But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs.
Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.
I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.
Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.
So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.
But I also think "back in the days" life was more fixed. Probably getting a full time job as employee, starting a family, getting a house was not really optional. Now there are much more choices. Add to that all the hyper-connectivity. I don't really think people were better off but were just forced to handle everything more calmly. Growing up in the 90s, what I've found is that things changed a lot when people were starting their jobs.
> In fact, if you look at the data, people today move for work less than our ancestors had. Our past was indeed glorious, but it was not a past of wealth and stability.
Indeed it depends how far you go back. I mostly talk about the baby boomer generation (who are "our" parents in many cases as many people here are 25-50 years old). In general they experienced more financial and occupational stability than us since they had much stronger unions and globalization was only starting.
Average family income in 1950 was $3,300, according to estimates issued today by Roy V. Peel, Director, Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce.
The average income across all occupations in the USA today is $61,900. The average household incomes averaged to $87,864
According to recent data, the average price for a home in 1950 was just $12,000, while the average price for a home today is upwards of $540,000.
It turns out that a typical “household” back then had one breadwinner make the vast majority of the money. Today the households are often single-parent, or both parents working
So I don’t think that only a factory job could provide for a whole family back then. But my point is that whatever the corporation was (law firm, or whateve) they weren’t going to lay people off because the automation and AI wasn’t there. Now there increasingly is. The number of people who hold a job for 20-30 years at the same company is much smaller than back then.
I guess the main factor is the diminishing returns of a glut of products (crops in the farm example, or AI-generate content now) which devalues that specific industry’s products and makes everyone in a race to the bottom, so humans are priced out of a job. If you do this across enough industries (and many today are electronic or manufacturing) that means humans are no longer cost-effective to employ for any except a diminishing number of positions. What will we do with the growing unemployed class?
Please do dig it up, because I find it highly unlikely that in an environment where the average wage increases by 20% over a generation, that the children of those who had been in one of the many occupations that had been made obsolete by automation were not better off than their fathers were at the best of times.
If it was a general rule that the children of those who lose their job to automation are worse off than their parents, the majority of the population would have seen its quality of life degrade over the last two hundred years given most occupations that existed at the beginning of the period have been made obsolete or mostly obsolete since that time.
For example: in the 1960s it was common for a family of 4 to have 1 breadwinner. Now it is impossible for most to sustain a family like that.
There are small houses in my part of town that were originally built as workers' cottages, for workers operating the railway, construction workers etc. As you can imagine, they are not the best of houses and not in the most picturesque location. Now, these houses are completely unaffordable to most, and cost well over a million.
A job for life used to be a thing, where you didn't really have to worry about it. Now it isn't.
Mobile and mobility are two different things. I have better things to do on a Saturday than to look up evidence, but intuitively people in the 60s were more likely to stay and work in their home town. As economies became more specialized people started to relocate for jobs. Moreover you have two body problems of married couples which limit career options, thereby REDUCING mobility and driving up housing costs.
Back then people at least got some good severance and a pension. The current generation will be forced out with nothing if they haven't saved up a huge amount of money.
The proportion of people who work corporate jobs vs the assembly line has surely changed though. The latter work their hours, go home and forget about work until next morning.
The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job.
And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.
You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities.
If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it.
For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle.
Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston.
I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping.
This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one.
For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
Less so when you could afford a house, a car, 2 kids and a stay at home wife on a single salary. It was also much easier when people didn't move to foreign countries and/or far away cities for their jobs, losing their family network &c.
I'm in my mid 20s, in tech and couldn't afford that at all, I could barely afford my gf being unemployed. I don't have a car and live in a small flat. If I can barely afford a comfortable but frugal lifestyle while being paid more than 60% of my peers I'm not too surprised most people literally can't afford kids
Yes but pay has gone down in real terms and people afford less of what’s important - owning a home, raising a family. We do indeed have more of the stuff we dont need, or want.
You can still get close to that today, even outside of tech. Tradespeople make plenty of dough.
The problem though is survivorship bias: plenty of people in the '50s and '60s were poor, or didn't buy their own house, or etc... and likewise plenty of "kids today" are doing well.
There was a lot fewer people back then, in most places the ratio of people to available housing was much lower. The network effects were also far weaker, expensive air travel and worse communications meant that people didn't move to big cities as often.
People also lived much more pragmatically. They had smaller houses, only one family car, and rarely went out to eat. If people made the same choices today, one income would suffice. Most families don't like living in 1400sqft houses with no cable, and no a/c. Most parents don't like spending 12hours a day cooking food from scratch while providing childcare.
Ahhh yes, let’s cherry-pick an example of a small slice of American back in the 50’s and assume that’s how everyone’s life was up until Millennials came around.
Those jobs disappeared 40+ years ago and regardless they weren’t available to everyone.
"Why these things were less of a problem in 1960/70?"
The family as safety net was more intact, job churn wasn't as common, medical expenses weren't insane, rents weren't in constant flux, whole industries weren't being continuously disrupted...
Boomers existed in a society were everything were not sold yet. Were every pieces of land was not occupied and optimized yet.
Now the theater is full.
It's not that boomers earned much and today a lot of people earn too little.
Is that then things were less rare than today compared to the demand.
Also, I earn way more than my father and grand-father, and my life style just cannot be compared, nor the energy I consume or waste I produce.
So as an IT guy, no, this is not enough to explain it. And boomers were certainly not divas. Their working conditions were definitly not as good as in IT today.
Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.
I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.
Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.
So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.
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