I once read on a crazy dude's website that corporations did exactly this to take advantage of feminism. They saw that women wanted to work so they dropped wages for men and then, on top of that, paid women less for the same jobs so that they could further undercut those looking for work. I thought that was crazy talk but maybe it's not too far off. That may not have been their motivation, but that's the situation that's happened anyways.

Wages for men didn't drop but many things (like housing) slowly became twice as expensive. It's not some grand conspiracy; it's supply and demand.

This a great point. It's not a conspiracy. Housing prices trend to match median income in an area. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If your income was significantly higher then current prices of houses you'd immediately buy a house, because why not, it isn't a big percent of your income and therefore isn't a huge risk either way. The moment prices reach what feels uncomfortable you'd think hard about renting vs buying. We are now in the later stage in several tech cities for tech wages.

Right. That was the point I was making. The conspiracy stuff was all nonsense, but somehow we still ended up in the same situation where no one can afford anything.

And we spend more on other things (like child care) because both adults are working.

Oh this definitely happened. Of course it did! I had an econ professor that gleefully talked about how he'd hire female architects to get lower wages / better quality at the same wage.

As you say, it's easily explainable by capitalism, supply and demand: * People want the nicest house they can buy, there is a shortage of houses in nice neighborhoods * Women start working, families have more income * supply is still short, demand has more money * price of housing goes up, in addition to the fact that families need child-care * gone is the extra income, cost of housing has increased, no way to turn back. Now everybody needs a double income to afford a nice home.

This idea made Elizabeth Warren famous. It was quite a profound finding. Well, I should speak for myself, when I first red the synopsis of the Two Income Trap it really felt like a slap on the head. It felt it was counter-intuitive, yet explains so much shiftily looking at own's family spending habits.

I also found the book's message darkly subversive sometimes. For example, all things being equal, it is better to spend more of your income on luxuries than on he biggies (housing, transportation, debt). If you do the former, you can easily roll back. If you do the latter, when times get tough, you're hosed. In yo face papaa!

Never heard of her, thanks. Sounds interesting.

Seems like a basic rule that has impact on more ideas recently discussed on hacker news: in a market where there is a short supply of high demand items, more money will cause more inflation.

This will also impact ideas around basic income.

So you're claiming that it wasn't Capitalism that existed from 1950-1980, that enabled families to make it on one income? And further, I can only guess you're implying that Capitalism is a recent phenomenon from the last 30 years, rather than the reason the US was able to become the wealthiest nation with the highest median income and most productive economy by ~1890?

Capitalism and culture interact. Before 1860, part of "capitalism" was also slavery. After that, it wasn't.

The causes for the US development are many, if I had to guess I would mainly bet on the extensive natural resources they had available.

The southern slave economy 1800-1860 performed very poorly, which is one of the underlying causes of the South wanting to secede from the Union. The industrial northern economy, based on free labor, completely overpowered the slave economy.

As for natural resources, Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there.

> Asia, Africa, and S. America are loaded with natural resources, yet the booms did not happen there

They are also loaded with people. America was a free-for-all (except the American Indians, of course, who were overpowered by superior technology).

How is N. America different from S. America in the 1800s, in people and resources?

Oil? I'm unaware of any big (existing) land-based oil extraction in S. America. Maybe they had them in the past, though.

S. America had enormous silver mines. Venezuela is big on oil production.

I imagine the main resources that USA had are the huge plains to grow food in, in a relatively favorable climate. The industry comes later.

Maybe there was a lot of wealth in silver, I don't know about that. It seems that it had some land-based oil that they started extracting in the beginning of the 20th century, but I've no idea if they were as extensive as in the US (where there was Standard Oil, an immensely wealthy corporation).

Mind you, I'm not saying it was only the natural resources, there are other factors as well - different climate, geography, cultural background (English vs. Spanish/Portuguese), colonial history, ... I somewhere read that it's a curious phenomenon how so many countries in SA had so many dictatorships in sequence...

It's really hard to argue that S. America, Africa, Asia, etc., all don't have immense natural resources and favorable climates.

A small note. I read a Statfor report that North American Rivers were very important.

What about the systematic destruction and de-industrialization of places like India by the British tho?

Capitalism is unhalting in its slow shift toward efficiency. Every moment in a capitalist economic system there's someone racing one step ahead of someone else toward the bottom, screwing over a worker or consumer to make a penny more profit and beat his competitor. Women in the workforce was just one inevitable step, but a large one: families with two incomes obviously make more money than families with one, so it was inevitable under capitalism that eventually the more efficient double-income family would become required for survival. We're not there yet but we're barrelling full speed toward that goal, and after we reach it we'll find some other way to push even further toward the worst possible dystopia, peak efficiency.

edit: Also you're attributing success to capitalism where it should be attributed to slavery. It's easy to have a very strong economy when you have free slave labor and most economic gains are still limited by manual labor. If you want to conflate capitalism with slavery I think that's not unreasonable since slavery of some kind is essentially the end goal of capitalism but I'd assume that's a move you don't want to make, so don't try to claim success for your economic system off the backs of abused slaves.