No, it was never normal for one person with a high school education to support a family of five comfortably in the US

The ever-present terrible take people have on the American economy

Remember when Homer Simpson could get a job at a nuclear plant and find himself and his family comfortably seated in the American middle class? Or how about The Brady Bunch? A normal American family with one man supporting all the kids. What a shame that average joes can’t live that life anymore. I never actually watched The Brady Bunch, save for one episode, so I don’t know if the wife worked or whatever, but nobody else watched it either, anyway.

Here's a link to the relevant post: https://np.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/15ghog1/the_american_dream_is_dead/

I feel the need to explain something to the generation that does not remember, or never saw, a world where one person with a high school education could support a family of 5 comfortably.

This was real. For millions of US families. It was *normal.*

It was stolen from you.

I don’t think 90% of the people reading this need it to be shown to them that this idea of American life is wrong, but apparently, thousands of people spending their time on Reddit think it's right, so let’s dive in. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to make the assumption that “normal” means occurring at or close to the median for continuous variables like income, or in other cases where the variable in question is discontinuous, occurring for a plurality of Americans.

Incidentally, this idea of American life was directly contradicted in a paper I read for a class I took on poverty in America during my last semester of college. The relevant excerpt from this paper, written by historian Linda Gordon, says “there was never a time in U.S. history when the majority of men were able to support a wife and children single-handedly.” This statement cites three sources, but all of them were written pre-Great Depression, and usually, it’s the time spanning from 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that people fawn over, so I’m going to look elsewhere for more information.

First, take a look at the real median personal income in the US, a measure of the income received by the middle American if you line everyone up in order of income, adjusted for the average price level. This contradicts the narrative in the post: albeit with busts and booms, the “normal” American has been making more and more money since 1974, the earliest year recorded in the chart, adjusted for purchasing power. Even if there was a time when the typical American with a high school education could support a family of five with just their income and a handy housewife, that same American can now make even more money in the modern day…assuming they’re willing to (potentially) get a college degree, depending on the industry they go into. This chart doesn’t look exclusively at people with only a high school diploma, and I’m guessing you’ve heard about the growing income gap between people with and without a college degree. It already seems doubtful that it's gotten harder for the typical American to pull off the lifestyle described in the linked post, but we're going to have to look elsewhere for data specifically on the earnings of those with just a high school education.

The St. Louis Fed has data on this going back to 1979. Between then and 2022, median nominal earnings among those with a high school education and no college degree have grown by about 242.6%, while the price level as measured by the CPI has grown by about 303.14%. Looks like we can no longer dismiss this particular single-earner idea out of hand: wages haven't kept pace with prices for those without a college degree.

Not so fast. If you took a macro class and remember its content well, you'll know the CPI has its flaws. For one, it's calculated without adjusting for substitutions made by consumers. That's not the case for the PCE index, which we can apply directly to our data thanks to the magic of FRED. For simplicity's sake, I've indexed both earnings and the PCE to 1979 and divided the earnings index by the price index to show the change in real earnings in a way that can be easily understood in percentage terms. If earnings kept pace with prices exactly, the formula would just yield 100/100 = 1 in the final date. If they didn't, we'd get a fraction less than one. What do we see instead?

The median worker with only a high school diploma earns about 3.663% more in 2022 than in 1979. There have clearly been some rough times for this sort of person, but at the very least this data doesn't describe a downward trend.

But let's focus on the point: was there ever a time when it was normal for a single earner to comfortably support a family of five with just a high school education? To our misfortune, there isn't a dataset looking specifically at the earnings of those with only a high school diploma adjusted for the cost of supporting a family of five over time. Putting together that data for every single year on record would be very time-consuming, so I’ll focus on 1979 before doing anything else.

The nominal median weekly wage in this data, in 1979, was $249. With one week of vacation time, that translates to $12,699 a year, but I’ll steelman the opposing idea a little and go with the 52-week figure of $12,948. Now all we need is the typical cost of living for a family of five in 1979. This kind of data is surprisingly hard to find, but I did find data from the BLS that includes the median nominal cost of living for a family of four in 1979. One might object that this measure includes the cost of entertainment, but I think it's fair to interpret “comfortably” as meaning “with a reasonable amount of money spent on leisure, for the time.” That comes out to $16,129, exceeding the calculated median salary.

So no, it looks like it wasn’t normal for a single high school graduate to provide a comfortable standard of living to a family of five in 1979. The trouble here is that we can’t be sure the median earner with a high school degree was both 1. making the same as the median earner with a high school degree and two kids to take care of and 2. paying for the same basket of goods. But we’d have to make some great leaps from our limited data to assume it was really typical for one high school graduate to take care of a family of five comfortably: the budget we found was about 24.6% higher than the calculated salary, and we’re talking about somebody with three kids to take care of, not the two kids in the four-person family this budget was calculated for. Unless someone else responds to this with better (and contradictory) data, we should be able to reject the idea in the post I linked with a fair amount of certainty.

But maybe we just need to look further back. 1979 wasn’t that long ago, and as we all know, everything started to get worse before then, in 1971. So how about 1960? What was life like for the typical family in the US then?

I don't have the data to provide a clear picture of that time, but I do have data on the prevalence of single-earner married-couple households in the US going back to 1967. (Props to /u/BernankesBeard for sharing a link to this data with me.) Back then, only about 35.6% of married-couple families had just the husband working, while 43.6% of them had both the husband and wife working. Just as described by Linda Gordon, the single-earner picture of families in the US doesn't accurately characterize the 60s (or at least the late 60s).

Nothing that I have shared here directly contradicts the idea that it used to be normal for a high school graduate in the US to support a family of five comfortably without anyone else bringing in income. And you might extrapolate backward from that BLS data on married-couple families to conclude it used to be normal for the husband to be the only worker. But even then, which type of family do you think tended to have three kids more often: the one with just one earner, or the one with multiple? It’s more likely that the three-child households in this data were concentrated among two-earner households, meaning it wasn't “normal” for a single earner to support a family of five back then. More likely, it was normal for two earners to support a family of five, because families with more kids need more money for them to be fed and clothed.

Limitations aside, it isn’t reasonable to look at the data we have and come to the conclusion that the idyllic economy the denizens of /r/facepalm wish they had used to be real in the United States. You have to make a lot of big assumptions to reach that conclusion:

1. Single-earner households were more common before 1967 than during that time, AND

2. A significant number of those households had three or more kids, AND

3. The earners in those households made more money than suggested by the data, AND/OR

4. A five-person household's budget would have been less expensive than suggested by the data, OR

5. The data is fabricated by THEM

Assumption 5 is my personal favorite. I wouldn't call this post conclusive, but until we get a better analysis, maybe we should stop getting so nostalgic for a time that, by all that we can tell, really didn't exist.