Smoke and Mirrors - Women’s Jobs More Vulnerable In A Downturn
Marketwatch breathtakingly reports “FAMILIES AT RISK IN RECESSION…Women’s Jobs More Vulnerable In A Downturn”
What it doesn’t talk about is just what the hell happened to the family wage. Why is it that no man, unless he’s done very well for himself in rising above the average payscale of the corporate schlub, can provide for his wife and children while allowing his wife and children to actually be together in his home, benefiting from said provision? Why must the wife provide 1/3 or more of the household income?
The answer, of course, is unfettered capitalism. Why pay for one when you can get two for the same price?
Used to be that a man could make enough to support his family alone. Then, when our Capitalist Masters realized that women - not satisfied with the immensely important work of teaching their own children everything they need to know to be competent in life and so, ready to trust this task to others for a hefty sum - could make wage slaves out of both husbands AND wives, they began adjusting pay gradually so that they had a smokin’ hot two-for-one deal.
No more family wage. Now both spouses HAVE to work, whether they want to or not, or be forced to live in near-poverty on whatever they can scrape together on one income.
G.K. Chesterton, in his essay The Wildness of Domesticity, wrote on the idea that women have no value unless they work outside the home:
“I could give many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase “Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?” The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn’t; except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere “pretty clinging parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the city and pretended to do something, while the banker’s wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of them economically dependent?”
In yet another essay, On Dependence And Independence, Chesterton furthers the point:
Thus, to begin with, it would be well to note what economic independence means: as distinct, that is, from what it ought to mean.It might mean that the lady went out into a primeval forest to slay lions and leopards and clothe herself with their skins, like Diana. It might mean that she sewed together the leaves of the forest and made herself a green garment, like Eve. It might mean that she held herself independent in owning her own spinning-wheel and her own store of thread, and weaving strips of simple drapery, like Mr. Gandhi. In a word, she might be really independent of the dress allowance,in the sense of being independent of the dressmaker. It is not very likely that it does mean this; but it is not the dependence on the dressmaker that is the serious inconsistency in the idea. It is the fact that modern woman, in the condition of modern society, will herself have to work, if not for a dressmaker, then probably for somebody else who is primarily the money-maker. And the question is, why is it any better to be a proletarian in the shop than to be a Communist in the home? For the only truly and legitimately Communist institution is the home. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow” is the only satisfactory Bolshevist proclamation that has ever been made about property. It is, therefore, of course, the one proclamation which Bolshevists would be the first to attack. The twisted and unnatural posture of the modern controversy, like that of a serpent with its tail in its mouth, biting and tearing at itself, is excellently illustrated in this queer revolt of Communism in the wrong place against Communism in the right place. We no longer make the normal attempt to break up society into homes. We only make an attempt to break up homes, and even that by a principle of division which we dare not apply to anything else in society. The crack or fissure is to run across the hearth or the roof-tree, but to be concealed as far as possible from the forum or the street.
It’s true that some female minds seem never to have been destined for the singular exertions of domesticity; others seem to have been trained never to find complete satisfaction in them, no matter how objectively critical they are. I understand this. The enormity of the work of rearing and educating children, especially when they are particularly young, can be masked by the sheer repetition and frustration of it. Talking only to toddlers can be stifling. Trying to figure out what to make for dinner day in and day out (and then, actually making it) may require more entrepreneurial spirit and creativity than running an advertising firm. Engaging oneself in the 24-hour battle of wills that outlines the shape of parental authority is exhausting.
There’s nothing easy about motherhood, even if there’s nothing unimportant about it. But there are times when it can seem so mundane that a mother wants to scream, especially if she’s a mother who is trying not to spend the money on fuel for her escape pod (read: minivan) so she can provide herself with a much needed change of scenery, however brief.
But none of this changes the fact that for those who are mothers, there is no work more pressing, no client in more urgent need, no challenge more worthy of overcoming. Many women in our time believe that fulfillment could never come within the four walls of a home (and perhaps in just believing it they make it so.)
But fulfilment outside the home is elusive as well. I’d go so far as to argue that most satisfying work can be done from home, or at least from a dedicated space within walking distance. Leaving the home to go to work is, from a historical standpoint, a relatively recent innovation, and not for the better for most of us. Families used to work together in concert, and without over-romanticizing the way this worked in the past (which often enough included quite a lot of poverty and other less-than-desirable conditions) it would be safe to say that the post-industial age has provided us with quite sufficient means for improving on the theme. Working from home has never been easier, at least in theory. The paradigm shift hasn’t happened yet, though maybe skyrocketing costs of fuel and everything delivered through its combustion may impact that. We’re already seeing work from home days and four-day workweeks in some sectors. (You can always promote this as an environmentally friendly thing to do as well - “If you’re not commuting, you’re not polluting!”)
The point being, as Chesterton says better than I, that women seeking independence from the home by running to the workplace have simply fled the bonds of loving duty to make themselves slaves of a new and unloving master. The compulsion that men feel to go to work (unless they particularly love their profession) is for some reason being competed for by women seeking a false egalitarian workplace utopia, which in turn feeds the beast, drives overall wages down through the abundance of applicants, and means we all get paid less for the same work and the women who want to stay home, often enough, can’t. So they go to work, complain about not getting paid the same as men (after all, if we’re all supposed to work, the wages should be equal based on ability) and further entrench the acceptance of the notion that single-income homes with functioning nuclear families where mothers actually raise their own children are a silly anachronism.
Yay. Once everybody wins, nobody does.
Filed under: Chesterton, Common Sense, Family
The concept of a living wage died with equal pay for equal work. Back in the days, the old guys would be paid more because they had a wife and family. The young guys understood that they had to pay their dues, and would have to work their way up the ladder.
Angry young feminists in the workforce changed all this. Let’s not forget that they were Marxists. And as you mentioned, corporations got on the bandwagon because it reduced costs.
By the way, I’m reforming the Old Boy’s Club, and I’m offering you charter membership. We don’t take crap from commies, young punks, and bureaucrats.
Excellent post, Steve.
Is this “family wage” or “living wage” the same as the “just wage”? It sounds like you’re talking about something a whole lot more than a just wage. What is missing? What can’t a single-income family afford, that justice demands they afford?
In particular I think your opening remark is lacking in perspective: “Why is it that no man, unless he’s done very well for himself in rising above the average payscale of the corporate schlub, can provide for his wife and children while allowing his wife and children to actually be together in his home, benefiting from said provision? Why must the wife provide 1/3 or more of the household income?”
Have you taking a look at the census.gov information to get an idea of what the wage level is? I have and I am not feeling sorry for anyone lucky enough to live in 21st century America. We have it good.
Sorry to post multiple comments, but I want to provide a little info so I don’t come off as a troll. Check this out:
http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/perinc/new03_172.htm
2006 Census. Category: Males with Bachelor Degrees (excluding those with more than a Bachelors!) aged 25-34 years who worked full time, year round.
Median Income: $50,033
What % Above $30,000? 87.5%
Want to guess how many of that 12.5% earning less than 30k were married and motivated? I would say, not a lot.
Can somebody tell me why $30,000 a year isn’t enough to get by today?
Steve,
One of the beauties of the free market system (if you are rich) is that it relieves you of the moral responsibility of fair dealings with others. If you can buy a pair of shoes for $10, knowing there is no way anyone could make such a pair without working in a sweatshop, well, that’s of no concern. The market dictates the price. You are only paying it. The same goes for workers. You can pay the going rate, and don’t have to apologize for it.
I suppose that it will always be thus, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend there are not moral consequences in always angling for the lowest price. I agree with you that when employers hire people, they ought to at least recognize that a dollar an hour difference in pay could make a significant difference in their lives. That’s what charity is all about. Charity is a lost word in our vocabulary.
This is slightly besides the point, but when I eat out I often consider this in my tip. I know when I am in a diner where the average ticket is $20 the waitress works hard for her money; in a $100-a-ticket restaurant the wait staff is rarely hurting for money. I sometimes see tipping in diners a unique opportunity to help people who are struggling. Chances are the waitress there is a single mom, and struggling in ways I will never know. The cheaper the meal, the more inclined I am to tip generously, especially if the service is good.. In expensive places, I stick very closely to 15%.
Kevin,
I think the family wage is probably both a pretty obvious and fairly vague concept. Roughly, it’s a wage that is sufficient for providing for a family. This means, of course, that more children require more income - a very anti-capitalist notion, and one that grates on our American sensibilities.
Catholic Social teaching has a lot to say about wages, but Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum seems to make a fairly plain (if not explicit) case that a just wage IS a sufficient wage:
“…There underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice…
…If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. ”
Notice the use of the word “comfortably” support himself and his family. There’s some play in the word, to be sure, but in my estimation “comfort” means not having to worry every month that you can’t cover all your expenses.
Take my family, for example. We never go out to eat, I take a lunch every day from the leftovers of the last night’s dinner, we attempt as much as possible to minimize our vehicle usage (and it wasn’t until very recently that we had two cars, because scheduling conflicts between my time getting off the train and my wife needing to make dinner were making us eat at 8 or 9PM), we furnish our house largely with what we can find used from craigslist, etc.
We have some small luxuries - a package from Comcast that gives us phone, cable, and internet all for a single price (which is less than just phone and internet); I buy fresh beans to make my daily coffee; we purchase a moderate amount of alcohol (a bottle of gin will last me about a month; occasionally I get wine and some cheese for Sundays); when I can I get my clothes cleaned and pressed at the cleaners because I don’t have time to do it myself and my wife is too busy chasing toddlers and their messes and doing copious amounts of laundry and cooking and running errands and homeschooling to do it; and once every few months my wife and I go to the movies. Oh, and I have Netflix, since we don’t go out.
I don’t think these things count against “living frugally” and should fit within “comfortably” supporting my family. And yet, my cost of renting, paying utilities, commuting, keeping myself in a reasonably workable pair of shoes, etc. demolish my income. Usually at the end of the month, we’re living on whatever groceries we have in the cupboards and the fridge, and if an unforseen expense comes up, we have no choice but credit cards. We have no savings, no retirement fund, no investments, no nothing. No financial safety net. If I’m lucky, I get a couple things published and make a couple hundred extra bucks.
I make over $30,000 a year.
My rent alone, BTW, is $22,800 a year. That’s in a modest, older home big enough for my family, with a decent yard, 35 miles outside the city. It’s why I commute so long every day. Speaking of that, my commuting costs are $2400 a year, my vehicle gas costs are at least that, if not more, my health insurance is another $3600 a year, my groceries are adding up to about $7,000 a year (everything has gone up - I’m spending about $20 a week just on milk) and we’ve planted a garden to try to offset that (we also buy rice in bulk as well as flour so we can make bread) and all my utilities together are easily another $12,000 a year, once the winter heating oil is factored in.
There’s more, of course. Homeschooling requires books and Catholic school is roughly $450 a month for cheap tuition. Then there are miscellaneous expenses, repairs, co-pays for doctor visits, toiletries, detergent…the list goes on.
You can see how this adds up. We’re a family of 5. There are lots of things I need to do and can’t (like fix my exhaust system and get new tires for the van), and more that I’d like to and can’t - (like paying for piano lessons for my kids and getting my wife a haircut once in a while).
I’m guessing you don’t have a family. When you’re single, you can live on $12 an hour in a sublet apartment. I did. All my earthly possessions fit in my car. But a family is quite an enterprise. You tend to keep more stuff so you don’t have to buy as much stuff later on. So you hold on to baby clothes and summer clothes and clothes that have been grown out of. You keep baby books for the coming children, grade school books for the growing children, and so on and so forth. This applies to cribs, beds, dressers, bookshelves - everything. Pretty soon, your family is taking up a decent amount of space, and you find that you want a bigger place so you can manage it all.
It’s not like the living conditions in Bangalore, Calcutta, or Darfur. But those shouldn’t be the basis of comparison. Yeah, we have it great compared to them, but they are so far beneath the standard that it doesn’t work.
I’m not sure if I’m a distributist or a free marketeer or a Constitutional libertarian or some mix in between. I lean toward distributism more, however, because that system offers the most hope to the family that wants the father to be part of the mix and believes that having a home and some land is important to our earthly life.
A couple of thoughts, for perspective:
1) We did the math and found that a second income wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. My wife is an attorney by training, and therefore has substantial income potential — but that income would come at a price. Professional clothing, commuting costs, more convenience foods because she’s not here to cook, school tuition because we couldn’t homeschool, and (of course) taxes. The marginal value of a second income, once you have multiple children (and do not want them in public schools), is minimal.
2) It depends an awful lot on where you live. Remember, you’re in one of the more expensive metro areas in the country. Our annual housing expenses in rural Michigan, including mortgage, insurance, and property taxes, are less than $20k — and we’re building equity, and have 15 acres. When we lived in rural Illinois, our total housing expense was only $12k per year, and there are plenty of properties still out there in this range. On such a property, we are able to produce most of our own meat, most of our own vegetables, all of our own eggs (with surplus to sell), and all of our own milk.
I bring this up to point out just how much farther a dollar goes outside major metro areas, and to encourage you as you think about big changes you may want to make in your professional life.
“when our Capitalist Masters realized that women - not satisfied with the immensely important work of teaching their own children everything they need to know to be competent in life and so, ready to trust this task to others for a hefty sum - could make wage slaves out of both husbands AND wives, they began adjusting pay gradually so that they had a smokin’ hot two-for-one deal.”
You mean “when our Feminist Masters taught women that they MUST have a career”…
Spoken as one who bought the lie and learned too late that it was a lie. But that’s okay, I had a daughter and raised her to respect the vocation of marriage and motherhood…
Chris - Oh, I’m thinking about big changes. Seems like it’s all I do these days. To be honest, I could buy a house here and pay a good bit less for a mortgage now than I am paying for rent, but that’s just an indicator of how far this market has fallen in the last six months.
I agree - the cost of my wife working is too much. She does some real estate work part time when she can squeeze it in, and every couple of months we may get a small commission that helps out, but other than that, it’s not cost effective (making it so much more frustrating that a guy can’t make it on his own.)
The bad thing is that when you leave a high-cost market like this, your earning potential drops with it. When my dad moved here from upstate New York, into essentially the same sort of job in the same kind of company (though a larger one) his salary just about doubled.
I’m afraid that the converse is also true.
Lynne - yeah, the Feminist masters had everything to do with it, but the top-level capitalists - no less opportunists than the men who took advantage of the feminists who decided to sleep around to show their “liberation” - did what they do best: They capitalized on women in the workplace.
It’s a supply and demand issue, as far as I can tell. With both men AND women in the workforce, the supply is abundant, and it exceeds demand, so they can pay us all less as we compete for the jobs.
Well, I definitely disagree with your interpretation of the word “comfortable.” I’ll try to explain why.
First, we are talking about the demands of justice: something that exists in reference to human nature, which I believe is unchanging. I don’t think that what is due a human being by justice changes from one society to the next or from one century to the next.
Second, a man (or woman) has a natural psychological approach to managing his resources that is almost totally relative. Our idea of what is “comfortable” in the modern usage of the word and what is “just getting by” or what is “not making it” is conditioned by our personal experience to a radical degree.
I will try to give an example of what I mean without cutting too close to home. Please don’t take this too personally.
You’ve said you have no savings, and you just about get by on X dollars which is greater than $30K. Lets say for the sake of example that you carry $2000 in credit card debt, but it could just as well be $0 for this point to be made. Now consider the last 4 years and imagine that you made $1000 more than you really did in each of the last four years. That’s about $10 a week. If that was the case, instead of the $2000 in credit card debt that you have, do you think that you would have $2000 in savings instead? (Or if you don’t carry a balance, would you have $4000 in savings?) I put it to you that you would not. I think you would be in almost the exact situation you are in today.
BUT, don’t you think $2000 in savings today would take an awfully big load off your shoulders? Of course it would. Why did our hypothetical alternate Steve spend that extra money which could have done you so much good at this time?
I don’t have the answer, but I believe that one of the keys to saving money is radical self-examination. The human being seems to be designed to convert his every available resource into consumption in the short-term. The only exception that I’ve encountered is people that have lived through true economic or political shocks that exposed them to the risk of actual starvation-level poverty. If you have personally experienced that sort of thing, you are more likely to have a “saver” personality. Other than that, its up to you to fight your human nature if you want to create a safety net.
How would a person that was acclimated to life of 200 years ago view your standard of living? Is is possible for us to shake ourselves up enough to even imagine it? The amazement at indoor plumbing, at the variety of fresh food in the grocery store? At the convenience of having a refrigerator? At the comfort of a modern couch to sit on? Is our poverty-level standard of living unjust today, while having been not only just but luxurious not too long ago? Or have the demands of justice changed?
By the way, what do you do with your gin?
I’m a big fan of gin and tonic with a few slices of lime and lots of ice.
I also like a pink gin, which I first heard of by reading Evelyn Waugh. A few dashes of angustora bitters, some gin, and cold water.
Another example, to add to Kevin’s:
We all know people who are constantly running a few minutes late. They’re always the last ones to class, or to a meeting,or to work. You would think, after we turn the clocks back for Daylight Savings Time, that such people would use their “bonus hour” to get caught up, and would now easily be on time. But we know they don’t. They adjust their schedules to the time available, and go right back to being late.
I think most of us are the same way with money, by natural tendency, unless we have some very strong experience of deprivation to teach us to save. We subconsciously adjust our spending to make more or less immediate use of all available resources. And Kevin is right that it takes a radical self-examination to recognize and overcome this tendency.
I say this not commenting on Kevin’s budget, or Steve’s, or anyone else’s but my own. In my own case, only the experience of losing my job 5 years ago and becoming self-employed, with income sufficient to provide for my family but highly sporadic in the way it arrives, finally kicked my tail into becoming a more aggressive and consistent saver.
Steve,
You are right on the money. I have been saying the same thing for a while now. It became especially poignant when I was working for a billion dollar company and I was earning aboout 26K, as a supervisor. Oh and my boss the GM a woman who always put work before her family(she had two little kids) made twice as much as me, for almost the same job. Not that she was making good money either but it illustrates the point that unchecked capitalist companies exploit people as long as they can.
Now $52,000 isn’t good money???
Steve, how is it that you are being exploited when you agree to work for that much? You have no other options? Did you get an education?
Sorry that last comment was for Matt, not Steve.
Kevin,
I’m irritated, and in charity I need to not say what I want to say. So I will ask the questions instead…How old are you? What do you do for a living? What is your life experience?
In the case of my brother (Matt) yes, that was all he could get. He has a wife and now three children, and in a managerial position for a corporation with retail stores, after putting in over a year he was making about $12 an hour, even with a college degree.
Most jobs I’ve had haven’t been much better. It wasn’t until very recently that I broke the $13 an hour barrier. Unless you live somewhere dirt cheap, supporting a family on that isn’t going to happen.
Chris is right when he says that having more money means you may very well expand your spending to fill it, but frequently the reason that happens is because when you’ve been living without enough to get by for long enough you tend naturally to quickly find plenty of use for that extra money when you get it. But it also depends on how much more money you get. A couple thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket, and is likely to get used on all the things you’ve been refraining from buying, some needs, some wants. But add 10 or 20 thousand to your annual income, and I’m willing to bet most of us who try to be frugal anyway will start saving a good chunk of it once our other obligations are met.
In terms of poverty, I haven’t been out on the street, but my wife has. She lived in her car for months when she was a young woman. Does that count as experience of poverty? As a family, we’ve been at a point where we had to take food boxes from a local pantry and borrow money from everyone to pay rent and the bills. We attempt to be frugal in everything without being avaricious about anything. We worked our way out of it, and got a small inheritance we used to clear out our debts, and we’re still just breaking even at the end of every month.
There’s a real vice in being miserly. Becoming too accustomed to counting every penny can destroy any sense of generosity, and suck the marrow out of living. It can destroy a marriage, when you’re constantly fighting about money, or how you got the NSF fees in your bank account AGAIN because you ran out of money paying for gas and groceries when that check to the electric company finally cleared.
How much you make is either sufficient or not largely based on the cost of living where you are. Here in Northern Virginia, the median household income is about $98K annually. I make a little over half that. But the cost of everything is oriented toward those making it.
So, you might say, move somewhere where it’s cheaper to live. That’s what Matt did. He moved from here out to Spokane, Washington. Houses were cheap, rent was cheaper, everything looked more doable. Then he wound up with a low-paying job that never offered him substantive raises, and he couldn’t find anything better. Eventually he had to go back to school and get in even more debt in the hopes of getting a better job.
Oh, and that’s another thing. College loans. Don’t know about you, but I had about $60K in college debt when I graduated. That’s because I went to a Catholic college, and they don’t provide a hell of a lot of help, or know when to cut you off when they see your tab running too high. Once you add about $600 a month or more in loan payments (add to that if you marry a girl you met at such a school) to your monthly debt load, and see how far you get.
You’re grossly oversimplifying the issue. I see by checking your blog that you’re a new dad. Congrats. Maybe you’ll never run into these issues. But I’ve known too many who have.
When a man doesn’t own the means of production, he’s a wage slave. (Read Belloc’s The Servile State). This can be good for him or bad for him depending on how he’s provided for by those who do own the means, but he will never have economic independence or control of his financial future. Capitalism is based on profit motives, and is, as often as not, a dehumanizing venture that reduces the worker to a commodity bought for the lowest possible price. He is an expendable commodity, and if he can be replaced more cheaply, he will be. (I’m not a Communist, so don’t assume that I advocate the opposite.)
Our society is not governed by virtue, so neither is our economic system. That leaves a lot of people getting squeezed in the middle or at the bottom, and since it takes money to make money in a free market, most will never get out. The ones who do are, often enough, the ones who neglect their families and work all the time so that they can get ahead. Is that a good trade off? I don’t think so.
I’m sorry I’m being irritating. I know this is intensely personal.
Since you asked: I grew up with parents that struggled a lot financially. I’m 26 and I have two kids (one not born yet). I went to Steubenville for two years, took an honest look at the amount of debt I was taking on, and decided to transfer to a cheaper school near home. I majored in mathematics and have a very boring, unfulfilling job as an Actuary. But I am not dissatisfied with it: I don’t look to my employment to give me meaning in life or make me feel whole. That is what God and family are for. And meanwhile my unfulfilling job is paying the bills and it offers good opportunity for advancement. So I am thankful for my boring, unfulfilling job.
What I am trying to ask you guys is, if your great grandfathers were teleported into this time in history, do you really think they would say, “Yeah, you fellas have it tough! I can’t believe you are only achieving this kind of lifestyle, considering how hard you are working.”
Would they really say that? To me, it is inconceivable. We know what they would say, what every American generation says to its young: “You kids have it easy. Things used to be much worse. You just don’t have the perspective to appreciate what you have.”
Look, I really regret the direction this conversation has taken. I meant for my comments to be about the just, living wage, in theory, not to judge anybody’s lifestyle or vocation. It was a mistake to use the gadfly tone that I used, and take examples from the details of strangers’ lives. Please forgive me.
Kevin,
I wrote a response, but my damn browser ate it. Suffice it to say, thank you for the apology, and yes, this can be very personal. If you’re making it on $30,000 or less, I’d love to hear how you’re doing it, what practical tips you have to offer, etc.
I have to say, if I could find a place where we could make it on that, I’d have been a teacher by now.
Well, if you want to be comfortable earning $30,000 a year, make a budget for $28,000 a year and stick to it.
Are you serious? That’s like Steve Martin’s old bit about how to have a million dollars and never pay taxes.
“First, get a million dollars…”
Making a budget of $28K when the cost of living works with that and making a budget of $28K when your rent alone costs nearly that much are two entirely different things.
But if you’ve got some great cost-saving tips that are universally applicable, regardless of cost of living, knock yourself out. (Our approach is reducing car travel, shopping sales, buying things used, growing as much of our own food as possible, keeping the thermostat lower in the winter and higher in the summer than we’d like, taking public transport whenever possible, avoiding frivolous expenses, etc.)
I think there are lots of happy people in the world right now, living on less than what $28,000 buys in America. Could you really suggest that there are not?
But my point was really to spend less than you earn in general. I believe you have indicated you make closer to $50K than $30K.
The real point is this: Aren’t there people out there getting by on $2,000 or $5,000 less than what you are making? Doesn’t that prove you can save, if it is important enough to you?
The real point is this: Aren’t there people out there getting by on $2,000 or $5,000 less than what you are making? Doesn’t that prove you can save, if it is important enough to you?
If there are, I don’t know them. At least, I don’t know any with three (going on four) kids. I don’t know any who are able to live in a home that fits their family, and gives their kids some room to play and can afford all the utility bills and other expenses of a normal, non-lavish life. And that’s the whole point of my original post - we aren’t paid a living wage for a family. We’re paid a wage that falls under other criteria, criteria that tend to be only tangentially related to general geographic cost of living and entirely unrelated to the living expenses of a family. You pretty much have to be at the executive level to live on a single-income here. I’ve lived a lot of places, and have never found the right balance of income to cost of living. Maybe it’s out there, and maybe if I find it I will overcome all my other considerations (moving away from family and friends, schools, the question of parish life, etc.)
Now, if you want to argue that a family of seven should live in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom (like my family did when I was a kid) or that I should feed my kids Ramen Noodles instead of something nourishing, then yes, we can lower our standards.
But if I am taking a holistic approach to the well-being of my family, trying to make sure that they are healthy, well-nourished, have room to sleep and play and grow; if I want my wife to stay sane when she’s cooped up with the kids and actually give her a yard to send them into so they don’t spend the day breaking dishes and throwing crayons around a small apartment; if I want a commute that’s less than 4 hours a day so I can spend some time with them other than on weekends, then I’ll stand by my original problem. I moved here because the job market is the strongest in the country, there are good schools and great (free) cultural opportunities, and I have a lot of family and friends here. But as my family has grown, my wages have stayed virtually stagnant, and my costs keep going up. With the falling dollar, I’m actually making less than I was last year at this time, and I am paying more in rent, utilities, and commuting costs.
It’s not as simple as just setting a budget and sticking to it. It requires a good combination of factors related to the cost of living vs. wages. As an adult, I’ve lived in New York, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Arizona, and now Virginia. Ive even lived in Europe for a while. Every place is different. Each offers its own unique strengths and weaknesses. I’ve never found the perfect place.
Are there happy people living on less than what $28K buys in America? Sure. $28K doesn’t buy a hell of a lot. I’ve met some of those people, living in dirt-floored huts in the furthest reaches of Michoacan, Mexico, where the common language is still an indigenous dialect that hasn’t yet been conquered by Spanish. Of course, they were malnourished, many of them were sick, and they lived in unhygienic squalor. Were they better off? Maybe. Who’s to say?
Can we live like that here? No. Should we? No. I don’t think your approach sounds realistic, unless there’s some secret you’re not sharing here.
I should add that in my mind, a just wage isn’t simply reduced to a question of the threshold between life and death: “Can my family survive on this wage according to a bare minimum standard of health and comfort?”
If that’s what you think it is, then we’ll just have to continue to disagree.
Now its my turn to get a little irritated. Your comparison to Mexico is irrelevant because what you are describing is an income level of a few thousand dollars, not $28K. Consider the following table:
Link
Is the average person in Japan living in that kind of squalor? They have a $28K GDP per capita, which means their median income is going to be even less (because the rich bring that average up.) and a large number of people make considerably less.
Italy: $26.8K
Malta: $17.7K
Poland: $11K
Mexico: $9K
India: $2.9K
The World Average: $8.2K GDP per capita.
These are the 2003 figures, but even a 10% difference doesn’t erode the obvious point. If you DESERVE a suburban American life for your family, I’d sure like to hear what makes you so special.
Furthmore, this chart should be considered:
Link
Kevin,
You’ve missed my point entirely, perhaps through lack of clarity on my part. You asked if people can be happy on less than what $28K buys in America (which, as I said, isn’t much.) My Mexico example is a proof point of the fact that yes, people CAN be happy on less (much less in this case) but those are the living conditions, and I don’t think that’s something to aspire to. (And the disparity between a few thousand in Mexico and $28K here isn’t as great as you think.)
So you need to define some conditions. What does a just wage look like? What does the sort of living described by Leo XIII entail?
I’m getting the impression that your definition has only the most basic parameters. A family living in a tenement with enough food that they aren’t starving, even if they are hungry, technically has enough, don’t they?
What does justice demand? How should a free market system be regulated? Should there be incentives for employers to pay a “family wage” or should there be regulations or should there be nothing at all?
The whole reason this discussion started is because it was once the standard for men to provide for their families in a way that involved more financial benefit than wondering if the next paycheck would cover the bills, if it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it wouldn’t. This is no longer possible in most places unless that man is a VP or a sales manager of some kind. And this fact is furthering the contraceptive mentality of young couples who keep working to save up for a baby because they don’t believe they can afford to have children on one income.
This is a real problem, not simply a matter of perception. So if you have a problem with my definition, offer your own. I’m not talking about the suburban dream here - white picket fences and a luxury home with a short commute and expensive cars in the driveway - I’m talking about a basic standard of living that would be considered modest by 1st world standards; a standard above squalor and below affluence.
The problem with my Mexico comment is that I am not making it clear that those people were seemingly very happy. Lots of smiles, lots of laughter, lots of childlike innocence. They had nothing, and in some respects were happier than we. Probably because they weren’t caught up in the acquisition of wealth. Still, their standard of living is below what we should want the standard to be.
When you ask what should we “want” the standard to be, that’s not the right question. It would be great if we could all live like kings and not lift a finger. Its not going to happen.
If a wage pays for a home and clothes that are clean and warm, and a diet of adequate nutrition, I don’t see what else can be demanded. Compared to the absence of these things, such a level of income is quite comfortable.
The problem is that our sense of our status is based on comparing to society. If you made $100,000 a year and everybody you knew made $500,000, you would still feel like you weren’t making it.
It seems to me that you aren’t listening critically to yourself. You said:
“Chris is right when he says that having more money means you may very well expand your spending to fill it, but frequently the reason that happens is because when you’ve been living without enough to get by for long enough you tend naturally to quickly find plenty of use for that extra money when you get it. But it also depends on how much more money you get. A couple thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket, and is likely to get used on all the things you’ve been refraining from buying, some needs, some wants. But add 10 or 20 thousand to your annual income, and I’m willing to bet most of us who try to be frugal anyway will start saving a good chunk of it once our other obligations are met.”
Can’t you see the bundle of contradictions in all this?
Steve, I’ve been monitoring this discussion and tend to agree with you. I think, however, that this debate has veered off course is because it confuses materialism with necessity. It is not just about how much stuff we have. Sure, we have more stuff than our grandparents, even the least of us, and in some ways live better. But this is simply stuff. Stuff doesn’t provide security.
People define rich in many different ways, but to me rich is absence of financial worries. This can occur at various income levels in various cultures. For example, I would be very alarmed if I didn’t have the money to send my kids to college. Now anyone can see that college is not a necessity for happiness, but in our culture, right now, I am far more comfortable with my kids having a degree than not having one. With a degree there are safety nets that simply don’t exist without it. And getting the proper education can be a quantum leap for some families. The cost of iPods and fancy shoes are a drop in the bucket compared to the challenge of getting an accounting degree. Does anyone really think a poor kid with an iPod is measurably further away from college because his parents splurged the $150 to get it? It takes a whole lot more than that to bridge that gap.
The point is that the average Haitian may not feel he needs a B.A. to be happy, but his circumstances are entirely different. The average Haitian may only need a fishing boat, or a plot of farmland, or a set of power tools to have lifelong financial security. In American those things guarantee very little.
In America, it seems to me that financial security requires a quality education, a place to live in a safe and drug free neighborhood, a regular paycheck, and health insurance. There are many well-paid individuals who don’t have all of these. In particular, I can point you to several individuals I know who make upwards of $70,000 and can’t get affordable health insurance for anything, because they have pre-existing conditions. For them $70,000 is poor, because medical bills are killing them.
Financial security is a relative thing. A T-shirt and shorts may be perfectly acceptable attire on some occasions, but not in the winter and not on a job interview. That is to say, your expenses are determined in part by what is going on around you.
Thus, financial health depends not simply on some fixed dollar amount but on the inner workings of the family and how it is able to function in its environment. One might think a piano a silly luxury, but if you have a kid who can play like Vladmir Horowitz that changes everything. A piano is that kid’s future, and families have to adapt to issues like that. Having sympathy for the difficulties of families is called charity, and it is about more than simply the price of gas.
Kevin,
I’m using “want” loosely here. My point is that we are dealing with abstracts and subjectives, and I’m trying to get you to think about defining standards in terms of justice and necessity. When I say material poverty isn’t what we should “want” the standard to be, what I mean is that we would not advocate material poverty as the standard that justice demands.
If a wage pays for a home and clothes that are clean and warm, and a diet of adequate nutrition, I don’t see what else can be demanded. Compared to the absence of these things, such a level of income is quite comfortable.
But that has been my point all along - that for many families, even this is not possible on the wages that they earn. At least not consistently. And even your definition lacks boundaries between necessity and desire - when you say “to pay for a home” do you mean to own or to rent? What about a homeless shelter, or the one-bedroom basement of your parents’ house (my wife and I had to share a 12 X 10 room with our then 2 children for a while in that situation. It was NOT adequate.)
The point is that you can’t define a minimum standard of living easily, but you can certainly say that settling for the bare minimum necessary for survival should hardly be the high-water mark for justice in wages.
The problem is that our sense of our status is based on comparing to society. If you made $100,000 a year and everybody you knew made $500,000, you would still feel like you weren’t making it.
No! If my annual expenses are, say, $55,000 and my annual salary is $100,000, I would not have that feeling at all! But if my annual expenses are $55K and my annual income is $55K (or $53K, or $50K) then I have no breathing room. The most I can do is try to cut expenses, and when I run out of expenses to cut, what then?
Then we get into a discussion of what expenses should be kept, and in what priority, etc. But if a family is not living a life of luxury, this shouldn’t even be a discussion. Should I need to decide between paying for the internet access I use for my freelance writing jobs and the electric bill? Is the internet a luxury? In some sense, yes, but for me it’s also a necessity.
If men are to be prosperous, they need an income that reasonably exceeds their expenses, in order to make provision for the unexpected, and to put away money for a better future, etc. If they are not making this much money, they are not making a living, family wage. They are making a wage that may be considered just by free market standards (ie., the guy with the same title and experience as me is making the same amount) but no consideration is given to family needs.
The flip side of this is that it means free market economics penalize large, non-agrarian (or non-entrepreneurial) families, making additional children a liability and not an asset. This puts us into conflict with the fecundity that marriage demands, because we must therefore wait until we make a certain amount of money before we can have a certain amount of children, or we are failing in our responsibility as parents.
Enter the power of contraception, and you see why so many people today are having so few children.
I don’t know the way to solve this problem, but acknowledging that it IS a problem would be a start.
Can’t you see the bundle of contradictions in all this?
No, I can’t. Because when I get a couple extra thousand dollars, what do I do with it?
I pay off credit card debt. I pay to repair my car, which I’ve been putting off. I take my kids to the dentist for that teeth cleaning I haven’t been getting them. I buy my daughter the new pair of shoes she needs, since she grew out of the old ones. I make that donation to church I haven’t been able to make. And maybe I get a haircut and take my wife out to dinner.
Now those last two things aren’t strictly necessary. But I’d do them anyway. They are things that can’t simply be measured on a survival need scale, but they speak to a reasonable approach to the quality of life. Things like our appearance and stress levels and the need to have those issues addressed effect our health and well being, our confidence, our job performance, etc.
Now, if I got a $12K raise, that would be an entirely different matter. An extra $1,000 a month would not only put me over the top in terms of bills and expenses, but would allow me to save money too. Because my INCOME would exceed my bare minimum OUTGOING, leaving me discretionary capital to invest, to save, or to spend as I see fit.
Discretionary income is the ONLY income that allows a man to get ahead in a free market. It is through the income that exceeds his expenses that he is able to attain further education, start a business, or bet on a horse. (Not that I’d recommend the last one.) If a man doesn’t have any discretionary income, he can never expect to be in a better financial position than he already is. He will always be a slave to the system, never an owner of the means of production.
I think that every man should have a chance at that, but I don’t know the best way for him to obtain that chance. I like the distributist model, and I like the idea of incentivizing employers to pay family wages.
Families are the building blocks of society. It behooves us to see them thrive, not merely survive. To me, a family wage or living wage provides for the former, not just the latter. There’s nothing just about economic dependence on a system that never allows for better. It really is a form of slavery.
Just ask anyone who has ever had need of leaving a job where they are treated horribly but can’t find another. It’s might as well be a prison.
Michael Hebert,
Thank you for bringing another sensible perspective to this.
I think Michael’s comparisons with the Haitian are a good example of how our satisfaction with a given level of income is culturally and societally conditioned. Once you are protected from the immediate threats of the elements and your own hunger and thirst, it all becomes relative.
But I am baffled by this notion of perceived “security” that seems to run through both his comments and yours. We should be clear: security is a matter of perception. Nobody is really secure. How secure you feel is as much a matter of temperment as it is your actual condition in life. At any income level, you are in danger of losing your job or run-away inflation, or any number of sudden expenses that could destroy you financially. The third-world individual is subject to all that and more. What if the weather ruins his crops? What if his trade is made obsolete by technology? You are not really secure until your are indepenently wealthy … unless you consider the risks of bad investments, war, bear markets, unscrupulous brokers, etc etc. Nobody is secure.
Steve, you seems to want security at a certain level of expenses, but that level is completely arbitrary. And I might add that your feeling of being almost there, but not quite, is due to the fact that your culturally conditioned expectations are themselves structured by our general American standard of living. So your feeling that you just need a little more to be doing well is undoubtably widespread in our society, or any society, and would be if our actual wealth was twice or half what it is today.
But I fail to see what any of this has to do with the topic of justice, whose demands are unchanging in every time and place.
Some responses to points you’ve made.
Living in a one-bedroom basement: How is this much worse than human experience historically, modern America aside? You emphasise that it was “NOT adequate”. What was missing? How were you or your children harmed by this situation?
Earning $100,000 and being the poorest guy around: My point, which I think I made more clearly in my last comment, is that your chosen level of expenses that need to be met is completely arbitrary. You don’t want to have to choose between one thing and another, but believe me if you have that attitude, your expenses when you are earning $100,000 are going to be approximately $100,000. You say, “If men are to be prosperous, they need an income that reasonably exceeds their expenses, in order to make provision for the unexpected”. But their expenses are function of their societal conditioning which is a direct result of the general available income! The ones who have something to set aside for emergencies will be the ones who make doing so a fundamental priority, and they are few and far between, at any income level. I assure you there are people making $100,000 a year who are not “getting by” and believe that they would be doing fine if only they could earn another $10k. Your arbitrary expectations of income are no more valid than theirs.
Regarding the quote of yours that I said was a bundle of contradictions: You said that if you made a few extra thousand, you would spend it immediately on “needs and some wants”, but you are willing to save, once your “other obligations are met”. Now you are saying your wants are obligations? Anyway, you missed the whole point of the exercise: The point is that you did NOT make that hypothetical extra amount, and you muddled through ok, somehow. And if your income was $5,000 less than it is today, you would have muddled through somehow at that level, too. The fact that you don’t have $5000 in the bank giving you the security that you claim you want should illustrate that said security isn’t quite as important to you as you claim it is. After all, we wouldn’t want to be misers, would we?
Re Distributism: Ugh. <a href=”http://www.hobbitmanor.com/thesoapbox/?page_id=1186″>See here</a>.
It should also be mentioned that forcing employers to pay fathers of families more would make it VERY difficult for fathers of families to find employment anywhere.
Here’s the link I tried to give up above.
Its a series of essays I wrote on why distributism is a bad idea.
I also just noticed that you are saying there is something wrong with society when you have to put off having children until you can afford it.
No, that is called acting responsibly. Not being able to afford children is a completely legitimate reason to practice NFP or put off getting married. If some people think the solution is to contracept, that isn’t a problem with the economic structure, it is a problem of catechesis.
Kevin,
First, lets get this out of the way - get off your high horse or get out of my comment box. Lose the antagonistic tone.
I disagree with virtually every premise you put forward. You have this idea that as long as a person is still living and breathing, that means they are being adequately compensated. What kind of foolish nonsense is that, and from what does this ideal derive?
It’s obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that putting a family of four into a 10 X 12 room does not constitute adequate living conditions for human dignity. It may be adequate to keep us alive, but again, THAT IS NOT THE STANDARD OF LIVING CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING REQUIRES. In a room that small, it was bedding from wall to wall, and there wasn’t even room for our clothing, let alone for all of us to sleep.
Why do you insist on presuming that the standards of living I am discussing with you are arbitrary? If I was making $5,000 less than I am today, no, I wouldn’t have “muddled” through, I would have gotten kicked out of my house, or not been able to buy groceries, or not been able to pay the electric bill. I don’t have $5,000 to spare. Even if somehow I could make an itemized list and remove anything that could conceivably be considered a luxury (which ain’t much) from my budget, there isn’t enough I could cut. My rent alone consumes 50% of my income. That’s where Michael Hebert’s “drop in the bucket” analogy fits. Putting $7 a week into savings might net me $364 a year, but I need $5,000, say, to put down on a house. At that rate, it would take me nearly 14 years to save $5,000.
But if I spend $7 on a bottle of wine for Sunday dinner each week - an act which contributes to quality of life without being strictly necessary - I derive more benefit without making a substantial difference in my ability to save. What I need is a larger source of revenue, not to give up drinking wine on Sundays. If you’ve ever gone without absolutely anything you want and subsisted only on your needs, you’ll know what a miserable, hum-drum existence it is. There’s no joy in a life that doesn’t have a little bourbon and chocolate in it, so to speak, and if you think there is, then feel free to go find it. One of the reasons that the plight of the poor is so sad is not just that they can’t meet their needs, but that they never experience the joy of having some of their wants.
But I’ll give the last word to the various popes who have written about this:
Gaudium Et Spes states that “Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural, and spiritual level, taking into account the role and productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good.”
John Paul II says in Laborem Exercens:
“Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family means remuneration which will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future. Such remuneration can be given either through what is called a family wage-that is, a single salary given to the head of the family fot his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the other spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home…”
Pius XI, Quadresimo Anno:
“…the number of the non-owning working poor has increased enormously and their groans cry to God from the earth. Added to them is the huge army of rural wage workers, pushed to the lowest level of existence and deprived of all hope of ever acquiring “some property in land,”[43] and, therefore, permanently bound to the status of non-owning worker unless suitable and effective remedies are applied….
…it will be impossible to put these principles into practice unless the non-owning workers through industry and thrift advance to the state of possessing some little property. But except from pay for work, from what source can a man who has nothing else but work from which to obtain food and the necessaries of life set anything aside for himself through practicing frugality?”
More from Quadresimo Anno:
“In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family.[46] That the rest of the family should also contribute to the common support, according to the capacity of each, is certainly right, as can be observed especially in the families of farmers, but also in the families of many craftsmen and small shopkeepers. But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately…”
Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum:
“If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income….
…The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man…”
So you see, Catholic social teaching recognizes that merely surviving is not sufficient. The dignity of man requires a certain dignity of living, and while there is some level of subjectivity in determining how that applies, clearly Catholic social thought indicates that men need to be paid more than their expenses if they are to put some away, attain property, become owners, and work toward a more adequate distribution of wealth and property that is in accord with Catholic thought.
Capitalism, unregulated, seeks to undermine this (the industrialist and property owner is often indicted in these same encyclicals.) Chesterton puts it rather well, I think, when he says:
“All but the hard-hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.”
- Utopia of Usurers, 1917
Unfortunately this is the way text-based conversations go. I write a comment, intending a completely serene tone, and you read it and conclude that I am antagonistic, because you are feeling antagonistic. Maybe you could calm down and reading it over again.
You are living in the richest society that has ever existed in human history. Your life is easier than about 99% of all humans who have ever lived. Probably more like 99.9%. There are millions around the world even today that would give anything to be in you position. If your income isn’t sufficient for human dignity, then pretty much no one’s is. If you are ok with that interpretation of Catholic teaching, then I guess that’s your perrogative, but it doesn’t make any sense to me to insist on a definition of human dignity that isn’t possible to meet except in the most wealthy and technologically advanced conditions. Did Adam have the skills to create a shelter bigger than 10×12 right off the bat? Perhaps God is to be condemned for putting him in such an undignified situation?
If you want to end the conversation, that is fine with me. You keep making it about the details of your life and then getting upset when I respond to your examples. Maybe this is something you aren’t in the condition to discuss.
Kevin,
Which of these statements do you stand by?
Unfortunately this is the way text-based conversations go. I write a comment, intending a completely serene tone, and you read it and conclude that I am antagonistic, because you are feeling antagonistic.
or:
I meant for my comments to be about the just, living wage, in theory, not to judge anybody’s lifestyle or vocation. It was a mistake to use the gadfly tone that I used, and take examples from the details of strangers’ lives. Please forgive me.
You’ve made this personal, more than once. You continuously tell me that I can and should live on less, that my financial issues are merely my perception, and that living in a tiny room with my family in my parents basement should have been completely satisfactory.
You apparently have things all figured out.
As regards your point about 99% of the humans who have ever lived, I keep trying to get it across (Michael Hebert also touch on this) THEY ARE NOT THE STANDARD.
Do you honestly think we would have this body of Catholic social teaching if 99% of the people that ever lived were meeting the conditions the Church is promoting here? Are we to always strive for the minimum, to seek to accommodate the lowest common denominator, to merely accept with serene resignation whatever crappy economic situation life throws at us because, hey, all justice demands is that we’re not starving and we have some clothes and a place to sleep?
If that’s what you think adequacy is, seriously, knock yourself out. Don’t ever provide anything more for your family than bread and water and the most basic accommodations, and merely accept the fact that as part of a capitalist system that is destroying the family, you’re probably getting paid less than you should be and perhaps will even be paid less than you need. When you have more kids, your expenses will go up. If you ever lose your job and have to move to find a new one, your expenses will probably go up.
Have you never been in a situation where your income did not meet your needs? Can you really say that justice demands that so many men should have to work 80 hours a week at two jobs and never see their families or have time for adequate rest just to make ends meet?
I don’t know what you’re advocating, but it sounds to me like it moves beyond thrift.
I’m not saying that we don’t need to work harder to get what we want in life, only that often enough, no matter how hard we work it isn’t enough, and reasonable pay should meet our needs - our most basic needs - with a little bit left over. Why is that unreasonable, in your view?
Perhaps the question I should be asking you (not having read your essays) is why you oppose the family wage at all?
I don’t understand how you could think that I am the one making this conversation personal. You are the one who is throwing in annecdotes and examples from your actual situation at every chance you get. But their mere factuality does not mean that your interpretation of the living wage is correct. So how should I respond to offer the alternative view of things? My earlier comments ignored personal details as much as possible, but you seem determined to argue in a way that makes that impossible. I am struggling with remorse at having gotten into this with you, because it is clearly hurtful. But I’m not certain that remorse is rational. If you say “How does your theory explain this personal detail,” and I respond politely, then you got what you asked for. I have just reread every word I wrote on this page before saying so and I think that is a fair characterization.
Now, to your comments: “Do you honestly think we would have this body of Catholic social teaching if 99% of the people that ever lived were meeting the conditions the Church is promoting here?”
That is not what I said. I said that 99% have had it more difficult than you. What number of people have had a dignified living? Maybe it is 5%. Maybe it is 95%. Maybe somewhere in between. But your arguments would make it less than 1%, and I think that strains credulity.
Now I can accept that you misunderstood that point, but what follows seems increasingly irrational, and I have to wonder whether you are taking the conversation too seriously.
“If that’s what you think adequacy is, seriously, knock yourself out. Don’t ever provide anything more for your family than bread and water and the most basic accommodations”
Did I say that was something to aspire to? That it was bad to earn more? In fact I believe I’ve mentioned that part of the living wage means the food should be nutritious, so I don’t know where you got “bread and water” from.
“Can you really say that justice demands that so many men should have to work 80 hours a week at two jobs and never see their families or have time for adequate rest just to make ends meet?”
I don’t know anyone who works 80 hours a week, do you? Why the exaggeration?
“I’m not saying that we don’t need to work harder to get what we want in life, only that often enough, no matter how hard we work it isn’t enough, and reasonable pay should meet our needs - our most basic needs - with a little bit left over. Why is that unreasonable, in your view?”
I don’t know what I can say to make this more clear. I agree that our basic needs should be met with a little left over. But I have a different idea of what constitutes a “basic need”. That is what we are disagreeing over.
“Perhaps the question I should be asking you (not having read your essays) is why you oppose the family wage at all?”
I don’t.
Kevin,
I’m not really sure how to debate this with you, because I can’t get any traction. I can’t get you to define your positions with clarity, I can only get you to tell me that you disagree with certain points I’m making. I need more specificity from you.
So in the interest of keeping this organized, I’m going to number this, so you can respond point-by-point if you choose to:
1.) I use personal anecdotes because they are concrete, and I have intimate knowledge of them. They are superior to theoretical considerations because I know precisely how things have worked out in the real world rather than the abstract.
2.) Your derision of my personal experiences and subsequent assessments comes across as condescending and rude. Your statements indicated an assumption that your analysis is superior and correct, and so you are quick to tell me that my conclusions are wrong. Again, my conclusions are born from actual experience, so if I am to be persuaded that they are incorrect, it will require more than your unsubstantiated judgment to move me.
3. You have asserted on more than one occasion that my expense levels are “chosen” and “arbitrary”. The complexity surrounding the factors that make up cost of living, however, do not support this assertion. Where a person lives dictates the cost of their housing, utilities, and to some extent their food. It also dictates their salary. Moving is expensive, and frequently moving to a place with a lower cost of living means moving to a place with lower salaries, thus keeping the proportion between income and expenses the same. The only thing arbitrary about most people’s daily cost of living is the fact that their salary and their costs are largely determined by outside parties, ie., employers, landlords, etc.
4. You say, “Did I say that was something to aspire to? That it was bad to earn more? In fact I believe I’ve mentioned that part of the living wage means the food should be nutritious, so I don’t know where you got “bread and water” from.”
My response to this is that you indicate through your comments an implicit notion that the standard should be subsistence, rather than something above subsistence. You say that food should be “nutritious” but do not define “nutritious”, or how much nutritious food should cost. You will probably tell me that spending $600 a month to feed a family of five is “arbitrary”, because you don’t spend $300 a month for a family of three.
The point is, I still don’t know what your standards are for subsistence, or whether you in fact believe a just wage means being able to provide more than subsistence. I am arguing with what I imagine your positions to be, because you haven’t given me a clear outline of them.
5. You say, “I don’t know anyone who works 80 hours a week, do you? Why the exaggeration?”
Yes. My brother worked two jobs for a very long time. My grandfather at times worked three. I work a minimum of 40-45 hours a week at my day job and commute for another 20. I also do freelance writing on my own time, adding as many as 5-10 hours per article. My weekly work-related investment of time is at least 60 hours a week, sometimes more.
Why do you assume it’s an exaggeration? Just because you don’t know anyone who has to do it?
6. You say, “I don’t know what I can say to make this more clear. I agree that our basic needs should be met with a little left over. But I have a different idea of what constitutes a “basic need”. That is what we are disagreeing over.”
What you can do to make it more clear is to simply say it. Outline for me what the basic needs of a family should entail according to your view, and I mean more than saying a place to live, food that is nourishing, and clean clothes. My bills show quite specific expenses, from insurance to utilities to transportation fees to gas for the car. If you really want to be specific, indicate roughly what you think they should spend on each item. Make sure you account for the fact that things you may consider luxuries (cell phones, internet) are things that some of us are required to use to make our living, even from home.
Also, I’d like to know if ANY wants should be provided for in the basic needs, and if so, what is permissible. If not, please give some indication of how you decide, say, between buying the more expensive and more nutritious wheat bread and the less expensive and less nourishing white bread. What choices is a man supposed to make to stay within the confines of your definition of necessity?
Or, more specifically, where do needs end and wants begin?
7. Finally, you say you don’t oppose the family wage, but you seem to disagree with every description of it I’ve ever seen. A family wage is more than a subsistence wage, other wise known as a “living wage”. A living wage seeks to provide the bare minimum, a family wage seeks to provide sufficient income for a family to thrive, “on the material, social, cultural, and spiritual level.” A living wage will never provide enough for the acquisition of property or the means of production. The family wage, managed properly, will.
I’m trying to push through the fact that there are big distinctions here, and that your idea of what the standard of living should be is below the threshold that true social justice demands.
But I can’t, and won’t, take this argument any further if you can’t, or won’t, make an argument that is more specific that what you’ve offered up until now.
I don’t have a clear idea of what the minimum level is for a dignified existance, but I can rule certain things out through logic. Here is an illustrative example of a frugal budget for a large-ish family. You could certainly go below this. It is based on my area. Things would be a lot cheaper in most places.
Rent: $850
Utilities: $200
Car Expenses: $291 (Including long term average over time of replacing the car.)
Student Loans: $250 (but who knows?)
Food Etc: $750 ($173 a week)
Total Expenses Yearly: $28,095.
Nitpick away.
OK,
So let’s take this example and add some realism to it, based on an area like the one where I live:
Rent: $1900
Utilities (Electric, Oil): $360
Car Expenses: $800 (2 cars)
Student Loans: $600
Food: $700
Cell Phone: $100
Home Telecom Package (inc. landline and itnernet): $100
Family Health Insurance: $300
Car & Renter Insurance: $120
Metro: $120
Other Public Transport: $200 (Train service)
Gasoline: $300
Credit Card Payments: $300
Total: $5900 a month/ $70,000 a year
Now, let’s say that we decide that, just for fun, that we remove the telecom package from the home, but we keep the cell phones because the land line is part of the telecom. So that knocks off 100. Now we deduct the federal stipend for transport from the total cost of public transportation and that knocks off another 100. We can’t really do anything about the rest, because oil has shot up astronomically since signing the lease, as has gasoline, and our hypothetical people drive as little as possible (public transport is far cheaper.) But they have to fill up their van once a week at $60 a fillup, and their small car, used for commuting to and from the train station, does about 1 fillup a month. But lets say they eliminate that second car, and they just wake the kids up at 6:20AM so they can take dad to work with mom in the one car, and they have to skip eating dinner until 8:00PM so they can pick dad up, even though their bedtime is 8:30PM. No, that’s kinda messy, so lets just say they own the small car outright. Hell, let’s say they own both cars outright, and drop the $800 in car payments right off the chart.
Now we’re down $1000. Great. So we’re at $4900 a month (or $58,800 annually) and that’s better, for sure, but still $30K over your $28K. Hell, let’s knock off the college loans - we’ll just imagine that these people can make a $60K payment to get out of their Steubenville debt (a common per-student debt from that school) and that knocks off another $600 a month.
Now wer’e at $4300 a month/ $51,600 a year. That’s definitely better. But it’s roughly equivalent to the $52,000 salary that you said earlier was such good money. And I say with $400 to spare per year, it’s just barely enough for this family to pay their bills, let alone get the $400 worth of new tires they need, or handle the $100 in copays, or cover any misc. expenses. There’s certainly nothing to put into savings.
And if we want to get really crazy, let’s move our hypothetical DC-area family away from here. Not counting the several-thousand-dollar moving expense, we’ll just look at their reduced costs.
So let’s say we go somewhere really cheap. Like Steubenville. We’ll use your number of $850 for rent.
Rent: $850
Utilities (Electric, Oil): $360
Food: $700
Cell Phone: $100
Family Health Insurance: $300
Car & Renter Insurance: $120
Gasoline: $300
Credit Card Payments: $300
Total: $3030 or $36,360.
So now, we’re way closer to where you want us to be, we’ve eliminated public transport and high rent, we’ve kept high utilities because we live in an equally old, energy inefficient house, but now we also live in a more dangerous neighborhood, have no room for a garden to offset food costs in the summer, have very few jobs to choose from except those at the university (and they don’t pay very well) and we’re now parked in a depressed economy in a go-nowhere town.
And we still need tires for the car, business clothes for dad, haircuts too (not everyone can cut hair), schools for the kids (not everyone can homeschool a kid K-12, and public schools are dens of iniquity, especially in Steubie), etc.
Again, the needs/wants delineation here becomes muddy, and proportionately, we’re still in the same ratio of income to spending but we now just have lowered everything, particularly by eliminating through magic a phenomenal amount of debt.
If that list you submitted is literally all you need to worry about, more power to you. Most people don’t have the luxury of such simple budgets.
2) Maybe you could point something out that I said?
4) You observed in the beginning that the standard was obvious but vague, or words to that effect. I agree with that. I don’t think either of us are unsure of where the exact line is, but we can both point to a level of income and say it is below (or above) that point. For you this apparently means greater than $50k but less than $100k, at least in your area. I would place it somewhere below $30k, for sure.
5) There is a big difference between working 60 hours a week and 80 hours a week. If we are including commute time, 60 hours a week is no problem, especially if your hours are flexible. You can be out of the door every day at 6, like I usually am, and home by 4pm to play with your kids before dinner. You only have to get 2 hours of work done after they go to bed in order to have the weekends off completely.
6) Your bills may show more detail than my simple statements, but most of those things are a means to an end. If you are, one way or another, achieving a warm, clean place to live, clothes to wear, and food to eat, then what more do you need? I understand having a car may be necessary to get to work. Then again maybe not. The real question is what kind of work is available without one, and whether having the car and the commute and the salary and the bills that go with it, is a net benefit over not having any of it? People will give different answers to that question. If you are richer because of your car, then keep it. If not, rationally you should get rid of it. But the key consideration is whether it contributes to your shelter, clothes, and food.
Oh, and my working definition of a want is something that isn’t required by justice for you to have, so that should answer that question.
7) I was thinking that a family wage = just wage = living wage for this conversation. For instance when I type “catholic living wage” into google, the first thing that comes up is http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=20965 in which the term “living wage” is clearly more than a subsistance level.
The important thing to focus on is the big chunks: Housing and Transportation.
Your budget has $1540 a month on transportation. That doesn’t seem right. Here are the actual figures from my budget:
One used car (40k milage) cost me $9000 in 2004 dollars. I expect to get 10 years out of it. At 4% inflation, keeping two cars comes to a current figure of $2105 a year, or $175 a month. For repairs I expect $500 a year on average, or $41.67 a month. Gas and oil come to $186, and my wife visits her family an hour away at least twice a week. Ezpass gets another $24 because a lot of the roads around here have tolls. Auto insurance is $62 a month because neither of us drive to work. Yearly registration and AAA membership are about $8 a month each. Commuting costs: Parking is $32.55, The first train is $154 and the second train costs $46.13.
All that should come out to $738 a month, unless I missed something. For the basic budget I reduced that to estimate for one vehicle and eliminated the commuting costs. There is plenty of low-wage work available without taking the train into a city. If you do want to go into the city it better pay the same as at home, plus transportation costs, plus extra to make up for the commuting time. Otherwise it isn’t worth it, by definition.
The second thing is housing. That $850 came from a 4-bedroom place in Newark, NJ, which would actually cut down on my commuting time and cost if I moved there. Newark is closer to NYC than I am. And even in a nicer suburban area like mine you can get a 3 bedroom house for $1600 a month. You’d probably pay less in an apartment building. I’m afraid you are overpaying for that as well. Maybe some good will come of this conversation: get on the internet and do some comparisons.
Oh, and if you are going out of the North-East and you want to do a basic budget, you should be looking for something around $400 a month or less. For example, Oklahoma City is pretty cheap.
Kevin,
That budget is not my budget, but it would be, if I still had the debts I used to. Some of it is made up, and some of it is real.
I’ve lived in 9 states, near 4 different major metropolitan areas, and in the suburbs. I’ve experienced big bonuses, small inheritances, and bankruptcy. We’ve rented and we’ve owned. We’ve bough a home below market, and we’ve lost a house in foreclosure. We’ve bought cars with high-interest financing, and we’ve bought a car with cash. I’ve commuted 10 minutes to work and 2 hours to work and everything in between. My kids have been homeschooled and private schooled. So have I.
My wife and I have, between us, experienced working for others, working for ourselves, working freelance, and owning businesses.
We’ve had health insurance, and we’ve not. We’ve had babies while covered by insurance, and babies when we couldn’t afford coverage. We’ve bought new cars and used cars. We’ve had luxury and we’ve had paucity. We’ve experienced a bottle of wine every night, and food boxes from the local pantry.
I grew up in a family that always struggled financially. She grew up in a family of entrepreneurs that always had money.
Our combined experience has led me to the conclusions I’ve discussed here. I know you’re a smart guy, Kevin, and you think you’ve got it all figured out, but I say give it time. Go through more experiences. Be a father longer. Have more kids. Lose your job and not be able to find another. Move to an economically prosperous area during a down economy and find the cost of living prohibitive. Stay in a small town where things are cheap but there are no jobs.
I’m only 30, but I’ve done all of this already. Things aren’t as simple as you say. I don’t know anyone - I mean anyone - who has been able to make it on as little as you’re suggesting.
If you can do it, more power to you. You’ve been lucky or blessed, or incredibly gifted in your financial planning, or maybe all three. I can’t do it, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect that most people can.
That’s all I have to say on this topic. You can only beat the poor dead horse for so long.
Very well, Steve. Thanks for putting up with my rants for this long!
Let me end this on a cordial note by sharing a great money saving tip that will drastically reduce the amount you spend on wine: Make your own!
It takes a lot of equipment and nonsense to do it from grapes, but you can make your own wine from juice concentrate with almost no effort at all. You would have to give up drinking for a couple months to save for a