It ridiculous to try to make the comparisons the article does, when you look at real purchasing power instead of trying to fake these numbers. You are completely right, no one could dream of owning a house and supporting a family of four with no college degree today, yet that happened up until around the early 90's. It wasn't unheard for someone to be completely unskilled and get a good paying union job and learn the skills on the job.

> no one could dream of owning a house and supporting a family of four with no college degree today

There are plenty of tradespeople who would beg to differ.

Are those the same ones being squeezed out of the workforce by companies who are unwilling to pay for their skills? Companies who offer $18 an hour for welders with 10+ years of experience (and gripe about the lack of skilled labor when nobody takes it)?

Reaching the median household income requires around $26 an hour for a single income. It’s getting harder to make that in the trades. Especially when you’re effectively trading your long term health for a paycheck.

The difference seems to be whether you’re in a state with a strong union culture or not.

I’ve seen trade jobs and apprenticeships paying less than what fast food restaurants are offering right now, but everyone swears to me that it’s a 6 figure job. Glassdoor and BLS tell different stories, at least for the regions I’ve lived.

Well I was going to double check and back up my data, but the BLS website is down till Tuesday???

Apprenticeships everywhere get underpaid. In Germany, the idealist model for apprenticeships, I remember reading a few years ago that the pay was 2-3EUR/hour...how does that compare with the US minimum wage? I believe they brought in a minimum wage law to deal with abuses but wages in the US are pretty high (yes, even after healthcare...the US has a public health care system that is as large as most in Europe, double places like the UK).

> Reaching the median household income requires around $26 an hour for a single income.

A bunch of secondary data suggests the average wage for most trades hovers around that average. This implies many Tradespeople earn in excess of the average and that they very much can hope to raise a family of four etc.

Those tradespeople are older. Young people going into the trades often require a degree from a community college.

There is this odd schizophrenia where the 50s were viewed as this golden age of middle class workers while at the same time a period of vicious sexism/racism/etc, which causes people to complain at how much worse they have things while simultaneously insisting about how much moral progress has been made.

What would be nice is some kind of self-aware synthesis of these views, one that isn't based on therapeutic expressions but actual analysis. For example, recognizing that opening the labor force to women and more immigration increased labor supply and drove down wages. Opening up international capital flows opened the doors to outsourcing and deindustrialization. Pitting the various ethnic groups in the U.S. against each other and promoting multi-culturalism has likewise resulted in an erosion of solidarity and thus an increase defecting on the social compact. I can respect people saying that on balance they think things are better today or worse today as long as there is some argument to back that up that takes the relevant tradeoffs into account. But there is unfortunately very little of that type of analysis on offer in these types of articles.

> There is this odd schizophrenia where the 50s were viewed as this golden age of middle class workers while at the same time a period of vicious sexism/racism/etc, which causes people to complain at how much worse they have things while simultaneously insisting about how much moral progress has been made.

It seems it's quite possible for members of the dominant group to reap benefits from a system that benefits them, while members of the oppressed group experience abuse. No schizophrenia needed to explain this.

Entire generations are members of oppressed groups now? You can't paint Millennials as being some kind of victim group that is, on balance, worse off as a result of policies while still insisting that these policies merely redistribute benefits within the population. For Millennials as a whole to be worse off, you must be talking about policies that, as a whole, provide a net benefit or cost to society. Hence the contraditictions. And in particular if you believe generation X+1 is more diverse than generation X, it requires deep schizophrenia so simultaneously claim that life is better for more diverse groups and yet generation X+1 is worse off. =

> Entire generations are members of oppressed groups now?

Yes? I mean, the US civil rights movement originated how many generations ago? Do you actually believe these issues and all those factors vanished in thin air once the leaders of those civic movements were assassinated?

It's simply not possible to come up with any remotely rational argument about these deep social problems plaguing the US that involves any type of denialism.

> Yes? I mean, the US civil rights movement originated how many generations ago?

This statement is a non-sequitur to the current discussion.

> It's simply not possible to come up with any remotely rational argument about these deep social problems plaguing the US that involves any type of denialism.

This statement is a non-sequitur both to the current discussion and to your previous sentence.

Drop the union and things get even better. Don't let the poor performers drag the average or top down.

> Drop the union and things get even better. Don't let the poor performers drag the average or top down.

As someone who lives in Europe and benefits from unions in multiple ways on a daily basis, I really do not understand how this absurd myth regarding "unions protect and foster bad performers" came from.

I mean, the core belief that supports this idea is that the only thing that's needed for a professional to enjoy decent and safe working conditions where he is fairly compensated for his work is to be really good at his job. No need to even have negotiation in the picture, rewards just magically fall from the sky as some sort of cargo cult.

But reality does not really work like that, does it? Specially for non-white collar jobs whose role in the production chain is designed to be easily replaceable and there are diminished returns in employee performance.

Does mean imply that the outliers were taken out? Seems he meant to say average. What a bullshit article.

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.

The obsession that people in the US have with unions is odd. They were never a big part of the workforce, and the reason they declined in the US is simple: they didn't work. Too militant, links with organized crime, heavily politicized, and usually focused on industries where they could strike and cause damage. If you look at how unions operate in Europe (in the few countries that have kept it going), it is the opposite (bar places like the UK that also had militant unions that declined after most union places went out of business).

But there are real downsides: spiralling cost inflation in vital goods (where unions, and in the case of the US organized crime, takes hold), low levels of competition, low levels of trade...the container ship was so revolutionary because it broke the back of the deliberate slow work of dock worker's unions (not just in the US).

Where the US really stands out is low levels of redistribution, and low levels of tax on middle and lower classes (to fund redistribution)...I suspect that isn't quite as popular as romanticizing a past that never existed.