just what the world needs (part 1)

A giant economic treatise by me, the length of which is in direct proportion to my lack of knowledge of the subject. This is inspired by an awesome post on ThinkChristian and the subsequent discussion. I commented a couple of times there, but I don

4 Responses to “just what the world needs (part 1)”

  1. KDC says:

    Wow! I hope the $ your actual jobs paid you while you wrote this were living wage; you’ve contributed to the country’s well-being.
    I can’t even tell if that was a sarcastic comment I just wrote. Oh well. Looking forward to Part II.

  2. michele says:

    Hehehe! Sad to say nobody was paying me anything for or while writing this particular contribution to society–just goes to show how unfair our economic system really is.
    See, I’m pretty sure what I just said was sarcastic…

  3. kim says:

    Last week, a study announced that the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is widening (read this). Some of the reasons directly tie in with the issues of low-wage work that you’re talking about. It’s helpful to remember that the well-being of individual workers is connected to the health of society as a whole.
    Looking forward to the continuation of this tale.

  4. michele says:

    Great, my own blog has turned against me. It just wouldn’t let me post a comment, and then “helpfully” tried to automatically put my real email address in the “Email Address” field. IT’S ALIVE!!!!
    I see it not only as a problem of low wages, but the expansion of low-wage jobs in the service industry to make a larger percentage of the employment pool. I seem to remember that being a talked-about issue around 10 years ago, but it seems to have gotten dropped. What I suspect we are getting is an upper class of relatively wealthy professionals, who have access to education etc. that gives them valuable, versatile general skills and very valuable specialzed skills; versus a lower-class without access to education and with no skills, whose work in the service industry frees the professionals from necessary but less-monetarily-valued work like cooking, housework, and yardwork.
    I think this says that we need to look not just at raw wages, but the way our economy is developing. What we are really moving towards is an older model of the household that employed a variety of servants, except that the servants are no longer part of the household and are expected to maintain their own households on their low wages. I don’t think this is healthy for either side of the income gap.

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