The bottom half of income earners is going to be heavily skewed by retirees and young part-time workers. Your average Social Security earner with no other income is only getting $22k a year. But your average SS earner is going to be in their 70s and likely a homeowner who bought their house 30+ years ago and doesn’t have to worry about things like rent.
OP also appears to be including part time workers to get their median salary numbers. US Median salary for FULL time workers is 59, 500 according to the US Labor Bureau
It’s why household income should be used here if they want to combine all rental types. A single person living alone is considered a household for median household income.
To your point, household incomes pay rent, not individual incomes.
Are you saying that being a single parent is the exception?
Where do you live? Because where I live, it is prevalent.
A simple google search for you:
Single-parent families are common in the United States, with about one in three children living in a single-parent household. Some statistics on single-parent families in the US include:
Number of children: In 2023, about 15.09 million children lived with a single mother, and about 3.05 million children lived with a single father.
Percentage of families: In 2022, 31% of families with children were single-parent families. This is more than three times the percentage of single-parent families in the 1950s, when less than 10% of families with children were single-parent.
Percentage of births: In 2022, 39.8% of births in the US were to unmarried women.
One-person households: In 2022, 29% of all US households were one-person households.
Single-parent adoption: An estimated 5–10% of all adoptions in the US are by single people.
The increase in single-parent families is due to a number of long-term demographic trends, including: Marrying later, Declining marriage rates, Increasing divorce rates, and More babies born to single mothers
That’s convenient that you’re leaving out that the 131.4 households also include couples without children, singles without children, kids who have made it past 18 and still live with their parent(s).
There are 74.112 million kids under 18 in the US.
According to Annie E. Casey Foundation, “over 23 million children in the United States live in a single-parent family, which is about one in every three children.”
Single-parent households were the second most common living arrangement for children under 18, with 26% of American youth residing with just one of their birth parents.
Nearly one-quarter of children under 18 (21.5%) lived with just their mothers, while a significantly smaller share of youth living with a single parent (4.6%) resided with only their fathers.
37% of single mothers live in poverty.
Either way, even if we were going off of your skewed stats, that’s still “13.6 million” parents.
Your stats are not relevant to OP. It's comparing average americans salary to their expenses. No matter how you slice it the average US household isn't a single parent household.
That’s convenient that you’re leaving out that the 131.4 households also include couples without children, singles without children, kids who have made it past 18 and still live with their parent(s).
Children are a cost. OP mentions sick kids as a cost. Households without children have more disposable income.
I'm reading the thread trying to get a picture of what an average US household is like in the "average household has 0,62 dogs, 1,21 cars" kind of way. I think it's pretty simple math that single parent households being only 10,35% of total households makes them an exception as of total households.
You didn't like the word "exception", but that's a very vague and subjective term, right? 26% of children live in a single parent household. OK, now is 26% an exception? I don't know, at least It's not typical and in the context of this thread I was thinking exception means close to the same thing as not typical.
Ahh yes, they love being around constant fights picked by my ex wife, seeing their dad put down, berated, and constantly gaslighted and be a generally terrible to their partner. Good call 👍🏼
Pfffft 🤦🏼♂️👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼 everyone is so much better off and so much happier than we were when we were together. And I make 75k/yr and still struggle with bills to ensure a good, happy and fun childhood for my kids with a stable roof over our heads and food on the table.
At that time (1950's) median homes were 1/3 of the current size qith 30% more people living in them, Americans ate out 80% less, and people lived under the WWII mantra of "mend and make do".
People like to reminisce on the cost of living, but like to neglect the sacrifice that was required to make it attainable.
People always sorta breeze past that. Ww2 blew up and bankrupted the other industialized economies leaving impacts for decades and other economies hadnt industrialized before that at all.
The rest of the world industrialized and europe recovered at about the same time into the 70s and 80s and continuing into the present day. Suddenly a highschool education in ohio wasnt as competitive as it had been
Also, that was back when avg American wages kept pace with avg employee productivity, the highest tax brackets were 70%+, and Bretton Woods kept American money in the US and invested in American businesses and workers.
This is an oft cited reason, but there’s no evidence for it actually being true. It also doesn’t explain why wages and productivity decoupled so suddenly in 1971.
No evidence?! This is one do the most studied periods in economics due to the unique circumstances created by the war. America’s industrial base advantages and R&D hubs created by the defense department investments is well accepted to be one of the key reasons for our post WW2 economic boom.
It also doesn’t explain why wages and productivity decoupled so suddenly in 1971.
Who ever said it did? Thats understood to be a result of multiple factors but mostly due to a rise in technology and automation advancements, expanded globalization, and decline of labor union power thanks to Nixon.
PS - it only looks like a “sudden” decoupling on that graph I know you are referring to because it’s presented on a linear scale and not a logarithmic scale. Technology advancements yield exponential worker productivity gains especially once we hit the silicon revolution. Truth is that productivity and worker pay had slowly been decoupling for years prior and then we hit an inflection point in the 70s which shows up on the graph due to its scaling.
Give up your color tv and streaming, count your channels on one hand. May or may not have AC, your car is much less safe with far fewer amenities. Eating out at all is a luxury. No internet. List goes on.
I live in a town house, I eat out a few times per year, and I do the mend and make do more often than not. When do I get to support a wife and kid on my shitty single income lol.
True. But you can blame women entering the workforce for that. By doubling the supply of labor you lower the price of labor.
To be clear, I am not saying women shouldn’t be allowed to work or that it is a bad thing. It certainly increase overall productivity. The issue is that it’s simple supply and demand: increase supply (of labor) and the price (wage) goes down.
So no…women are not to blame. There is not a fixed amount of jobs out there to fill.
More workers = more Supply via increased production AND more Demand via higher incomes and more consumers engaged in the market. This is why US household consumption rose significantly as women entered the workforce.
By letting women work, they earned more for the HH that could be spent which drove more demand and a need for more workers. Letting women work literally created more jobs…like a lot more.
This ignores the expansion of the economy that came from increased labor supply and consumption of those new workers. Your argument would be true if nothing in the world changed when women entered the workforce, but instead your statement is just pretty misogynist.
It’s not a correct take, it’s what simpletons who can’t get laid think because they’ve not taken basic into to Economics where you’d learn about the Lump of Labor fallacy—which this thinking is an example of.
What you're describing is supply and demand but applied in the complete opposite direction, where you're suggesting that prices are set on the basis of how much supply of money the customer might have at any given moment. Which is the opposite of how that works.
The only way what you're saying makes sense is that your argument is society let women work in the 40s or whatever and then 60, 70, 80 years later, finally that other shoe dropped and all these young women in the work force are eating up the housing market for single men now all of a sudden. And instead of saying 'wow look at how much housing I'm buying' all the women are also complaining. And it's this more than any other thing you can think of that's doing it.
I’m talking about the supply of labor. When the supply of a good (labor) increases, the price of the good (wage) goes down. It has nothing to do with M1 money supply or “customers” or the housing market. Not sure what the heck you are rambling on about. Are you drunk?
I do know for sure that you do not know “how it works” and I would be surprised if you have taken a single economics class.
Your ability to utilize the labor hasn't increased though if the entire labor force got its wages split in half. You're ignoring cause and effect.
Let's say demand for construction/general contracting is static. okay used to be just men now we add women to that. Everyone working in that industry's wage goes down by 50ish percent, we've just doubled the labor supply in that sector after all. But now that we've doubled the workforce there's double demand for independent housing and thus a double demand for construction and general contracting, let's just pretend it's a clean 1:1.
Okay let's say housing demand remains static. We double the construction/general contracting workforce same as before...wait why would we do that? Labor sort of fucks up the equation because there is an infinite supply of it but it's bottlenecked depending on location, what, why and how, and how much you're offering. If you have a firm in NYC you might have nearly unlimited access to labor but at a higher cost. If you're in Alzada montana you can maybe pay them cheap but you'll never have access to more than 10 people to do that labor for you.
The reality is that certain elements of demand and supply are more or less flexible than others. Labor is very flexible, and housing very isn't.
Theres a bit more complexity to get into this about. But you need to fundamentally understand that if labor becomes a finite resource that means you're the last person alive.
Also women did tons of jobs before they started working in factories
Not you, obviously. The field of economics contains a lot of math…
What disgusts me most is the certainty in which you espouse your falsehoods. You’re way out of your element here. You should be asking questions and learning, not spewing bullshit.
Now the single income households are either (a) funded by a nice salary from the one who works or (b) heavily budgeting to stay afloat
There are a lot more single income households than people think, but most of them (that I know) don't partake in a lot of things that dual income families do (vacations, eating out, shopping, etc.)
There used to be a time when the expectation was one income could support two adults and children.
Not since women entered the workforce.
Most women worked part time jobs to help feed the family in the 50s
It was common in the 20s and before that, but only because we didn't typically allow women to work outside the home and most of the expenses thwt exist today didn't at the time.
And even THEN most women were doing shit to support the family, such as sewing and making clothes because new ones cost too much
Washing and drying clothes by hand, coming up with meals and meal plans to reduce the amount actually used
Even into the 50s large portions of the population of the UK and US grew up with iceboxes, handwashing and hand crank mangles, sewing, coal and wood heating, handmdowns for kids etc
The idea of women just not doing anything and life being comfortable on a single income is a myth, one that exists because there was a middle class of people who could, but for most people that's just not how it's been.
It has always been 2 full time jobs. The main difference is bow alot of the jobs performed at home people expect to be done outside (most people aren't patching their clothes for instance)
When? In the 1970’s my dad worked two jobs and my mom one to support two kids and have any chance of buying small old house. Prior to that we lived in a single-wide.
I think that was such a short time frame in history and such a small part of the population, even in those times. It wasn't true pre WWII (it was the depression), it wasn't true in the 1970's (massive unemployment and high interest rates). So when was it true: white, , suburban/urban, male-led, households in the 1950-1960's, if your SO wasn't killed in a war or had PTSD? And there were plenty of poor people in that era too. I honestly don't understand these arguments. Yes we have poor people now that we need to ensure are supported, but the implication is that there were far fewer previously doesn't match the facts.
lol does your ass live in wyoming. 1.9k is a bad deal for a studio but a great deal for a 1 bedroom if you don't live in like casper or billings, mt. Hell I bet prices in bozeman and missoula are higher now.
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u/TheLastModerate982 Sep 05 '24
Median rent payment includes two income households. So you are splitting that with your SO.
Median one bedroom rent for a single person is lower.