WHEN KIDS in the U.S. WERE CAPITAL GOODS

What This Means for "Work" in the Future

You know by now that I am a member of the "Silent" generation.  In that generation, people had large families.  The economy (mostly agricultural, early manufacturing) required more kids to offset the costs of raising large families (and account for those kids lost to infant death).  My first full time (10-hr day) job came when I was eight years old (for ten cents per hour). 

Around the time of Mad Ronnie, it was clear that our economy had shifted permanently in most of its characteristics.  One of those was our attitudes toward, and our laws concerning, child labor.  Most people think that was a "good" thing.  It was also the time in our history when we should have shifted public awareness to all things economic; but we didn't.  Liddy Biddy, in the early sixties, noticed the phenomenon of the baby boom (leading edge, then, entering teen years) and, with the Disney effect, shifted them into becoming shop-a-holics.  Then there was Tricky Dick and Revenue Sharing, the Commodity Shocks, and the Oil Embargo in the seventies.

Safe to say, our lexicon should have totally shifted to all things economic, but we were thoroughly "mushroomed" into the economic stupidity that prevails today.  Take the word "good".  We first think, along with our religious nuts, of good and evil.  But we should be thinking, instead of economic goods.  Check out Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_(economics) for a quick tutorial.

Drucker taught me that children in this country were a capital good until somewhere around 1956.

Up to that time, children were expected to earn their keep by the time they were teenagers.  They learned to work; which means they learned all of the basic skills required to earn an income. 

After the transition, children became consumer goods, and were economic trade-offs with other consumer choices like new cars, new house, luxury goods, etc.  Most of our citizens never realized this consciously.  Over time, the costs associated with those econoomic good connected with child rearing exploded in cost: (housing, children's clothing, medical care, etc).  Like frogs slowly cooking in a tub of water in which the temperature is steadily increased, we now can no longer ignore the fact that children are a good that most in this economy can no longer afford.  We can no longer afford these "cost-drivers; that are never trained to help offset those costs.  They ae never taught basic work skills.

The 2012 Election is totally an economics issues election.  In the old days (Truman in the 1948 election) it was taken as given that people would "vote their pocketbook"; i.e., not vote against their economic interests.  Dubya proved in the 2004 election that babyboomers were not that smart.

Reflect on the fact that the majority of "jobs" in the future will be service jobs; to be manned or womaned by people who were never taught to work and who were trained to be served, and, you get the picture.