You can’t survive or support a family with a single income these days.. It’s required for both partners to work.
Manufacturing jobs used to exist.
Manufacturing jobs used to exist in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a high school education existed in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that paid well and provided a pension and didn’t require high education existed in high numbers.
It isn’t always a choice, but often it is. Many people can live on one income but choose a lifestyle that requires two.
Not all of the US is a hot spot for high paid immigrants, yet. Displacement is a real thing. Not everyone can change states or nations to make the finances work out.
You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have, what food to eat, how much to spend on vacations, etc.
Hell, you can even choose where and what you do for work! What a country!
Many people will choose higher spending power with two incomes rather than take a step down to live on one.
The (mental) cost of moving is sometimes hard. Here are only two main things:
- you lose your support system (friends, family)
- you lose your time (and maybe cost) saving tricks/knowledge (where to go to buy things, medicine, …)
All these are not impossible to solve but they are way harder for single parent family.
Yet Detroit's unemployment rate is 3.8%. For comparison, New York's unemployment rate is 4.6% and San Francisco's unemployment rate is 4.0%.
See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.
> what food to eat
Have you heard of "food deserts"?
[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.
We also lived in what was barely not a food desert at that time, and we walked to the grocery store all the time. "Food desert" can mean it takes 10 minutes to walk to the store. Like for a low income urban census tract it means 0.5 miles. We go on afternoon walks 3-5x that every day.
I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
Won't. Some can't, but we can't tell how many.
If you leave this out of your response, do you believe that you're still conveying the same message?
I do.
Why didn’t women entering the workforce lead to growth and more jobs being created ?
If a family had to make X to live comfortable before, now you can do so with each of you making half that as long as it adds up to X. People shouldn’t settle for less, but they do even if only a few percent… where before people didn’t to the same degree because it had more immediate impact.
This in turn is one of the several market forces that has contributed to deflated wages.
In late 1960 we peaked with somewhere around 47% of households having children. It is now around 26%
In 1990 the number of married couples in the US started to flatline even though the population is up 40% since then.
But it also should put pressure on parents to stay together once the children are conceived.