Richard D. Wolff

post-1970 change in the conditions and lives of American women changed their families and households in ways that also altered US capitalism. Briefly, the mass movement of adult women, mostly married and with children, into paid, mostly full-time labor transformed households and families. Wives and mothers had long held disproportionate responsibility for maintaining the emotional integrity of the traditional nuclear family and the physical integrity of the traditional household

US families discovered that doing more hours of paid labor and covering the associated extra costs left too little net income to offset the impact of stagnant real wages. The American Dream increasingly moved beyond working families’ reach. Threatened with the prospect of slowing consumption, advertisers intensified their association of personal worth and success with the extent of one’s consumption of commodities. Without rising real wages, and unable to earn enough with extra hours of labor, US households turned en masse to the only remaining way to achieve the American Dream: borrowing.

So now, by following the money, we can grasp the economic interconnections that drove world capitalism into crisis. First, stagnant real wages and rising productivity sharply altered the distribution of income and wealth in favor of profits and increases in wealth for the rich. Second, the working class responded by borrowing vast sums to postpone the end of rising consumption that would have had been necessary if they relied only on their wages. Third, employers and the rich lent back to the workers, via ABS, a portion of the extra profits they made from real-wage stagnation. For thirty years, these interconnections generated enough gains—in the forms of rising debt-based consumption for the masses and rising wealth for the employers and the rich—to reproduce the system. But the pattern was unsustainable.