It feels like the USA is becoming like India (and others) where a middle class lifestyle depends more and more on the work of the extreme poor. I have friends in India with live-in Nannie's, live-in chef and a driver and they aren't extremely rich - they can get by paying these people a pittance.
The USA similarly relies on low-paid, often illegal, workers being paid less than minimum wage to harvest their food, wash their cars, do their gardening, etc...
A lot of this is because of the housing theory of everything along with increasing wages and professional opportunities for (a subset of) women.
In the post-WW2 era, housing, food, and energy were cheap, which made it possible for a single wage earner (usually the husband) to support a family. All of the things that upper-middle-class families commonly outsource - cooking, cleaning, gardening, childcare, housework, driving kids around - were done by the wife. Now they are low-paid labor; before they were unpaid labor, but they still had to get done.
The existence of a market for low-productivity tasks like childcare and cleaning depends upon income inequality. These are not jobs where capital and specialization makes you more efficient; one person can do them roughly as well as another, and often times a household member is more efficient than external paid help. For a market to be profitable in these activities, the opportunity cost of one person’s time must be much greater than the wages they pay for this service, which implies wage inequality.
Two-edged swords and all that. Greater equality between sexes within a family is made up for by greater inequality between families.
Calling childcare "low productivity" is sadly part of the problem here. It doesn't hit the GOP as hard, but it's a necessary task for the future of society. And those impacts determine how future generations react.
You don't invest in your future, don't be surprised when the future doesn't invest in society.
I mean this in its specific technical and economic definition. Childcare is low productivity in that no matter how much capital, technology, and mechanization you throw at it, one adult will be able to care for a limited number of children, and that limit is not all that much higher than what a parent could do. Infant childcare, for example, is limited by law in many jurisdictions to no more than 1 adult per 4 children, and if you've ever cared for an infant, you'd know that limit is pretty inherent to the job itself. Through Baumol's Cost Disease [1], this implies rising costs in these sectors and an increasing percentage of employment devoted to them.
That these sectors are necessary was part of my point. If the parent isn't doing the job, somebody else is; you can't just eliminate or automate the job entirely.
> It feels like the USA is becoming like India (and others) where a middle class lifestyle depends more and more on the work of the extreme poor.
With a longer perspective, the trend in the US can be seen more as a reversion to a prior state. 100 years ago the US wasn't that different than India today in terms of exploitation of poor laborers.
> 100 years ago the US wasn't that different than India today in terms of exploitation of poor laborers.
100 years ago there was a period of prosperity in the US following WWI.
100 years ago there was much stronger unionization for Americans both in factories and on farms.
The high tech infrastructure 100 years ago was electrification, US cities being wired up and almost all rural (where most Americans lived and worked) areas not. You might argue for the phone but rural phones took longer than electricity to deploy. The high tech infra today is Internet and rural Indians are much more connected than century-ago Americans.
Conditions are very different in important ways. I'm intentionally leaving out race/caste comparisons, which are valid but will also lead to massive downvotes.
Most of the world looks that way and it's largely a consequence of their culture.
We've spent decades saying that the US's culture was immoral for various reasons and did everything we could to import foreigners from places like that, now we're seeing the cultural shift and it turns out the ideas we had weren't as bad as we thought.
That you think that US has historically been "friendly" towards the idea of rights for women, blacks, and latinos is pretty amusing.
At the very least it shows a history illiteracy that can only be derived from ignorance. It's either that or malice. I'll cut you some slack and presume it's ignorance.
We fought an entire civil war to free the blacks, they're more free here than in many places in Africa. We preceded most countries with giving women rights and even many of the most misogynist people here want them to have more rights than they have in most of the rest of the world.
If we gave minorities and women any more than they already have we'd have to actively take things from other people here (and in some cases we're already doing that.) The idea that we now or have historically not been near or at the frontier of this is completely absurd and actually historically illiterate.
I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, I'm saying it could be (likely is) the cause of the problem. Maybe it's worth the cost.
I don't think it is but a lot of people seem to think tolerating that is an absolute moral axiom that should supersede anything else so if you think that then you would say it's good.
I'm referring to some of the rhetoric used to sell the current so called "decline" (authoritarian or economic). I believe they call them wedge issues? Every culture has nice words for it's bullshit. And yeah, that's whatabotism.
There's an obvious decline in income inequality and other metrics of economic egalitarianism in the U.S. A big part of these stats has always been the labor for those industries with undocumented labor, prison labor and the like but recently, wages for your average service worker have failed to keep up with inflation and, on a longer horizon, productivity gains. These gains are in big part from automation, and I suppose owners feel entitled to that share of the pie but with gig work, monopolies and mega-corps slicing up the economy amongst themselves, workers have generally have it worse than their forebears.
Economists and sociologists have been forever talking about this.
The USA similarly relies on low-paid, often illegal, workers being paid less than minimum wage to harvest their food, wash their cars, do their gardening, etc...