What has changed in the last 20-30 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?
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Honestly, families having 2 incomes is a big part of what changed. The following is not a lifestyle endorsement or political commentary, just something that a lot of younger people wouldn’t have seen first hand. When most families had a single income, they had far lower expenses. No childcare, because one parent was staying home with the children. Lower food costs, because one person had more time for grocery shopping and food prep. Depending on the neighborhood, you might only need one car, if only one person worked outside of the house. And this isn’t even factoring in expenses that didn’t even exist 20-30 years ago: mobile phone, internet, streaming services.
The more important factor though, is that we had a functional economy based on single income households, then, rather quickly, we shifted to an economy where two incomes were common. When you have a sudden shift in buying power like that, it will inevitably lead to inflation in areas like housing, because people are willing and able to spend more to live where they want to live.
If you want to get even deeper, improving technology and growth of disposable income, along with decrease/elimination of employer funded retirement (pensions,etc), lead more individuals into the stock market and helped create the modern retail segment of the stock market. On an individual level, this allowed new groups of people to accumulate wealth in a way that wasn’t possible previously. Inadvertently, we created a system where CEOs get rewarded for the performance of their stock price, and the incentives for how you run a public traded company completely changed. Slow down wage growth to protect the bottom line. We don’t need to pay the individual enough to support a family, because families have two incomes now.
There are so many factors that have gotten us here, it’s hard to simplify it in an accurate way
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