It’s fascinating to see a creature that can’t count to six attempt to tackle supply and demand. Phoenician returns and a modicum of economic hilarity ensues:
“And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don’t work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.”
Alas, dipshit, demand doesn’t stay constant – the women working and earning wages also spend those wages. Fucked up again with basic economics, dipshit.
Wait, working women are going to spend their wages? Why didn’t someone point that out to me earlier? This changes everything!
Actually, it doesn’t. It is obvious that consumption patterns change when a woman works instead of staying home. More office clothes and restaurant meals, to say nothing of day care and transportation costs. So how much does total female demand have to increase in order for this altered female consumption to break even with the increase in the labor supply, everything else remaining equal?
35 percent net. Since not all women work, every single woman who does and is part of the aforementioned post-1950 delta would have to increase her new work-inspired consumption 81.7 percent just to balance her wage depressing effect. Since Does that sound even remotely plausible given that real household income has remained essentially flat between 1965 and 2012?
And anyhow, we can forget that required 81.7 percent increase because it is extremely unlikely that female consumption-based demand has increased AT ALL due to more women in the labor force for the obvious reason that working women bear fewer children. The US fertility rate has fallen from 3.7 to 1.9 children per woman since 1955, which means that the increased number of women in the labor force has reduced overall consumption and demand due to there being 1.8 less children in the average family. At the USDA middle-range estimate of $234,900 to raise a child to 18, that reduced fertility rate translates to $422,820 in reduced demand per woman, or $983,302 per working woman in the delta.
Which effect, I note, is something I had already pointed out in the post to which Phoenician was so ineptly responding: “The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and
therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative
effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further
negative pressure on wage rates.”
It was brave of the little guy, though, wasn’t it? Perhaps if he’d only thrown in a few more vulgarities, he would have won the debate, because rhetoric is always so effective in an intrinsically dialectical discourse. Well, there is always next time. Hop along now, furry little fellow.