The breakdown: mortgage 500 (no paying towards the principal, so you're stuck with the debt) food 350 (yes, it's that expensive), health insurance 280 to about 320 depending on the coverage, energy 100 to 250 (depending on season and insulation), commute 150 or more, clothing, various taxes (on top of your income tax) and 'unforeseen' will easily eat up the remainder.
If you live in 'subsidized housing' it gets a bit better.
> but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.
That's from direct experience and believe me I don't throw money around if I don't have to. A very basic bit of shopping for 3 or 4 days costs you 50 bucks easily, if you're careful you can whittle that down a bit but not by much. And then of course I still have to get to the cheap supermarket and back, which is 20 km by car, if I bought it in the one around the corner I'd pay quite a bit more. No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.
Please note that I left things like cell phones, internet connection and TV subscription, newspapers etc out because they're not strictly speaking 'needs'.
Can you install a loft bed and put the freezer under the bed? Do you have any space outdoors where you could put a freezer? Have you tried buying dried foods only in bulk?
I am also not an economist, but you're only covering the supply of workers. Do more workers = more money being spent = more products/services demanded = increased demand for workers? In other words, does it even out?
I have read that wages have decreased in the last few generations while dual income houses became normal, but I don't know whether those are cause and effect or have common causes.
If you wanted to make this argument, I think a better way to approach it would be from the supply side. The supply of goods and services should increase, because well, that's what workers produce. This should theoretically lower the prices of existing goods and services, because increased supply of a commodity puts downward pressure on pricing.
That's all in theory. I highly doubt it's anywhere near that simple. The thing about macroeconomics is that it's somewhere between cargo cultism and ancient mythology: people compare situations that superficially resemble each other, and then invent models that explain several situations but are entirely untestable.
What I'm saying is that (inflation-adjusted) cost of living has been going down for the last couple of decades, and that salaries have gone up in absolute inflation-adjusted terms. You can argue that this trend won't hold for the future for a myriad of reasons but I wouldn't support such a view.
Still many of the factors that are considered 'requirements' today aren't in my book, but of course this can be subject to discussion. To take your telephone example, here in the Netherlands (an advanced Western country by all measures) I don't know of many jobs that one wouldn't be able to get or keep without a phone. For those where you're on-call, you are provided with one.
Similarly, cost of living statistics by our national statistics institute changed their household budgets a few years ago - the tv has been a 'basic necessity' for decades (in these statistics), but the budget was upped several hundred euros because now LCD tv's are the norm. Still I think it's stupid to budget 800 euros every 5 years for a TV into a 'basic necessity' budget.
I remain convinced that even after accounting for an adjusted lifestyle to the level of a 'basic lifestyle', and where 'basic needs' have evolved to match societal progress, the increase in income has outpaced the rise of cost of living.
I would have thought they would have been paid for by increases in efficiency (largely due to new technology).
As they become more productive, their wages are going up, too.
This is not the case at all. The Chinese can produce vastly more items than the US can for the same price/time. Do you have any examples where some US company can produce things as such an improved production speed compared to China?
My guts tell me that the US is more productive than China in, say, software development and probably finance. But don't trust my guts. Do some research yourself.
A quick search for "productivity US china" turned up "U.S. Leads Productivity Ranking; China Gains" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04o...).
Is this true? Surely the cost of living has decreased over the last 100 years, so it must be easier for a single breadwinner to feed a family than it was back then.