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The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places.

Is this true? Surely the cost of living has decreased over the last 100 years, so it must be easier for a single breadwinner to feed a family than it was back then.

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Not where I live and this is a pretty rich country. Between your rent/mortgage, your energy bill, public transportation costs, taxes, mandatory health insurance and food a single person income is not enough to make ends meet. And that's when you don't own a car. Typically a single person income is about 1700 euros net take home, and your costs will be slightly above that (for the above mentioned family of four).

The breakdown: mortgage 500 (no paying towards the principal, so you're stuck with the debt) food 350 (yes, it's that expensive), health insurance 280 to about 320 depending on the coverage, energy 100 to 250 (depending on season and insulation), commute 150 or more, clothing, various taxes (on top of your income tax) and 'unforeseen' will easily eat up the remainder.

If you live in 'subsidized housing' it gets a bit better.

Which country is that? 1700€ net monthly isn't necessarily that little money.

Netherlands.

You have to pay 200-300€ for health insurance in .nl (or is this just a tax taken out up front)? Wow, my complaints about the UK are ratcheting down a notch, I don't pay a bean, except for dental (as and when).

If you're not paying NI then surely your dental is also covered?

I do pay NI, but I don't class it as a medical expense. It's basically a second income tax and payroll tax mixed into one.

What you listed adds up to about 1400 on average. If you can't pay the principal, mortgage seems like unnecessary debt. Also, I'm not familiar with supermarket prices in Europe, but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.

You'll have to because affordable housing is so rare that you end up buying a house because the mortgage roughly equals the rent elsewhere. Of course then you do have to pay for the maintenance.

> but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.

That's from direct experience and believe me I don't throw money around if I don't have to. A very basic bit of shopping for 3 or 4 days costs you 50 bucks easily, if you're careful you can whittle that down a bit but not by much. And then of course I still have to get to the cheap supermarket and back, which is 20 km by car, if I bought it in the one around the corner I'd pay quite a bit more. No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.

Please note that I left things like cell phones, internet connection and TV subscription, newspapers etc out because they're not strictly speaking 'needs'.

> No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.

Can you install a loft bed and put the freezer under the bed? Do you have any space outdoors where you could put a freezer? Have you tried buying dried foods only in bulk?

Increasing the size of the workforce will tend to put downward pressure on wages. So if you double the workforce I expect you'd see pretty serious downward pressure on wages, maybe to the point where previously one partner working could support the family (historically the norm), but now you need both partners working. Though of course adding women to the workforce has had lots of positive effects, so maybe the overall improvement in the economy cancels out the downward pressure on wages. I am not an economist.

Exactly right. Having both people working not only increases the work force, it increases peoples disposable income driving prices above what a single income can afford. I.e. either through downward wage pressure or upward price pressure, buying power goes down.

"Increasing the size of the workforce will tend to put downward pressure on wages."

I am also not an economist, but you're only covering the supply of workers. Do more workers = more money being spent = more products/services demanded = increased demand for workers? In other words, does it even out?

I have read that wages have decreased in the last few generations while dual income houses became normal, but I don't know whether those are cause and effect or have common causes.

I'm not an economist either, but heuristically I'd expect the precise opposite to be true: the products/services with elastic demand curves (that is, luxuries) tend to require time to consume in addition to money. Simply having more money available will not necessarily increase demand for these things.

If you wanted to make this argument, I think a better way to approach it would be from the supply side. The supply of goods and services should increase, because well, that's what workers produce. This should theoretically lower the prices of existing goods and services, because increased supply of a commodity puts downward pressure on pricing.

That's all in theory. I highly doubt it's anywhere near that simple. The thing about macroeconomics is that it's somewhere between cargo cultism and ancient mythology: people compare situations that superficially resemble each other, and then invent models that explain several situations but are entirely untestable.

This is what people somehow don't get. If cost of living goes down, so do the salaries. How do you think those decreases are paid for? For most any business you can name the biggest item in the budget will be human resources. If you want to cut prices this is where you have to cut to have any real effect.

How do you think those decreases are paid for?

I would have thought they would have been paid for by increases in efficiency (largely due to new technology).

There are efficiency explosions now and again that create huge shifts, but mostly you just get little tweaks here and there (e.g. increase factory output by 5% or even 50%). Not numbers that can touch sacking half your staff or replacing all of them with a production provider in e.g. China.

You know why the Chinese have lower wages at the moment? Because they are less productive.

As they become more productive, their wages are going up, too.

Completely wrong. If that were the case then the cost of developing 10k cheap electronic gadgets would be the same in the US vs. China. The US workers would cost more but make more in the same time.

This is not the case at all. The Chinese can produce vastly more items than the US can for the same price/time. Do you have any examples where some US company can produce things as such an improved production speed compared to China?

You are right that richer countries are not more productive in all sectors. E.g. a Swiss hair cut won't be as superior to a Somalian one, as the differences in wages suggest.

My guts tell me that the US is more productive than China in, say, software development and probably finance. But don't trust my guts. Do some research yourself.

A quick search for "productivity US china" turned up "U.S. Leads Productivity Ranking; China Gains" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04o...).

One has to be careful how one measures these things. It's easy to get into tautology land ("Who is more productive? The more expensive one. How do you know they're more productive? Because they're more expensive").

Indeed. Though if you can compete on the world market and be more expensive, there's got to be something to justify that.

In absolute terms the cost of living (when comparing with a constant standard of living though!) has decreased significantly vis-a-vis median salaries over the last 30 years. Most of the gains were made in increased production efficiencies. I think you severely underestimate the amount of gains that have been made there over that time. Total food budget is 5 to 10% of middle class household income in most of the West; it was a multiple of that only 100 years ago!

What I'm saying is that (inflation-adjusted) cost of living has been going down for the last couple of decades, and that salaries have gone up in absolute inflation-adjusted terms. You can argue that this trend won't hold for the future for a myriad of reasons but I wouldn't support such a view.

I think that's a little trickier to pin down than that. Yes food costs less. Housing? Maybe. But now things you didn't have 100 years ago are requirements. For example, if you don't have a phone today you're going to have a hard time finding and keeping a job. Keeping someone from 100 years ago alive would certainly cost less than it did then but you have to also consider if they could function in today's society on that money, otherwise it's not a realistic comparison.

Yes this is true, but only to a certain extent. It's why I put in the "when comparing with a constant standard of living though", but that is trickier than just that one line of course, as you correctly point out.

Still many of the factors that are considered 'requirements' today aren't in my book, but of course this can be subject to discussion. To take your telephone example, here in the Netherlands (an advanced Western country by all measures) I don't know of many jobs that one wouldn't be able to get or keep without a phone. For those where you're on-call, you are provided with one.

Similarly, cost of living statistics by our national statistics institute changed their household budgets a few years ago - the tv has been a 'basic necessity' for decades (in these statistics), but the budget was upped several hundred euros because now LCD tv's are the norm. Still I think it's stupid to budget 800 euros every 5 years for a TV into a 'basic necessity' budget.

I remain convinced that even after accounting for an adjusted lifestyle to the level of a 'basic lifestyle', and where 'basic needs' have evolved to match societal progress, the increase in income has outpaced the rise of cost of living.

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