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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

Is society better off? Honest question, you used to be able to support a family of four with a single 9-5.

My great grandfather supported a family of 7 making brooms. He didn’t own the broom factory. He was an employee, and was paid by the broom. My great grandmother stayed at home to raise 5 children. There was even enough to lend to the local grocery store, apparently. This was at the turn of the 20th century in Canada.

He would have probably worked 12+ hours a day, his children could have died of a toenail infection, their teeth would be falling out early, they could have been deformed by various diseases, many children died young or at birth, etc, etc.

I would never choose to raise a family in that period.

sure, but lower jobs there were getting you further than engineering jobs now

And that support was a family of 4-6 in a 1200 sq ft house, eating out <6x a year, vacations were picnics at the local beach, one car that you did your own maintenance on, one tv, only one set of good clothes (your Sunday outfit), et cetera. Most places in the US can still support a family at that same level of expenditure on an average income.

The difference is the social structures supporting that kind of life have disappeared.

That exact same 1200 sq ft house is now 300k in the Midwest, if it's even for sale at all, and it's likely a rental for $2.5k/month.

You can't get the same 1200 sq ft detached house in the suburbs on an average single income because suburbs have urbanized. But you can usually get a 1200 sq ft apartment in an urban area or a detached house in a rural area.

In many cases it's illegal or commercially unviable to build said 1200 sqft house.

It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)

Outside of the city cores in the US, homes are built as castles. We have large refrigerators and freezers so that we can amortize our trips to the grocery store by maintaining our own inventory. In my family, we plan the menu a week ahead of time and shop for it in advance. Missing an ingredient means a minimum 1 hour round trip to the big box grocery store by car when it all adds up, which is enough to scuttle an evening's plans. There is 1 smaller store, but it's barely closer -- the main savings is less time walking across a giant parking lot -- and it's absolutely pointless; the only things they can afford to carry are sugary trash and stimulants and intoxication-related supplies. The big box stores use their scale to monopolize the lower profit margin "actual food" category.

When I briefly lived in Paris, we had a laughably small refrigerator. But it was about a 5 minute walk to a neighborhood grocery store, so we effectively used their fridge instead. Which also provided human contact in a way driving to and shopping at a big box store really cannot.

Some of this is just the difference between living in a city vs the suburbs. But not all: even in the US cities, my impression is that you'll have a large fridge and shop at the big stores, even if you take public transit to get there, because the small stores can't compete on staple items.

We're in a path-dependent hell where losing a parking space is felt as a mortal insult, while losing the need for a parking space feels pie-in-the-sky, an unobtainable fantasy. There's an entire synergistic system of dependence on scale and cars and "self-sufficiency" (that masks the infrastructure dependency that it requires).

</rant>

Indeed, this is why I moved to the Netherlands. But the US has a severe sickness at its heart that puts life behind an increasingly difficult paywall.

More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.

How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.

> The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either.

Far, far more people and the same amount of land.

> Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist.

Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.

> Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.

The average person is doing this? Do you have sources/stats or are you just going on vibes, or are you looking at people in your (likely non-average) peer group?

Edit: A source I found cites 130 million US delivery app users in 2026, which is a little over 1/3 of Americans. Given that some non-users will call in orders (pizza, Chinese, etc) then it’s plausible that over 50% of people do order delivery from time to time. That said, it’s hard to find good statistics on how much the median person spends on delivery given the likely inflated numbers promoted by delivery app companies. One source said almost 50% preferred ordering delivery through third party apps like DoorDash; if so then how are only 1/3 of Americans actually users of those apps?

Given the numbers on consumer financial stress it’s likely that there is less food delivery happening right now.

No shot. As a general rule of thumb, most Americans, regardless of income, are also in a small mountain of debt. The rich and the poor alike max out their salaries with debt payments and then pile up living expenses on credit. Since that is "fake money" to so many people already, they overspend and convince themselves that using Klarna for a burrito bowl is a reasonable use of resources.

According to USDA average spending on restaurants is around $4k/yr. So close to 10% of average income.

Does that have any bearing on the experiences of those in the lower four wealth quintiles though ?

The trouble with averages is they don't always say much that is accurate about most people .. it all rests on distributions.

Right, you need the median numbers. HNW people are likely skewing the mean.

Buying prepared food is not a bad thing, it's cheaper than eating out and many people are busy. I live with a lot of roommates and this is what most people are doing. I'm just saying this is not the same division of labor we had before. My mom worked part time and was a part time house wife, she cooked meals for the family from scratch. Parents today are more likely to both work full time and outsource more food preparation. Part of the reason one income could support a family in the 60s is that they were buying raw ingredients and the stay at home parent was doing more house work.

Average families are very much buying prepared food but it’s making us obese.

So: tight knit families, fresh home cooked meals. Sounds like improvements.

Agree that no washing machines outright sucks.

You could still do that if you are ok living at 1950 standard of living. Average income back then was $26k in today’s dollars. Even low paying jobs today are better than that.

I’m sure you will say something about housing costing more, which it does. But also many things cost less, such as food and clothing.

Can safely disregard everything you say as soon as you say food costs less than it used to.

All the ersatz food that comprises most of the grocery store shelves may very well be cheaper. This does not make it a better value.

point me at the apartments or houses you can afford today on a single, minimum-wage income with 40 hours a week. I dont care if its 1950s standard vs todays standard.

You still can if you want to live like you're in the 60s. My parents grew up eating bread with dripping for most meals, meat since they were farmers, some inexpensive vegetables, not much variety. Houses were half the size and had twice as many people in them, my grandparents did any building or expansions themselves. Public schools with free tuition. No overseas holidays, eating out once a month max. The urban poor had it much worse.

You just can't live an upper-middle class on a single income unless you have a good job, but you couldn't back then either.

You can't really live like you're in the 60s. Food and accommodation and other basic costs are going up all the time. Young people in entry-level jobs can barely support themselves while renting a room with flatmates.

Standards of living are going up regardless if we like it or not, and costs as well.

Shareholders = society. The rest of us are just the help

Yes. Choose a time and country in history where you would like to be raising a family now as a "median person"? I bet it is within the last 50 years, and specifically in one of the developed nations and probably during the 1970-2000 period. People rarely would choose to go back further.

You can thank neoliberalism

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