Unless those resources went into the safety nets that have been getting shredded while the top .1% and above end up acquiring all the wealth while not actually contributing to society. It’s not like working single parents aren’t producing enough that they SHOULD be able to survive just fine if not for the fact that they weren’t getting wages commensurate to their productivity.
Why are you struggling with this concept?
Instead we can see where things are going… to the people who aren’t earning a fraction of what they have (if anything)
You appear to have a massively distorted idea of what poverty is like.
It isn’t about your kids not getting their kale smoothies and fashionable sneakers; it’s about do the kids eat at all (or, for a personally-experienced example: do the kids get peanut butter sandwiches for dinner for the third night in a row, because that’s the only food in the house).
Subsistence-level poverty is much more common than you appear to think it is, and a lot of those people are parents.
Ok, you said you found it difficult as a single parent. Can you describe what those difficulties actually were? I feel like we’re using very different definitions of survival.
I’m not struggling with anything, and that graph is irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand.
It demonstrates that the wealthy are getting more than their fair share, but the absolute wealth of all brackets would have increased substantially since the '60s.
I don’t deny those people exist, but unless they’re singularly responsible for the extra worked hours they’re irrelevant to the discussion as to why everyone in the US, including middle class and the wealthy, are working more hours than many of their counterparts.
For example at my office, consisting largely of 20-30 males, making what they’d consider a comfortable income, we have a large degree of autonomy over whether we stop at 40 hours a week or go over.
When we were hourly they averaged about 42-45 hours a week, making 2-5 extra hours of income a week. Since going to salaried very few people exceed 1-2 extra hours. To me that’s fairly clear, these people who were not in poverty or desperate for money chose to work longer hours to make more money. It’s an anecdote but I suspect it’s a very common scenario, it’s not poverty causing the long hours, it’s culture.
To counter your anecdote with an unsupported guess ():
I’d say that the poor are working long hours because the American poor are paid starvation wages; the American middle class are working long hours because they are (justifiably) terrified of becoming poor; and the rich are working long hours because, when your “work” involves a private jet, a corner office and boozy lunches at the golf course, why the hell wouldn’t you “work” long hours?
It’s culture, sure, but it’s a culture that is strongly shaped by the context of American plutocratic economics.
How much do you have to pay to get the most basic roof over your head that’s actually available to you? To get the cheapest food and clothing for your family? To be able to get to work and any other necessary destinations? To pay for medical care? Education? How much working time (including travel time) does this require? Even at the middle class, paying student debt, a mortgage, car payments, insurance etc. is going to mean that a lot of people can’t afford to drop below 40 hours even if they want to. There are places you could save, but it can’t be easy when the basics cost so much.
Why is “what’s considered necessary to be a parent” such a huge investment?
You don’t think it has a single thing to do with inequality?
Hint: why did you use the word “investment”? In what sense do people “invest” in their children?
Doubtful.
Only if you assume all prices are infinitely elastic, which simply isn’t true. Doubling the income of everyone outside the 1% isn’t going to double the price of a barrel of oil or a pork belly or a bushel of grain. It might push up the price of a loaf of bread, but I’d bet some pretty good money that it wouldn’t double it.
I’ll buy it for the poor, but in general if groups A, B, and C all show the same behaviour the safe assumption is it’s the same factors at work.
For whom are you talking about? For the poor it’s very hard, but I don’t think that’s relevant since they’re not singularly responsible for the long working hours as a nation.
People really care about their kids and want them to succeed relative to other kids so they’ll invest as much as they can.
Inequality means wealthier people can invest more than non-wealthy which makes inequality persist across generations, bad but I don’t think it causes long working hours.
That’s not the basis of my assumption.
In the 1920’s being a good parent meant giving your kids 9-12 years of schooling, sustenance level nutrition, and several pairs of clothes.
Now it means 12 years of schooling and 4+ years of university, a variety of healthy foods, lots of nice clothes, sports teams, lots of toys, etc.
Increase salary (or more pointedly wealth) and raising them doesn’t become easier because now you’re expected to supply them with a bunch of trips and extra tutoring. It’s not inflation, it’s just that you’re expected to spend that much more.
I’m not talking about poor people, I’m talking about the middle class because those are the ones driving the increase in working hours.
30% of American’s have an undergraduate degree, of the current youth that will be higher, providing undergraduate education is very much a thing that middle class parents will compete among themselves to provide for their kids.
Yes, but you are making stronger claims than “seeking undergraduate degree” – you’re describing a kind of helicopter parenting that happens in a very small subset of US families.
It is not applicable across the entire middle class. I encourage you to visit some public schools in middle class districts and familiarize yourself with the variety of different family types and approaches to parenting.
Only helicopter parents take their families out for dinner, buy their kids toys, and sign them up for the occasional extra-curricular activity?
I think you’re significantly underestimating just how much time and money parents across the economic spectrum invest in their children beyond what’s necessary for basic survival.
I can actually answer that directly since two weeks I told my manager I might need 1 or 2 days off this week (ie a 24-32 hour week). His reply was I could use vacation days or work a bit extra so I totalled 80 hours over the 2 week period though I could probably string them out a bit more than that. This in the middle of a big push.
I ended up only needing a half day but it wouldn’t have been an issue.
I don’t claim my workplace is typical, though I still think it’s a useful test case for the reasons of overwork.
Also of note I couldn’t start working 24 hour weeks in general without modifying my contract since that’s based on 40 hours. And I do tend to put in 41-42 hours a week, not because of management pressure but because I find it meaningful enough that I don’t mind going over to compensate for the times I zone out.
Between 40k-100k per household seems reasonable.
I’m not sure if I trust the household income brackets they give, the bottom 25% seems really low, lower than the mean high school graduate which doesn’t make sense. I suspect there’s something fishy going with unemployed or something in those lower brackets that skews the numbers.
You do lead a privileged life, and as such you simply don’t comprehend what life is like for people who work because they have to, not because they find their work “meaningful”. Taking the family out to dinner, buying toys, signing up for extracurricular activities are very different when you have no disposable income. For example, you have to be one of the first in line at the local park district on the morning they open up the free/low-cost day camp options that are the only affordable choice when both parents have to work and school is closed for the summer. Toys come from the dollar store, or hand-me-downs, or only on birthdays and Christmas. Going out to dinner? McDonald’s, maybe. You think every family sits down at a restaurant with cloth napkins on a weekly basis?
When you add up the costs of two people transporting to work, plus housing, utilities, food, child care etc., there really isn’t a lot left over for frivolous things like piano lessons. And let’s not forget student loans: college graduates are considered middle class by default, but that doesn’t mean they get salaries to match when they graduate, despite having large sums to pay back for the privilege of being educated.
The expenses on middle class families are myriad, but salaries have not kept up. Back in the Boomer years, one salary was all it took to have a house in the suburbs, a new car every 3-5 years, a family vacation every year, and college for your kids (with no loans to pay back). If you were white, that is. Now, it takes two salaries, no family vacation, and significant debt just to tread water for a lot of those considered “middle class”. Basically, being “middle class” now is a lot like what it was to be “middle class” as a family of color in the 1950s.
Not for nothing, the poverty line in Canada for a four person family was $34,829 in 2009.
So that “40k-100k” being “middle class” is egregiously incorrect. A four person family living on 40K in 2016 would be struggling like crazy, and likely be just enough above the poverty line to not qualify for any aid, but still not able to afford fuck all.
I think that just shows how tiny the margin is between bare subsistence and lower middle class.
But I do also think that there is a baseline assumption that working certain types of jobs means you’re middle class, even if you don’t make as much money as someone with a working class job. That’s how you get the lower end.
We can continue to argue about how prevalent the “no disposable income” vs “some disposable income” groups are (and what you consider disposable income). But I think it’s irrelevant to the discussion of whether inequality is causing poor people to work more hours. My evidence is the fact that across every income bracket wealthier people work more hours.
If anything the problem of the poor isn’t that they’re overloaded with hours, it’s that they’re either too busy to work more hours or they can’t find people to give them those hours.
True, on the lower bound I was thinking too much of single individuals and 2 person households.
You still have almost 60% of households over 60k, at least some disposable income, and working long hours.
That’s not evidence. That’s one site making claims that don’t pass the smell test. For example:
the average American private sector worker works 34.3 hours in an week
Thanks for the laugh. It’s true that Walmart and such corporations work tirelessly to ensure that few hourly workers get the number of hours necessary to be considered full time (and thus be eligible for benefits), but then there’s the second job so many workers have to take to make up the difference.
Meanwhile, the hours spent sitting in an ergonomic chair at a desk in a private office with assistants to do all the grunt work are not the same type of hours as stocking shelves. This is one of the problems of raising the retirement age across the board: a construction worker really is unable to keep working by 65 (in most cases), whereas someone with a livery service taking them to a climate-controlled office every day isn’t scarred and exhausted by the same age.
What? You’re saying you don’t believe the graph is accurate because you know some unstated number of people take second jobs? Are you saying the blogger fudged the numbers when he made the graph? That the University of Minnesota project has bad data?
So what? We’re talking about why the number of hours worked is high. Whether or not some group has a tougher job is irrelevant!
And the point has been made that most don’t have a choice, especially salaried professionals. You work the hours demanded by your job and bosses or you don’t work at all. Pick one.
Working class folks work all they are allowed because if they don’t, they can’t survive. Go read the book “Nickel and Dimed” by a journalist who went undercover to do working class work for over a year.
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