The higher standard of living we enjoy today comes at a price. More time spent at work, less pensions but we now have 401Ks that empoyers pay into and that we can take with us. Yes, there are layoffs but we have the opportunity to change jobs more frequently as the economy has grown.
Life is what you make it.
I remember my parents scrimping pretty hard on an airline pilot's salary. Shoes were a huge expense.
Now I buy a fresh pair any time and they're cheap.
I remember eating handfuls of raw rolled oats because I was rationed on apples, of which we couldn't afford too many.
Same with just about every item you can think of to buy. It is cheap now compared to when I was a kid.
But mainly, we have things now that never existed. The PC on which you're reading this would have cost you over $100,000 in the '70s and filled a room.
The point is that we don't really enjoy a higher standard of living. We have a few more toys, but in order to pay for those toys, we're working twice as much. Forty years ago, a family was a husband, a wife, and children. The husband's productivity was geared towards bringing home money. The wife's productivity was geared towards raising children. Today, no one in the family can have primary responsibility for raising children. We've taken "one adult unit" of productivity out of raising children and had to put it towards other expenses.
More time spent at work, less pensions but we now have 401Ks that empoyers pay into and that we can take with us.
A 401k is nice, but many employers have paid bonuses and extras for years. A family that was smart enough to invest those bonuses could also "take it with them" if they wanted.
Yes, there are layoffs but we have the opportunity to change jobs more frequently as the economy has grown.
The situation of an employee changing jobs is better than that of an employee being laid off because he can bargain from a position of strength, but often, the change really doesn't improve one's financial situation. Many employers base their 401k contributions on years of service. If you leave a job where your employer is making an 8% contribution to your 401k for a job where the employer will be putting only 2% into your 401k for the next five years, you have to get 6% raise before you've even broken even on just that benefit. If the change means lowered pension benefits, the raise must be bigger. If the change means losing vacation, you can effectively count each week of vacation as 2%. It's not hard for a new company to pay you ten or twelve percent more than the old company did but you'll still end up only breaking even.
When something is wrong with one's current job situation, changing jobs is necessary. However, changing jobs is not such a great deal for the employee. I've been in that situation, and it's not positive.
The economy has grown for some people in certain paper-shuffling jobs, but the economy hasn't grown for everyone. Someone who is a smooth talker and good at hyping himself will always do well. The honest, hard-working, analytical types are not doing particularly well in today's "hype is everything" economy.
Life is what you make it.
Yes, life is what we make it, but if we're working harder to have less and enjoy less than what our parents and grandparents did, then the thesis of this editorial is wrong. We aren't better off than we were forty years ago.
Bill
Yes it's what you make of it but it's undeniably true that for anyone over 50 who has been in a good job, performing well then gets "downsized" will find it very difficult indeed to switch into anything even close in salary and benefits (of course there are always exceptions), let alone retrain where you will of course be on or near the bottom again even assuming you can get hired.
Another factor is that old style "defined benefit" pensions tended to ramp up very sharply in one's 50s so an early "out" can be enormously expensive in terms of lost payout growth. In lump sum equivalent terms that lost payout can easily exceed a million bucks for an averaga professional - and that is nearly impossible to make up, simply not enough time left.