What has changed in the last 20-30 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?
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I was about to link [https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) but someone already did.
One interesting thing to add: Back when they introduced the first tractor, they advertised it with one machine being so productive that the farmer only needs to work 2 hours a day to get the same stuff done that he and his team did in a whole day.
Today, farmers still work 8 hours a day, the economy simply adapted to the fact that the farmer *could* work 8 hours a day, so now he does.
Didn’t expect to get 1.5k upvotes on here. I may need to add that this “adapting” thing could be applied to many factors such as
* women entering the workforce
* communication and travel being much more accessible
* trade going down much faster than it used to be much
* many more things
This isn’t necessarily “better” or “worse”, it’s just that economy and productivity works different than it did 70 years ago (“20-30” is a bit too tight on the time frame there) and because many factors added up it’s very hard to pin it down to a single factor. It also leads to people “disproving” individual factors that may in fact still could’ve had some effect, either in the long run or for a short burst that eventually had effects on the future many years later still.
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