← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: How Capitalism Changes Intimacy and Family
00:58:31
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Sam.
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Richard Wolff
Saint Gonna change one. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children. How the future looksor looms might be the better word. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Today's Economic Update will begin with what's good news, although only for certain folks. There was a recent release by the Dow Jones Company that surveyed the incomes earned in the last full year, 2015, by the CEOs, the chief executive officers of the six largest U.S. banks. So I wanted you to share in the good news for them. Their compensation, these six people together, was $122.8 million. That is up 10% from what they earned the year before. So a nice healthy increase. Since prices only went up 1 or 2%, they're way ahead of the curve. Let's take a look at what this means. The top earner, I just have to single him out. So the best paid of the six biggest banks was Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's CEO. He topped the group with $27 million. That was up from 20 million year earlier. You can see that he did really well. Well, I did a little average because that's what we economists do. I averaged what each of them got and then I divided it by 52 to tell you what the average weekly pay was every week, 52 weeks of the year. I'm assuming they had no vacations. Of course, you and I know, or I hope you do, that they all have vacations, but the vacations do not interrupt the flow of their pay, which befits people at that level of the capitalist system. The average pay of the six CEOs of the six largest banks in the United States was. Here we go, $391,000 per week, 52 weeks of the year. Let me say it again so you can enjoy, as they no doubt do, this reality every week, they get each of them on average $391,000 for that week, whether they felt well or not, whether they were on vacation or not, whether they were fill in the blank. No wonder they don't buy lottery tickets, because they win the lottery every week of the year. My next update for today has to do with a story that caught my eye very recently. It was in Business Insider, and it was basically an interview with Mohamed El Erian, if that name is not familiar to you, he's the former CEO of Something called the Pacific Investment Management Company, Pimco, the largest dealer in bonds, I believe, in the world. Certainly one of the three or four largest, if not the largest. He's currently the chief economic adviser to Allianz, an enormous global insurance and financial services company. In other words, this is a man who has spent all of his adult life at the highest reaches of the financial world. He says something that I want to underscore and present to you, albeit in a slightly adjusted way. The quote in the story is remarkable. The road we're on is coming to an end. What does he mean? He explains he was speaking about a week ago in London when he made these. Either the world will collapse into a mire of financial volatility. Wow. Or some way will have to be found. And now, please pay attention with me to what he says. Some way will have to be found to unlock the huge stores of cash held by the largest corporations in the world who are not investing that money, who are playing in the stock market with it, who are lending it to one another, but who are not using it to. Here we go. Create jobs to build the economy, to improve the standard of living. They're sitting on growing piles of cash, and if some way isn't found to get them to invest and spend it, well, then we're going to go the other way, which is to be again mired in financial volatility and political collapse. Hmm. Political collapse. We seem to be getting a taste of that all already. How does Mr. Mohamed El Erian explain this? Just the way I would. He points out that over the last decades or two or three, most of the wealth creation has gone to the richest people. They don't spend that money because they're already rich. They already have 10 houses, 20 cars. You know the drill. So what's happening is the people getting the wealth are not turning around and spending it to create the jobs to build the economy. They're just hoarding it. In effect, says Mr. L Erian, something has to happen to deal with that. So far, and he's very clear on it, the central banks of countries, the monetary system, have driven interest rates down to zero in a hope of getting these companies to be active again. It hasn't worked. They pumped the system full of new money in the hope of getting this system working again. For most people, putting everybody back to work. It hasn't worked. These are Mr. El Erian's judgments. So he is very worried because he doesn't see the political ability of this capitalist system to solve its own problems of concentrated wealth and the negative economic consequences of concentrated economic wealth. And the alternative, if the system doesn't solve its own problem, is a period of economic difficulty the likes of which we have not seen and that are downright scary. Let me turn next to the story that Bloomberg with it tongue in cheek, released on March 14th of this year. It was actually an editorial of the Bloomberg Business Service. No critic of capitalism, a booster to say the least. They're very worried about the auto industry. And I thought you should know why. After all, the auto industry is supposed to be having a banner year. And it's true. It sold more cars in 2015 than it ever had before. Mrs. Clinton toured Michigan repeating that over and over again in the hopes that somehow the good year that the auto industry had would lead its employees in Michigan to vote for her in the Democratic primary. Unfortunately for her, they didn't. They voted for Mr. Sanders and he won that state. But Bloomberg is concerned that the underlying economic conditions of the good year auto company is having is very fragile. And I thought you might be interested to know, number one, they point out Detroit was helped by low oil prices. And, and why is that? Low oil prices make it less costly to buy a gas guzzling truck. And so people who want to buy a truck have less of a reason not to because gas is cheaper. Detroit, you see, produces trucks that people want to buy. It's not so good at producing cars people want to buy. So as long as oil is cheap, they will be able to sell trucks and Detroit will have a good year. But if and when oil prices go back up, as most analysts think they will, well, then people will shift away from trucks. That's what Detroit produces, back to cars. That's what Detroit isn't so good at. And therefore the good times for the auto industry in Detroit will not survive. But they don't stop there. They point out a second issue more and more. The ability of Detroit to sell anything to the American people depends on lending them the money to buy it because they don't have it. The cars are all bought on credit. Even more important is this statistic mentioned in the Bloomberg report. And I quote, nearly one out of five new auto loans are being made to borrowers with low credit ratings. This is called the subprime auto loan business. And if the word subprime makes you remember subprime mortgages and the role they had in plunging us into a disaster in 2008, well, then your memory is working and Bloomberg is worried how many of these people will be unable to sustain the payments on their cars, delinquencies on subprime car loans have already risen, the article notes, to 4.7%, which is the highest rate since 2010. There are other reasons, but the irony is that the so called efficient capitalist car industry is making decisions to boost sales that even their boosters think unwise. Let me read you the last sentence of the Bloomberg article, by the way. The Bloomberg article dated March 14 is called Detroit's Next Big Crash, an editorial by Bloomberg. Here's the final the Big Three, by which they mean General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. The Big Three are again making many of the same mistakes that drove them to ruin a decade ago. And this time they should be ready to bear the consequences of on their own. Of course, what Bloomberg means is when they failed and collapsed in 2008, the United States government bailed two of the three of them out, General Motors and Chrysler. Bloomberg is cautioning that we're looking at something very similar very soon. Okay, let me turn then to responding to some of your questions in the time that we have left in the first half of our program. Deflation. More and more you are reading about, if you're looking at the financial news, deflation, and so many of you have asked me to talk a little bit about it, what it means and why it's an issue. Well, first of all, the simple meaning deflation is a word we use to describe the opposite of inflation. Inflation is when all prices tend to go up, not all at the same rate necessarily, but if you have a general phenomena where prices are rising, you call that an inflation. And by the same token, if you have a general economic situation where prices are falling, it's the opposite. It is a deflation. Have deflations happened in American history? Yes. Have deflations happened in world history in other countries? Yes. They don't seem to happen, at least in the modern times, as often as inflations do, but they happen. What is the problem of a deflation? Well, the people who like deflations least are businesses. And the reason is not hard to see. A business has to make a decision today to invest in producing something. But that investment process takes time. You have to hire workers, you have to buy equipment, you have to oversee the production. Then you have to fix the problems that arise. There's time between when you buy, buy all the inputs and when you can sell the output. If prices are falling and you have to pay now for the input, by the time you have your output to sell, prices will be lower and that's going to hurt your profits that's why businesses prefer some inflation, because then what you pay now to get production going is rewarded by an output later. When prices are higher, you cash in on the inflation, but you suffer from a deflation. So businesses tend to get freaky when they face this kind of situation. Businesses are further upset because the population may react to a deflation in the following g Prices are falling. I was planning on buying a car, a refrigerator, a sofa, something big for my home, for my job. But if prices are falling, maybe I can do with what I have for another few months or a year or two, and then it will be cheaper for me to buy, because that's what a deflation means. So what you have is people postponing purchases, which for business is very bad news. And indeed, as people postpone when a deflation is happening, they worsen the deflation. Why? Because businesses losing customers, since the customers are waiting to buy at a lower price, businesses become desperate. And you know what they do when they're desperate and can't sell their products? They lower the price of them, which makes the deflation worse, which is a further incentive for people to postpone their purchases. So a deflation builds on itself and is bad for business. Finally, people who are borrowers don't like inflation because they borrow today and they have to pay back a certain dollar amount. But they will be earning less because everything's down lower. They still got to have to pay the money they borrowed when prices were high, and this is therefore a burden on them. So in any case, deflations are a problem. And why are they a problem now? Well, the answer couldn't be clearer over the last 30 to 40 years, as we have documented on this program many times, indeed again, in the first half, the distribution of wealth and income has become much, much more unequal. Basically, we've redistributed wealth and income from the middle and lower classes to the upper class. We've had a good old class war, and the middle and the lower have lost and those at the top have won, as Warren Buffett likes to tell us. And quite right he is. And when that happens, you're taking money away from people who do the most buying. The middle and lower classes spend every nickel they earn. They don't save. They can't. In our economic system, one of the qualities of modern capitalism. So if you take money away from middle and lower income people, every dollar you redistribute it to the folks at the top is a dollar less they have to spend on goods and services. Meanwhile, when you give more and more to the wealthy. They don't spend all that extra money because they're already rich. And beyond the meals they're consuming and the houses they're living in and the cars they drive and collect or what in the world more is there? So they don't spend the money they get anywhere near the way middle and lower income. So if you redistribute from middle and lower to those at the top, you're crippling the spending in your society. So companies are suddenly discovering they can't sell their goods and so they start dropping the prices. That's why we have a deflation. The rich may think they're building up their economy by redistributing wealth from everybody, but in the end they too depend on the system. And they are crippling the system they depend on too. What they have done has come back to bite them in the rear end. Will they learn from this? Well, not if history is much of a guide. Another question many of you have sent to me also requires me to restate something I have done before. But the urgency of the flow of emails coming to us really leaves me with little choice. Bernie Sanders and Socialism the economics of all of this. Well, I know why many of you are writing to me. Because like me, and indeed like most Americans looking at the Democratic race for president, the stunning reality is how well a man with the name socialist attached to him has done. The predictions before this race began was that anybody who allowed himself or herself to be labeled as a socialist was thereby committing political suicide, was in a position where the 50 years of demonizing everything, Marxist, socialist, communist, anarchist, this country would make the population recoil as if such a person was scary. Well, Mr. Sanders has proven that even if that may have been the reality in America, it isn't anymore. The amazing thing is that Mr. Sanders is not getting the 1 or 2% of the vote that had been predicted for him. He is a major contender. Even when Mrs. Clinton wins, she wins. And he still gets 35, 40, 45, and in some cases more than 50% of the vote. It is a staggering testimonial to how fundamentally disappointed and disillusioned people are in this country with the capitalist system we have. So that Mr. Sanders label as a socialist does not have the turnoff effect that all the pundits imagined it would have. What a change is going on in the United States? But what about this socialism that Mr. Sanders does not disavow? Quite the contrary. Well, let's go over it. Capitalism has been the system in the world. Since roughly the 17th century, it has been the dominant economic system, spreading from England in the beginning to Western Europe and slowly over the interceding years, around the world. So it's the dominant economic system in the world today. So it's 300, 400 years old. That's what we're talking about. From the beginning, capitalism, as it became the dominant system, has had people who love and admire and celebrate it on the one hand, and people who don't like it and are critics of it on the other. In that way, capitalism is no different from the slave system, from the feudal system, from every system that human beings have erected. There has never been a system that has not had critics. There's never been a system that does not have weaknesses and flaws, which encourages and stimulates critics. Capitalism is no different. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth, these critics coalesced around a basic idea that came to be known as socialism. So you can see if socialism is the criticism of capitalism, the notion that capitalism has major flaws and weaknesses and that the human race can and should do better than capitalism should go beyond it, Much as the critics of feudalism felt that way about feudalism and the critics of slavery felt that way about slavery and so on. Among the socialists there developed, particularly in the 18th and 19th century and into the 20th too, a dominant idea, and that idea was the way to do better than the capitalism they were living through was by having the government play a major role role in softening, adjusting, moderating, controlling, regulating, private capitalists. This was the idea. The mass of people, the majority, would take over the state either by evolution, you know, voting and elections, or by revolution one way or the other, take over the state and then use the state to make this system work a lot better for people than capitalism left to itself was doing. That's what the critics thought. So you might say moderate socialism, which is really what Bernie endorses, has the government playing a major softening role of capitalism, protecting the mass of people, limiting what private profit can lead businesses to do, and so on. That's why Bernie, like other moderate socialists, wants the government to come in and make a fairer tax system, wants the government to provide free tuition for college students and all the other things that folks like Bernie have always supported. Then there have been other socialists who aren't so moderate. They want the government to take a much more active role. They took the name in the 20th century communists, and here their idea really wasn't so different from the socialists. They just wanted to take it further, the government shouldn't just regulate. The government shouldn't just pass laws. The government should take over. The government should run the enterprises to make sure they behave properly towards the working class. And the government should make sure that the goods and services were distributed according to people's needs and not according to how much money they had, the way it was in an unsocialistic capitalism. So they wanted a more exaggerated, a more profound role for the government. When that didn't work out real well in the cases of the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and so on, a new kind of socialism emerged, and that is now ascending in the 21st century. And this idea says that the government has to be counterbalanced in a way. Whatever authority you give it to manage, to regulate has to be grounded and limited by power from below. And the way to do that is to bring democracy to the workplace, to reorganize the enterprise so it isn't a small group of people who run the enterprise, which has always been socialism's objection, that if you have private enterprise run by private individuals, they'll make the economy and the enterprise serve them and not the average person. You put the average people in charge, then it'll serve everybody. You want an economic system that serves everybody, then everybody has to be in charge. And the way that has to begin is by putting the workers themselves and the communities they live in in charge of the stores, the factories, and the offices. And socialism in the 21st century is going in that direction. I hope that clarifies where Bernie fits in the complexity of socialism, which is as evolving a system as capitalism is, because it's the shadow criticism of capitalism. We've come to the end of the first half of our program. I want to thank you for listening. I want to remind you to make use of our websites, rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info these are there for you to communicate with us, to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to let us know if we can partner with you in all the other ways. We talk about working with you to get on local radio stations, so we go beyond the 52 stations that carry us now so that we can arrange visits so I can speak in your area and meet you personally. But most of all, make use of what we do here. So the Democracy at Work team that produces this show will have the maximum effect that together we can have on where this society and where this economy goes. Stay with me. We'll be right back.
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Singer
Your eyes may be whole but the story I've told is your heart is as black as night. Your lips may be sweet such that I can't compete but your heart is as black as night. I don't know why it came along at such a perfect time. But if I let you hang around I'm bound to lose my mind. Cuz your hands may be strong.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
But.
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Singer
The feelings are on. Your heart is as black as night. I don't know why it came along at such a perfect time. But if I let you hang around I'm bound to lose my mind. Cause your hands may be strong.
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Richard Wolff
Welcome back to the second half of Economic Updates. I am very, very pleased today to have once again, as we've had before, Dr. Harriet Frad, a licensed mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in a private practice for many years here in New York City, as well as a writer of articles and books on a variety of topics having to do with the intersection between the society as a whole and the individuals who are trying to live in a personal life within that society. Beyond opening this up and wanting to thank you Harriet, for joining me again.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Thank you for the opportunity.
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Richard Wolff
I hope it's okay if I call you Harriet. One of the reasons I wanted to bring you back, besides the fact that we're getting many emails from our listeners appreciating the conversations that we've had, is that I've recently been reading two things that caused me to realize that this is a topic we can and need to work on. The first was a contribution to the New York Times blog, which is called Couch. Like the object in your living room, it's called the Couch Blog of the New York Times. And back on the 15th of March, a man named Richard Bruyet, licensed clinical social worker, had a very, very interesting column that he contributed called why Therapists Should Talk Politics, in which he makes and makes very well the point that the political realities impinging on people these days have accumulated in terms of job insecurity, of wage compression and so on, that to properly help people with issues that they want to talk over with a psychological help, to ignore those issues, to ignore the reality of society impinging on people is to do them no favor at all. It's not to work properly with them. It is inadvertently risks making them feel as though the problem is inside themselves rather than appreciating that it's a combination between the factors imposing on you from outside yourself and your own interaction with with them. But it is not healthy and not Helpful to exclude that. And at the same time, I was reading a book given to me by a listener in Los Angeles, and I want to recommend that because in its way, it makes the same point. The author is Nancy Carroll Hollander. Her book is called Uprooted Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas Psychoanalysis, History, Memoir. The book was published by Routledge and is available as Volume 47 of the relational Perspectives book series. These are remarkable books that explore just what we do here, the intersection between the larger society, politics, economics and all of that, and individual, intimate life, individual, personal psychology. So let me begin, Harriet, by asking you to tell me what you've been working on recently in the area we discussed, which is how recent changes in capitalism have begun to radically reshape intimate and personal life.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Well, what I've been working on is looking at how capitalism, in its relentless search for profit, has transformed American life and how it's transformed everything from dating, marriage and family. Why it happened, what happened, why it happened, and what would be some ways that we could adjust to that as other countries have to create a much safer, saner society? That's what I've been working on.
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Richard Wolff
Well, let's begin by asking you, what do you think are the big changes in capitalism that we ought to focus on in terms of how personal life has been changed?
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Well, the biggest is that since the 1970s, when computers were easy to obtain and facile and useful and multinational communication systems allowed international communications, millions of American jobs were outsourced. Capitalists found it was cheaper to hire Chinese, Bangladeshi or other Indian labor because the conditions of their labor were that they got lower wages, they had very few and weak ecological protections, and they also had poor job conditions. So this was a bonanza for capitalist America, who then transformed what were mainly the basic American spine for male jobs. Manufacturing building materials as well as a lot of secretarial work and factories, all of those things to other countries before that, for a long time, American white men had gotten two great bonuses in a very scarce labor market. The US Used to be constrained to the United States as a labor market. Now they have the whole world to choose from, with all the dismal labor conditions that are out there for workers and great ones for capitalists. So white male workers used to get a double wage prize, one for being male, another for being white. And that allowed them to earn what was called a family wage, which means a wage that could support a family until the mid-70s.
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Richard Wolff
Wife and children.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Wife and children, dependent wife and children. In fact, the whole of suburbia Was designed for the dependent wife and children staying in their little house in the suburbs, while the wage earning male commuted to his job in the nearby urban center. That's why the suburbs are falling apart disastrously as people want to move to the city, which is getting more and more expensive. However, that's what happened. And because the marriage and dating system, the personal life system, was built around that family wage for the male white, for the white male worker. And don't Forget, until the mid-70s, the mass of American workers were white. That bonanza never happened. And were male and were male because women were earned 59 cents on the dollar. They didn't get those wage supplements. They were, they had to be married because they wouldn't be able to support themselves or any children.
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Richard Wolff
And before the 1980s, most of these adult white women weren't in the paid labor force anyway.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
That's right. For example, 25% of mothers had some part time work in the 60s.
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Richard Wolff
So the family wage that you're talking about supported the suburban lifestyle, the structure of dating and family. And then when it begins to crumble when the jobs are outsourced and the family wage isn't there, what happens then?
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Well, the jobs are outsourced, computerized, robotized, mechanized, Millions of jobs are lost. And those were mainly male jobs that supported families. Then with all these sophisticated tools, capitalists, in their search for profit over everything, had the whole world as their labor market. They could go to other countries with few or weak labor protections, no ecological standards to speak of, and very cheap exploitable labor so that white men no longer got one bonus for being white and one for being male in the scarce labor market that was racist and sexist in the United States. And that wage system that supported a family structure of dependent women and children on a wage earning male, rather sexist, but it was the basic economic unit that supported the family. With that gone, personal life has been transformed in terms of dating, marriage, cohabiting, which means living together. And the whole fabric of personal life and family have been transformed. And I'll try to explain how.
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Richard Wolff
Okay, let's start then. So, with the collapse of the white male family wage as a result of a capitalist movement out of the United States. Let's take it one by one. What happened to dating? How is dating among young people, or for that matter, people of any age changed by this reality? How does that work?
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Dr. Harriet Frad
Well, one of the things that I think we need to add to the previous idea is that millions upon millions poured into the labor force in the 1960s. There were maybe 25%. About 25% of women you're talking about of women in the labor force and of mothers, particularly. Now 78% of women with children of 11 and up are in the labor force, and 60% of women with children under two. Huge transformation. Women have to work. Two workers working full time don't make the standard of living that one male worker made before the mid-60s.
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Richard Wolff
That's huge.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
So millions of women's lives have been.
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Richard Wolff
Transformed because they have to go out of the house to do a paid job while still maintaining the bulk of the obligation to work inside the house.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
That's right. The women's liberation movement also encouraged women to do that. And what you have is that the old rules don't work. And let's go back to dating again and see how that impacts dating. Well, first place, it used to be that you met somebody if you were a hetero. There was huge discrimination against homosexuals. But you met someone through family or friends, you liked each other, you might have had some sexual experimentation, you got married, and you could have children and be supported by the family wage. When that's over, women realize, oh, I can't get into a serious relationship, which might mean marriage, because women are still the emotional caretakers in marriage. And when men and women are married, women's salaries go down. Employers assume they'll be distracted by their homes. Men's salaries go up because employers still assume that they'll be the support of their family so that they'll work harder. And women are now the ones rejecting marriage because. And in dating, keeping men at a distance because they don't want to lose a career, the likelihood is they'll get divorced or separated if they marry in the first place. And they'll have to support themselves either in a marriage and particularly outside of one. For the first time since they started counting in 1880, the majority of women in the United States are single. And not because women live longer, but because they're choosing to be single. 75% of people 18 to 34 are unmarried for the first time since the 1800s when they started counting. That's an enormous transformation. So what happens is a hookup culture exists. People, if they marry at all, marry later. 42% of children are born outside of any marriage. If people get together, they often cohabit serially, and then those relationships dissolve, and so that people shy away from the kind of permanence of a serious relationship. And if they have one at all, they have one later on. Also, people don't meet through family and friends and know really who they're getting. They look at all these photos on the 30 plus apps available for dating and I'm not in the know. I'm sure there's more than 30 to pick somebody who looks good, sounds good, and who could be lying and have a doctored photograph. The whole, the whole business is rather uncertain now and people are postponing the decision to hook themselves up to someone. A whole sugar industry has developed, which is sugar daddies supporting sugar babies, 44% of whom are paying off college debt.
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Richard Wolff
Well, for our listeners, define what the sugar daddy sugar baby industry is.
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Dr. Harriet Frad
I'm about to do that. It's that you are sexually often, but not always and emotionally available to often an older, but certainly a whole lot wealthier man in exchange for various subsidies. For most of the women involved, the one thing is paying off college or university debt. But there's also paying for credit card debt, paying for rents, paying for all of the above in exchange for being the sort of attractive and intelligent, at least for the university sites of sugar baby's date, that a man can have prestige taking to business events as well as have his good company. Now, when women are asked why become a sugar baby? There's quite a bit of literature on the subject. The overwhelming answers are to pay off college debt or because this keeps you, you have a connection, but you don't have to get married and ruin your career. You keep your career options open and in fact you enhance them through lack of college debt and lack of post college debt.
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Richard Wolff
So this is an adjustment by women, mainly by women, to this new reality of a labor force which can't pay the family wage to a man anymore, where the women in a sense are now equalized in the labor market but have to take accordingly, take the steps that are now transforming personal life. So it's a, it's a perfect illustration of how the shifts in capitalism are transforming intimate life.
- [45:36]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Right. But gender norms haven't really changed. There's a lot of pressure on women to take on domestic labor and if they have children, childcare, which hampers their careers. Despite all this, men and women share. It's a very interesting study that was done in 2016 showing that men and women share tasks more or less equally if they're both professionals and they're both working their way up. But as soon as women make more than men, which they do in a couple, which they do in 29% of the cases, women do more labor because they have to compensate men for their lower economic status because manliness is still associated with the ability to support a family, even though most men can't do it. And both men and women postpone serious commitments, which changes dating radically. The marriage age has changed much later. Yes, it's much later, about seven years later than it used to be. And both women and men reject marriage. Used to be, you'd see jokes about the woman dragging the man to the altar. Now nobody's going to the altar. That's different. You know that. Or some people are, but many fewer. And dating has changed. Marriage has changed because the expectation that a woman will be supported for life if she has children and she will be at home taking care of her husband emotionally and sexually and doing all the domestic work, that's over. Marriage has collapsed statistically for all but people with college degrees and professional jobs who can hire other people to take care of children. To take care of children. And not only to take care of children or go to expensive daycares or take care of meals, get takeout, go to restaurants which are very expensive and can't be afforded for a blue collar couple, and do the housework. There's a huge. The dry cleaners cost a lot more than having to do that yourself. The laundry, the drop off, the pickup, those are paying services, often services provided by other professionals who are making money. And the labor is done by poorly paid workers who can't afford the kind of things they're producing for other people. So marriage has become a luxury good. It was an expectation. Now it's a luxury good. That has really changed. And it's changed in part because women and men both know that it's likely they'll be divorced. 50% of first marriages, 60% of second and third, 70% of third marriages end in separation or divorce. And those are for people who bring the legal system into their separations. If you have no assets or children to fight over or you're not fighting, there's no point in paying for a divorce or a legal separation. So you go your own way. That adds at least another 10% to the mix. So you are talking about the majority and people cohabit.
- [49:03]
Richard Wolff
Let me ask you to turn. Because of our time constraint, tell us how this has impacted the men, particularly those men who have seen their jobs outsourced, who have seen their home life transformed as their wives or now their girlfriends becoming their wives, have to go out and work. That is a huge issue. The current question about who's supporting Donald Trump, for example, what young people are, why they're shifting to either Trump on one Hand, if that's the case, or to Sanders on the other. Connect those things for us if you can.
- [49:41]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Okay, well, I'll talk about Trump and Sanders at the end. But what's happening, what has happened is that the jobs that have been outsourced and computerized are overwhelmingly male jobs in industry and heavy machinery, in factories. And so that blue collar males can no longer support women and children. And what has happened is that since their idea of manhood, which was the dominant idea of manhood, I asm, I am a man, I support my family, I support my children with that family wage, with my family wage, that's gone. And women are deserting marriage, particularly blue collar women. And men are bereft and they're emotionally particularly angry and upset. And their anger goes in traditional, in the traditional areas reserved for men. One is guns, one is the military, one is the evangelical churches with their insistence that women be subordinate, although they have an even higher divorce rate than everybody else.
- [51:01]
Richard Wolff
Pornography.
- [51:02]
Dr. Harriet Frad
And also pornography, which has become a $17 billion industry where men can control women access visually. And that's a huge problem. 10% of college students at University of Kansas in this study, male students couldn't get an orgasm without pornography. That's very interesting. At any rate, you have men in crisis. The ultimate crisis is something that's an element of life only found in America. It's totally American. That's rampage killings, where you have lots of people killed. In other countries it's political. Like in France, revenge for the bombing of Syria. Or in Norway, a fascistic person killing socialist children. These are one time events and they're not random rampage killings. The United States has one every few weeks that we can read about. They are not rare and they are white men. I did a study of this for my own edification. They are overwhelmingly men with two qualities. One is they're unemployed. Two, they've been abandoned by girlfriends or wives. And they're reclaiming their manhood at the mouth of a gun. So it's had enormous impacts on American manhood. The recession in Germany is sort of. Germany, I'm sorry, the recession in Japan, which has happened for 22 years, you can see this very radically because they had very traditional sex roles. Women are rejecting marriage, so are men. There's a whole phenomenon called the herbivore phenomenon where men reject sex with women altogether, except for virtual girlfriends who they take to hotels and dates and so on. And the government is so desperate because they don't. They're losing 5 million of population every year.
- [53:11]
Richard Wolff
That's right. They're losing their population because there's no marriage.
- [53:14]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Because there's no marriage and you can't have children outside of marriage without social condemnation in Japan. And women want to make a living and men can't support them, and so they're opting out altogether. The government pays $35 a head to go to a for a mixer, $35 a person at various bars to get people together.
- [53:37]
Richard Wolff
So the government subsidizes mixing of men and women dating.
- [53:40]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Right, because it's collapsed with their recession and that's happening. It isn't dating. But marriage and hooking up is all right in the United States, which it isn't. And having in Japan and having children outside of marriage is gaining rapidly among whites as well as African Americans. Whites are catching up. So that you have. Dating has changed, marriage has changed. It's only stable for people who have college educations or up. And you have children's lives totally transformed. Most American children don't live with their biological parents. The poorest people in the United States are children because single mothers make less, because they can't afford quality child care. And they're constantly needing to be home with their children. And so you have a tragedy for children. Most children over 3/4 go home after 11 years old to an empty house. And during that time between school and their parent returning is the time most kids commit crimes and also are the victims of crimes. They're also getting fatter and fatter because they have to stay home and they can't go out and play. They have no protection.
- [55:05]
Richard Wolff
Well, I think what we've had, and I know from my flow of emails, let us end the conversation because we've run out of time. I have a comment to make, and let's bring you back quickly this time in a week or two to talk about what other countries have done to try to cope with this problem so that we are not left just with this problem. But my comment as an economist is, look what capitalism has wrought. Look what this system is doing to the most intimate, personal parts of our lives. The damage, the chaos, the hurt, the pain of a system prepared to lose the jobs, disorient the population, taking no responsibility for all of this, pretending none of this has happened, refusing to provide the taxes or the portions of the profits they've made that could even soften this problem. The only thing more grotesque than such a failure of an economic system to serve the people it ostensibly is there to serve. The only thing worse than it is the claim by the people who are champions of capitalism to freely go around the world that they are also believers in family values. What they have done is support, encourage and subsidize the very social forces that have wrecked the very family they're suggesting they support. Final word.
- [56:39]
Dr. Harriet Frad
The only analogy I can think of is bombing Syria and then rejecting the refugees.
- [56:45]
Richard Wolff
Okay, good point. Folks, we've come to the end of our program. I will bring Dr. Harriet Frad back to talk about what to do about all of this, what some other countries have done, what we could do as the necessary follow up. Please remember to appreciate with me truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that is our partner, as we wish you to be. Use our websites democracyatwork.infoordwolf.com to share, to distribute what we do here, such as this interview, to contact us about speaking in your area, to help us get on radio stations and generally to work with us to change the spirit, the consciousness and the direction of this country and of a world in change. I look forward to talking with you again next week.
- [57:40]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Change.
- [57:40]
Richard Wolff
Change. Change.
- [57:43]
Dr. Harriet Frad
Change.
- [57:43]
Richard Wolff
Change. Change. Me. Yes, it is, Sam.