People have been lamenting the difficulty of making ends meet for as long as humanity has been around and I'm not so sure that today it is truly any less possib

People have been lamenting the difficulty of making ends meet for as long as humanity has been around and I'm not so sure that today it is truly any less possible to finance a home and family with just one earner than it was a generation ago. I certainly don't think it was easily affordable on one income a generation ago as seems to be the perception. A lot of the reason for two earner families today is because of the fact that more women are able to work due to a more equitable marketplace for jobs. Perhaps the people of a generation ago would have liked the extra income but that just was not an option. Now two inomes is often seen as a necessity but that could be because people's expectations of what kind standard of living they should have, as well as what is possible for the average person to have today, has risen along with their incomes. As for the 40 hour workweek, if I read the same source, that amounted to a reduction in hours for the average person.