Generational standards of living

[GGG]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

I have not thought deeply about this nor looked at your links, but is the following possible:

1. Could demographics explain why median family income is up? Just spitballing we've had boomers in their peak earning years and starting to leave the workforce, but never in history have there been more managerial and professional positions in the workforce...

Say 50 years ago 60% of people worked menial jobs, 5% white collar in those companies, and 35% were professional positions. Today it might be more like 40% menial, 20% white collar in those companies, and 40% professional? Totally spitballing the numbers...I suppose you could argue that many of today's "marketing coordinators" would have been working an assembly line before. And thinking out loud, female workforce participation is probably an even bigger impact

2. Housing costs would still disproportionately affect younger people, even if it's true that all wages have outpaced inflation. Boomers had to direct comparitively very very little to pay off the back end of their mortgages, freeing them up vast resources for other consumption now. Of course current millenials/Gen X should get this advantage down the road, but who knows if it will be as pronounced? It seems boomers certainly benefited more from this than their parents

Just thinking out loud...the 'boomer advantage' might be heavily skewing a lot of stats?

It certainly might be suffering from an average not really being average.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1...101%2C20210101

Here is some data to support your assertion. It has median income growth by couples by age. It doesn’t consider dependants and it doesn’t have seniors. But if you set it to go back to 2000 you get that young couples 25-34 had growth of 88% and older couples 45-54 had income growth of 94% and young and old singles 72%.

So some evidence that families starting out have seen lower wage growth. This could just be longer average education though skewing the average or the impact of more two income families when people have children. The older singles and younger singles did not show an affect.

I thought one of the stats can tables had it broken down by seniors, families with dependents and those without but I can’t find it.

[CliffFletcher]

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the mass entry of women into university and the workforce. It created a new class of household - the dual-income professional - that did not exist before the 80s. An upper-middle-class household with income of 180k can afford to spend much more on housing than their counterpart household a generation or two earlier that had one professional salary, or maybe one professional salary and a service industry salary.

This economic class has driven up housing prices and widened inequality. Because of assortative mating, the income advantage of skilled professionals gets doubled, and households with two working-class incomes - let alone a single income - can’t compete. Then there’s the keeping-up-with-the-Jones impact. Families where mom and dad earn 60k each come to see the lifestyle of families where mom and dad earn 90k each - the trips to Mexico, regular dinners at Earls, the new SUV every five years, expensive gymnastics and hockey programs - as just baseline middle-class norms.

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the mass entry of women into university and the workforce. It created a new class of household - the dual-income professional - that did not exist before the 80s. An upper-middle-class household with income of 180k can afford to spend much more on housing than their counterpart household a generation or two earlier that had one professional salary, or maybe one professional salary and a service industry salary.

This economic class has driven up housing prices and widened inequality. Because of assortative mating, the income advantage of skilled professionals gets doubled, and households with two working-class incomes - let alone a single income - can’t compete. Then there’s the keeping-up-with-the-Jones impact. Families where mom and dad earn 60k each come to see the lifestyle of families where mom and dad earn 90k each - the trips to Mexico, regular dinners at Earls, the new SUV every five years, expensive gymnastics and hockey programs - as just baseline middle-class norms.

Elizabeth Warren's book, the two income trap

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...th-warren-book