back
43 comments
> As consumers and housewives, they saw their task as complementary to that of their wage-earning spouses.

Well, that's the "benefit" of raising the cost of living to require 2 incomes to support a family: no one has time to arrange things like this. Even if you had energy to do it, how will you get the time off work and not lose your job?

One way to solve this is to lower the supply of labor. This has to be done very aggressively to work though, such as the following: - massively reducing immigrant intake, especially outside of the top-tier paying fields - legislate dramatically reduced working hours, i.e. 3 8-hour day workweek or similar, providing exceptions only at very high salary ranges

Of course, as what we've seen during the past year in the US, this is going to create high inflation.

The other method, which I much prefer, would be to lower the cost of living, while only modestly limiting immigration and working hours (still need to be reduced compared to current levels). By far the easiest way to do so would be popping the housing bubble, Japan-style, by building tons of extra housing and bankrupting private equity groups gobbling up houses, which would release further housing on the market. Perhaps a government agency can buy up some properties to rent out at a breakeven price.

These are proper pipe dreams in society like US, attacking on basic freedoms and rights (ie to work yourself to death and be stupid enough to be proud about it). US, nor any other capitalist economy is not run by hippies who are going to do such social experiments. I'd say people on top who actually hold the power are quite happy about the state of things, and complaints of average Joe are not something they bother with.

At the end, the core of American dream is that your success is a function of how hard you try, so if you see yourself failing your are just slacking (not that I agree its healthy for individuals nor for a society I would like to live in, but that's another topic).

Btw FWIH Japan is mostly screwed up due to long term demographic curve, something knocking on the doors of ie Europe too, with their borderline racist approach to foreigners, even very similar Koreans. If you work 5am-10pm and have to excuse yourself to your boss for each leaving only after 12 hours of rather ineffective bureaucratic work, very few want to add raising kids on top of that.

> providing exceptions only at very high salary ranges

And of course you would fall in this demographic, amirite? Fuck the poor, don't mess with the salaries of the rich.

> building tons of extra housing and bankrupting private equity groups

They'd just continue to buy up that new housing. This can't change without taxing the land value.

> This can't change without taxing the land value.

Yes it can. Bar corporations from owning residential real estate. Taxing land value will just cause an exodus into hellhole suburbs.

Everyone who advocates a land value tax needs to explain how housing used to be affordable, even in places like California, without land value taxes.
There were fewer people and more land that wasn't being used. It's fairly simple, supply was higher, demand was lower. As our population increased and we developed more and more land, the supply shrunk while the demand grew.
Yes, we all know that -- the point is that affordable housing is possible without a land value tax, and we know that because it actually happened.
So your answer is... "Thanos did nothing wrong"?

Shall we all wait for covid20 to wipe out enough people that the housing supply overwhelms demand and prices drop?

As there's (apparently) such an under-supply of people who earn those high ranges, restricting that demographic only makes everyone poorer because wealth creation is hence lower. Maybe it would reduce those wages somewhat but it's unlikely.
I remember there being protests last years. So, the premise of no one organizes political action is not true.

Also, past protests I read about involved employed people. And they involved males too. It is not like stay at home women were sole organizers of protests through the history.

I don't think there's any benefit to that at all, but there's a lot of benefit to not forcing people into certain limited occupations and roles of subservience because of their assigned gender. Capitalism demanded that to get one you have to pay with the other. It ain't great.
Who said the one staying home had to be female or subservient?
At the time, society did. Meaning most people (most men) did.

This is not actually new information for you, right? I think there's a subtext of your question I am missing?

It’s not 1950. I’m talking about now.
I too would love it if the economy were still such that a family could be supported with only one adult "earning income" outside the home, for the majority of occupations and jobs, but without people having their social and professional roles limited due to gender. I can't imagine any worker would not love this. I don't understand what we're disagreeing about, but if we are and you'd like to discuss it, less sarcasm and implied accusations and rhetorical questions and more just plain saying what you mean would help.

Personally, I think that the only way we get this is with popular anti-capitalist movements, to change the nature of the economy to be structured around people's needs instead of maximal exploitation of labor for capitalist profit. But I'm open to hearing about other visions.

Trying to pretend itnis not about that is just bad faith. Of course topic is women dependent and without income rather then males being dependent on women.
It’s not 1950. I know plenty of women who want to be breadwinners of the household and men who’d be happy to stay at home and manage the family not to mention folks who are rejecting the gendered identity all together.

Also plenty of people in lower income brackets are finding that a second partner having a job is more expensive than staying home because of the high costs of child care.

A few people want that kind of subjugation but broadly it just wouldn’t happen again, the vast majority of men and women wouldn’t stand for it.

In 1950, no one would make the comment I responded to, true. In 2022, it is super rare for a man to stay as stay at home father. Trying to pretend that dads are primary caregivers as often as women is just dishonest. And that goes for lower income brackets especially. Especially after pandemic when female dominated jobs got killed in higher numbers and especially since it was overwhelmingly women who started to spend way more time on childcare.

> not to mention folks who are rejecting the gendered identity all together.

And those folks are literally accused of being groomers by large parts of population just for existing and being visible. There is literal campaign of fearmongering going on against them. Threats of violence against these people are a thing now too. There are attempts to make gender non-comforming clothing in the presence of children into illegal acts.

>A few people want that kind of subjugation but broadly it just wouldn’t happen again, the vast majority of men and women wouldn’t stand for it.

Quite a lot of them would happily stand for "subjugation" I see nostalgia for it regularly. Seriously, abortion rights are being reversed and those were supposed to be untouchable too. Just teaching about ugly parts of history is in the process of being outlawed as boogeyman CRT.

And Wisconsin did not even managed to make underage marriages illegal, because it is constitutional right of adult men to marry girls under 16.

> Capitalism demanded The nature of supply and demand means that adding people to the workforce lowers the bargaining power of individual workers, regardless of their sex, which lowers wages. Once a certain amount of women started to work without their spouses stopping to work, most women and men had to work to support the family.

Socialist countries like the USSR are no different, but due to another tradeoff. By ignoring the nature of supply and demand in favor of a command economy, they had massive losses in efficiency in a way that forces everyone to have to work, and even then only producing mediocre results.

The kosher meat industry in NYC at the time was quite the racket. Beatings, non-kosher meat sales, and other unsavory activities were commonplace up to and including murder.
It's still a racket. For decades, New York State had state-run kosher food inspection. But in 2000, there was a lawsuit by one group of kosher butchers against another group of kosher butchers over which one got to define what was kosher. This went to Federal court, and the ruling was that the US courts could not decide the issue, because to do so either way would literally be an establishment of religion.[1] Now the state just has a labeling requirement and keeps a database of who says their label indicates kosher.

Israel has a whole "my label is more kosher than your label" thing going, mostly in Jerusalem.[2] This pushed the price of kosher meat way up. There was a reform plan to standardize kosher regulation, and it got to within two weeks of going live. But as part of the coalition agreement Netanyahu negotiated to take power, it's been put off for six months and is probably dead until Israel gets a new prime minister.[3]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/04/nyregion/judge-voids-law-...

[2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-israelis-want-kosher-fo...

[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/shas-minister-s...

> Israel has a whole "my label is more kosher than your label" thing going, mostly in Jerusalem.

This is at best an over-simplification. Many of us use a specific certification due to legitimate differences in tradition (מסורת) as opposed to "blue stampy is better than red stampy". I find it increasingly frustrating that frequently, we're seen as a monoculture, when we're not.

I say this living in Israel, and not Jerusalem, not that it matters.

Going on a bit of a tangent - in the context of what you are saying, does מסורת (masoret, “tradition”) mean the same thing as מנהג (minhag, “custom”) - or would the latter be the wrong word to use here?
No, they're different - apologies if I'm not clear, or making assumptions in the following! Amongst most Sepharadim we have the מסורת that Swordfish is kosher - there is a discussion about the relative Kashruth (Kosherness) in the Shulchan Aruch. But only amongst (some) Moroccans, and Yemenites, is there an actual מנהג of eating Swordfish. Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians, etc don't.

There are other examples, but I always like this one.

Thanks, I think I understand what you are saying. Some things you believe are acceptable in theory but you wouldn’t actually do them in practice, other things you actually do in practice.

About your example, what happens if a Yemenite Jew invites a Syrian Jew to dinner, and serves swordfish? Is the Syrian allowed to eat it?

This is an excellent example.. and my life ;). There are all sorts of things that I don't serve Ashkenazim (Europeans) that are kosher for us North Africans. In particular, I'm fond of Arak (and Bouja). I have Arak from Turkey (Raki), it's made with crushed grape seeds; I have Arak from Lebanon which includes non-wine based grape alcohol. These are not Kosher for Ashkenazi, but are kosher for (most) North African and Middle Eastern Jews.

From a Jewish Law (halachic) point of view, that person isn't allowed to consume these things. But moreover (and logically), I actually can't serve it to them. So, there are multiple layers to these things.

This was true of almost all small to medium enterprise at some point. It isn't because it was kosher, it was because people at the time did stupid things. The meat-packing sector kosher or not was a hotbead of bad practices.

The garment trade in NY was so bad, it's why unions took off in the USA. All the recent fires in garment factories in the Indian sub continent are a re-capitulation of what caused militancy in the garment industry.

Thuggery is not uncommon in migrant communities. Strong migrants self-predate on marginalised people in their language and religion group. The Irish had this problem in spades, for years ("collecting" for Irish independance)

(writing because calling out the Kosher butchers in particular misses a point, and can be read as implying they were worse than other sectors because they were Kosher)

"“thousands of women streamed through the streets of the Lower East Side,” Hyman writes, “breaking into butcher shops, flinging meat into the streets, and declaring a boycott.”"

Sounds like a little more than a boycott. It also says the ly continually assaulted butcher shop patrons and smashed windows. The article also ends saying that the price was originally 12¢, went to 18¢, the boycot happened and it went to 14¢, then the boycott ended and the price went back up. So it wasn't even successful?

This makes no sense. If not many butchers do kosher slaughter how does putting the existing ones out of business lower the price? If the butchers were colluding to keep prices high why is that accusation never made? This reads like an high school essay shoehorning a point about the power and intelligence of jewish women into an event that as described demonstrates the reverse.
There were in fact very many (rather than "not many") kosher butchers in NYC in 1902, and most of them probably sold almost exclusively to people who would only buy meat from kosher butchers. Kosher butchers weren't really competing with non-kosher butchers, it was an economy of it's own (already charging a premium over butchers at large).

According to the OP (and the wikipedia article, of course there is one, perhaps you will find it a less shoehorning source on the event, I agree the article is a bit... boosterish), the boycott worked, and lowered the price of meat? Which seems to be a major problem with your argument that it made no sense as a political tactic and couldn't possibly work... it did work?

The wikipedia article provides a bit better context, that it also involved a battle between butchers/retailers and the meat wholesalers who provided the meat ("the meat trusts", which is a great phrase).

> On May 11, 1902, around 400 kosher butchers on the East Side of New York organized a boycott of the meat trusts to put pressure on them to lower the cost of meat. However, the trusts were too powerful and the butchers ended their boycott. In response to those unsuccessful attempts, the women of the Lower East Side Jewish community, led by Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson, held a massive protest.[9] On May 15, 20,000 protesters, mostly women, took to the streets to attack the butcher shops.[10] They smashed shop windows, poured gasoline on the meat, lit it on fire and threw pieces of meat at police officers. By the end of the day, 85 people had been arrested, 75% of them women

OK, honestly I have a lot more questions afterreading the wikipedia article. This is an even somewhat stranger event than the OP suggested... the butcher shops wanted lower prices too, but the women rioters smashed the butcher shops... and then it worked, the butcher shops said, great, we're joining the boycott too and not selling the meat until the wholesalers drop their prices... and restaurants joined the boycott too... and eventually the wholesalers lowered their prices, and the butchers passed on the price drop.

Oh, and as far as "not many" butchers, note that mention of 400 kosher butchers on the east side of manhattan? I don't know how many butchers there were total in manhattan at the time, but 400 butchers is a lot of butchers.

I'm also really loving the image of women throwing burning hunks of gasoline-soaked looted meat at police officers as a weapon. That one paragraph from the wikipedia article has so much to offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_kosher_meat_boycott

Why would there be gasoline in 1902?
Assuming that’s just a good faith error (rather than made up) they probably meant kerosene, which was widely used for lamps.

Still seems like a weird thing to do.

Standard Oil was incorporated in 1870. Why wouldn’t there have been gasoline in 1902?
No gasoline-powered vehicles. Oil and the other products they refined is not gasoline. Perhaps there were other devices needing gasoline at that time, but the existence of gasoline would be so rare that these city women would not have access to it.

Wikipedia is rife with nonsense sometimes.

Peer comments suggestion that it would make sense if it were kerosene seems right. There was probably plenty of kerosene around for lamps in nyc in 1905 (although piped natural gas lighting was also common), and kerosene would work fine to turn meat into a burning projectile. Or perhaps to intentionally befoul and ruin the meat for sale, as part of the boycott/protest/riot, with the projectile part being secondary.

But yeah, unfortunately the wikipedia source for the burning meat projectile claim is to a web page that makes the same claim without really citing it's source (beyond the name of a historian). We'd have to do some research to see if we could find a cited primary source that this claim came from originally, and how it appeared there.

I really like the image regardless. It does not seem implausible to me, generally, with kerosene. But it's an enjoyable image either way.

If they have no one to sell to, they'd lower prices to reasonable instead of quitting. Monopoly game played the other way.
Not mentioned in the article but there is also a question of who gets to decide what is kosher or not and indeed to what extent something is kosher ( there are different levels depending on the interpretation of the scriptures )

Competing financial interests arise out of this.

Kosher, halal, whatever. Have middle eastern people heard about hygiene and freshness of meat? I don't need food with your voodo.
At least for Muslims, halal requires hygiene and freshness as well. It is not just about "voodo" or prayers. I would assume Kosher is the same.