Re: US immiseration
On Mar 6, 2007, at 6:51 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
Doug, it is not that I have a hard time believing this, it is just
that I am not used to the idea that immigration and more women in work is a
bad thing.Aggregate hours worked in industry don’t tell us much about hours
individual people work. You seem to accept here weekly hours are falling.You did relate the growth in aggregate hours worked to population
growth, but it is the size of the workforce (which, if it is anything like
the UK’s grew rather more than the growth in the population) that they
should be related to.
I’m about to give up on this, because you constantly change the
subject when things aren’t going your way. You had initially claimed,
relying on right-wing apologists Cox & Alm, that the productivity
miracle has delivered a lighter workload, because you don’t have to
work as long as you would have in 1820 to buy a chicken or some such.
But, as I’ve repeatedly cited, the real earnings numbers show no such
thing for the last three decades.
More women working (for pay - they’ve always worked without pay) is a
good thing. It makes them more independent of men. But it also means
that the number of paid work hours in the society has risen
dramatically, with little assistance for child or elder care (two
things that are on my male mind right now, too). Household incomes
are flat, average hourly earnings are down, yet productivity is
massively up. There’s something seriously wrong with that. As the NYT
put it a decade ago, approvingly, the American economic model is all
about working harder for less. Sounds great, eh? Wanna sign up?
I also did provide the employment/population ratio, which measures
the workforce as a percentage of the adult population. It’s up
strongly over the last couple of decades. Working harder for less.
Doug