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A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.
You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.
If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.
In many places, starter single family homes run about $2M. You're not going to be able to afford that with a single half decent job.
You might say that's a choice to live in such an area, and sure, it is. But the idea that you can just get up and move from it to rural Iowa exacerbates other problems: the disintegration of the extended family, the decline of friends, etc.
It's also worth digging into what we mean by "most of the country." If you're weighting by acreage, I agree, most of the country can be lived in on a single half decent job. If you're weighting by population distribution (more appropriate IMO), that shifts the needed income much higher. There are still realistic places to move (e.g. in the Sunbelt), but for those you need a single decent job, not a single half-decent job. Weighting regions by GDP contribution (which has some arguments for it) shifts us solidly into the two income requirement.
In very few places in which a miniscule portion of the US population lives. I have the misfortune of being one of the rare unlucky few to live in such a place. And even then that's by cutting your $2 million starter home figure to a more realistic ~$1 million. Even in San José a starter home is much closer to 1 than to 2 million. Almost every American has much cheaper housing than in San José.
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You could live in a trailer- much cheaper than a single family house. Or you could live in not California or the NYC metro area. Kansas City isn't the end of the world. The majority of the country doesn't have $2 million dollar starter homes by any metric.
You can live in the NYC metro area, just not Short Hills or Essex Fells or Alpine or whatever other hyper-expensive example you can find.
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Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.
Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?
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Many? I live in an expensive area of the country, northern New Jersey. It looks like that's true for Millburn, NJ -- one of the most expensive places in the area. It's not true for a lot of adjacent similar places. You don't have to go to to rural Iowa to get cheaper housing than that.
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I wish, but it's not. Just to get the ordinary "get married, buy a house, have kids" life (and not two cars etc.) you need both partners in the couple working fulltime or forget it.
Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.
If you've saved up ahead of time, or don't mind living in a bad part of town with a bad school.
This is what I'm talking about.
Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.
Sure. I just agree the WASP lite take is directionally correct. My mom homeschooled my brother and I, then worked as a public school teacher when I was old enough to leave the house and go to college. It would have been a bit better if she'd gotten a job when I was a teen, but it wasn't disastrous. But, also, she's smart and conscientious. My father is reasonably smart, not as conscientious, but perfectly willing to read books and go to church book club for entertainment instead of more expensive activities. People who are smart, conscientious, not given to envy, and generally somewhat virtuous are still living that lifestyle today. My family is to some extent, but it's not great, we need to get out of it sooner rather than later.
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Is this an Irish thing? I think @JTarrou is right about the US. Let's do a back of the envelope calculation for ireland.
So after those expenses you've got about 1400 euro a month to spend on everything else. Doesn't seem so bad?
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