The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The National Aviation Policy: Flight Path to the Future?

73 comments on The National Aviation Policy: Flight Path to the Future?

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Luke H on March 15, 2009 - 7:03pm

Is the ratio that much different in Australia than the U.S.? Skilled labor in these parts averages about $40-$60 thousand a year, about four times the median house price. Also in the 1930s households didn't have two income earners, add that in and we are down to a modern house (which is a far different product than a thirties house) costing two or three years wages. Not much different than your 1930s number.

I will bet if the ratio of air fare/freight to median first world incomes returns to where it was in the thirties the airline industry will not be a big enough fuel user to warrant much consideration.

On a local note: the refinery here has halved its jet fuel shipments to the regional air cargo hub from 80 railcars a day (for Feb. 2008) to 40 (Feb. 2009) because of the downturn. Jet fuel is one of the most 'practical' ways for Alaska to conveniently deliver a high volume value added product made from its own oil so the manufacture of the product will likely continue here for the foreseeable future. Likely that will have little impact on Australia though.

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HoustonB on March 16, 2009 - 12:45am

Also in the 1930s households didn't have two income earners, add that in and we are down to a modern house (which is a far different product than a thirties house) costing two or three years wages. Not much different than your 1930s number.

Which is 2 or 3 years, because that is a 50% increase.

You also seem to think that 40 hours of earnings is "not much different" from 80 hours of earnings - a 100% increase. It is a travesty that it takes two incomes to run an average family household!

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Luke H on March 16, 2009 - 5:33am

The average home now would be 150% to 300% of the physical plant of the average home available in the 30s. The standard 1930s chore load of labor intensive washing and ironing, preparing and cooking all meals from scratch, and labor intensive house cleaning added enough time to the homemakers day beyond what those same chores require today to free up at least an eight hour shift. The well off upper middle class (or lower upper class might be the more accurate term) had housekeepers to handle much of this, working class families handled it all themselves. Women raising the larger families of that time worked no fewer hours then than woman raising families do now.

The running around built into our current lifestyle is what really sucks the time out it, and most of that is brought on by our automobile centric system, the system we built in the glorious 50s and 60s.

A great many of the woman raising smaller families with a more mechanized chore load in the fifties and sixties had worked in the war plants and wanted out of the house and back on the job where they got a paycheck for their efforts. Of course the wage differential put in place by that time made sure their out of the house labor never matched up to the men's income wise so the slippery slope had begun.

Households had very little disposable time or money in the thirties. Its the mid fifies and early sixties post war boom years (in the victorious USA anyway) that are the good old single earner income days-with the perfect June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson kept homes-which are held up as some lost ideal. They were an anomaly not the norm, and we are still suffering from their hangover. Husband and wife teams have traditionally worked very hard except of course for the relative few of the upper crust, like those idle, bored gentlefolk of the Victorian novel who wouldn't stoop to a days labor (god had created the rabble to do that for them).

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