Skip to main content

1952 recalled




A Facebook friend of mine has recently quoted Senator Bernie Sanders thus:

Bernie Sanders's photo.

She (my friend) then added her own comment:

There were a lot of things wrong with the 50's, but one parent working with another one staying home (which they owned) was doable when the onus of taxes wasn't on citizens.

There are so many different lines of thought that arise out of such claims., I almost replied thus:

One line of thought this suggests, (your comment, not Bernie's) is the size of the labor pool then and now. Were women staying home (after the riveting services of Rosie were no longer required for reasons of war) because their men could make enough money to support them comfortably? That's what you seem to be suggesting, though you prefer to state the fact in a gender-free manner that would have seemed off in 1952. Anyway: consider the other direction of causality. Perhaps the fact that women were expected to stay home helped keep the supply of labor for certain sorts of jobs low, and that allowed the salary-earning to do what you say was then but is now no longer "doable." At any rate, I don't see how that has a lot to do with what Bernie wants here, And I'm not suggesting a return-to-1952, any more than are you, but I am suggesting that the "things wrong" you mention may have been related to the things you see as having been right, and related in uncomfortably intertwined fashion.

But that would have been misunderstood as something other than analytical exuberance, so I've simply left it here instead.

I'll follow another line of thought tomorrow.
Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryOctober 31, 2014 at 10:28 AM

    Christopher,

    Your friend's comment contains two unstated assumptions for which she offers no evidence. First, she assumes that lower taxes on citizens played a significant role in the wealth that enabled families to get along on just one salary. Second, in the parenthetical, she implies that homeownership was more prevalent then than it is now. I don't know whether either of these assumptions is valid, and I suspect that your friend doesn't know either.

    Henry

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherOctober 31, 2014 at 10:40 AM

    My own suspicion, which I'm too lazy to research right now, is that she is wrong on the first point but right on the second. Wrong on the first because corporate taxes are not the "free ride" for non-corporate people ("citizens") that Sanders is suggesting. Those corporate taxes do get passed along to consumers and employees in various ways. Right on the second because in the 'Levittown' era right after WW II, with all those soldiers coming home and starting families, government policy was very favorable to housing, and probably created a glut.

    ReplyDelete
  3. HenryOctober 31, 2014 at 11:07 PM

    It hadn't occurred to me that corporate taxes get passed along, but of course they do. I was thinking merely that, if taxes really were lower, the tax savings would not be sufficient to enable a spouse who otherwise had to work to quit work.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more