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A global housing crisis is suffocating the middle class
(english.elpais.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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We need to stop using the term "middle class."
Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.
Today it's two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.
We're in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.
The middle class has always been a myth to get people to work harder and for a homogenized society where everyone’s got that “all-American” family with a white picket fence. We can once again blame fucking Henry Ford. See Ford’s sociological department for the literal enforcement of this ideal in exchange for his touted “$5 a day!” lure. Company people came around to your house to check what you were eating, how you were dressed, how your kids were doing in school, and if you were an immigrant, how assimilated you were becoming and if it was acceptably quick enough.
No. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
Look up "Hells Angel's" by Hunter Thompson. There's a chapter where he runs down the economics of dropping out circa 1970. A biker could work a Union stevedore job for six months and earn enough to live on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musicain boyfriend.
That was before Nixon started printing paper dollars to pay for Vietnam and Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the rich.
I have read Hell’s Angels, and while Hunter S. is always interesting, I wouldn’t really trust him to get his facts straight on anything except Nixon or college football. Blue collar work and trades are not necessarily what you’d call “middle class” in terms of performativity. You can have money, but middle class is about that idyllic myth being pushed. You can always have people living outside of the myth, but the Hell’s Angels lifestyle on the road is not for the 99% of people who are cultured to need the suburban 9-5er. Adorno writes extensively about the Culture Industry and being endlessly cheated out of promises that the (entertainment) media sells us, like as previously mentioned, sitcoms showing what a family ought to look like and their means. Also, fuck Reagan.
In 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000.00.
So a 1960 minimum wage could buy an average home with 5 years of 40h/week and you don't think that's a "pretty good life" compared to the current situation?!
One of the biggest problems nowadays is exactly that the house-prices to incomes ratio is several times what it was back then.
lemme technical comment.
I'm Dagwood and I was arguing that we'd actually had a 'middle class' where the average wage earner could move ahead in the world by working 40 hours a week.
Sohoriots was arguing that the middle class was an illusion.
I think you were trying to commnet to Soho and not me.
Okay?
The existence and purchasing power of the minimum wage is applicable to the working class and the poor, not the middle class unless your theory is that there is no such thing as a working class or poor and "middle class" starts at the bottom of pay scale, which would be strange given that being "middle class" at least back in the 60s was about what kind of work people did and were did they sit in the income scale relative to other people (hence the word "middle") - so office workers back then were typically middle class whilst blue collar workers were typically working class, both due to the latter doing "manual" work unlike the former and having a lower income relative to the former.
That explains why I misunderstood your point as meaning that the minimum could not buy all that much, which per your clarification in this post is not what you meant.
Granted, compared to today, the working class of the 60s had more purchasing power than much if not most of today's so-called middle-class.
The previous poster's point wasn't that there wasn't a middle class, it was that blue collar workers and traders aren't middle class which would be correct per the definition of "middle class" I provided in the 1st paragraph of this post.
Talk to the people who were around at the time, or look at books or essays.
Archie Bunker was often cited as a 'middle class' figure.
Yeah I think you meant to hit my comment here. I didn’t say it wasn’t a “pretty good life.” We’re sort of making points past each other at this point, but the gist is that 1. Dagwood is correct, you could get a decent house on minimum wage etc., however 2. I believe the notion of the middle class is a myth pushed to keep us struggling to work harder and to flatten diversity for ideological reasons (see my first comment).
I suspect we're running with different versions of "middle-class".
In Europe middle-class used to be about the kind of work one did and roughly correlated with doing or not manual work - those doing manual work were considered working class and those doing office work were middle class.
This tended to also match incomes, so middle-class usually had a middle range income, higher than the working class but not as high as the rich.
This all sorta matched because non-manual work was generally either some kind of management position or some position requring higher education - such as, say Medical Doctor, Engineer or Architect - which very few people back then had.
It wasn't about what an income could buy, it was about the kind of work people did, their level of formal education and the level of their income compared to others.
Things have however changed a lot - a much higher percentage of people have higher education, most of the income advantage of higher education is gone and in general all layers but the rich have fallen down in the income ladder - were there was a middle class there is now mostly a gap and essentially the working class and the middle class have been squeezed together.
IMHO, what we have nowadays is a two class system:
However we were talking about the 60s and I do belive there was actually a "middle class" back then, at least per the definition we had in Europe.
I’d love to try an experiment to see what it would cost to build a simple home to 1950s median norms and 1950s building codes, with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry. Middle of nowhere town with one store and a highway going by. How much would that actually cost?
I’m sure it would still cost more now because of materials, and there really isn’t a way to get around building codes. But the living one could achieve with a simple job, back then, was definitely simpler than what people consider a typical life now. I don’t really have a point here - I’m just wondering how big the cost gap would really be at the exact same living standard as yesteryear.
Unless you're trying to say that all the advances made since 1960 are a direct result of inflation, nothing you posit makes any sense.
I mainly asked questions, positing only that lifestyle was simpler then, building codes were different, and materials were cheaper. What part of this are you having trouble with?
When I make a random observation I like to put "[off topic]" at the start.
I make the $1.00 minimum wage/$11,000.00 house argument a lot because it so clearly shows how far down we've gone.
A lot of people try to refute it by pointing out how much "richer" people are today.
I was confused because I thought you were trying to address the main point, not adding an aside
See?
You said:
And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.
I don't think that the 1960's life style was 'lesser' than today's by any means.
Check "Hell's Angels" by Hunter Thompson. There's a chapter where he runs down the economics of being a hippie/biker/drop out.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and then go on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boy freind.
There was a popular travel series. The first book was "Europe on $5.00 A Day." Eventually, they had "Paris..." "London..." and other great vacations all for $5.00/day.
Sporting events, movies, and concerts were much cheaper.
If you wanted distraction, there were book stalls and news stands everywhere.
Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.
If you want to argue the minutia of building codes of the past, I'm sure there's a sub for that.
Read the rules.
Bruh. All that is like pennies, comparatively speaking.
Also, pretty sure you've described is like every other property on sale right now, so no need for calculations - just check the local zillow or something.
Yeah. Al sold shoes. Unreal.
It was also a work of fiction.
Or propaganda.
A lot of 80s/90s TV was selling a lie because it was primarily written by the upper middle classes portraying the lives of the working class.
They had little idea how things actually worked.
You do know that there are people walking around your town who were alive in 1970, right?
And had money to go to the nudie bar...
A bunch of people complaining about a show they clearly never watched.
He barely supported a family of 4 on that pay. Especially the early seasons make running gags that they're all on the brink of starvation as in fighting over an m&m they found in the kitchen to a tiny scrap of food elsewhere in the house, and skipping out on checks if they are out. Marcy had often complained the Bundy household was an eyesore for the neighborhood and was dilapidated. Plus his Dodge which was in constant disrepair, and was so old the odometer had rolled over from 999,999. Even more running gags about how Al only owns 3 pairs of underwear, all his socks are falling apart and have holes in them, and his generap wardrobe is cheap and out of date even for the time period. Al and Bud are often looking for some kind of side hustle while Kelly likely gets a lot of stuff bought for her from all the guys she dates.
But let's not forget an the important fact...it's a fictitious TV show made for the purposes of entertainment about a lower class family and anyone who tries to use it as examples of affordability or someone living beyond their means should have lost all credibility to their argument.
Yeah the press've been claiming it's dying for 40+ years. y'all... It's dead
Sounds like you’re saying that the actual middle class is a small set of professionals at the upper end of what we generally call the “middle class?” And that 90% of people are actually working class? That seems like a really sensible interpretation. I mean, if you don’t own your home and can’t build significant savings, you are living pretty close to hand-to-mouth. And that’s a lotttttt of people these days.
Yes.
That's exactly what I was saying