A FEW YEARS BACK, THE VENTURE CAPITALIST Peter Thiel famously complained: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” With equal reason, those of us in the third decade of the twenty-first century might complain, “We were promised that the future would have one-earner families and more money for less work, instead we got two-earner families and stagnant wages.”
In 24 episodes that ran in 1962 and 1963 and then later in syndication, the cartoon series The Jetsons portrayed a family with a working husband and non-working wife (in 1960 only 38 per cent of American working-age women were in the paid workforce). As those of a certain age recall, George Jetson was the sole employee of a high-tech manufacturing company, Spacely Space Sprockets.
Jane, his wife, was a homemaker. Neither George nor Jane did much work, paid or unpaid. George worked an hour a day, two days a week. His work consisted of pushing a button and then relaxing. Jane was relieved from domestic drudgery by
