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Everything is so expensive
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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If you went 100 years back in time and told people that school teachers would be dead broke despite making the best financial decisions possible and be nearly homeless despite working long hours they would be fucking shocked.
Being a school teacher, even one for elementary school kids, in the late 19th century was not only a respectable profession, but also decently paid. I think Horrible Histories said that the average school teacher in the 1880s and 1890s in the UK made around 60 pounds sterling a year, which was a fairly decent wage at the time.
Holy moly! According to this website that's over £9000 today! And teachers are risking their physical, mental health and lives, today.
Wait, why are you impressed by £9k per year? That is below minimum range in all western society.
Oops, my brain must have autoconverted "year" to month. That's... Not good.
At that time it was considered better, and they sure as hell wouldn't be homeless.
The problem is there's not a good historical context for the high cost of daycare and nursing homes. Just 60 years ago it was considered normal and good parenting for kids to be left unattended for most of the time. We're taking 3 year olds wandering around town unattended. This is where some of the outdated expectations of children come from is teaching kids to survive in a world where they're expected to be on their own for such a huge amount of their childhood
And on the flip side of the spectrum people are living far longer than they ever have so end of life care has become a decades long investment. Social security was first implemented because people who didn't expect to live long enough to need to think about retirement suddenly found themselves too old to work but needing to make ends meet
The only window of historic context we have for the sheer cost of daycare and nursing care would be from about 1970 and later, since that would be after civil rights protections had been passed (meaning you couldn't just pay a minority person a pittance to do the work) at a time when women really started entering the workforce in earnest, and expectations had largely become that children were not left unmonitored
Like someone else said, £60 in today's money is £9k. Per year. What am I missing because that does not sound like a decent wage.
At that time it was.