“The U.S. middle class is still shrinking… because we’re getting richer. According to data from the Current Population Survey, over a third of U.S. households now earn more than $150,000 inflation-adjusted dollars per year, up from 5 percent in 1967,” reports The Doomslayer.
Some of this increase in wealth is due to more married women having jobs than in the 1960s. But much of it is not due to that, and simply reflects rising prosperity and higher wages.
As an economist explains, “Dual-income households were already the most common family structure by the 1980s. There hasn’t been an increase in total hours worked by married households since Boomers were in their 30s. You can explain some of the increase up until the Boomers by rising dual-income households, but this doesn’t explain the continued progress since the 1980s. And as Scott Winship and I have documented, even if you look just at male earnings, there has been progress since the 1980s.”
Moreover, the fact that more women have jobs is not a sign that people in general are being forced to work harder. Married women were able to go into the workforce partly because of the fact that labor-saving devices, such as dryers and microwave ovens, made cooking and cleaning a less time-consuming task.
There has actually been an increase in leisure time for both men and women since the mid-1960s, even after factoring in growing numbers of women having paid jobs. As the Heritage Foundation noted in 2007, “Since the mid-1960s, the amount of time that the typical American spends working fell by almost eight hours per week, while the time spent on leisure activities rose by just under seven hours per week. This additional leisure time is equivalent to an extra seven to nine weeks of vacation per year. Workers’ incomes would rise by over $5,000 per year if they worked these hours instead of enjoying more leisure.”
