If that be true, what does it say about the cost of living now versus then? Perhaps the incidental expenses have reduced, but if the bigger fundamentals of living have gone up, then it’s not simply a matter of just giving up the most modern conveniences in order to reduce a family’s budget.
So, it sounds like that means that transportation costs have increased for middle Americans, also, since the typical job isn’t local to where they live.
And that brings up the issue of having multiple cars; is it a modern indulgence that families tend to have cars for each eligible driver, or a requirement for modern life?
If in the 50s a second car was considered a luxury (since the wife could drop off her husband at work and then run her errands before picking him up at the of the day), but today it’s essential in order for a worker to be able to get to their far off job while still enabling the other parent to handle day to day functions around the home, maybe it’s not so simple to declare that people could return to a simpler time if they wanted. A one car family might simply not be feasible for a typical modern middle class lifestyle.
Of course, since we are on a message board, we all think home internet service is a necessity - but it’s really not. I could manage fine without it, and I know plenty of people who do. Not every job allows WFH and plenty of people don’t need any access to work email when they are at work and even more don’t need it when they are home. I could absolutely get by using only free wifi in restaurants and stores on a phone. There’s still broadcast TV and since I live in a place with good public transit, plenty of households have no cars. My house is around 1000 square feet and was built before the 1940s. And it’s the house that makes it impossible to live a 50’s lifestyle on one income - I’m told the houses on my block went for around $14K in 1950. * That’s about $172K today - my house is currently worth about $600K. (Which is why my neighborhood is changing so much - the working class people who lived here when I moved in can no longer afford it)
* I’m not sure if it’s accurate, but if anything they were actually less than $14K , not more.
I don’t think the garment factory jobs were decent paying, though. Do/did they pay more than retail/service jobs? Maybe - although seamstress jobs where I live currently pay about $15-21/hr and minimum wage is $15/hr.
The more I think about it, the more that I think that this issue serves as the basic reason why people cannot live the lifestyle they did in the mid 20th century.
If you have such a high cost for buying a home, then it is more likely to demand two incomes. That in turn eliminates having somebody taking care of household needs (like cooking, cleaning, and rearing the kids), necessitating additional expenses, like prepared foods, modern technologies, and childcare.
Or, in pursuit of more affordable housing, people end up moving to more remote locations, far removed from where they need to work or get other things done. That increases transportation costs.
And nowadays, even the far flung places are pricey, so here we are.
This is an important point to reiterate. Yes, it is certainly the case that a family can live on one decent income today, as described and testified by other posters. But in doing so, are they experiencing the same level of “quality of life” as someone in those mythical earlier generations? That, to me, is a compelling discussion. One frequently hears younger people decrying that they can’t live as their parents did. Or even older people observing that there is no way they could afford to buy a home in the neighborhood they currently live in. Those are quality of life issues. The same job does not put a person in the same status as it did in those earlier times.
I couldn’t buy my house today. I mean, i could because i could sell this one, but i am so grateful i bought a house in the late 90s, because housing around here skyrocketed after that. My younger friends have much tougher housing choices than i had, despite having more lucrative employment.
“Hey, I have a decent income, I want to live in a decent neighborhood in a decent house, in the area I grew up in. Just like mom and dad did.” If the answer to that is that you have to move far away, then you aren’t achieving your desires.
Meanwhile, a zero-car lifestyle is near-impossible for a typical modern middle-class family, unless that family lives in one of the few cities that still has widespread and reliable public transportation (and can afford that city’s attendant high cost of living).
If you’re going to look at life in the 1950s and 1960s, you can’t just look at the average, you have to look at the bottom too. In 1960, 10.3% of households didn’t have a toilet and another 6.5% lacked some other element of “complete plumbing” like hot water or a bath/shower with running water. 21.5% households didn’t have a phone. (There were actually more households with televisions than telephones, something I wouldn’t have expected. I suppose payphones were more convenient than payvisions would have been, though.)
It wasn’t common , but it also wasn’t just NYC. NYC probably had the most both in percentage and numbers but there are at least parts of other cities where you could live manage without a car if you both worked and lived within the area covered by public transit. This is a few years old, but probably still fairly accurate and my guess was the numbers wouldn’t have been higher in the past, not lower.
A higher percentage of household spending goes to housing. Housing has also gotten larger while households have gotten smaller. I’ve seen data on new housing size, but not on how total housing stock has changed over time. I suspect the new housing data show a bigger change than the mean or median.
Broomstick and others have expressed my thoughts better than I could. It is possible for most folk today to do without many of what we consider necessities. Doing so, however, requires accepting some lack of convenience/choice - and resistance to marketing/peer pressure.
You can buy a modest home/rent a modest apartment in many areas, You can use broadcast TV, and avail yourself of the many services available at libraries including internet, movie and game rentals, and - of course - reading material. Drive an old car - or live where you can use public transportation. Cook your own foods using unprocessed ingredients. And get the cheapest pay-as-you-go cellphone.
It CAN be done if you wish to. The more flexibility and convenience you demand, the more it is going to cost you. If you want a big house, you may end up moving further from the city center, which will involve more transportation costs, etc.
My parents paid $50/month rent. Know what $50/month got you? Half of a tiny house that started out with six tiny rooms.
Food? Yes, we made it all ourselves. I never had pizza or chinese until I was in college.
Cars? Always used. When I moved out I had a series of even lousier used cars that broke down constantly, leaving me on the side of the road. No cell phones then, of course. You walked until you found a pay phone.
Vacations? We took one when I was in high school. We visited out-of-town relatives once as well, but I was too young to remember.
We didn’t go to movies. We didn’t go out to anything. Yes, we did have a television. I got a color tv later. In the 1980s.
My dream when I was growing up was to live like the families the OP talks of. We had a cousin who lived in a suburb. They had a six room house, too, but also a big sun porch! I wanted to be middle class.
Of course no one wants to live like that anymore. The 50s and 60s weren’t halcyon days. They were the years you suffered through so your kids could have it better. Never cherrypick the past just for the good memories. Never trade better for worse. Never give up progress. Luxury is a luxury. Embrace it.
I graduated from high school and started college in 1970. I grew up in a struggling working-class family in a rural area. I never went to pizza places or Chinese places either to eat there or to pick up a meal there until I entered college. My mother a few times when I was high-school-age bought pizza in a grocery store and cooked it. Pizza in general was not a typical dish for most Americans until the late 1960s. The first American chain pizza restaurants were open in the mid-1960s. Up to that point if you wanted to eat pizza in a restaurant you had to go to certain restaurants in certain neighborhoods in big cities with a significant Italian-American population. There’s a 1956 movie called Baby Doll set in a small Mississippi town. It was filmed in the last few weeks of 1955. The director decided to actually film most of it in a small Mississippi town and cast some local people as the extras and actors in small roles in it.
There’s a scene in it set in a bar in that small town where the locals are eating pizza. When I saw the movie sometime in the past few years I immediately thought, “This is ridiculous, since nobody in rural Mississippi ate pizza in 1955.” I did some searching online and found a comment by someone who was the grandson of one of the locals who appeared in that scene in the bar. He said that his grandfather told him that the bar scene was one of the few that was not filmed in the town. He said that his grandfather told him that it was filmed in a movie studio in a big city with a significant proportion of Italian-Americans. They needed to get some food for the people in the scene to eat as they talked in the scene. They got some pizza. He said that his grandfather said that it was the first time he’d ever eaten pizza.
My mother was born and grew up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago in the 1930s / 1940s. Her ethnicity was German / Dutch.
She used to tell the story of her and some high school pals wanting to go out for Italian food in another nearby suburb that was predominantly ethnic Italian. This would have been in 1949 or 1950.
Her mother was simply mystified that anyone not ethnically Italian would want to eat such a thing. Or that any child of hers would want go to such a place. “But that’s not our food?!” was her plaintive response. This was in Chicago. In 1950. Not in Bumfuck, Mississippi.
When land is at a premium, developers make more money with big, expensive houses than they would for moderate houses. That’s why they have to be forced to provide even a modicum of affordable housing.
The growth of the suburbs meant that more and more houses are far from public transit, even in the East. That means cars are required either to get to work or to get to a rail stop. In the '50s you had the traditional commuter from Connecticut to NY, who might not even have needed a car to get to the train station.
And lets not forget college debt. Not an issue in the '50s - either people didn’t go to college, or went to inexpensive state colleges. Even top private colleges were a lot cheaper then than they are now.
My semester tuition at MIT was about 10% of an offer I got from a company after I graduated (which I didn’t take.) Very few people get offers 10 times their semester tuition at a top college today. That’s just tuition, not counting housing, meals and books.
