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Cost of living and inflation have surpassed middle class wages.
In the 1950s - 1960s my grandfather supported his wife and 7 kids with his middle class factory job at Pfizer. Today you can can hardly afford to support yourself with a similar job and salary adjusted for inflation.
You can bet they did not have many of the things that are considered necessities now.
This question is not specific to the US, but if capitalism brings so much wealth (and it does) why can´t families survive on a single income anymore like in the past when usually only men worked and women were not in the workforce?
By "in the past" you mean one car per family that only the husband drives, a small house where multiple kids share bedrooms, no cable, no cell phone, no internet, no eating out, no education debt, no daycare debt, store brand clothes from a Sears catalog that get handed down to siblings and mended by the housewife, a wood stove for heat, no AC, and a family vacation that might be a road trip to a Howard Johnson that had a pool? Most families could live like that today on one income. They just don't want to.
Capitalism and individualism goes hand in hand. Left on its own, capitalism will turn everyone into workers and consumers who need their OWN everything. Everyone needs to be working and buying so that capitalism can continue to grow. If it does not grow....then it becomes a zero sum game. Capitalism seeks expansion to bring in new workers and consumers....to create new profits. This is why capitalism seeks to destroy socialism. It needs those territories to convert those people into the fold of working and consuming to expand profits for owners of capital.
Things that are "collective" in nature will be eroded by capitalism. Collectives "share" and "pool" resources. People sharing and pooling resources stagnates the growth of consumption. Capitalism encourages everyone to want and need "their own" of everything. It encourages planned obsolescence. It encourages trading in the old for the new, even if the old still works.
Welfare housing projects are collective public housing. How did those turn out? Chicago's Cabrini-Green was so abused by its collectivist residents that it had to be razed as it had become uninhabitable.
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Wages are morphing to be sufficient enough to only support the INDIVIDUAL in meeting the desire to have it's own car, its own home, its own phone, TV, stove, refrigerator. Hence, a job is needed to support each individual in a marriage as wages are not sufficient enough to support everyone wanting their own things and not sharing.
Eventually capitalism will burn out a society, if left unchecked, because it will destroy the needed balance between individualism and collectivism. Going to far in either direction, away from the middle, is destructive.
Collectivism destroys far more than individualism. The Cabrini-Green example I gave is just one example of many.
the 1500 sq ft home I grew up in, a suburb of dallas, sold for less than $120,000 in 2014.
boston doesn't represent all of the country.
How much did your parents pay for it.
My parents paid 11,000 for our home in a suburb of Dayton in 1950, sold it in about 1974 for something like 30K, the same house lists for 74K today. A new house (less than 1000 sq ft.) in 1950, 11K, now almost 70 year old house 74K. That is still quite a price increase especially considering the condition of the house over 70 years.
Like Mr. Joshua I also remember we had 1 car for most of my childhood, later we got a second car. Now most families have at least 2, many 3. We had no cable or wifi bills, no cell phone bills. We had one land line and were given a dime in case we needed to call home. Water came out of the tap, not a bottle. We rarely ate out even at fast food joints and seldom had junk food. Our activities were basically riding bikes and playing with kids in the neighborhood or walking to a occasional matinee that cost 0.90. We got clothes once a year before school started. Normally my sister and I rotated years for shoes and winter coats. We got a couple toys at Christmas.
I think it's possible to live on one salary...but.
Most "need" that cell phone with all the extras. We need direct tv/dish/cable and all the channels. We need the 72 inch tv. We need to have the heat or ac on all the time. We need those new shoes/fashion clothes. We need the new tattoo. We need all those toys for our kids. We need to go out to eat 3 times a week. We need all that food. We need need need.
I work with some millennials who even need to have their own house cleaned once a week.
I'm an older person but I remember that only my dad worked. We had 3 tv stations, we wore hand me down clothes, we waited till birthday or Christmas for toys. We had a 19 inch tv with rabbit ears, (ask your mom). When we were out of breakfast cereal my mom would say, eat toast, I'm not going to grocery store till next Monday. The AC never came on...didn't have it and in the winter you always wore a sweater and dare not complain.
My folks taught me how to be conservative, and for the most part I've taught this to my kids.
It is indeed possible to live that way. Many have cut the cable and rely on the channels their antenna pulls in and maybe Netflix or Hulu.
Lot of people shop consignment and garage sales for toys and clothes.
They drive cars until the mufflers fall off and clean their own homes.
I know families who do this and still need two incomes to pay the bills, have health insurance, and save a bit for retirement.
We could have always lived on one of our incomes. I admit that I just didn't want to live like that. I like things. I'm not as materialistic as some (I carry older phones, older cars, mediocre TVs) but I just didn't want to live a life of scrimping. It can be done but I just like to buy what I want, eat what I want, and go where I want. I don't think many people did that in the 60s and 70s.
It wasn't until 1973 that SCOTUS made it illegal to segregate job advertisements by gender. Men and women did not hold the same jobs in 1960, 1970 and sometime beyond. The jobs open to women paid less than those available to men. Women had no choice but to work for less and it has taken 50 years to get to the point of making the same pay for the same job. I'm not sure how the argument that women in the workforce competed with men's job, lowered wages or was responsible for inflation.
Because it increased the supply of labor while.demand was slowly declining due to increases in technology and automation.
Increased tolerance and use of illegal labor also is a contributing factor.......the nonsense argument that "they're just doing the jobs Americans won't do" notwithstanding.
There may have been some truth to that argument at one time, back when most Illegal laborers were ditch diggers, fruit pickers, maids etc.
But that's not all they do here anymore.
Illegal labor has all but taken over skilled construction jobs in many areas of the country.
Jobs that used to be good paying alternatives for those who either didn't want to go to college or couldn't afford to.
Now the wages have been driven down so much that the clich'e has become a self fufilling prophecy.
I bet grandpa didn't have a 5,000 square foot house, 2 cars, took expensive vacations every year, ate out all the time, and had a home filled with expensive electronics.
Ah, the baby boomer myth that $500 flat screen TVs and cell phones are the real reasons. No matter how many statistics and numbers you put in front of these people, they'll still just come back with the same worthless anecdotal nonsense.
Look at a sears catalog from 1980 and see how expensive electronics were relative to incomes. They were MUCH more expensive relative to incomes.
What was much less expensive was : housing, health care, education. Things that are actually important.
Trade school/apprenticeship is equally valid. There are highly skilled tradespeople who earn a hell of a lot of money, frequently much more than a college grad with a liberal arts degree.
This goes back to the argument against illegal immigration. It's the trade skills, where a lot of Americans could graduate high school, learn a trade as a plumber, a mechanic, a carpenter, electrician or they could go into building construction and raise a family. In many places, cheap illegal alien labor has dropped the bottom out of the wages for trade skill professionals.
How much did your parents pay for it.
My parents paid 11,000 for our home in a suburb of Dayton in 1950, sold it in about 1974 for something like 30K, the same house lists for 74K today. A new house (less than 1000 sq ft.) in 1950, 11K, now almost 70 year old house 74K. That is still quite a price increase especially considering the condition of the house over 70 years.
Like Mr. Joshua I also remember we had 1 car for most of my childhood, later we got a second car. Now most families have at least 2, many 3. We had no cable or wifi bills, no cell phone bills. We had one land line and were given a dime in case we needed to call home. Water came out of the tap, not a bottle. We rarely ate out even at fast food joints and seldom had junk food. Our activities were basically riding bikes and playing with kids in the neighborhood or walking to a occasional matinee that cost 0.90. We got clothes once a year before school started. Normally my sister and I rotated years for shoes and winter coats. We got a couple toys at Christmas.
Sounds like my area except the matinee was $.75. I guess we didn't realize how miserable we were
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