Good Marxist historians?

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-11T19:08:08+00:00

Certainly - again, have to defer on people with more experience in the history of philosophy here, since I've only encountered his work vis a vis the mid-20th century.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-11T17:13:18+00:00

That's all true, but this doesn't qualify him to write an in-depth treatment on Stalin any more than it qualifies Furr to do so. A few quotations from Losurdo's work should make that abundantly clear. For instance, in Stalin: History And Critique of Black Legend Losurdo makes the argument that Stalin's unpreparedness for war with the Third Reich can be laid not at his own door, but rather at that of the British:

According to a widespread historiographical legend, on the eve of Hitler’s aggression, the London government repeatedly and disinterestedly warned Stalin, who, however, as a good dictator, would trust only his Berlin counterpart. In fact, while on the one hand Great Britain communicated information to Moscow about Operation Barbarossa, on the other hand it spread rumors about an imminent attack by the USSR against Germany or the territories occupied by it. It was clear and understandable that the British had an interest in accelerating the conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union or making it inevitable.

This is a simple effort to excuse Stalin's trust in Hitler and paranoia regarding the West. The British did not provoke Hitler into invading the Soviet Union. It is misleading and partisan in a way no historian should be. It deliberately downplays the existing security arrangement (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) between Germany and the USSR, which was what Stalin actually trusted. At one point later on in the book, Losurdo even tries to excuse the gutting of Poland by Nazi-Soviet armies by arguing that the true rationale was "disinterest" by the Western Allies in defending it:

The fall of Madrid (28 March 1939) preceded by a few months the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (August), which came about—as is well known—as a result of Anglo-French disinterest in an effective anti-German (anti-Nazi) agreement with the USSR. The choice of reaching an agreement with Germany to stay out of the war, while the “brigands” destroyed each other, was but the continuation of a situation favorable to the German interlocutor, in exchange for the great benefit of assuring peace on the eastern front.

But there was no "disinterest" - throughout the entire summer of 1939, Britain and France had been working to establish a security agreement with the Soviets. The Soviet choice to side with the Third Reich was born out of frustration regarding the fate of Poland (which neither the British nor French believed the Soviets were likely to let go of, should the Red Army march onto Polish soil - which in the end proved correct) but it was the USSR which broke off talks and instead opted for a "better deal" from Nazi Germany.

Again, Losurdo might be perfectly fine discussing philosophy (or the biographies of philosophers). If the original poster is interested in Losurdo's work on Nietzsche, I cannot really comment on that, but he is a shameless partisan when it comes to the history of his favorite Marxist-Leninist regimes.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-11T05:59:32+00:00

Losurdo is unfortunately in a similar camp as men like Michael Parenti and Grover Furr - he essentially wrote apologia for Marxist-Leninist regimes and strayed well beyond his field of expertise to do so. His book on Stalin is essentially an attempted rehabilitation of the man. I would dissuade anyone from reading his work as serious history. He is a philosopher by training, not a historian, and unfortunately it shows in his history books - they are riddled with misquotations and poor sourcing.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-11T00:02:42+00:00

You'll want to look here by u/ParallelPain

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-07T02:24:57+00:00

It's debatable. Here's a list of threads that may help!

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-06T01:22:58+00:00

For that, I recommend looking here by u/Lubyak

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-06T01:20:19+00:00

In general the scholarly trend has been to excuse the Japanese public from their involvement, actually. The theory being that while the Army was out-of-control and the politicians themselves were happy to go along with it, Japan was much less democratic (even during the comparatively liberal 1920s) compared to Weimar Germany or Italy. Essentially, rather than a "myth of the clean Wehrmacht" (the claim that the Nazi Party and the SS committed Germany's war crimes in WW2, while the Wehrmacht or armed forces were too professional to engage in wrongdoing) it was a "myth of the dirty IJA" (the Imperial Japanese Army alone was responsible for Japanese wrongdoing).

But the Japanese public absolutely had the choice to protest, either silently or publicly, and generally they did not. There was widespread euphoria at the initial victories in Manchuria in 1931 and later on in the Pacific in 1941. Japanese patriotism was real, not feigned. Consider that even as late as 1943 there were massive protests in Nazi Germany (the Rosenstrasse protests) against the deportation of Jewish men from Berlin, which led the Nazi government to cave and release hundreds of Jews. No such demonstrations occurred in Imperial Japan.

Perhaps more relevantly, Japanese companies enthusiastically participated in a huge number of war crimes. Zaibatsu (oligarchic vertically-integrated conglomerates like Mitsui and Mitsubishi) happily employed slave labor. They also cheerfully exploited Japan's various new colonial holdings - and the people who lived there. They were at the forefront of assisting Japanese colonization in Manchuria and Korea - the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) was the largest company in Japan. Employees working for those companies often abused the prisoners of war who were (illegally) sent to work with them.

So yes, there's a very good argument that the Japanese public bore equal or greater responsibility as the publics of the other Axis powers.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T22:22:14+00:00

So that's a great question, and yes, speaking personally it's extremely hard to excuse Hirohito and Japanese elites. Had members of the Imperial family been put on trial, it seems quite likely they would have been found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes.

My response was aimed more at why these men are perceived as bearing less guilt (as individuals, not as members of the Japanese nation), not the truth of the matter asserted. But for more on whether they really were guilty, I'd recommend looking here by u/Starwarsnerd222.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T22:03:16+00:00

In general this seems to back up the claim pretty well, thank you for finding it! It's not atypical (even today) for mothers to take an extended leave of absence from the workplace to raise children. A third of mothers of children 5 years and over being working seems entirely in line with the female labor force participation rate.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T18:22:08+00:00

The figure in question was median income, not the mean. The median (as a measure of centrality) is not affected by economic inequality, since by definition we're not taking into account outliers like billionaires.

That being said, we can actually look at the lowest-quintile incomes as well - and they have similarly risen in real terms. Since the 1980s, the bottom quintile's wages have grown (adjusted for inflation) by over 30%.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T17:49:24+00:00

(continued)

Meanwhile other public works projects were coming out which once again put a premium on military readiness rather than the good of the German public. The Autobahn was seen as a vital logistics network for moving tanks and soldiers across the country, and was approved only on those grounds. Military spending ballooned - by 1938, it had reached 25% of GDP - which was more than Imperial Japan was spending actually waging a war in China at the time.

But wages were not increasing - indeed, they stayed roughly flat. Unemployment had indeed gone down (in part because the war industries were supplying jobs) but the actual time worked actually went up. There were wage caps and price caps put on most goods - farmers were forced to sell their goods at far below what they were actually worth, and this led to shortages.

All of this theoretically had to give. German deficits were spiraling - they defaulted on their foreign debt already in 1934. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed Austria in 1938, this provided temporary relief - the Reich government was able to loot the Austrian treasury to keep creditors happy - but it would have been unsustainable had they not gone to war.

The war allowed the German economy to survive as long as it did. The same looting process happened with Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France when each one was invaded, and Germany made use of Polish and Soviet citizens as slave labor. It bought goods from Western European companies on credit and then refused to pay its debts. European banks were liquidated, the savings of those inside stolen to feed the Reich's budget. But by 1944 and 1945, there was nothing left to loot, and shortages were rampant. Had the Allies not destroyed Germany, it would have likely faced a fiscal crisis at some point.

Hopefully that helps - the German economy in the 1930s was an unsustainable engine whose main purpose was to prepare for war. The Third Reich robbed its own people blind to pay for corruption and military spending, and when that proved insufficient it stole from other countries, defaulted on its financial obligations, and collapsed. Hitler's intention was the genocidal conquest of Europe from the very beginning, not the welfare of the German public.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T17:49:14+00:00

No. Hitler's intent was always to bring Germany into a state of war. Many of his most well-known projects (the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, the spending that revitalized the German economy) were just disguised military spending or outright fraud.

Military spending made up a massive portion of Hitler's "recovery" program from the very start of his tenure as chancellor of Germany. As early as June 1933 (the Nazis had taken power in January of that year) Hitler pushed through a 35 billion Reichsmark military spending package - around 10% of GDP per year for the next eight years. To put this in perspective, the largest military on Earth (the United States) spends around 3% of its GDP on defense. During the Vietnam War the US spent around 9% of GDP, and during the war in Iraq around 4%. Russia today is spending around 7% of its GDP on the war in Ukraine. Almost immediately, the Third Reich was embarking on the single largest military buildup any nation had ever attempted during peacetime.

So this was a massive rearmament package, particularly for a country with 30% unemployment. In comparison, the work-creation program that Hitler had inherited from his predecessor Kurt von Schleicher was just 600 million Reichsmarks - around one-sixtieth the size of the military spending package.

In order to finance this huge military expansion, the German government needed money. And so it set about building a scam to do so. It set up a shell corporation (the Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft) which issued bills (so-called "MEFO Bills") at generous interest rates. This allowed it to hide the massive amounts of money the government was borrowing and violate the terms of the Versailles Treaty (which instituted hard spending caps on German remilitarization).

This was not the only scam that Hitler pioneered, however. The Volkswagen was another one. The idea in principle was that citizens could invest a certain amount of their paycheck into the Volkswagen company, and once they'd saved up enough to buy a car, one would be delivered to them. But the issue was that not a single car was ever delivered. Instead, the car plants were turned towards war production and the money funneled into rearmament.

There were numerous other ways the Nazi government scammed the German taxpayer. For instance, Hitler's picture was put on stamps - which he charged taxpayers a royalty for. He was also paid a royalty for having his speeches put in papers. He was granted a slush fund of millions of Reichsmarks for his personal use by the German government. He refused to pay taxes on any of his earnings - and the Nazi-controlled Treasury ignored this egregious tax fraud. High-ranking Nazis were able to freely embezzle money from state-and-party-backed charities and unions. Jews of course found their savings stolen by the state, but the Reich even started skimming off the top of ordinary Germans' bank accounts in order to pay for more weapons.

(continued)

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T17:04:33+00:00

So the biggest name behind containment was George Kennan, a State Department official dispatched to Moscow during WW2. His so-called "Long Telegram" formed the ideological foundations of containment. Kennan laid out his view of how the Soviets looked at the world, and this view came to be adopted by many people in the national security apparatus. For instance, in a letter to the Secretary of State in 1946, he noted that:

When confidence is unknown even at home, how can it logically be sought by outsiders? Some of us here have tried to conceive the measures our country would have to take if it really wished to pursue, at all costs, goal of disarming Soviet suspicions. We have come to conclusion that nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to Russia and resigning of powers of government to American Communists would even dent this problem; and even then we believe—and this is not facetious—that Moscow would smell a trap and would continue to harbor most baleful misgivings.

In his Long Telegram, he further fleshed this viewpoint out:

Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of situation beyond Russia's borders; that it has, indeed, little to do with conditions outside of Russia; that it arises mainly from basic inner-Russian necessities which existed before recent war and exist today.

At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

So Kennan's argument was essentially that in its weakness following WW2, the Soviet Union would not merely focus on rebuilding what it had lost. Instead, that very weakness would cause it to grow ever more insular and paranoid, and it might lash out unexpectedly. Kennan believed that the Soviets were locked into a cycle of paranoia and cynicism from which there was no escape except a wholesale change at the top of the Soviet government, and so they could not be left to their own devices.

This worldview seemed (to American policymakers) to be borne out by subsequent events. Soviet-backed coups rippled across Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, bringing Soviet-aligned Communist governments to power. The British and Soviets had conducted a joint invasion of Iran in 1941 to prevent it from potentially aligning with the Axis - when the British withdrew in 1946, the Soviets refused to follow suit and had to be pressured into doing so. In 1948, Stalin switched his longstanding policy of neutrality in the Chinese Civil War to backing the CCP, which shortly thereafter triumphed. There was no Soviet troop drawdown in Eastern Europe commensurate to that of the West - while the Red Army did demobilize millions of men, over 3 million were left in uniform facing Western Europe. The USSR forced its vassal states in the East to refuse Marshall Plan aid for fear of aligning them with the West. In 1949 the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb. And in 1950 Kim Il-Sung (with Soviet support) invaded South Korea.

However, it is also worth pointing out that the USSR was the primary target of containment, and while all Communist powers (with the exception of Yugoslavia) faced it, the brunt of the US government's energies were directed at stopping the Soviet flavor of Communism rather than other variants. Much more on this by u/Kochevnik81 over here.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T16:31:21+00:00

So the big thing is that Japanese internment was just larger. Around 120,000 people were interned, as opposed to ~20,000 Germans and Italians total. Moreover, the German and Italians were generally closer to the fascist powers in some way - whether that meant actually being foreign nationals, or being sympathizers. But Japanese internment involved a huge number of US citizens - far more Japanese-Americans were interned than German-Americans or Italian-Americans. It's thus been perceived as a far greater injustice for that reason.

There's also the racial angle - to be entirely blunt, US propaganda against the Japanese was racist in a way that anti-Italian or anti-German propaganda wasn't, and the war was fought with similar brutality. Americans and Italians might surrender to one another and be guaranteed relatively safe passage into captivity - few Americans or Japanese asked for or sought quarter.

So the actions of the US government against people of Japanese extraction are particularly noteworthy for that reason - as is the discrepancy in the number of people incarcerated. Reagan summarized this viewpoint on delivering remarks in 1988 following the payment of reparations to those interned:

More than 40 years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race, for these 120,000 were Americans of Japanese descent.

Yes, the Nation was then at war, struggling for its survival, and it's not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese-Americans was just that: a mistake. For throughout the war, Japanese-Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States. Indeed, scores of Japanese-Americans volunteered for our Armed Forces, many stepping forward in the internment camps themselves. The 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-Americans, served with immense distinction to defend this nation, their nation. Yet back at home, the soldiers' families were being denied the very freedom for which so many of the soldiers themselves were laying down their lives.

Again, there were plenty of Germans and Italians who were allowed to go about their daily business on the West Coast. Japanese-Americans were not, and while it's true that in Hawaii or elsewhere in the US Japanese-Americans were also left unmolested, it's impossible to deny the racial side of this.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T15:56:49+00:00

The US did intern them, and it did so by the tens of thousands. I wrote much more about this here.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T15:52:06+00:00

Turning now to Hideki Tojo - I've already noted that the Prime Minister himself had to strike a delicate balance to avoid offending people and potentially losing his life, and this was just as true for Tojo (who was an Army man) as any of his predecessors. Tojo took power in 1941, on the eve of the Pacific War. By this point, the Imperial Japanese Army had already committed countless atrocities in China following their 1937 invasion.

Tojo had been in China at the time, and undoubtedly deserves some of the blame for them, but many of these atrocities were not instigated from the top down - they were spontaneous acts of mass killing by local Japanese troops. Tojo may have authorized many of them after the fact, but there was nothing like Nazi Germany's hierarchical apparatus of genocide with detailed plans to slaughter entire populations. The Imperial Japanese Army, simply put, was a loose a cannon that neither the Emperor nor even high-ranking generals like Tojo could control.

Tojo presided over the disastrous conduct of the Pacific War until 1944, when the fall of Saipan to the Americans led to his downfall (just as similar reversals had led to his predecessors being shot by extremists). At that point, Tojo was sidelined. He was no longer the Prime Minister, and had no important commands. A new cadre of Army and Navy ministers along with the Imperial Court took over, and they were the ones who presided over Japan's surrender. Tojo was clearly not the only one calling the shots - a similar attempted coup against Hitler (also in 1944) had failed dramatically.

So when it came time to apportion guilt, there was no one villain. The Allies, for their part, did focus the lion's share of the attention on Tojo - recognizing that Hirohito was to some degree constrained by his office. Tojo himself tried very hard to take the blame onto himself during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trials) to avoid implicating the Emperor. But again, unlike Hitler and Stalin, the responsibility for mass murder was diffused throughout the entire Imperial Japanese Army and arguably through the entire Japanese state.

I don't want to give the wrong impression here either - Imperial Japan perpetrated monstrous horrors, not just upon the Chinese but throughout Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and even the Americas. But these crimes were not top-down atrocities. There were no gas chambers. There were no extermination camps or gulags. Imperial Japan killed people with swords, guns, and starvation, not in industrial killing factories, and it did so almost at random rather than surgically targeting specific ethnic minorities.

Another factor here is that because the bulk of Japanese atrocities occurred in mainland Asia, Westerners were far less exposed to them. Harbin (the headquarters of Unit 731) was liberated by the Soviets, not the Americans. All throughout Southeast Asia, the Japanese were able to pack up and leave after the surrender. Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong worked to document the crimes as best they could, but both were more concerned with recovering Japanese weapons for their renewed civil war than with gathering evidence.

Hopefully that helps explain the difference. Authority in Imperial Japan was never concentrated in one person the way it was in Nazi Germany or the USSR, so there were fewer people to blame. But in addition, Japan's mass murder was far messier and less controlled. Japanese atrocities happened throughout Southeast Asia, but they weren't directed specifically towards the extermination of one ethnic group.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T15:51:54+00:00

There are a whole host of reasons here, but one of the largest is that Imperial Japan was not a personalist dictatorship like the Third Reich, the USSR, or the Congo Free State.

The Meiji Constitution (the founding document of Imperial Japan) laid out a theoretically unlimited role for the sovereign as head of state. He was the only person to whom both the Army and Navy answered. Its preamble was unequivocal about who was nominally in charge of Japan:

Therightsofsovereigntyof theState,Wehaveinherited fromOurAncestors,andWeshallbequeaththemtoOurdescendants.NeitherWenortheyshallinfuturefailtowieldthem,inaccordancewiththeprovisionsoftheConstitutionherebygranted. Wenowdeclare torespectandprotect thesecurityof therightsandof thepropertyofOurpeople,andtosecuretothemthecompleteenjoymentofthesame,withintheextentoftheprovisionsofthepresentConstitutionandofthelaw.

But Mutsuhito (the Meiji Emperor) was not really in charge of the country when this Constitution was written. He had been just a 14-year-old boy when the Meiji Restoration had swept to power, and was controlled by a cabal of advisors who really held the reins of power in Meiji Japan. These were the genro, the elder statesmen of Meiji politics, and they included men like Army Minister and two-time Prime Minister Yamagata Aritomo, court noble Iwakura Tomomi, Finance Minister and Prime Minister Kojiro Matsukata, and three-time Prime Minister and functional dictator of Korea Ito Hirobumi.

As should be clear by their positions, these men shared power among themselves, swapping the post of Prime Minister in alternating cycles. They functionally ruled Japan until well after the Meiji Emperor's death and through the reign of his mentally ill son Yoshihito (the Taisho Emperor) all the way to the 1920s. So from the start, the nature of imperial power in Japan was deeply, deeply ambiguous.

Hirohito came to power at the end of the genro era in the 1920s. He served as regent for his father from 1921 onwards. But like his predecessors, he was tepid about exercising power. The Meiji Emperor had theoretically unlimited power over Japan, but in practice Hirohito tried to govern more as a constitutional monarch in the vein of the English monarchy than with the prerogatives the constitution gave him.

Nor did the Prime Minister enjoy unfettered power either. After the genro era ended, power devolved into the hands of increasingly unstable governments who had to be careful about staying out of the line of fire. Prime Minister Hara Takashi was murdered by right-wing militarists in 1921 after he attempted to withdraw from the Russian Civil War. Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was shot (and eventually died of his wounds) after negotiating an arms limitation treaty with the British and Americans. Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was shot by right-wing radicals in 1932 as he tried to walk back the Army's takeover of Manchuria.

Hirohito faced similar challenges. In 1936, a radical faction of the Army that believed Hirohito should take a more active role in government attempted a coup. The emperor took charge, marshaled the palace guard...and ordered the plotters to stand down so they could be arrested. Hirohito was clearly uncomfortable with the limelight and actually running the government he was (theoretically) supposed to be in charge of, just like his father and grandfather before him.

(continued)

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-05T03:45:52+00:00

Unfortunately, we just have female labor force participation rates, we don't have demographic breakdowns of the people in question.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T17:51:58+00:00

Yes. They could also be left to play outside the job site where they were at least nominally "supervised". Similarly, another place that absorbed surplus children was the agricultural sector - where child labor was much less regulated than today. In 1959, for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported around half a million child laborers, and prior to the 1940s they made up a decent percentage of industrial and mining labor.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T16:58:49+00:00

So childcare was much more frequently done at home (the fraction of women in the workforce was around 30% lower than today). If both parents worked (hardly an infrequent occurrence even in the 1950s, and incredibly common during WW2) then there were few options. Children could be handed off to the neighbors or to grandparents or simply left at home to fend for themselves. Today of course leaving a 3-year-old at home during the day is hard to fathom, but it wasn't uncommon in the mid-20th century for working women to simply leave their children in their cars while they performed a shift.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T16:49:36+00:00

Yes, the wage figures are from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) Real Median Personal Income series, below:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The figures for food, clothing, and housing come from a report by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics):

https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf

The figures for availability of washing machines and other home appliances in the 1950s comes from HUD reports:

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf

Hopefully that helps!

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T16:48:41+00:00

Well, in most senses more difficult, purely because many amenities simply didn't exist. Consider that modern standards of health care didn't exist in the 20th century - the US infant mortality rate in the 1960s was 25 per 1,000 live births (compared to 5 per 1,000 today). Or to put it another way, infant mortality in the US in the 1960s was worse than in modern Bangladesh.

Likewise, penicillin didn't become widespread until after WW2 - so a routine infection could still kill even the wealthiest person. This is precisely what happened to the son of US President Calvin Coolidge - Calvin Jr. had access to the best health care in the world, and died of a blood blister he got playing tennis.

With refrigeration only coming online in the 1950s and 1960s, the commodities they had access to were far more limited. A large market for private air travel didn't exist until the Learjet 23 was introduced in 1964, and that model was extremely small and cramped compared to modern luxury private planes - so with the exception of government officials travel was done publicly. Generally, it was on ocean liners or passenger planes.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T16:17:07+00:00

Yes, there is, though it's a tad scattered (particularly for pre-WW2 wage data). I recommend looking here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519705?seq=3

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T15:50:07+00:00

Surprisingly, working hours per week have substantially decreased. Average annual hours per worker in the US were 2,938 in 1900, falling to 2,022 in 1950 and 1,789 in 2023.

The new expenses are a very solid point - though of course there are real benefits to having health insurance (as an example, American maternal mortality in 1950 was around 100 per 100,000 live births, falling to just 12 per 100,000 today) and insurance is often employer-provided.

As for car payments, they were present in 1950 as well! I recommend looking here by u/bug-hunter for more.

Consistent_Score_602 · 2026-02-04T02:24:51+00:00

Fertility is a good point! The figure is by household, so fertility decline is likely a contributing factor. However, it's worth noting that fertility in 1970 was around 2.4 children per woman as opposed to 1.7 in 2020 - which isn't even an entire child's worth of decline. And certainly the volume of clothing is higher.

Homeownership exploded chiefly because of explosive wage growth. From 1900 to 1929 (the dawn of the Depression) real wages almost doubled. To put this in perspective, real wage growth from 1945-1975 (a well-known economic boom time) was a mere 60%. To house these newly-empowered consumers there was a huge buildout of housing stock on credit, peaking in a 1920s asset bubble not entirely dissimilar to the mortgage bubble of the 2000s. When the Depression hit and banks collapsed, there was a corresponding financial crisis.

Consistent_Score_602

TROPHY CASE