Edit: I meant less than a century ago! My bad! Just a brain fart.
In: 9783
Because a few decades ago top earners paid significantly higher taxes than today, and income inequality was lower. Almost none of the productivity gains in the economy were captured by the low and mid income earners, while the costs of university education, healthcare and housing went up, to fuel corporate>shareholder’s wealth accumulation.
I think you may have a slightly skewed perception of the timeline. 2 income households have been the norm/requirement since way further back than 2013.
Regardless, there are a lot of factors. One of them being that people started to figure out that if the woman also worked, they could afford more toys, bigger houses, nicer cars, etc. This drove the price of these things up due to higher demand. This in turn forced many others who didn’t necessarily want to work into the labor market.
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The real reason is that in the post-WWII era America was uniquely positioned to make a shit ton of money. All other major countries had wrecked infrastructure, decimated populations, and reparations/war payments/rebuilding costs. America had all of its infrastructure intact, a large population, and the ability to lend money/invest cheaply in the aforementioned decimated economies.
Also, this created perfect conditions for workers. Because America was the only place left that could manufacture a number of things, lots of easily accessible, high paying (due to huge demand from foreign countries) jobs opened up. This, along with a lack of globalization which would cause downward price pressures on american goods, as well as a much smaller degree of foreign investment into the US housing market causing high prices in desirable US markets that we see today, and finally lack of competition from the middle east in oil production which only began to be exploited in the post-wwii economy created a perfect storm for working people to make a lot of money. There are other factors (one I would suspect was a healthier, less divided population) but these are some main ones.
It’s only a small period of time where there weren’t two incomes in households. There may have been a male breadwinner as the main income but the wife almost always had some sort of income as well. Only richer families lived with sole breadwinners throughout history.
10 years ago 57.4% of women worked.
Today 57.4% of women work.
In 1989 57.4% of women worked.
In 1965 40% of women worked.
[source](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002)
That’s definitely a shift – from 40% working to 57% working, but its not really all that different for most people.
My mom was a painter in the 80s. My grandma worked at a car parts factory in the 60s. My great grandmother worked at a publishing company. I didn’t have any friends in the 80s whose moms didn’t work.
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Early 90s required 2 middle class incomes (and 7 years of saving for a down payment) to buy an old small starter home in the least desirable suburb of Toronto.
Even when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s half of the homes had 2 incomes.
This goes back to the turn of the century for black Americans. The post war 1950s image of nuclear family with a dad working and the mom raising 2.3 kids in the suburbs was the exception not the norm.
Look at Boston Irish catholic slums where the woman were working and child malnutrition was common even on two incomes.
We have a lot more stuff now and that stuff is expensive. Beyond that people tend to have a skewed view of how difficult it was to live in the past. 100 years ago my great grandparents bought a 40 acre farm for $200. Sounds like a steal you say? Well the farmhouse was a 300 square foot building with no basement, no running water, no electricity, and both heat and cooking was provided by a potbelly stove in the middle of the only room. All 6 of them slept in the attic. They had no tv. No radio. No computer. No iPhone or iPad or Nintendo switch. No gas stove or refrigerator or sink or marble countertop. You could go buy an equivalent building for $5k from Home Depot today. If you were willing to live equivalently remotely (1 days travel from nearest city) you could get 40 acres for $20k. $25k is about what that $200 is worth today.
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