Couple this with the fact that nowadays couples have less children in average and you start to get the picture. If now two people work (vs 1) to have one child (vs 5) that will get the same (vs better) quality of life than their parents then you have on average become poorer.
I can't help but feel we have been duped.
Anecdotally I know a family of five that survived on one income that is half of a common tech salary, while in a fairly high cost of living area.
You know how they did it? Frugality, and sacrifice, of anything unnecessary. The mother keeps up the home and homeschools the kids. The dad learned to maintain cars by watching YouTube every time their old car broke down.
Mom could've gotten a job, but they made a choice to sacrifice a more luxurious lifestyle for the ability to keep the kids out of public schools. It is a choice. It's just a choice most people don't want to make. They want the lifestyle that comes with two incomes, and the benefits of being a stay at home spouse, and it's just not realistic.
Buddy, in California, you need $208K of income to just QUALIFY for a mortgage for a median house. [1] No matter how much frugality people live in, most people won’t even come close to that number on a single income. Average car payments are $700+ a month and $500+ on used one. [2] Average cost of a 4 year attendance in a public college is $100k and for a private college it is $200k [3]. Average monthly premium for non subsidized health insurance for a family of 4 is around $1700, which drops to $500-$800/month with employer or state sponsored subsidies. [4] It’s very convenient to blame things on lifestyle, but the reality is that even the basics are way out of reach of a median household on single income. It ain’t the 50s anymore for a reason.
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2023/08/11/only-16-of-californian...
[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-....
[3] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
[4] https://www.anthem.com/individual-and-family/insurance-basic....
Chicken as a meat has been depicted in Babylonian carvings from around 600 BC. Chicken was one of the most common meats available in the Middle Ages. For thousands of years, a number of different kinds of chicken have been eaten across most of the Eastern hemisphere, including capons, pullets, and hens. It was one of the basic ingredients in blancmange, a stew usually consisting of chicken and fried onions cooked in milk and seasoned with spices and sugar.
In the United States in the 1800s, chicken was more expensive than other meats and it was sought by the rich, but by no means does this make meat-birds a novelty of CAFOs.
Although if food keeps going this way we may need to cut back on some things.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...