Is it not the norm? It certainly was until quite recently.
A young family with one breadwinner and a couple of small kids might reasonably want to live in a 2BR, in many countries not just USA.
A young family with one breadwinner and a couple of small kids might reasonably want to live in a 2BR, in many countries not just USA.
E.g. a 1BR in San Jose where I live goes for $2100/mo, a 2BR goes for $2400 (obviously, it's different everywhere - a friend of mine is renting a room in SF for $2K+).
It makes sense for a couple to get a 2BR even on a single income if it's good enough (and usually, once you can afford spending $2100/mo on rent, you can afford $2400 too). For 15% increase in rent, one gets the ability to e.g. comfortably invite friends/parents from out of state for a couple of days.
Of course, single-income no-kids couple does not look immediately look like the norm these days; but once you think of it, there are plenty of situations other than children that make sense for such a scenario: one of the partners might be in school / looking for a job / changing fields / being involved in something that doesn't provide a stable salary (arts, entrepreneurship) / did I mention start-ups? / etc
That norm is quickly going out of style at least
My wife would love nothing more than to raise the kids but making ends meet is proving a tough tradeoff
Another factor is rents and house prices. If everyone you are competing with for that house can pay the mortgage on two incomes, you aren't going to afford it on one. So that's economic necessity I guess.
You can't logically conclude that based on that one data point.
Jokes aside, it was a data point to illustrate a change that I know takes place also in other countries; that women account for an ever larger fraction of people with higher education. The number of families where the mother makes more money than the man is slowly increasing.
I think if you dig into the data for US universities, you'll find that women are underrepresented in high-paying STEM majors and over-represented in low-paying majors like Dance or Early Childhood Development or Pre-1860 Russian Literature. Until that changes, I don't think your prediction is likely to come to pass.
That sounds like a value judgement. What difference does it make?
Not convinced: "Among married-couple families with children, 96.8 percent had at least one employed parent, and 61.1 percent had both parents employed" -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/employment-in-families-wit...