Some articles I have read in the past 24 hours on work and what it means to people: I see a common thread.
helmintholog: Where the money went:
Not all the gays in the world getting married live on television could do so much to destroy the patterns of marriage and family life in which they believe as these wage statistics have done. And they have nothing to do with feminism, militant or otherwise. It is simply the development of the modern American economy — but of course this can’t be said or thought. So they blame the feminists, the liberals, the democrats, the elites.It is the quality of rancid dispossession, the feeling of being cheated, which is the most notable quality of modern right wingery; and it is unusual. The temptation, for liberals, is to dismiss it as nostalgia for the Fifties, and for a mindlessly conventional society in which many people were oppressed. But I think this is silly. There are some things from the Fifties that no one could miss, though most of them are technological inadequacies. There are many things that no one should miss, most to do with racism and the persecution of minorities. But there are important and worthwhile things that anyone would miss if they remembered them: chief among them is the reasonable expectation that things would go on getting better for ordinary people and their families.
No longer being able to get by or even thrive as a middle class family on a single income is what they miss: having one parent at home makes a huge difference, we’ve found.
The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine:
ANOTHER POINT is that while many of you enjoy the highest standard of living in human history and will live in bigger houses, take better vacations and drive flashier cars than your parents, you nonetheless are well and truly screwed.From 1947 to 1973, real income, adjusted for inflation, rose about 75 percent, and went up almost equally for the poor, middle class and rich. Since then, the growth of wealth has continued, but real hourly wages have declined and middle-class income is virtually static (rising at best half a percent a year, adjusted for inflation). Only pay for the upper classes has soared.
The stall in pay for most people is odd, since worker productivity — or the amount of goods and services we each produce, on average — has risen 61 percent since 1980. Benefit should have followed, right? If we make more, don’t we get more?
Nope. Instead, average CEO pay in the same period rose 480 percent, corporate profits rose 145 percent, and income for the top 1 percent of Americans climbed 157 percent, all adjusted for inflation. America now has 2.2 million millionaires, and CEO pay that was 44 times that of an average worker in 1980 has rocketed to 301 times in 2004.
As Billmon explained last week, wages dropped 17% in from 1972 to 1992. He sees the root cause as “the massive influx of women into the workforce in the ’70s and ’80s – a social trend which turned many, and then most, U.S. families into dual-income households. That’s primarily were the money came from to support the steady rise in personal consumption – that plus ample amounts of personal debt.” The trouble, as he notes, is that its not repeatable: once you soak up all the work capacity and thereby depress wages, you can’t get any more (though I suppose that’s what offshore outsourcing is all about: that or we resurrect child labor).
Then we have this on the fraying of Norway’s moral fiber:
IHT: Norway work ethic slips on oil-coated slope:
OSLO Before the oil boom, when Norway was mostly poor and isolated, it survived on hard work and self-reliance, two sturdy Scandinavian virtues.
Now, with the country still bulging from three decades of oil money, Norway is discovering that sudden wealth comes with complications: The country’s bedrock work ethic is caving in. Norwegians now stay home from work at the highest rate in Europe, outdoing even the former titleholder, Sweden.
[ . . . ]
The average time people were absent from work in Norway in 2002, not including vacations, was 4.8 weeks. Sweden totaled 4.2 weeks, Italy came in at 1.8 weeks and Portugal at 1.5 weeks, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.Throw in vacation time (five weeks for most people), national holidays (11 per year) and weekends, and Norwegians take off nearly half the calendar year – about 170 days.
See my earlier comments on oil-based economies as based on hunting/gathering as opposed to the more evolved farmers we think we are.