Less bargaining power, that's a fact. But I'm not certain about the lesser wages. I've been looking at the inflation + CPI index in Europe [0] over the 1990-2

Less bargaining power, that's a fact. But I'm not certain about the lesser wages. I've been looking at the inflation + CPI index in Europe [0] over the 1990-2020 period. The result is that for an equivalent €100 in 1990, you would need to earn about €200 in 2023. According to [1], the wages in Germany have not increased enough (due to the well known wage stagnation of the 2000-2008 era). But the wages in France [2] (with data over the 2000-2023 period) have. Over the 2008-2019 period, the wages in both countries were increasing at the same rate. The inflation + CPI index is not perfect, but it gives an indication of the costs changes of a "representative" consumer basket. With our sample of 2, this means that those basic costs have not increased disproportionately w.r.t. wages over the 1990-2023 time period. The pill was a bit harder to swallow for the Germans, but they also started at a higher level. But what the inflation + CPI index totally fail to take into account is the explosion of other costs that now put single-income families in great difficulties w.r.t. a few decades ago. And the mechanism behind those costs increase is the one that would be interesting to understand and analyze. [0] https://www.inflationtool.com/euro https://www.inflationtool.com/euro [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416207/average-annual-wages-germany-y-on-y-in-euros/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/416207/average-annual-wa... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416204/average-annual-wages-france-y-on-y-in-euros/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/416204/average-annual-wa...