(2) After a year of this, the wife has a baby and works just 20 hrs a week, still at $15/hr. The husband has been promoted to store manager or higher (convenience and fast-food store chains are desperate for workers they can promote) and makes $25/hr.
(3) Their new combined income is $67,600--less than before, but still enough for a good life except in a few megalopolises. This is a completely realistic scenario, and not even demanding (the husband could easily continue to work 48 hrs a week). And it's been done with jobs at convenience stores.
(4) If you come up with places where the starting wages are lower, they're highly likely to be in poor states where the cost of living is lower. It's still a realistic scenario. Making enough money to support a family is easy in the United State if you're willing to work. Easier than it was in the fabled 1950s.
THIS is capitalism’s “economists”? one that does calculations without taking taxation into consideration and then does further calculations based on hypothetical promotions and hypothetical wages for those roles? i know economics is a soft science but come the fuck on, you have to be a LITTLE more concrete than that no? and why does this dude think people should be working 50hrs a week? the 40hr work week was invented when one person was at home taking care of the housework. now, in his defense of this bullshit system, his solution is BOTH those people do a nearly combined 100 hours of labor per week, while nobody is taking care of the home, in hopes that one of them will be promoted so that the other can— not even stop working entirely to take care of the home, but just work LESS and still take care of the home and also somehow raise a kid while doing all this. again, to try to pretend the system that HE grew up in where ONE person working LESS than he’s proposing we do could afford to take care of a family and have savings while the other parent is at home keeping everything in order and raising the children
i hate these pig pieces of shit so much because they present these “solutions” to try and gaslight uninformed people into thinking we arent a far cry from capitalism’s supposed “glory days” that THEY grew up in and benefitted from meanwhile if you actually think even the tiniest bit about what he’s saying and apply just a little bit of historical analysis you see right through it and see what a dishonest piece of shit he is for trying to paint this as something anything other than dystopian
how about its the most basic human function to have a child and if your economic system doesnt permit people to do that then the system needs to be killed and if you disagree then so do you?
He's an economist? Damn that's incredibly sad
If you think that part of his work is bad, you should read his interviews about his time in Thailand, where he supposedly did some work on behalf of the American government on how to pacify a restive native population (in Thailand, these were the peasants and ethnic groups that got displaced to build western-accomodating hotels and resorts, and in the US the population were the african americans in the inner cities). Mind you, his trip to Thailand was before the Vietnam war even started IIRC, so he literally just went there to do experiments on racial control.
Actual demon of a human. And he seems to be a very big star with rightists. Go figure.
I would say Economists have more in common with ancient Roman Augers than they do Scientists. It's a job for the rich by the rich, to justify why the rich are so rich. They're the high priests of capital.
Yes, after purging LTV from economics and basing the science on vibes and wishes of capital the downfall was ineviteble. Result is basically a religion.