I have no idea whether working class wages were deliberately not kept up with inflation or were just simply ignored, or progressives or whoever thought wages would just keep up on their own.
There's two sides of the coin to the two person working class households thing, the first is that more women entered the workforce (for a variety of reasons, including the feminism movement, but that's not what we're discussing) due to more opportunities, and having women enter the workforce is actually a good thing. The second is that low wages are certainly a factor, but not the only factor.
And third, no, society didn't 'force' women into the workforce, thus society didn't force two working parent households.
You double the workforce, you double the amount of people able to do jobs without having double the jobs to do, you halve the wage. It's really simple economics. Supply vs demand.
That is simple economics, but economics isn't simple.
You halve the wage, you reduce the cost of labor. When labor costs are reduced, costs of running a business are reduced, meaning more people can start them. Which means more jobs. It's obviously going to reduce the wage, but doubling number of people in workforce is not a direct line to halving the wage, particularly when it doesn't happen all at once.
Two-income trap still
suuuuucks though. Less flexibility, more stress, same purchasing power worth of wealth.
Hell, (salaried) people are working 50 or 60 hour work weeks now because employers seem to have forgotten the productivity & efficiency benefits of having well-rested, happy employees, who have the energy to do their jobs right the first time.
As for the culture&whatnot: People forgot that though the scaffolding restricts, it also supports. The goal is to have a society free enough to enable people to strike out on their own and pursue their passions if they have the drive and desire, but structured enough that you don't leave the people who want or need more structure out in the cold. I do well with routines. I need a bit of structure in my life. I know for a fact that doesn't make me stupid, but people maybe don't realize that what works for some people doesn't work for others. People who do well with the freedom of an individualist culture are often stifled under more structured, restrictive cultures, and people who function well with structure to support and build off of are left foundationless in more chaotic environs.
@Covenant: Unfortunately, the right doesn't seem much better at the moment. :/ I remember a study (and things like this are notoriously unreliable, mind) where they found that the right (in America, at least, which is all I can really use as the basis for Europe, though it's obviously farther right) serves the interests of the 99th-100th percentiles of wealth, while the left serves the interests of the 95th to 100th percentiles.
Though it frustrates me to no end that somehow innovation and efficiency leave more people worse off. It's not how that's supposed to work. You get fewer people required for specific types of labor, and it should enable more people to create value/wealth through other means, resulting in more prosperity overall. When you hit the cap on methods of value production, then you enable people to do art and the like that allows everyone more enjoyment and quality of life. It's not supposed to be a concentration in the hands of the few who honestly don't need that much money to live extraordinarily nicely. Million dollars per year is plenty, more than that and it's just being wasteful. >.<
Or excess wealth goes to helping deal with disease or develop other nations (once we can trade we'll get a ROI anyway, if you lack the innate desire to help others because it's the right thing to do) or funding research or a hundred other things it could be spent on that would be better.
Goddamn I wish research was better funded
TempAcc: A nice summary. Everyone was in such a rush to shit on their own culture and past for its flaws, without realising that there was a hell of a lot more value there then they'd ever realised.
All the blue-haired dragon-kin demi-girls hated things like tradition, or the Church, because those things said they were wrong, so they tore them down - not realising that those things were a bulwark against much more serious threats.
Grim: 'Appropriated by the financial elite' is a good way to put it. The old left fought for the working class. The new left fights for its paymasters, while distracting everyone with guff about transgender bathrooms or 'mansplaining'.
I'd more argue that at some point the left disintegrated into a bunch of factions each with their own issue that as far as they're concerned is the most important thing in the world, many of whom are directly opposed to each other and largely sharing few values other than "Is not right-wing or centrist(the modern-day dirty word in politics)".
I personally think the reason the left is weak these days is because it isn't about strength in unity any more, but rather about individualism and self-expression. These are lovely ideals but they sure as hell dont make for a united political front.
The left has always been about individualism. It is the alliance of rebels, at heart, and always has been. When the rebels begin to win, the overriding survival need that drove them to band together becomes weaker. Rebel groups often splinter after they win. After all, by their nature they were the people more likely to push back against authority. That doesn't end just because they won. That's why rebellions often have such brutal methods of suppression immediately after, and why cancer often has distinct stages. If it gets too big and doesn't have the right support network built inside itself, it'll starve, so it has to wait until one of it's cells develops the right mutation and survives to take over and have that become the predominant genome type within the cancer.
United front is what's used up until that point, and then they realize the differences between themselves, and begin to squabble about the proper next steps.