“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception
I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.
During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.
The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.
This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.
Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.
Why?
It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.
It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.
But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.
I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.
Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.
Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.
And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.
On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?
Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.
I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.
This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.
It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.
Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.
To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.
As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.
The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.
That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.
Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.
Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.
The only solution? Resilience.
