Leonidas
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Without going back and watching the whole thing again, I could have sworn she was making a case for one spouse staying at home and taking care of the children.I have read some of Prof. Warren's stuff before, but this is the first lecture I've seen. She is a good speaker.
The lesson I take from her is that if you want to be on the high end of the new dumbbell shaped curve, you need to:
1. Get married and stay married; and
2. Both work, but make sure that you can live on the salary of the lower paid spouse, which will be far more likely if you;
3. Don't have any children, and
4. Do everything you can to live a healthy lifestyle.
She is a good speaker and she raised some very interesting points. Like others though, I was curious about some of the things that she didn't offer much detail about. Taxes for instance; she showed a ~25% increase, but I immediately wondered if she was capturing and comparing all of the hidden and added taxes we pay today that were uncommon (or unheard of) in 1970 (i.e. User Fees).
Her comparisons on housing seemed limited as well. The number of rooms hasn't substantially grown (I think it was around 1 room difference) but the size of houses has to have grown as well as all of the amenities. That's just my opinion of course, and I think she may have been limited in her comparisons by what data was available.
At several points in her lecture I found myself thinking much like Koolau - the lesser skilled jobs that used to provide for a lot of working class lifestyles are now being held by foreign workers. Great for the foreign laborer who has a great job paying 50 cents per hour, great for the executive who got $5 mil in performance bonuses by cutting costs, wonderful for the shopper buying cheaper goods at Wal Mart; but, not so great for the man or woman whose factory job doesn't exist here anymore.
When she got to healthcare all I could think of was that the whole mess (not just HC but the complete onslaught against the middle class) was created by "smart people" who figured out ways to squeeze more money out of something or somebody. Everybody was busily looking at their own bottom line that they never thought about the ultimate fallout.