Just a reminder, your average factory worker today can buy a pound of butter with only 20 minutes of labor, compared to only 100 years ago and that same amount of food would have taken 3 hours of labor to earn.
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@freemo@qoto.org
@freemo (Just because my understanding was that in the US and UK at least, the deregulation of Reagan and Thatcher has led to that gain going backwards since then)
@VoxDei you are expecting the 1975 numbers to be significantly better than current numbers and 1900 numbers I take it?
@freemo That would be my hypothesis. Though I am frequently wrong. ;-)
My understanding is that the gains you speak of were largely won by organised labour. Deregulation of markets and weakening of trade unions since the 80s has demonstrably led to wider inequalities between workers and executives, which would suggest the gains in worker buying power should at the very least have slowed since then and possibly gone backwards.
@VoxDei not off hand, but it wouldnt be too hard to research
The average price for a pound of butter in 1975 was $1.025 cents.
The average gross hourly wage for a factory worker in 1975 was $4.81.
4.81/1.025=4.692 lb/hr
60/4.692=12.78 minutes to buy one pound of butter.
Sources:
Avg Wage (see chart 606): https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021301612&seq=406
Avg Prices:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008856711&seq=527
Though its important to note for reference in 1975 the work-related death rate was also 3x higher.
So you are 3x likely to die for a 40% increase in butter buying power :)
@freemo @kilroy_was_here I don't know, but I strongly suspect that increase in death risk is rather uneven. Teachers, probably about the same, coal miners, not so much. So most jobs you'd probably be fine. ;-)
Except that teachers made less than manufacuring jobs in 1975 ($4.01 per hour based on a 12.5K salary). AND just living in 1975 at all makes you far more likely to die of almost anything. So even teachers would likely have a much higher death rate than modern teachers.
Yea most of the advances in safety arent really specific to teaching. But back in 1975 safety was just abysmal for everyone. Teachers were often exposed to asbestos (very common in school buildings) and other hazards, just as everyone was in various settings.
My point is, just keep in mind a 1975 lifestyle and wage is only possible when you cut safety **everywhere**. Once you start wanting a society that is much safer, cleaner, and more inclusive the cost for that is more expensive stuff, like butter.
Also keep in mind butter itself is manufacturing/farming and when you want to do it safely even just the cost to make the butter will be more, naturally.
This is kinda the point I make when people get depressed or angry about economic conditions today vs yesteryear.
Houses back then were way smaller, people had one car max, one black and white TV they paid off over time, ate out rarely, diets were dramatically simpler, and travel was driving over to the next state, not getting on a plane to the next continent.
You can still bank some impressive money if you live like that, but few are willing to today.
@freemo @kilroy_was_here I don't think it's correct to say that living standards in 1975 were achieved by compromising workplace safety (and by extension that any loss since then is because more is being spent on safety). Safety standards at the time were what was believed to be acceptable, it's not that people were cutting corners to save money, and even if they had been workplace safety isn't generally as expensive as all that.
Any erosion of median living standards since the 70s is likely to be a result of massively widening inequality between the top and the bottom. For instance in the UK in 1979 the top 10% took home 21% of the total net income, in 2009/10 it was 31%. This rise was largely at the expense of the bottom 30%. (figures from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/more-unequal-country). The top 10% have a 50% pay rise over that period, the bottom 10% have a 75% cut. Similarly, from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/pse-research/going-backwards-1983-2012, the percentage of people lacking three or more "necessities" in the UK has more than doubled between 1983 and 2012.
Similarly in the US the share of aggregate income from 1970 to 2018 being taken home by the "upper tier" income group rose from 29 to 48%. The "middle tier" income group fell from 62 to 43%. Share of aggregate family wealth for the upper tier rose to a whopping 79% from 1983-2016, to just 4% for the lower tier (both stats https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/).
The rules got changed, a lot of regulations that served a very good purpose got done away with, and the richest in society got the benefit. It's nothing to do with spending money to make workplaces safer.
> I don't think it's correct to say that living standards in 1975 were achieved by compromising workplace safety (and by extension that any loss since then is because more is being spent on safety). Safety standards at the time were what was believed to be acceptable, it's not that people were cutting corners to save money, and even if they had been workplace safety isn't generally as expensive as all that.
No you misunderstand. I dont think people in 1975 said "Lets be especially dangerous and fuck safety because we want to make things cheap"... I think that they just had a mind set where safety was less important for a number of reasons, a large part of it is ignorance.
The point however is that, while unintentional, that lack of process/effort put into safety relative to the level of time , money, and effort we put into safety today, is the reason things were so much cheaper, even if it was accidental.
> Any erosion of median living standards since the 70s is likely to be a result of massively widening inequality between the top and the bottom. For instance in the UK in 1979 the top 10% took home 21% of the total net income, in 2009/10 it was 31%. This rise was largely at the expense of the bottom 30%. (figures from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/more-unequal-country). The top 10% have a 50% pay rise over that period, the bottom 10% have a 75% cut. Similarly, from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/pse-research/going-backwards-1983-2012, the percentage of people lacking three or more "necessities" in the UK has more than doubled between 1983 and 2012.
This train of logic makes no sense, you suggest the lack of safety wasnt intended to save money, then go on to assume it **didnt** save money... this makes no sense. We know the safety was less, and we know that saved tons of money. Any argument you make about intent is not relevant to that.
Furhtermore your argument just doesnt line up witht he facts, like at all, and I debunked it before. In short when you look at the correlation throughout history between wealth disparity and cost of living it does **not** line up, in face we see an inverse corelation, suggesting the **opposite ** of what you say is true.
We have to be ccareful to use facts and evidence to back up our claims and not just try to back up what we feel makes sense or feels right, no matter what amount of explanation you can produce for it. Thefact is, the numbers do not line up with your assertions, yet they line up with mine quite well.
@freemo Do you happen to know what the number was for say, 1975?