“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.
Resilience is why our ancestors weren’t eaten by the ice giants.
One drawback to the both working is if the man should lose his gig and she keeps hers, the I’m working card will get overplayed.
Statist utopian Long March comrades always hate God and Family because it dilutes loyalty to the total state hive of dull mediocrity.
It might even inspire you to be more than just a minion.
Indeed – it might inspire people to be valuable humans. (excellent comment)
Every time I add the four digits, the AI in charge of technology says to drop them. And vice versa, of course. As for dual v. single income, I have lived every permutation, and mastered none. And thus, in life’s twilight, I find that resilience is indeed the only answer … and now I’m too brittle. Sigh. Ita abscedit.
I imagine Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory finally cracking the +4 code.
Not too brittle, as long as we’re breathing.
Most of what we know about the Great Depression is feel good fables. You’d think everybody got along and pulled together to push us out of the Great Depression (It was WORLDWIDE BTW) into victory in WW2.
Facts gathered from pre-60’s history books (gotta love that old book smell) and family diaries tells a less happy situation. While folks couldn’t find enough affordable food to eat, the US Government was paying farmers to dump milk and slaughter and bury pigs and such to “Keel PRICES UP”.
The courthouse steps were popular places for bankers and such to bid pennies on the dollar for farms and homes. They were protected by Sheriffs as they claimed and evicted the previous owners.
Bonnie and Clyde two most vicious murderous thugs were treated as HEROS because they were “Sticking it to the MAN”. Not that Bonnie and Clyde gave a thin dime to poor folks. But Bankers and the Rich were viewed as enemies.
It got so bad socially that having a chauffeur and a big car was a BAD thing. Rich folks parked their big cars in barns for storage “until the current unpleasantness went away”. Armed robbery was a real threat, the Lindberg kid abduction was that era.
Resilience is a good thing but let’s define what it meant in the Great Depression. It meant hard choices what of the extended family homesteads was best to keep (and PAY TAXES ON) and move the rest of the family in as the rest were lost on the courthouse steps.
It means taking ANY JOB you could and Everybody in the family had a JOB. Even jobs that paid in a few eggs or part of a butchered hog was welcomed. Grandparents if able worked the gardens, watched the kids AND THE HOUSE as sneak thieves were Very common. Having the clothing solen off the clothesline was BAD as you couldn’t afford to buy more.
Kids played by going fishing and berry picking. Picking up sticks was a game that kept Grandmom with biscuit firewood.
TRUSTED Friends were a blessing and often kept the wolf off the door. There was always a need for manual labor and a few fellows with a truck could get some cash for paying the TAX MAN doing day labor.
The wolf at the door, perhaps, is our friend because it makes us strong for the long, cold nights that reality will bring.
Often, inefficient systems are resilient systems. From my 13 years as a GM of an oil jobber that was followed by 34 years as an environmental consultant, there’s a 180º difference between the 1979 petro disruption and what I see in the horizon. And that change will result in Level 10 violence.
Say you lived in a semi-rural county of 80K or so. There’d be 8-10 oil jobbers w/ “bulk plants” that stored 100K+ of gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and kerosene (also in our case Varsol® & naphtha, as we were in furniture country). So, back then you had a redundant system that could allocate fractional supplies where needed. Today, there’s 1, maybe 2, bulk plants with smaller storage. 95% of gasoline/diesel is delivered straight from a large, urban tank farm directly to the C-store/pumper.
When violence engulfs, petro shipments will be daytime only, if possible. And now, not much local backup storage. That’s when the fit hits the shan.
Where we’re at there are three or so within a hundred miles. We have created an efficiency that will result in chaos. Yay, us!
Towards the end of 1 Timothy 2, Paul starts tearing into the female’s urge to usurp the male in all things, and the male’s urge to let her invert God’s created order, and to fund, facilitate and enforce her satanic inversion.
Feminism began in Eden. It ends with Christ’s Millennium and establishment of the Kingdom of the Father. Of the FATHER.
During those thousand years, Earth will be no place for a single mom, nor for an empowered girl, and ‘single women’ will beg males to be allowed to use the man’s name, that she may have a cover and a covering.
Paul is not a Happy Apostle about the matter, thus the ‘I suffer not’ lingo that precedes his warnings.
He finishes off saying despite all these realities of female nature and behavior, God permits the female an opportunity for salvation via childbearing, i.e., the opposite of what satan and America promote — empowered single women.
Bearing and caring for small ones often forces the female out of her natural selfishness, vanity, and covetousness. She focuses on her child, and ‘comes out of’ herself thereby, becoming much less vulnerable to error, and thus potentially pleasing to God. No childbearing for a female = rich man getting into heaven. Long odds.
We all have our place, our role.
Through 31 years of marriage with eight children we have almost always been a single income family. Sure some of the time we only had one car, we have never been to Disney and most of our vacations were inexpensive, but we managed just fine. In the couple of years where we had two incomes more recently, our quality of life didn’t go up and mostly suffered when my wife was gone even though our kids are older and most moved out. We just spent more money and didn’t find it being more fulfilling. We are back to one income again and our quality of life isn’t diminished plus it is great having my wife home again.
Most people can’t seem to make it on one income because they are terrible at budgeting and have media driven unrealistic expectations about consumption. Prioritize family and it gets a lot easier to make it on a single income.
Shhhhh! I’ve been reliably informed that happiness comes from moar thingz!
,,Your mileage may vary” is very real in today’s times. Children who are raised responsibly, observing good habits (financial, eating, etc) will tend to do the same as adults. Pay your bills. Eat healthily. Be Patriotic. Be grateful. Don’t try to keep up with the Ho-Nez family, because they ain’t ewe. Remember the seven P’s: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Indeed. The one job of a parent is to make a child turn into an adult who will live up to the family name. Sadly, the Bidens did this.
We once had a life based on two incomes. When we bought our first house, it was just barely manageable.
We had to sell 3 years later, after I’d lost my job and been unable to find another in the small town we were living in. We lost our shirt on the house, and had to sell just about everything but the cars to manage it.
We spent most of the next year re-building. When we bought our next house (and others after), we UNDER-bought. Paid about 1/2 to 1/3 what the real estate agents said we could afford.
Best plan we ever made. As a result, we were never again in danger of losing our home, no matter what the economy or our job situation.
When we moved back to OH and looked at homes for retirement, our criteria was simple:
– could, if necessary, be lived in without upgrades and without putting a lot of money in first
– bathrooms on every floor
– minimal steps (there are 12 steps to the basement/laundry room/family room, but otherwise not)
– price under $150K – we made it with room to spare
– decent neighborhood, near medical facilities, easily accessible by family members
When we finally sold the previous home, it was an equity windfall (we arranged the mortgage – a fixed rate one – for 15 years). We’re using that money for retirement investments, and some upgrades for the new house (including a chairlift for those stairs). Also added a railing for the front steps (there was one in the back steps already).
We’ve got sufficient income that we can make it on 1/2 our retirement income, providing us some give in our budget. We look forward to planting a garden, entertaining family and friends, and enjoying our retirement.
Both my husband and I do some part-time work, but our budget could handle either one of us, or both quitting. We use that money for ‘fun stuff’ we want to have, or trips.
I think your best advice is… “UNDER-bought. Paid 1/2 to 1/3 the real estate agents said we could afford”. Words to live by.
Now that is hardly efficient! But I love every word!
Regardless if man and wife are working, consuming every dime plus loans
is a poor idea. Now, the financial gurus are saying, “get your $$$ out of the banks”, (and buy our
PM products),”because you could lose it all”. Bummer.
But, if you don’t spend it all, you can be free? How does that help those that would control?
John, agreed that most folks operate their income at or above 100% based on the economic income that is true at the time which does not reflect what happens if something go bad (I have a little experience with this). The wise learn to live below their income now, and maximize every opportunity (I say this – I have not always been as diligent in this as I should have been).
The point isn’t the past, it’s the actions from here on out.
Exactly, past happened, lets resolve to do better next time.