2 ms·

You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/196

by Retric 2y ago

You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-037.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/median-household-income.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. Why? Because drastically increasing the labor force drove down wages. We need a lot of childcare, restaurant workers, delivery drivers etc to support dual income households which obviously don’t pay very well. Worse households are paying a large fraction of that 20k on things like childcare and meals that used to be done by the stay at home parent.

gruez 2y ago
>You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... "almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant. >Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. "number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%. Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
- Retric 2y ago
  In my first link “In terms of constant (1960) dollars, the median family income increased from $4,000 in 1947 to $5,600 in 1960, or by 40 percent.” That’s 40% in 13 years vs a 33% in 64 years and a great deal of “productivity improvement” from all those computers, etc. And I’ll reiterate because you seemed to skipped that bit “productivity is vastly higher” and people are paying for stuff that was otherwise done by homemakers. I know many dual income households that pay for childcare, housecleaning, food prep, shopping, etc which should be subtracted from any income differential. Eating fast food isn’t necessarily a net positive over a home cooked meal even if it “boosts” GDP. PS: There’s also other subtle differences, like commuting costs, but to a reasonable approximation none of our increases in standard of living comes from an increase in dual income households.

by Retric 2y ago

gruez 2y ago

>You might be thinking ‘poor’ but look at median household incomes. In 1960 the median household pulled in $5,600 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... inflation adjusted that’s $59,720 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ which is almost where median household incomes sits today (80k). https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/medi... "almost" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. The difference between 80k and 60k is 33%, which is significant. >Except to make basically the same money more than twice as many households are dual income and productivity is vastly higher. "number of dual income households" seems like a weird metric to compare against. It's impossible to go from "twice as many households are dual income" to calculate "how much of the household income rise was explained by more earners". For instance, if dual income households were 1% and it doubled to 2%, that would have much less impact on median household income compared to 50% to 100%. Why not use the labor force participation rate directly? Looking at BLS data[1], women labor force participation rate was already 37% in 1960. In 1990 it's 57%. In the same time, male labor force participation rate also dropped from 83% to 76%[2], but let's ignore that and pretend no male jobs were being displaced. If we assume that, the average earners in a married household went from 1.37 to 1.57, which is only a 14% increase. The 33% rise income is now looking much better. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

Retric 2y ago
In my first link “In terms of constant (1960) dollars, the median family income increased from $4,000 in 1947 to $5,600 in 1960, or by 40 percent.” That’s 40% in 13 years vs a 33% in 64 years and a great deal of “productivity improvement” from all those computers, etc. And I’ll reiterate because you seemed to skipped that bit “productivity is vastly higher” and people are paying for stuff that was otherwise done by homemakers. I know many dual income households that pay for childcare, housecleaning, food prep, shopping, etc which should be subtracted from any income differential. Eating fast food isn’t necessarily a net positive over a home cooked meal even if it “boosts” GDP. PS: There’s also other subtle differences, like commuting costs, but to a reasonable approximation none of our increases in standard of living comes from an increase in dual income households.