
Yes.
Let’s start with some data:
A few comments:
1. This deflates median wages by the CPI. Most economists believe the PCE is more accurate, and it would show much more rapid real wage gains.
2. This excludes fringe benefits, which have improved much faster than money wages.
3. On average, families are smaller, hence there are fewer children to raise.
4. If I had used average wages, the increase would have been even greater, as top end incomes have risen faster than median wages.
To summarize, this is a conservative estimate of the gains in real wages. So, why the perception that it now takes two incomes for the lifestyle that one income once supported? I see many factors:
1. In a few places such as Silicon Valley, that claim is clearly true—at least for workers with median incomes. Influential pundits often live in places where housing prices have risen much faster than average.
2. We now have higher expectations. Suppose you are a median worker that wished to reproduce a 1960s lifestyle. How do you do this? You’d move into a 1200 square foot ranch house with one bath in a working class immigrant neighborhood. To get a car as unreliable as a 1960s car, you must buy a cheap 15-year old car. To get a TV as bad as a 1960s TV, you find one that someone left out at the curb. You give up your cell phone. No vacations by jet, it’s a drive down to Disneyland. You get the idea.
3. After the 1950s, a steadily increasing number of women began working. As two incomes became the norm, the lifestyle that two incomes could support became the norm. Now families wanted a 2500 square foot house with a big kitchen and three baths. They expected a reliable car, a big flat panel TV, and an iPhone. They flew to Disney World instead of driving to Disneyland. Humans are social animals, so the perception of “necessities” depends mostly on what sort of lifestyle you see among your friends and family. Keeping up with the Joneses.
Pundits seem surprised that people now believe it takes two incomes to support a family, whereas one income would have been adequate in the 1960s. In retrospect, however, this was inevitable once America’s married women decided to enter the labor force in large numbers. It would have occurred even if real wages had increased 10 times faster.
If you don’t believe me, you might want to study more extreme cases, such as China and South Korea, where real wages did increase at least 10 times faster. If you speak with people from those countries, you’ll often hear claims that the birth rate has fallen to very low levels because it is too costly to raise children today. In one sense, that’s obviously nonsense. Back in the early 1960s, South Korea was as poor as sub-Saharan Africa and (like Niger today) Korean women had roughly 6 children on average. Today, South Koreans are vastly richer, even adjusting for the rising cost of living, and they have 0.8 children.
In places such as China and South Korea there has been a radical change in expectations, in all sorts of dimensions. Not just the number of goods that are viewed as necessities, but also the expectations for childrearing. Far more effort is now devoted toward getting kids into the best universities.
Thus although Chinese and Korean parents are obviously not too poor to have larger families, there may be a sense in which economic factors are influencing family size. But it has more to do with a change in acceptable lifestyles, rather than in any lack of growth in real wages.
READER COMMENTS
AMW
Dec 14 2022 at 1:11pm
Can confirm: I’m currently raising a family of 7 on a single income in Southern California. My pay is quite high by national standards, but nothing special for this part of the country. My wife would prefer more creature comforts than we can currently afford, but she prefers staying home with the kids even more.
Henri Hein
Dec 14 2022 at 1:38pm
Good for you!
Andrew_FL
Dec 14 2022 at 1:27pm
It seems plausible to me that people are dissatisfied with the composition of their consumption basket, but they perceive this as a income or cost issue rather than artificial constraints on their choices.
It is basically illegal in this country to negotiate an employment contract for additional wages in lieu of fringe benefits especially health insurance. Even if you can it is now also basically illegal to not buy insurance, and it is illegal to sell catastrophic coverage. On the other hand, when you get to be the age where you actually consume healthcare, the doctors are cartelized, the hospitals are cartelized, supply is greatly restricted and you find that to consume the amount you want you must pay exorbitant costs (if supply was unconstrained, we would probably consume *more* not less, which people get wrong). I could make the same remarks about housing & zoning. “Many such cases” as one might say. People blame their employers for not paying them enough, or suppliers of goods and services for charging too much-again, they think their problem is not enough income, or too high of prices, but they are wrong. Seen and unseen.
OneEyedMan
Dec 14 2022 at 1:42pm
Do you know how the total tax burden has changed? 15 years ago, Todd Zywicki, of Volokh conspiracy game, pointed out that raised taxes, more than increased house prices, can explain the two income trap that documented by Professor Elizabeth Warren. My impression is that, between property, sales, income, social security, and medicaid taxes, marriage penalties, and the growth of two income families, total tax burdens have grown a lot in the transition from one to two income households.
https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_08_05-2007_08_11.shtml#1185883980
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 6:13pm
I don’t believe that net taxes have risen much (if at all) for a median income household. Net taxes account for both taxes paid and transfers back from the government.
Brett
Dec 14 2022 at 1:53pm
It could be challenging to find housing on a 1960s scale. Lots of small old homes exist, but they’re not usually making any of them anymore – there’s a “missing middle” problem in much of newer housing construction where it’s either larger single-family homes or apartment block buildings.
<blockquote>If you speak with people from those countries, you’ll often hear claims that the birth rate has fallen to very low levels because it is too costly to raise children today. In one sense, that’s obviously nonsense. </blockquote>
That’s not necessarily the case. They might have been poorer back then, but education expenses would have also been much lower – and just as importantly, the <em>time</em> requirement involved in raising a kid might have been much lower.
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 6:15pm
I am accounting for increases in the cost of living when I call that claim nonsense. Wages in places like South Korea have risen more than 10-fold, even in real terms.
MarkW
Dec 14 2022 at 7:16pm
It could be challenging to find housing on a 1960s scale. Lots of small old homes exist, but they’re not usually making any of them anymore
But it’s not hard to find ones that have already been made. In my city (of Ann Arbor), the number of housing units has greatly outpaced population growth for decades because houses that were once homes for families with children are now considered big enough only for singles or couples. Even though many/most have had extra rooms added at some point in their lifetimes. My parents raised four (4!) kids in a 1200 sq ft brick ranch with 3 bedrooms and one bathroom. My Mom was a homemaker, but both my parents were college grads and my Dad had a white collar job that would have enabled us to buy a bigger house after a while, but by that time we had a lot of friends in the neighborhood and anyway, it was completely normal to raise such a family in such a house, so they didn’t feel compelled to move.
That house is still there — both it and the neighborhood look almost exactly the same (judging by Google street view). Zillow thinks it has the same square footage as it did when I was a kid and is worth something a bit over $300K. It doesn’t seem such a heavy lift to buy such a house on a single income. Even back then, though, there were plenty of moms in the neighborhood who went back to work when their kids were school aged, thereby creating proverbial ‘latchkey kids’ and available empty houses after school where we could engage in our teenage hijinks.
Warren Platts
Dec 14 2022 at 2:06pm
I must say this article comes off as rather Antoinettish. According to the chart above, in today’s dollars, the median worker in 1979 would have made around $47,000 annually. Today, the same worker makes around $50,500. So after 43 years, the median worker has received a $3,500/year raise.
And fringe benefits are not a good thing. We used to call that getting paid in kind instead of cash. Slaves receive fringe benefits, but to a person, they’d rather have the cash.
And the comparison with 1960s consumer goods is really unfair. Flying in the 1960s was A LOT more expensive than it is now. I’ll bet I could fly to Disneyland cheaper than I could drive there. I’ll also bet a good-sized flat screen is cheaper now in real terms than the little black & white TV we watched in the 60’s. And if smart phones seem rather expensive, at least we can make all the long distance phone calls we want for free. And yes, a lot of Americans are driving around in 15-year old cars and living in 1200 foot homes or smaller. (And what’s wrong with immigrant neighborhoods?)
As for rising expectations, that’s not a matter of keeping up with the Jones: it’s a matter of long-standing economic theory. In the same book Ricardo presents his famous theory of comparative advantage, there is an excellent chapter “On Wages.” He argues that workers demand a minimum “natural wage” that is far above the minimum required to provide enough calories to keep from starving & freezing to death. The natural wage depends on custom & also advances in technology. Ricardo claims that when workers are forced to take wages below this natural wage, their lives become “miserable.”
Not only that, Ricardo claimed that the rate of population increase will decline under such circumstances. That is exactly what we are seeing. Even prior to covid, U.S. life expectancies were declining. Birth rates have declined far faster (especially in commuter zones affected by the China Shock). That is not a sign that wages are too high.
Thus to claim that since we now have smart phones, internet, and cheap flights that we didn’t have in the 1960s, then, therefore, we should be happy despite flat wages is a non sequitur. We might as well say that because we have it so much easier nowadays than did our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we should be happy.
robc
Dec 14 2022 at 3:47pm
Because we have it so much easier nowadays than did our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we should be happy.
I said it.
Jim Glass
Dec 14 2022 at 4:08pm
And fringe benefits are not a good thing.
So it’s amazing how labor unions have driven the huge increase in the tax- favored ‘fringe benefit’ percentage of compensation (which is not counted in “wages”) securing the largest for themselves. Workers are so stupid!
For the record, of the biggest ‘loopholes’, er, tax expenditures in the entire tax code, #1 is the tax-favored treatment for employer-provided health insurance and #3 is that for employer-provided defined benefit retirement plans.
Thus the voters speak. Dumbbutts.
We used to call that getting paid in kind instead of cash. Slaves receive fringe benefits, but to a person, they’d rather have the cash.
You speak for slaves? Who want to pay more taxes?
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 6:24pm
“I must say this article comes off as rather Antoinettish.”
This is a common problem with commenters, Responding with “mood affiliation” rather than responding to what I actually wrote. I never claimed that living standards only rose by a small amount, and I never said anything at all about whether workers should be happy or unhappy with the actual rate of progress. The post is about fertility rates.
“Ricardo claims that when workers are forced to take wages below this natural wage, their lives become “miserable.””
So how would Ricardo view our current living standards? How would he view the progress in living standards in the past 50 years?
“Not only that, Ricardo claimed that the rate of population increase will decline under such circumstances. ”
So what would Ricardo make of the birth rates in Niger and Mali? Are they high because living standards in those places are high? How about South Korea?
Warren Platts
Dec 18 2022 at 10:25am
Agree. Which is why I brought up Ricardo’s theory that relates fertility rates to wages rates.
I can’t read Ricardo’s mind, but a Ricardian analysis of recent decades would say that the increase in the natural wage has outpaced the rate of increase in the real wage. The increase in living standards caused an increase in the natural wage but, for many demographics (e.g., working class males), real wages flatlined or even declined (cf. black working class males) in recent decades (as evidenced by the FRED chart above that includes fringe benefits, according to the description), entailing that their real wages are below the new natural wage.
Thus according Ricardo’s theory of wages, when the rate of reproduction is well below the replacement level, that’s a good indication that the market wage is below the minimum natural wage.
That is easy to answer sir. As Ricardo pointed out, the natural wage is not only a function of time, it is also a function of location. If the rate of increase in Niger & Mali is well above the replacement level, then according to the Ricardian theory, the market wage there is well above the natural wage.
Similarly for 1960s South Korea. At the time, the natural wage wouldn’t have been much more than in the 1950s when the devastating Korean War was happening. But peace & stability would have allowed for steady employment at least, entailing that take-home wages for working class folks would have been much more than in the 1950s. As a result, people then could “afford” many children & hope for them to survive to adulthood.
But nowadays, where an average Korean can realistically aspire to a U.S. standard of living, like in the USA, the rise in the natural wage has outpaced the growth of real wages. (Despite the 10-fold increase in real wages you point out, the natural wage would have increased even more.) Therefore, for many Koreans, their real wages are below the prevailing natural wage. Consequently, as predicted by the Ricardian theory, birth rates are well below the replacement level.
Jim Glass
Dec 18 2022 at 6:45pm
I can’t read Ricardo’s mind, but a Ricardian analysis of recent decades would say that the increase in the natural wage has outpaced the rate of increase in the real wage.
Why just “recent” decades? Ricardo wrote the words you quote in 1817, in presenting his labor theory of value. The US fertility rate has been falling steadily since 1800. By your logic, I take it this shows that his “natural wage” has been increasing ever higher above the real wage since … 1800?
And you really can’t imagine any other reason for declining fertility accompanying the 200+ year rise in real wages?
My 8-track tapes! That’s why they are lost to me, along with the other “absolute necessaries” of my youthful life.
So if Covid had killed another 50 million Americans I’d have gotten my 8-track tapes & all back?
I agree with you that Ricardo probably didn’t believe in a “naïve” version of the labor theory of value.
I also think Newton probably didn’t believe in naïve versions of the luminous aether, alchemy and Bible Code.
JFA
Dec 15 2022 at 9:39am
I think there’s some validity in what you say about an extra $3500 a year after 40 or 50 years seems like America greatly undelivered on its promise. At the same time, your comments seem not thought through. I’ll just highlight this one: “I’ll bet I could fly to Disneyland cheaper than I could drive there.”
Maybe if you are only going by yourself and you lived far from Disney. The monetary costs of flying very quickly overwhelms the monetary cost of driving the more people you add. I can get 400-450 miles out of my subaru. At $4/gallon (which is about 80 cents above the current national average), I could fill up for $68. If I lived 1200 miles away from Disney, car transportation to and from Disney would cost $408 (3 tanks there and 3 tanks back). If you want add in 2 nights in a hotel room, that’s what… another $200 (you can find cheap lodging throughout the US (especially if you used Airbnb)). So that’s about $600 in travel cost to take 4-5 people to Disney. I don’t know many places you can fly 4-5 people (or even 3 people) to Disney for $600. Also don’t forget to add in transport to and from both the departure and arrival airports when you calculate the cost of flying to Disney. There are many other things you could include, but it’s difficult to come to the conclusion that flying is cheaper than driving.
Dylan
Dec 16 2022 at 8:46am
I think you forgot to add in the cost of buying and maintaining the car. Sure, if you already own a car, the marginal costs is not that high, for those of us who don’t, flying will be much cheaper than buying a car, and usually cheaper than renting a car and driving.
Jon Murphy
Dec 15 2022 at 1:14pm
Not true. Some people may prefer cash, some may prefer fringe benefits. It all depends on their circumstances. I, as a relatively young and health university professor, would prefer more cash and less fringe benefits. But some of my older colleagues prefer more fringe benefits.
It’s an old theory you cite, but the Malthusian Labor Theory of Value hasn’t been standing economic theory since the Marginal Revolution.
Jon Murphy
Dec 15 2022 at 1:44pm
My brother is a union rep. I think he (and his members) would be surprised to hear you comparing benefits, which unions fight so hard for, as slavery.
Dylan
Dec 16 2022 at 8:50am
Well, according to some, all wage employment is slavery
Warren Platts
Dec 18 2022 at 10:44am
OK, fair enough; point granted. My point was that the FRED chart was an accurate measure of real median wages; it turns out that the chart above includes fringe benefits. Therefore, the claim that the chart underestimates total wages because it excludes fringe benefits must be rejected.
Be careful here, John. The mere age of a theory has little to do with its truth. We wouldn’t want to reject Adam Smith merely because his theory predates Ricardo! More to the point, by your logic, we’d have to reject Ricardo’s famous theory of comparative advantage because of his “Malthusian Labor Theory.”
Two responses:
(1) It is highly debatable whether Ricardo actually held a naive labor theory of value. If he did, he would have said a unit of Russian grain would be worth a lot more than a unit of English grain because Russian grain involved a lot more labor.
(2) More importantly, just as the labor theory of value is irrelevant to the truth of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, the labor theory of value is also irrelevant to Ricardo’s “Iron Law of Wages” that says in the long run, working class wages will tend to equilibrate around the minimum natural wage. Thus when the market wage is below the natural wage, then Ricardo’s theory predicts that fertility will decline below replacement level until the market wage increases to the natural wage.
Jim Glass
Dec 18 2022 at 5:49pm
Entirely correct! Isaac Newton believed in the luminous aether, alchemy, and the Bible Code. We wouldn’t want to reject his theories merely because they even predate Smith’s.
As we’d have to reject Newton’s famous theories of optics and gravity because of his theories about the aether, alchemy and the Bible Code!
Jason Black
Dec 14 2022 at 3:41pm
My wife and I have raised my family of 9 (7 children, currently aged 8-21) on one income since 2000. My income is a little higher than the median, but far below 6-figures. We receive no government transfers except the child tax credit, which we could do without. We’re not what most would call well-off, but we always have enough for our needs, to save for retirement, and to tithe to our church and donate to other charities.
I agree with Scott here that expectations play a major role in whether or not two incomes are necessary to raise a family. Our needs are relatively low compared with many of our friends with higher incomes: when we travel as a family, we drive instead of fly, and we tend to stay with friends or camp out; we drive older but (usually) reliable vehicles; we rarely dine out; our teen children work and save for their own college educations; we have a modest home that today would be considered tiny for such a large family, but is larger than my wife’s parents’ home, where they raised 8 children.
The rich man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.
Jim Glass
Dec 14 2022 at 4:46pm
We might as well say that because we have it so much easier nowadays than did our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we should be happy.
Well, yeah. You’d better be. Psychologists tell us that “gratitude” is a key to happiness — and ingratitude is a key to the reverse.
You’re not happy that you have a life that is so much easier — safer, longer, more healthy, and luxurious — than all your ancestors? Hunter gatherers, peasants, serfs, sweatshop workers, 1960s owners of 8-track tapes and black-and-white 4-channel TVs?
Tell us: what did you do to earn being born to such hugely better life? Not a damn thing. Yet no thankfulness for it? That’s the height of ingratitude indeed.
I won’t want to be around you over the holidays!
Jim Glass
Dec 14 2022 at 5:26pm
2. This excludes fringe benefits, which have improved much faster than money wages.
Real Hourly Compensation for All Employed Persons, 1948-2022
Fringe benefits included – the amount employers really pay to employees.
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 6:25pm
Thanks Jim.
Dale Doback
Dec 14 2022 at 6:32pm
When people say they can’t afford more kids, I’m inclined to believe them. To achieve a median salary, you probably need a median education and live in a place with median housing costs. Those costs have increased at a far greater rate than incomes. Other modern luxuries like cell phones are a drop in the bucket compared to education and housing. Besides, a cell phone is defacto required to apply for and maintain a decent paying job. Antenna TV is broadcast in high definition and so you can’t just grab any TV off the street to replicate a 1960s life. The car example works well, but again I think housing and education dwarf other costs.
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 10:25pm
“Those costs have increased at a far greater rate than incomes.”
Actually, they have not, as I showed in the post.
“When people say they can’t afford more kids, I’m inclined to believe them.”
I’ve noticed that people routinely misuse the term “afford”
Dale Doback
Dec 15 2022 at 1:29am
“Actually, they have not, as I showed in the post.”
I don’t see where you showed that in the post. In 1980 the median worker didn’t attend college so his education costs were zero. Today the median income worker is making a little more real income sure but she only got that income increase by paying for a 4 year degree.
Dale Doback
Dec 15 2022 at 1:39am
Also the median worker in 1980 lived in a more rural and lower cost area. The median worker today earns a larger real income by moving to a more urban and higher cost area.
john hare
Dec 15 2022 at 5:13am
Actually you don’t need a median education to make a good living, provided you are willing to work hard and learn your trade. I have two immigrants working for me that, in their mid 40s, have their houses and rental property paid for. Both dropped out of elementary school in Mexico. Their wages are above local average in addition to their side jobs and rental income.
I suspect that one of the reasons people don’t think they can make it compared to “back when” is they don’t remember or don’t know the difference in working hours and conditions. 50-70 hours manually lifting and stacking is quite different from 40 hours on a forklift. Same for shovel vs excavator. There are people that work hard today as well as think and learn without college. Quite often they are considered the lucky ones.
Jim Glass
Dec 15 2022 at 12:38am
To achieve a median salary, you probably need [A, B & C] Those costs have increased at a far greater rate than incomes.
You seem to have proven here that median salary has fallen to less than the median salary.
a cell phone is defacto required to apply for and maintain a decent paying job.
My family phone when I was a kid was a “party line.” When I sold my parents’ home neither the buyers nor the broker knew what that was. Also back then there were no answering machines. The good old AT&T monopoly banned them. (So if your work tried to reach you at home and you weren’t there, good luck.)
The technology in each cell phone today is estimated to have cost deca-millions of dollars in the 1990s — if you could have gotten something back then to do all the things cell phones do today that were totally impossible back then. (Remember that in those days phones were just, well, phones.) That’s a pretty darn good cost saving for quality delivered!!
Antenna TV is broadcast in high definition and so you can’t just grab any TV off the street to replicate a 1960s life.
Though I can just move my mouse from EconLog to Youtube to get my choice of millions of videos free, including countless classic TV shows from the 1950s onward. In color! (If made in color way back then.)
The idea that median welfare today isn’t hugely greater than in the 1960s is ludicrous. Been there, done that.
For one thing, life expectancy in the 1960s was 67, now it is over 77. How much is a year of your life worth to you? Times 10? (And you gel all those extra years with YouTube too!!)
MarkW
Dec 14 2022 at 7:27pm
Besides, a cell phone is defacto required to apply for and maintain a decent paying job. Antenna TV is broadcast in high definition and so you can’t just grab any TV off the street to replicate a 1960s life.
But cell phones plans are much cheaper than 60s phone service in constant dollars. If you wanted an extra handset in the house, that was an extra fee (my Dad wired illegally himself, we almost got busted and fined once). You couldn’t actually buy a phone, you had to rent from ‘Ma Bell’ for a monthly fee. And then there was the eye-watering cost of long distance for taking to the grandparents!
As for TVs, we got our first color console TV (a major purchase!) in time for the moon landing. It had a 25″ screen. You almost cannot buy a TV that small any more (except for the kitchen counter), but a 32″ TV (also getting hard to find) can be had for $100 on Amazon, which works out to 12 1969 moon-landing dollars. $12! And the cheapest no-name modern TV is obviously vastly better than the Magnavox console beauty from the late 16s.
So the TV and phone examples work even better than the car example.
MarkLouis
Dec 14 2022 at 9:12pm
Society has bifurcated. Raising children around lesser-educated peers outside of the major job centers is cheap. Raising children around well-educated peers near major job centers is very expensive. “Average is over” as TC says.
Rajat
Dec 14 2022 at 9:56pm
Great post, Scott. The one piece missing from this account is home ownership and the importance people place on it in feeling comfortable and established in their lives and families. Due to falling real interest rates and supply restrictions, buying that 1200 sqf house has become very expensive in many places and countries.
Scott Sumner
Dec 14 2022 at 10:27pm
Yes, but it’s worth noting that despite the fast rise in house prices, the average American is in a much nicer house than back in the 1960s.
Monte
Dec 14 2022 at 10:50pm
According to the Living Wage Calculator, a one-income family of 4 living in San Diego county could manage on a yearly salary of $92,160. But why bother, when total government transfers targeted to low-income families have increased in real dollars from an average of $3,070 per person in 1965 to well over $35,000 per person today, which amounts to over $140,000 of transfers for that same family.
The problem is twofold: A disincentive to work fostered by a dependency on government transfers, and our society’s propensity towards Pecuniary Emulation (PE):
PE is evident today from the ultra-wealthy to the lower classes (who carelessly go into debt purchasing expensive automobiles, brand-name clothing, and $300 tennis shoes). The more expensive an item, the more it is sought after for conspicuous display, regardless of its utility. Has living within our means become too passe?
“There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.” – Calvin Coolidge
MarkW
Dec 15 2022 at 9:37am
The more expensive an item, the more it is sought after for conspicuous display, regardless of its utility. Has living within our means become too passe?
There are (mostly religious) cultural minority groups where older patterns persist. We know a couple from our university days who became more religious and have lived on a single income while raising an unfashionably large brood while driving old cars and taking camping vacations even though the breadwinner in the couple is an exec. But their peers are other religious families from their church or kids’ parochial school, and any flashy ‘bling’ in that context would be status-impairing rather than status-raising.
Monte
Dec 15 2022 at 12:26pm
True. Might your friends be members of either the Amish, Mormon, or Jehovah’s Witness faith, who tend to eschew PE and practice thrift? There are others, of course, outside of those affiliations, but I’m sure you’ll agree they’re hardly representative of our culture. We could all do a lot worse than following their example.
MarkW
Dec 16 2022 at 10:36am
Nope, nothing exotic — just traditional Catholics.
Jim Glass
Dec 15 2022 at 1:59am
The post is about fertility rates.
US fertility rate, children per woman… 1800: 71900: 42022: <2
People have fewer children as they get richer, not poorer. This is universal throughout history. Emperor Augustus complained that the noble Romans were being out-bred by the plebians and ordered the upper class to breed more. Comrade Brezhnev lamented to Nixon that his white Russians, so to speak, were being grossly outbred by the eastern and southern Asiatics in the Soviet empire.
In the natural original state of agricultural societies, parents need as many children as they can have so enough will survive to work the farm and support them in their old age. As an economy advances enough to provide financial savings to pay for old age, and beyond, fathers decide to spend less on kids they don’t need, and mothers decide to cut their risk of dying in childbirth while spending more time engaged in the ever-more new activities that become available to them, rather than raise annoying bra^h^h, er, children over-and-over.
It has always been thus, and so it is now. “Not being able to afford” kids is the reverse from the truth. Now that people don’t need kids, and there are so many other nifty things to spend money and time on, why waste so much time and money on them? If economic history and theory don’t convince, just go onto social media where the girls of Gen Z and the millenial generation talk, and listen to them.
Floccina
Dec 16 2022 at 12:16pm
At some level of income fertility starts to rise as income gets higher, and in the developed countries, it looks more like education level drives differences in fertility more than income at the not very high levels of income.
Jim Glass
Dec 16 2022 at 2:41pm
At some level of income fertility starts to rise as income gets higher
Birth rate by income in the USA.
Richer women don’t tend to be more educated?
Dale Doback
Dec 15 2022 at 8:49am
Citing median income without adjusting for demographic changes is a “reason from a price change” level of error. For example, look at a specific education and geography group like people-who-didn’t-go-to-college-and-live-in-small-towns-in-the-Midwest and compare those real incomes today vs 1980.
Knut P. Heen
Dec 15 2022 at 10:47am
People have a tendency to forget the “tax-free income” women staying at home produce (child care, cleaning, dinner, etc.). Most families have not moved from one income to two incomes, they have moved from one measured income to two measured incomes. The measuring does not increase what is produced. Someone staying at home with 6 children is probably more productive than someone in a kindergarten looking after 6 children. Better utilization of the home is one important factor in crowded areas.
Spencer
Dec 15 2022 at 12:16pm
That’s a good question. It looks increasingly doubtful. The U.S. Golden Era in Capitalism was when savings were expeditiously activated. Never are the banks intermediaries in the savings-> investment process.
…
But an even more valid metric is the rise in crime. I grew up leaving my doors unlocked.
Damian Bouch
Dec 15 2022 at 3:16pm
Homes cost between 2.5x and 8.0x as many work-hours to cover the total cost, compared to 1950 or 1960. Controlled for city and occupation. We’re a single-income home as well, for the record, but I’m on a professional salary and we live waaaaaay beneath the means of our parents.
Luke J
Dec 15 2022 at 5:59pm
As a non college graduate living in Portland OR with three kids… yes you can raise a family on a single income.
And if your hardworking and lucky, you might be able to save and buy a house. And if that house has electrical problems and rats, then you’ll also be learning some new skills
Scott Sumner
Dec 16 2022 at 2:30pm
Everyone, I recall the 1960s. Living standards today are far higher, and it’s not even close.
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