Do you live in an area with high international demand for housing?
Not all of the US is a hot spot for high paid immigrants, yet. Displacement is a real thing. Not everyone can change states or nations to make the finances work out.
Don’t let the reality that this was in response to a statement that implied a universal reality that it’s impossible to raise a family on a single income be lost on you.
I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.
You are agreeing in a weird way. Yes, in America if you live somewhere that other people want to live, then you have to move or take on two incomes. That was my point, that because US real estate has become an attractive investment over the past decades and the growth and current size foreign capital outweighs the average American family’s purchasing power which results in: people resort to two incomes, wait to start families, have fewer children when they do have children, etc…
> You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have
See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.
> what food to eat
Have you heard of "food deserts"?
[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.
A few years back when I worked in a downtown office in a suburban metro, my wife would often drop me off/pick me up and then she'd have the car all day. Other times I'd bike. When only one person works outside the home, you have more flexibility.
We also lived in what was barely not a food desert at that time, and we walked to the grocery store all the time. "Food desert" can mean it takes 10 minutes to walk to the store. Like for a low income urban census tract it means 0.5 miles. We go on afternoon walks 3-5x that every day.
To be fair, this is mostly a consequence of women entering the workforce. Not that that’s bad, but it’s an unintended consequence that companies were then able to convince workers to work for less because people could survive on it still.
Because it’s not about the jobs, it’s about what salary people will settle for.
If a family had to make X to live comfortable before, now you can do so with each of you making half that as long as it adds up to X. People shouldn’t settle for less, but they do even if only a few percent… where before people didn’t to the same degree because it had more immediate impact.
This in turn is one of the several market forces that has contributed to deflated wages.
That's an argument that should be increasing the number of dual parent households. If a family could be supported on a single income, then abandoning your family would have fewer consequences and thus seemingly more likely.
A substantial reason for that is cultural change though. You can’t close to double the supply of something without expecting the price to go down (probably by something close to half).
Manufacturing jobs used to exist.
Manufacturing jobs used to exist in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a high school education existed in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that paid well and provided a pension and didn’t require high education existed in high numbers.