You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kep out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.