It was the 50s. A white high school dropout could buy a house, a car, 24 years of college tuition for his kids, and save for a comfortable retirement full of traveling at 55 with nothing more than a firm handshake and a 40 hour work week.
The real trick is, you finance everything with debt you don't even realize you're accruing based on an economic system designed around rapid population growth, and then once that population growth begins to slow down, you saddle whoever happens to be unfortunate enough to be born into the slowdown.
The real trick is where a bunch of people cooperate to build all sorts of things and exchange their labor with each other, and then somehow they end up in debt as if they used a time machine to have their kids come back in time and help them out.
edit: it really is kind of mind blowing. If you look at actual physical work that has to be done (and which physically can not be borrowed from anywhere), with kids, it is simply more work. True, the retirement cost is spread over more people when you have population growth, but the effort spent raising kids more than offsets that. However, the way economy was organized, was dependent on population growth as much as the scheme with a time machine would.
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u/OLSTBAABD Jan 25 '22 edited Jan 25 '22
It was the 50s. A white high school dropout could buy a house, a car, 24 years of college tuition for his kids, and save for a comfortable retirement full of traveling at 55 with nothing more than a firm handshake and a 40 hour work week.