Ohio State - Free

[freeloader]

OI think the issue with this thread is that people are kind of talking past one another.  There are plenty of jobs that pay a living wage, a middle class wage that don’t require a bachelor’s degree.  HOWEVER, you would be hard-pressed to find such a job that doesn’t require an advanced skill which often requires a license (plumber, electrician, nurse, etc), working in difficult or dangerous conditions, working in remote or dangerous areas, and/or which require years of experience.  

So, what has changed?  The entire economy has changed. Education has changed, for one thing. In the mid-1940s around half of adults graduated from high school. Today, that number is around 93%.  A high school diploma is less valuable because they are simply so much more common. The same thing has happened with most higher-level credentials, such as bachelor’s degrees, as well.

America in the roughly 2 decades that followed WWII was the world’s workshop. We manufactured everything, at least everything that was worth having. Factory jobs paid well because our goods commanded premium price in the marketplace. They also paid well because more of business’s income were paid to employees and less to shareholders and senior management. That isn’t meant as a political statement, just a fact.

Something else, equally important happened because of the high wages paid to factory workers, miners, loggers, etc. Their high wages drove up wages of other workers in the marketplace. If you ran a store in Detroit across the street from a Ford factory and the factory paid $2/hr in 1950 and were constantly hiring, you had to pay a wage that was reasonably close to that $2 or you couldn’t keep workers. So, cities like Detroit and Milwaukee were excellent places for factory workers, but also excellent places for people adjacent to the manufacturing industries.  A rising tide did raise most, but not all, ships.

The three decades following WWII also saw the rise of something that was basically new in American history: consumer debt. Sure, farmers had long mortgages their crops and people took out small loans to buy the occasional large item, but the great majority of people lived with very little debt. The postwar years changed that. Credit became much more widely available. The first credit card as we know it, the Diner’s Club Card, debuted in 1950. Imagine if all debt was wiped out and we all were able to go out and start buying (and borrowing) how much we would buy, how much the economy would lurch forward, and how many jobs would be created. That’s kind of what happened in the 1950s-1970s.

As I noted above, the rising tide didn’t raise all ships, at least not equally. The golden decades that followed WWII were really a golden time for white American families. Cheap credit for home purchases (backed by the government), the GI Bill, cheap and expanding public universities, and hiring practices that strongly helped white males all combined to funnel money into the pockets of white men and their families. Part of that prosperity was built on intentionally inequitable distributions of wealth. To make it possible for that white male to make $2/hr, the black janitor in the factory might have needed to make 50c/hr for work that was just as physically demanding. That janitor’s wife almost certainly made even less.

My family originated in small towns in flyover country. In the 1940s/1950s a white male could “come home” to such a place after service in WWII or Korea, get a government-backed loan to buy a “starter” house, get a job at Sears or the (locally owned) gas station, get married, and support his family. True, he didn’t have an iPhone or an 80-inch plasma television, but he probably was in a bowling league and owned a car, something his parents who had been devastated by the Great Depression thought was remarkable.  

What is also interesting to note, however, is that the doctors in the small town probably drove Mercury’s (to our man’s Ford) and lived a little bit larger house, but still modest by todays standard. They made a little more than our man, but not 10x as much, as is often the case now.  There were fewer “rich” people and the line between normal and rich was nowhere near as stark as it is today. 

There were some huge businesses, sure, but there were also more small businesses than today. My wife’s grandfather went to business school (at one of the most prestigious schools in the US, mind you) in the 1940s. He was taught that as a manager/owner he should live over his store or next to his factory. He was taught that he should be making 2 or 3 times AT MOST what his employees were making. More than that and a) he wasn’t investing enough in his business, b) he wasn’t investing enough in his people and/or c) his people would hate him because of a and/or b.

Let’s also not forget that many of our worst societal problems, including people starving to death and left totally destitute with no hope of improvement, have effectively been eradicated. The poor of today have, on the whole, a pretty decent standard of living. People of color and women-headed households are far better off today than they were in those “golden decades”. Better or worse off today?  Hard to say, depends on who you ask.  But let’s not kid ourselves and say that it is easy, or anywhere near as easy, to maintain a middle-class lifestyle with a “basic” job.