to that available in the '60s, you would probably have lots of leisure time. I think you could take this as far as you wanted until you were living a brief but brutal pastoral existence, naked and free. Most people seem to prefer the modern life, because although it has Mondays, it also has weekends.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by galen * I work four days a week. I have a three day weekend every week. My income is in the top 20% or so of wage and salary workers. My wife doesn’t have to go to work. No, what I am talking about is the existance of most other people.
…but what the rest of us are saying is precisely that “most other people” are pretty much like you - better off than they were in the fifties. Let’s note that everyone posting to this threat (including you, as far as I can tell) claims they’re better off now than they were then.
**The promise was that we could divide up the necessary work and work very short hours and be creatures of leisure. **
Again, who is it that you think promised this? Nobody else here seems to remember that particular promise.
I have seen retrospectives dated earlier this century detailing future predictions, and they did seem to have some pretty outlandish ideas about what life would be like by the year 2000. I wasn’t alive then, so I couldn’t comment on how accepted these ideas were, but I do believe that might be what galen is referring to.
I do think that there is less manual labour to do now, both in the home and in industry. What we do have now are a lot of companies trying to keep up with technology, and many more companies devoted to enhancing our leisure time. This creates longer work weeks for people. We may be doing less coal stoking, but more e-commerce.
Based on stories told to me by my parents, I beg to differ. I grew up in a room full of toys, Rubik’s Cubes and a tv. My parents had a piece of string each, and they were happy to have it.
The people making the predictions were wrong. Society has increased consumption rather than leisure time. People don’t want lives of leisure, they want to more thoroughly enjoy the spare time they do have. We could all lie around and be waited on by robot butlers constantly, but we’d rather work, then take a vacation, pack the kids in the SUV, and spend the weekend at a ski resort. Or perhaps we just like that on the drive to work, we can be surrounded by climate control, and the flawless sound of a ten-CD changer. Maybe we just like that our kids are protected by ABS and side-impact airbags.
Our entire society has wholeheartedly rejected (not necessarily consciously) the chance to live on easy street for all eternity. We are driven towrds progress. That which is currently unattainable calls to us. Since we are all used to working, we would rather get more for the same work than work less for the same result.
