If a worker's wages don't cover child care for their 1.4 kids (the 0.4 kid is seriously ugly), never mind covering maintaining an fueling the aging minivan for a daily commute then why bother? Family unit is probably better off as a whole if one parent stays home for the urchins and maybe learns how to garden or something else actually useful and productive. Before my mother passed away we took a road trip to where she grew up and she talked about how hard those days were and how self-sufficient every family had to be whether they were townies or hayseeds. I laugh when I hear media droids drone on about the wonders of working from home. There used to be a name for that form of working, although it often just amounted to isolated out-of-sight servitude for the low-skilled, they called it "cottage industry." Those workers and that economic model was crucial in the US during WWII because that was where the necessary highly skilled machinists worked to a large degree (ahhh, the wonders of electricity to every home...). The idea of bringing highly skilled technical workers like that into a central location (like Ford had done with low-skilled assembly line men) was still a novel idea. I had a relative that used to make various high precision parts for aircraft out of his 'garage' during WWII and right up into the Vietnam madness. Then there was their contribution to centuries of English industrial development. An untold and unappreciated story by most of the stunningly ignorant OECD citizenry is the extent to which China bootstrapped itself on the backs of similar small-shop/home technical/machinist 'cottage' workers. Memories of the extreme sacrifices these workers and families suffered to advance China are no doubt still pretty fresh in living memories still. I suppose it must play into the extreme irritation Chinese officials demonstrate today when some Western ignoramus presumes to scold them for this or that 'human rights' abuse. Must be pretty galling to listen to that crap when millions of your people sacrificed themselves to feed OECD supply chains with the least expensive inputs possible. Have to imagine this model is still important in eastern Europe and places like Ukraine. Many of the Chinese workers responsible for the China economic 'miracle' died early, but, I'd imagine there are large pockets of them still laboring in conditions hard to imagine. All this is likely just a long winded way of saying maybe those lines on the graph, hinting at a labor supply/demand gap not seen since the 1950's in the USA, are marking less of a return to a relatively recent past and maybe are symptomatic of a possible reversion to something so old it is new again? When 'progress' stops the past catches up.
If a worker's wages don't cover child care for their 1.4 kids (the 0.4 kid is seriously ugly), never mind covering maintaining an fueling the aging minivan for a daily commute then why bother? Family unit is probably better off as a whole if one parent stays home for the urchins and maybe learns how to garden or something else actually useful and productive. Before my mother passed away we took a road trip to where she grew up and she talked about how hard those days were and how self-sufficient every family had to be whether they were townies or hayseeds. I laugh when I hear media droids drone on about the wonders of working from home. There used to be a name for that form of working, although it often just amounted to isolated out-of-sight servitude for the low-skilled, they called it "cottage industry." Those workers and that economic model was crucial in the US during WWII because that was where the necessary highly skilled machinists worked to a large degree (ahhh, the wonders of electricity to every home...). The idea of bringing highly skilled technical workers like that into a central location (like Ford had done with low-skilled assembly line men) was still a novel idea. I had a relative that used to make various high precision parts for aircraft out of his 'garage' during WWII and right up into the Vietnam madness. Then there was their contribution to centuries of English industrial development. An untold and unappreciated story by most of the stunningly ignorant OECD citizenry is the extent to which China bootstrapped itself on the backs of similar small-shop/home technical/machinist 'cottage' workers. Memories of the extreme sacrifices these workers and families suffered to advance China are no doubt still pretty fresh in living memories still. I suppose it must play into the extreme irritation Chinese officials demonstrate today when some Western ignoramus presumes to scold them for this or that 'human rights' abuse. Must be pretty galling to listen to that crap when millions of your people sacrificed themselves to feed OECD supply chains with the least expensive inputs possible. Have to imagine this model is still important in eastern Europe and places like Ukraine. Many of the Chinese workers responsible for the China economic 'miracle' died early, but, I'd imagine there are large pockets of them still laboring in conditions hard to imagine. All this is likely just a long winded way of saying maybe those lines on the graph, hinting at a labor supply/demand gap not seen since the 1950's in the USA, are marking less of a return to a relatively recent past and maybe are symptomatic of a possible reversion to something so old it is new again? When 'progress' stops the past catches up.