On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:42:50 -0800 (PST), Ste
wrote:

The average individual family cannot survive on a single salary
without suffering a significant loss of living standards.

Quite, although this seems incongruous with your proposal that
families do exactly that: survive on one salary.

You may recall that I stated that a return to the traditional
one-worker family is IMO highly *desirable*, but I then lamented that
unfortunately present economics will not allow that to take place for
many/most families.

=A0The
ever-rising fixed expenses such as mortgage/rent, council tax, water,
electricity, gas etc. have resulted in *very* little money left over
from the wages of an average worker, and in many cases the second
income is necessary to even be able to afford to buy a reasonable
amount of food, let alone any luxury/leisure items.

Agreed, although I suppose it will not be unexpected if I point out
that this is all perfectly consistent with what I said about there
being sufficient economic capacity for all families to live on a
single income. The only reason some families would struggle under the
current circumstances, is because other rich families are consuming
vast amounts of finite economic resources.

Whilst physical resources are necessarily finite, economic resources
are an artificial construct. We presently have a situation in which
there are sufficient of many resources (especially all the essentials)
to supply everyone with as much as they would take if the resource was
completely free. The very rich do not consume more food, for example,
than the poor in this country - and IME the quality is not
significantly different either (even though the rich person may pay
more for better presentation, preparation or packaging). You will
find that physical comfort in the homes of the vast majority of people
in the UK is equal to the physical comfort in the homes of the very
wealthy in terms of temperature, air quality, the comfort of beds &
furniture etc. Whilst the wealthy may have larger homes, the average
person does not feel particularly short of room in their home. Whilst
the wealthy may have leisure and luxury facillities in their own home,
those same facillities are available and affordable to most people as
public facillities, and the real increase that having such facillities
in the home afford to a person's standard of living is largely one of
perception than reality. In fact in many cases people *prefer* to
indulge in such activities in a public place than in their own home
because of the increased social interaction of the former. I have a
fridge containing drinks, tables and chairs in my house, for example,
but I still visit pubs on occassion even though the same activity in
my own home would, if anything, be more comfortable.

Having experienced both camps, it is my belief that in fact there is a
relatively small difference between the actual quality of life of the
rich and the actual quality of life of the average person in the UK.
A person sipping a £15 cocktail at the poolside of a £1000 per night
hotel on an exotic tropical island is not gaining significantly more
pleasure from that activity than someone drinking a Barcardi Breezer
at the side of a hotel pool in Spain or Portugal - which is an
activity that the majority of the UK population is able to afford to
do at least once a year. And having dined fairly often at places
where meal prices are in the 3 figure bracket per person, I can say
that if anything I enjoy a £10 meal at Weatherspoons just as much if
not more. And I can completely honestly state that I get no more
pleasure or satisfaction from washing my hands in a marble sink with
gold taps than I do in the typical batroom of an average home.

Probably the biggest difference wrt quality of life is the ability of
the wealthy to employ servants to carry out the boring chores that
most people have to put up with - though again, having been in such a
position myself, there are plenty of downsides to having servants that
are not necessarily compensated for by losing the need to clean the
floors or do the washing-up. And these days many onerous tasks are
made a lot easier with affordable machines - heck, choose your clothes
wisely and you don't even have to use an iron all that often.

--
Cynic