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comment by Quatrarius

the other little thing that i wanted to say was (as per the Wallerstein convo) cooking it used to be a Woman Duty and now it's a Nobody Duty. the shift from unpaid to paid labor with women entering the workforce spread the household responsibility of cooking/cleaning/kids/etc, at least nominally, across everybody - and now that people don't train their daughters to do it, nobody gets trained to do it. the grassroots is gone, for lack of a better word, and you only get this scattershot stuff about home ec or scrabbling things together out of necessity until you figure it out, and the two roads are roast beef girl and doordash coiner

it's tricky to talk about because it's not like forcing all of it unpaid onto women was any better either, but you're right. money has hollowed the whole thing out. now there's no script, and we're just improvving for lack of being told what to do by the world





kleinbl00  ·  117 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Elizabeth Warren was radicalized when she did a study on bankruptcy for a right-wing think tank and discovered that 80% of all bankruptcies were women who were bankrupt because of (A) a divorce (B) medical bills. Her reaction to this radicalization was a book she wrote with her daughter called The Two Income Trap.

Here's her thesis:

- America had a burgeoning middle class not solely because of the economic opportunities for the primary breadwinner, but because there was always temporary piecework for women whenever they needed it.

- The ability to protect against tragedy and homelessness by having the woman of the household take on short-term labor while the man of the household restarted his career allowed for families to weather out bad storms.

- White Flight and the rise of secondary education put an emphasis on "good schools" as a condition for home purchase, the principle path for wealth protection after the New Deal.

- The American decision to fund school districts via local property taxes created a massive leverage effect on home prices, where houses in "good school districts" skyrocketed while those in "bad school districts" plummeted

- In order to provide a quality education for their children, American families eschewed the "one breadwinner, one spare" economic model in favor of "both parents work all the time"

- Which has had the effects of eliminating the safety net against economic hardship, radically increasing the utilization of daycare, eroding the family unit, putting housing out of reach of everyday americans and otherwise fucking everything up royally.

Warren argued, in 2004, that all schooling should be fucking federally funded, full stop. But then, she's a communist wanna-be squaw.

It all pretty much comes down to "do you, as a society, care about individual welfare? Then you, as a government need to care about individual welfare" which up until Trump got you painted up as a communist. Now nobody knows what to do because the 'wingers are too busy worshipping Viktor Orban and shit.