"I feel the need to explain something to the generation that does not remember, or never saw, a world where one person with a high school education could support a family of 5 comfortably.
"This was real. For millions of US families. It was *normal.*
"It was stolen from you."
It's almost the same now.
Millions of US families together can support 5 billionaires comfortably.
@vy Yeah ... I wish I could get my hands on the fuckers that told LBJ we could beat the Viet Cong and maybe the Pathet Lao too. And the fuckers who pushed Nixon to make a treasonous deal with the Vietnam peace talks delegation.
I can only imagine the kind of deals Trump made, considering how bad the ones are that we know about.
@IAmDannyBoling I do get nostalgic sometimes for the family wage, I'm not gonna lie. My dad earned one and supported us quite nicely, though my mom did work too and socked away enough money that none of us kids had to take out a dime in college loans.
But then I remember the people who earned that family wage were almost exclusively white and male and I get less nostalgic. In very real ways the family wage epitomized a certain stage of patriarchy.
@josemanuel @IAmDannyBoling Yes. It is a good thing. A family shouldn’t need to work multiple jobs to be able to survive.
Requiring higher education to have a living wage:
a. rules a lot of folks out of the living wage pool - I would say that is bad.
b. severely devalues higher education. At the time that the family OP spoke of how do you think the engineer with the degree was living? How about now?
See, a robust middle class makes everyone better. Except the really really really rich people who don’t get to hoard the massive piece of wealth that would fund such a thing.
@bleakfuture No, it is not a good thing, and I’ll tell you why. The key word was not ‘well-paid,’ as you seemed to believe, but ‘uneducated.’
When uneducated people have children, they usually don’t have anything to offer to satisfy their kids’ natural thirst for knowledge. They don’t have books in the house, or good records they can share with them. They have nothing at all to teach them (after all, they only know about their jobs), so they will be forced to learn elsewhere.
This means that, at some point, the world view of the parents and that of the children will diverge, and that will bring communication problems that the parents will blame on puberty and teenage rebellion. If they’re also dumb, they will try to control them, straining the relationship even more.
What will happen if, on top of being uneducated, they are also well-paid? Well, the parents, then, will think they are not failures, and that will create an even greater divide, because now they won’t have a low opinion of themselves. (On the contrary. They earn good money. They are clearly not the losers people thought they would become.)
So, when the kids inevitably find out their parents are not the role models they hoped they would be, they will try to keep their distance, but the parents, still seeing themselves as the greatest thing since sliced bread, will start feeling resentment towards their children: “Why won’t they talk to me? Why won’t they admire me? I’ve given them everything money could buy! (And whenever we argue, I’m right, because I’m the one who’s well-paid and self-made.)”
In short, higher education should be the standard, with high school being just the minimum needed to survive in the woods. That doesn’t devalue higher education at all. How can knowledge be devalued just by being the rule? Even in economic terms, everybody chooses their own studies, right? There should be no flood of graduates waiting for the exact same job.
Problem has always been to think of higher education as a thing for the rich to get the good jobs. It is not. It is for everyone, as human beings.
tl; dr: I was not talking about economics (of course I support a living wage for everyone), but about children’s welfare and their prospects in life. (BTW, of course there are exceptions to the examples I gave, but they are just that: exceptions.)
You raised interesting points. Sorry I could not address all of them for fear of spreading too thin.
@josemanuel @IAmDannyBoling yeah I can’t follow you on this one.
In the examples you stated there seems to be some metamorphosis that occurs upon receipt of a BA that completely transforms one from worthless loser who is a shame to themselves and their children into a shining pillar of modern civility.
I want to be respectful about this but it seems like it’s coming from a place of not really experiencing much of the world and life yet. Maybe age, maybe circumstances, maybe I’m just wrong…
Let me be clear.
You do not need to be smart to graduate college.
You do not need to be particularly skilled or even disciplined to graduate college.
You are not required to go to college for a wide variety of excellent careers.
I guarantee you that I could tell more about a candidate that I hire from the details of their student loans than their transcripts. That’s a much better measure of a persons common sense and decision making.
Cool, you have a degree - what did you pay for it?
My grandfather supported a (very catholic) family of 9.
This would be literally impossible now.
@IAmDannyBoling OK, but in 1960 only 40% of Americans had a high school education, and 7% had a college degree.
Today, it's 90% high school, 40% college.
I don't know; I'm not sure it's comparable. Real wages have definitely stagnated, but it doesn't feel like comparing apples to apples.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
@IAmDannyBoling The "it was stolen from you." part feels particularly dangerous.
It was "normal" for many Christian white families. Also, one member of the family was a full-time, highly skilled, unpaid domestic laborer.
The rhetoric of the far right is that this lifestyle was stolen by people of color (especially black and immigrant) and women who gained footholds in the workplace since that time. Further, they allege that it was the coastal liberal elites who conspired to enable this theft.
My grandfather had only a high school education. He went into the Navy instead of college. After he got out of the Navy, he went to work for the railroad doing railyard inspections and security. He had a wife and three kids to support.
When the railroad ceased to be a thing, he became a floor walker (loss prevention) for a major department store.
When his teen daughter had a baby(me), his family needed more money, so he became a cop. He retired from the police force at age 70.
Of course back then if you were a woman you were a housewife and IF you had a job it was a very low paying one. No woman could support 5 kids alone, only a man could.
Salary dynamics changed with the introduction of two-income households. Aka giving women a financial independence.
What I am saying is I understand the idea, but going back to that time and that economy is probably not something we actually want to do.
Sure, I'm all for a return to higher real salaries. But the idealisation of the single (male, poorly educated) bread winner is completely alien to me. That's just blue-collar patriarchy. My mom was a chief HR officer at a major company and always encouraged me to get the solid free higher education that Sweden offers.
@IAmDannyBoling
Yup.
Where I grew up, in the east SF bay area during late 70s and early 80s, there were families that could pay a mortgage on a small house while the husband worked as a gas station attention or janitor or short order cook and the wife just did part time work while the kids were at school.
That simply is not possible now.
Me working 50 hour work weeks, I'm flying across the US to hospitals and labs to support them and to make sure people can be diagnosed with their problems specifically about viruses and bacteria infections with our instrumentation, away from the wife and daughter for a weeks time, alone at my hotel, can barely afford the house and bills and food and I have to save for a few months for surprises for the wife and daughter
Na, it's still easy. Really easy. 🤐
@IAmDannyBoling this is so tone deaf.
That good life was stolen from the colonized masses of the world. Lament the ease that was lost but IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE ACTUAL COST you can't see how foul it was, let along take part in fixing the problem.
Normal for millions of *white* families. Of course, racial injustice was not a problem back then: if you weren’t white, you did not exactly have a voice in society.
Comfortably supported by one *man*. Of course, domestic violence was not a problem back then: if you weren’t a man, you did not exactly have a voice in society.
But yeah, let’s talk about how the white man’s privileges were “stolen” by things like the civil rights movement.
Same here in the UK.
My father and mother had five children, and for most of the time, he had the job.
Nobody should imagine that what we are seeing today is normal, and it certainly isn't necessary.
@IAmDannyBoling My grandpa supported a family of six. They were thrifty but never impoverished. He always had good work. They bought a comfortable home and were able to afford a large add-on. The only reason my grandma started selling cosmetics on the side was so they could give the kids piano lessons.
Grandpa had an 8th grade education.
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