[the_solenoid]

I agree - and will take it one step further: he misses the root causes of "instability", and I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's, and/or the same flat-lining of wages (not keeping up with inflation etc) despite huge increases in productivity in about the same time period.

Money is a huge stressor in relationships. Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well.

[bradlys]

The author of this article used Charles Murray’s Coming Apart as a source. He’s a pretty… controversial figure. The counterpart to him that is more progressive and less controversial is Robert Putnam. His books are a lot more digestible. I’d suggest looking up talks with the author on YouTube. (He even has a debate with Charles Murray - as they are somewhat of friends)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing

One thing I want to mention here is that it seems that social effects come before economic effects. People go through social change and then the economics follow later. That’s the one thing I would take away from the books/talks. Somewhat ironic to many here.

[parineum]

I noticed that you didn't mention which of these arguments were good or bad.

[marcusverus]

> I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's

This belief is oddly common, considering it has no basis in reality. The share of adults living in households with sub-middle-class incomes has only grown by 4% since 1971.[0] The share of adults living in upper-class households grew by more (5%)! And this even as the number of single-adult households has soared[1], reducing the average number of earners per household!

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-...

[ALittleLight]

The portion of double income households more than doubled between 1960 and today[1]. The middle class is working more because they want to, or because they need to? Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work. That fewer people are getting married or having kids is likely not because human nature shifted in the past few decades, but probably because their lives are not going well or developing properly.

1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2... 2 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

[kortilla]

> Purchasing power for the average worker is flat[2]. In some sense, it's like the middle class has been working for fifty years without a raise, only now two people in the household need to work

That “flat” wage is accounting for inflation according to your own link. So not only would a single earner be doing just as good today as back then, adding a second income means they are raking in twice the spending power as back then.

The only thing that has changed are expectations. People want way bigger houses, nicer cars, computers, smart phones, more meat, dental care, better medical care, etc. Worst of all (from a financial perspective), they want both of their average kids to spend 4 years at an expensive university.

[jjav]

> Worst of all (from a financial perspective), they want both of their average kids to spend 4 years at an expensive university.

Expensive only because it's been allowed to become expensive. Decades ago it was normal for a good university to be nearly free or at least quite affordably by the student working part time to pay their way.

> dental care, better medical care

People "want" health care. I mean of course, but it's not a whim, it's a basic necessity. Which like the university, was very affordable to nearly everyone decades ago.

Not sure people want bigger houses either, every housing topic on HN is full of desire for smaller apartments to get built.

[rsanek]

> Decades ago it was normal for a good university to be nearly free or at least quite affordably by the student working part time to pay their way.

Here's a few graphs that show this more explicitly: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gregschoofs/how-much-co...

[jjav]

Indeed. Even as late as the early 90s, my summer internships (not at minimum wage, but still just intern pay) was almost enough to pay for a year of tuition at CMU, an expensive top university.

[marcusverus]

> The portion of double income households more than doubled between 1960 and today[1].

Your data only represents "married couples with children under 18"--a (shrinking) minority of households. By definition it does not account for the dramatic rise in single-adult households.

[ALittleLight]

The single adult households are a separate and bad thing. I don't think there has been a substantial shift in human desires in the last couple generations - most people still want to get married and have kids and fewer of them are. That they are able to subsist in one family households is not a bragging point for our system.

[rayiner]

How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?

[danans]

> And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?

Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own.

But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.

[jacobolus]

In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...).

E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other.

Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.

[danans]

I think we agree that many pro-social structures exist in poor and socially rigid societies.

However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.

[rayiner]

I agree there is a trade off, but let’s explore this a bit further. Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates? Decisions about these trade offs tend to be imposed from the top, by the elites. 2/3s of Americans still disagree with the Supreme Court ruling banning school prayer.

When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?

[jacobolus]

In many places “low divorce rate” is a euphemism for widespread sexual assault, domestic violence, and total lack of women’s individual rights. You get young women handed off from father to husband as effectively chattel. Women have no choice but to put up with that when they don’t have any viable social/economic alternatives, but it’s overall pretty unpleasant and oppressive.

A significant proportion of people in the US seem to pine for the days when homosexuality was taboo and illegal, women could be beaten or raped by their husbands (and children by their fathers) and it was treated as no one else’s business, non-white people were kept out of the neighborhood and interracial marriage was frowned on if not illegal, pre-marital sex was encouraged for men but made women into “sluts”, middle/high school students received no education about basic human biology/anatomy, rape victims were forced to deliver their rapists’ babies, most professional jobs were reserved for white men, etc. But hey, low divorce rates!

[danans]

> Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates?

> When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?

Of course the Supreme Court when concerning anything involving the government making an establishment of any religion.

The US isn't Saudi Arabia. As much as it's any American's right to practice the religion of their choosing, it's not in any religion's right to deny any individual - even in their religion - their individual liberties, or to impose their religion upon a person of another or no religion.

[zozbot234]

Liberties have always come paired with obligations to one's surrounding community, so there would be nothing new in this. We have a name for pure liberty or "liberation" shorn of any checks or obligations towards others: we call it licence, and every increase in licence is ultimately a step towards bondage and tyranny.

[danans]

Those obligations are strong and operational in many places where religion isn't the center of civic life.

There is nothing wrong with religion as a framework for teaching people about their social obligations, but it's hardly the only way to achieve that.

[formerkrogemp]

I don't think describing them as "rural peasant societies" is a great perspective to assume.

[jacobolus]

What do you mean? Historically most people in most places in the world (e.g. my ancestors in Europe a few generations ago, my godparents in southern Mexico recently, or most of your ancestors if you go back a couple centuries, wherever they happened to come from) have lived as rural peasants.

[philistine]

I think you're trying to think that stable families become less stable if their waged stagnate. They don't. What happens is that in aggregate, with stagnating wages, there are less stable (middle-class) families in society.

For so-called poorer countries, they are differently structured. It's tough to compare their family units with our rich nations.

[rayiner]

> For so-called poorer countries, they are differently structured. It's tough to compare their family units with our rich nations.

But that’s exactly the point! Prior to the 1960s revolution in social norms, families in poor countries weren’t structured all that differently than ones in the US.

I’m no Reaganite, but the fact is that the stuff the old “family values” conservatives said is pretty much the same thing my Asian immigrant parents told me growing up.

Meanwhile, the data shows that Asian Americans who grow up in the bottom 20% have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% as adults. For white kids it’s just 11%. That’s a really big coincidence to hand wave away.

[philistine]

Asian-Americans are not this rose-tinted perfect example of family values breeding success. https://www.vox.com/identities/22530103/asians-americans-wea...

The crazy successful asian immigrants are mostly those who came recently, and who are bluntly the best and brightest of Asia coming to America for a better life due to US policy attracting the very best. Just like the above conversation, you only think of one slice of data to arrive at your conclusion.

[nradov]

The issue isn't with the absolute level of wages but with increasing income inequality (Gini coefficient) and the resulting loss of social status for young men on the lower end of that scale.

[purplerabbit]

Correct. The hierarchy is getting steeper and harder to climb.

Men who don’t feel connected to a clear path of ascension become desperate and often either dangerous or losers.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the increasing number of men who feel they have “fallen off the path”. Could be scary

[DeathArrow]

>It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the increasing number of men who feel they have “fallen off the path”. Could be scary

They will probably seek revenge against the social norms and classes which alienated them. History tends to repeat itself.

[nightvoomer]

Community.

[rayiner]

The “community” in those countries enforces exactly the norms the author talks about.

[rayiner]

Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1970-_Relative_incom...

You can make a fair argument that the bottom 50% haven’t gotten their share of productivity growth, but that doesn’t explain why social indicators among the bottom quantile have gotten so much worse.

[dragonwriter]

> Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970

It's grown for every group used in that breakout, but while it breaks out the upper income groups on relatively fine categories, it groups the bottom half as one category.

(It's useful for the graph's original purpose of discussing top-weighted inequality, it's not useful for the argument you are trying to make with it.)

[coldtea]

>Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970

And education, housing, and health costs has sky-rocketed, number of "essential services" to pay for (mobile phone, internet, severan "rentier" subscriptions) has increased, while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted...

But yes, the top 10%, the types to usually post at HN, never had it better.

[rayiner]

But a lot of those requirements are manufactured. Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college?

I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperception of what income is necessary to maintain a similar quality of life to the past.

[hef19898]

University is free in Germany, and a lot of jobs that require a college degree elsewhere are fulfulled by 3 year appreticeships in Germany. So hard to compare.

[danaris]

Whether it's manufactured or organic, it's still real. That's the economic reality we all have to live with in America, so it doesn't matter whether Germany can operate just fine without the crushing college debt we have: the fact is, middle-class households in America have lost real wealth and purchasing power over the past 50 years because of this and a number of other factors.

[qeternity]

Just because it's real, that doesn't make it right. You're missing the entire point: maybe the issue isn't the gutting of the middle class, but the expectation or encouragement of higher "education" even if it is unnecessary for a huge chunk of people.

[coldtea]

>Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college?

Because Germany doesn't treat non-college graduates working class people as "losers".

Germany also has a quite solid social protection, not a cut throat environment where tons of people are a medical bill away from homeless.

[MathCodeLove]

> Because Germany doesn't treat non-college graduates working class people as "losers".

Neither does the United States? Not sure where you're getting this idea from. Most people I know revere trades as they're a known way to make great money without a degree. And, anecdotally speaking, I've managed to get great jobs as a software engineer without a degree. We treat non-college graduates who don't try to ascend above retail or fast-food as losers - and for good reason.

[qeternity]

> while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted...

What?! The labor market has been so strong over the past decade that economists started to wonder if previous paradigms no longer apply (i.e. Phillips curve).

[coldtea]

In most empires on the way down, the scholarly narratives and the truth on the field are different things...

[pyuser583]

The author is focusing on working class families, not middle class families (they are discuss as a comparison).

How does the gutting of the middle class harm stability of working class families?

[johnnyanmac]

>Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well.

yes, this is why I couldn't quite be convinced of the thesis being proposed here. Or at the very least, they way they try to describe the "marketing" of being in a faithful marriage runs counter to the reality. While the situation of "deadbeat dad becomes alcoholic, won't get jobs, and cheats" is not an uncommon cause of divorce, the more common narrative pushes it as a liberation of women's right. Less about a man breaking away to be free and more about a woman not being trapped.

That above deadbeat stereotype has more become the "violent domestic abuser" type as of late. So divorce is a way to turn an absolute nightmare of a situation into emotional stability in exchange for what will likely be financial hardship. It turns a bad into slightly less bad, not a potentially patchful good into a bad.

Or at least, that's how society markets it. I don't have hard sources and admit these are just the notions I feel have risen over 3 decades of media consumption.

[quantified]

>> Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.”

> It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore.

As though it’s ever been considered high-status to have crap pay and deal with abusive bosses and coworkers. Ask the really high-status people whether it was.

You need recordings to be able to review interactions for who is more in the right, telling the employee they need to turn off FB and get on with work seems like it management would say it’s reasonable and worker might say it’s overbearing.

[fwip]

It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes:

> Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.

Without seeming to make any sort of connection that poverty is a causative factor in every single one of these. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes of desperation. Poor people are over-policed when compared to middle-or-upper class people. Poverty makes it more difficult to escape domestic abuse. (Idk about the infidelity one). Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor.

But y'know, that doesn't fit into his worldview that the dissolution of "family values" is the root cause of all this.

[paradox242]

Did you grow poor or have friends from poor backgrounds? I saw lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence, and little if any of it had to do with their trying to survive in a material sense. There are different norms around which behaviors grant status, and this is the primary driver behind this kind of behavior in my experience.

[etchalon]

I grew up poor, but was lucky enough to go to a fairly 'rich' school district amongst fairly rich people (upper middle class more than "rich" I guess).

You know what I saw in rich kids?

Lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence.

I just rarely saw them suffer any consequences for it.

[zozbot234]

This just goes to prove that anti-social behavior is not a "consequence" of poverty, and that solid social norms are far more relevant. Rich kids can still live in a socially frayed, marginalizing environment.

[hef19898]

If you are you get away, or even ahead, with anti-social behavor. If you are poor you go to jail.

[etchalon]

Ding.

"Crime" is a function of poverty in so much as those punished for committing it are poor.

[scotty79]

It's about survival in mental sense which lack of material means makes extremely hard.

People don't need money, but they desperately need sense of agency and entertainment and lack of money makes fulfilling those core needs in legal and moral manner super hard.

[zozbot234]

You're describing the cultural correlates of social marginalization and fraying social capital, not "poverty" per se. In many poor countries, casual anti-social behavior does not grant community status; in fact, the opposite is the case and punishments can be quite harsh indeed (though not nearly as harsh or socially damaging as the long-term imprisonment that's all-too-common in the US.) Widespread poverty in those failing communities is the consequence of such dynamics, not the cause.

[fwip]

Yeah, I did.

[rayiner]

Poverty isn’t the cause of crime. People were objectively poorer in the 1950s, even in the lower classes, and people in developing countries are much poorer than even poor Americans.

[fwip]

Absolute income (whether measured in dollars or purchasing power) means very little when compared across time periods or countries. Poverty has never been about your absolute buying power. It is relative to the society you exist in. You will find, by any objective measure, that the wealth disparity in the US is nearly as high as it has ever been (only exceeded by the Great Depression). These same objective measures will consistently score the US as worse than many developing countries.

You will find across many eras and cultures in the last two millennia that the poorest members of the society are the most vulnerable members of society and the most likely to be punished for committing crimes. If you still don't believe me, read this paper for an in-depth analysis that controls for many factors: https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/IN...

Laws are made by those with power. In today's society, power comes in large part from wealth - that's the foundation of capitalism. The objective of capitalism is to accrue capital, and our laws and police system are set up to protect the wealthy and their wealth.

That's why graffiti is punishable by ten years in prison. Stealing a week's worth of groceries can mean years in prison. In contrast, the penalty for illegally evicting a renter, rendering them homeless, is about two or three months rent, and no prison time.

[t-3]

> Stealing a week's worth of groceries can mean years in prison.

Not even close to accurate, unless you're running off with a cartful of steaks, which might push you into criminal territory. Most shoplifting is not even a misdemeanor, just a civil infractions. Criminal charges require hundreds or thousands of dollars and usually multiple offenses to get more serious than probation.

[giantg2]

"Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor."

I imagine this explains the correlation between poor minority neighborhoods during the crack epidemic or between the depressed rural areas and the opioid epidemic now.