I wonder if salaries were more competitive because there were less workers? If the cultural norm was to only have one parent work, then it seems like the supply of workers essentially doubles* if both parents work, leading to less competitive wages.
*not exactly, but essentially. Yes, not everyone is married etc.
This is what's known as the "lump of labour" fallacy - the idea that there's a fixed amount of work that needs to be done, therefore opening the job market to more workers necessarily lowers wages due to "increased supply".
The reality is that increasing the supply of workers doesn't necessarily mean increased competition for jobs. More people available to work means that more can be produced across the board; each additional worker can create opportunities for further additional workers. The pie can be grown at the same time that it's sliced more ways.
> each additional worker can create opportunities for further additional workers
By more people working, we created more opportunities for more people to work?
I think there is a fallacy within that "lump of labour fallacy". I'm not saying there is a fixed amount of work needed, but eventually you do run into economies of scale: less and less addional work is needed to support more people.
Hasn't cost of living and other expenses have increased faster than wage growth? With more jobs just for the sake of creating jobs, does each additional job pay the same or more?
I'm of the opinion that we need more opportunities for people to work less, so they can have more time for raising kids or persuing hobbies.
>By more people working, we created more opportunities for more people to work?
Yes, because more workers = more people with money = more people who stimulate production through spending.
The issue with the "economies of scale" argument is the same issue that the original lump of labour argument has - it assumes that there is a sensible upper bound on the amount of work people want done at any one time.
The only reason more efficient workers would lead to less work per worker is if the work to be done is bounded. What history shows is that instead, more efficient workers work the same amount and produce more, and the consumption of the product of that work is effectively unbounded.
For an example in tech: advancements in programming theory and practice over the last ~50 years have made it so that the modern programmer is easily able to produce the kind of programs that computers used 50 years ago in a fraction of the time it originally took to code them. Does this mean we need a fraction of the number of programmers compared to 50 years ago? No, because the improvements in efficiency have been completely offset by the demand for more complicated programs. In general, there doesn't seem to be any kind of bound on program complexity - the easier the programmer's job becomes, the greater their requirements become.
I’d put it on the other side, though after correcting for inflation maybe it’s the same thing depending on the sector.
If you’re buying a house with two incomes, you can outbid a couple with one income by a factor of two-ish. You don’t need more houses to keep up with more workers per house, so you just see prices get bid up. Eventually a house costs 1.7 full time incomes because that’s what the couple you’re bidding against probably has.
The salaries were not more competitive than they are now. Families who raised children on one income back then quite simply expected and did with much less than single income families do today, not to mention with how much two income families make today.
I'm on my phone and I'm having a hard time finding a single source that shows this, and it's possible that I can't find it because it doesn't exist, but I have found that housing prices have outpaced wages, car prices have outpaced wages, and tuition prices have outpaced wages (though tuition prices is a whole different issue). Real Wages, which accounts for inflation, have barely budged.
It seems like both parents work to pay for child costs that exist because both parents work.
Real Wages, which accounts for inflation, have barely budged.
If real wages have barely budged, it means precisely that it is exactly as affordable to buy a basket of goods as it used to be. You can't argue both that all costs have outpaced wages, and that the real wage hasn't budged, because this is just logically contradictory.
It seems like both parents work to pay for child costs that exist because both parents work.
Yes, it is often the case that the income of one parent is just about enough to cover the cost of child care necessary to enable this work. This is usually justified by positing that this is necessary for the career growth of the second parent. This makes perfect sense, but my point is that people used to expect less in the past, and one of the things that they didn't expect was good career growth of both parents.
*not exactly, but essentially. Yes, not everyone is married etc.