The US was settled by people leaving those old generations behind and moving west (be it from somewhere in Europe to the US or from somewhere in the US to somewhere less populated in the US) with their spouse and maybe young kids. You always had stay at home moms, because home was usually mom's workplace, often dad's too.

Multi-generational households in the US existed as the exception when early settlers brought their entire communities over or when first generation Americans moved West with their immigrant parents. Having multi-generational households was never the norm.

Also, it would be interesting to explore exactly how and why "protestant work ethic"-based communities and "multigenerational housing"-based communities became generally mutually exclusive, whether there is causation, or just a happenstance correlation.

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The “two-income trap,” described The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting. Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities. Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on. This last point is really the key to Warren’s specific argument about bankruptcy, though it’s the first two that would drive her larger interest in politics. Bad things have always happened to families from time to time. In a traditional two-parent, one-earner family, there was always the possibility that mom could step up and help out when trouble arose.

“If her husband was laid off, fired, or otherwise left without a paycheck,” Warren and Tyagi write, “the stay-at-home mother didn’t simply stand helplessly on the sidelines as her family toppled off an economic cliff; she looked for a job to make up some of that lost income.” Similarly, if a family member got sick, mom was available as an unpaid caregiver. “A stay-at-home mother served as the family’s ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability — insurance that had a very real economic value even when it wasn’t drawn on.”

A modern family where mom is already working has no “give” and is much more likely to be pushed into bankruptcy by job loss or family illness unless it builds up a big financial cushion.

First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.

This seems especially true during a bad economy when unemployment is high and people stay unemployed for long periods of time. With a dual-income family, the two often work in different fields. One might get laid off but the other's job is safe. You'll suffer, maybe even have to sell your house or something, but at least you can feed yourself.

Second, I've seen what happens when a spouse doesn't work outside the home for a long time. This happened to a relative of mine a long time ago. She had a short but perfectly fine career as a teacher for a while before getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Eventually she got divorced and found that, after being out of the job market for 20 years, the only job she could get was near minimum wage data entry. (She eventually got a better job, but it took many years as she was basically starting over.) Anyway, the point is I'm skeptical of Warren's reasoning that in a single-income family, the other spouse can just go out and get a job if needed. Over the long term, the single-income situation tends to damage the career path of the spouse who doesn't work outside the home.

The general crux of Warren's argument, is that the fixed costs incurred by the necessity of women working is so large that it basically made household income a zero sum game.

Previously, one person made income Y, and if the breadwinner became unable to work then they made some amount close to or smaller than Y.

Today, two people each make X, and also have to pay childcare and additional commuting or other expenses of Z every day.

Warren's assertion is that overall, today 2X-Z <= Y, because women increased the labor supply so much that wages were suppressed; so that Y for one person eventually became X for two people in a household. Depending on how bad the decline is, X may be a lot worse than a new, untrained wife making less than Y.

In the scenario of 1 working partner, if that 1 person loses their job, you can have 2 people looking for jobs in order to get back to normal.

So in effect, a wealth transfer to equity holders.

And a woman cannot rely on her parents to support her as an adult until she gets married. That’s too heavy a burden on her aging parents.

Really, the only way forward, is for the woman to get educated, skilled, trained, or certified, in order to work.

But, we as a society need a new and different social contract.

The trap is: declining real household income for segments of the population. The "two income" part is a consequence of the trap, not a cause.

This matters because a lot of the increasing representation of women in the workforce is not the result of the two-income trap, but the result of women, individually, wanting to work. In other words, not every two-income household is actually in a trap. Many of them are formed by two people who each have jobs they like and want to keep.

My wife, for example, has advanced training and likes her job. She couldn't wait to get back to work after we had our first child. As a family, we could survive fine on my salary today... but she would kill me if I suggested this. Now we're struggling to home-educate our child while we both work remotely. If I suggested that she quit her job to be our family's "insurance policy", again, she would kill me (even if I invoked Elizabeth Warren).

My mom worked too, because she wanted to. Good thing she did, because when my parents divorced she was able, financially, to transition to being on her own right away.

Single-income families can be a trap too... for the person who is not earning an income. About half of U.S. marriages end in divorce. A spouse with no independent financial base and no job of their own is not in a position to leave when they want to.

This stuff is really important to understand, so we don't go down a fruitless rabbit hole of wringing our collective hands about the decline of the traditional family culture or whatever. Taking that broad simple view of two-income households runs a very real risk of simply denying the agency of women who want to work and make their own way in the world... even if they are married with kids.

The article calls the book "controversial", but I don't see how the harm from effectively denying motherhood to women is "controversial" at all.

In countries less allergic to establishing welfare programs, cheap subsidized daycare is used to boost workforce participation amongst women: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

From the Quebec study:

> For those kids who are in Quebec’s public programs, known as centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), “repeated studies have found sharp improvements in child development,” Fortin said. This accounts for about one-third of Quebec’s children in care right now.

Now the problem is scaling up good childcare to the other two thirds.

Other than this I don't really see how you would put the genie back in the bottle for women juggling childcare with employment, without also screwing over women who want both or don't want children.

Besides, I don't believe anyone other than parents are "the best" to raise children, on average. That's because I have children of my own and I know that childcare and primary education is basically a game of roulette wrt whether you get lucky and get a teacher who's any good. We should just make it socially unacceptable to abdicate parental responsibility at this point, IMO. It's absolutely nuts that 6 months old children end up in daycare.

As opposed to the average parent who is great at parenting, right?

Sorry, but many (most?) parents absolutely suck at raising their kids. They didn’t have good parents themselves and they never dealt with the psychological issues that resulted. And in 99% of cases, they’re totally blind to this, and think (as you apparently do) that loving their kids makes them good caregivers.

I’m not arguing for or against childcare, but it’s a mistake to think the average parent is well-equipped.

But even there, just looking at developed countries around the world with arguably much better values around parenting, I still think we'd end up with most kids in childcare. Maybe not starting at six months, but starting pretty young. I'm biased as a parent too, just in the other direction. There are just too many benefits to both children and women.

That's something my wife & I have been discussing recently. She pointed out that traditional family structures have more slack built into them, which comes in handy in times of trouble. The problem is that in the modern Taylorist world we treat slack as waste. But it really isn't, any more than insurance is waste.

My advice is to not over-tax yourself trying to do two things at once. It is very tiring both mentally and physically to switch back and forth too frequently.

Focus on your kids when they need your focus and reserve your strength for planned time that you can actually focus on work. Like during nap time or after bedtime.

I understand the gist of what you mean, but I think you’re really pointing at the idea of the “nuclear family,” and the “two-income household,” both of which are post-war ideas. Specifically, Elizabeth Warren wrote an entire book about this “Two Income Trap,” how much more fragile it makes families, and why we should be working to get back to one-income being a reasonable option so that more people could choose it when their circumstances demanded it.

We've chosen hyper-specialization of our living areas. The places which are good for raising children are mostly horrible for careers and social life. The places where young people can get ahead and be social aren't as traditionally convenient for raising children (unless you have lots of money).

You pretty much have to pick where you live based on what phase of your life you're in, and I think for most people the expectation is still that once you get married you'll just move out to the 'burbs. Personally, I hate the idea, but I'm both not in a place in life where I'm too worried about children and also fortunate to work in an industry where its at least theoretically viable to afford to raise city kids and maintain a career.

My parents are getting ready to retire and thinking of moving to the mountains somewhere because being retired is no fun in a place where everything is optimized around children and everything is developed family-size. They won't be a support system where they are for my hypothetical kids anyways, and are eager to escape the suburb I grew up in as it has declined over the decades, so I wouldn't want to be there either.

Wrapping up that rant... quite simply, I insisted on moving away from where I grew up because there was nothing for me there and I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in that place. The fact that my parents still live there for now is mostly incidental. (But I also generally think suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing, none of the cohesive culture or community of a small town but also none of the variety, walk/bikeability, or cultural diversity of big cities, so my bias might be showing).

So we moved out to the burbs, where we could afford a starter home big enough for our two kids and a mother-in-law.

I guess it's already happening to some extent with Schengen and young talented engineers moving to job centers.

Because over a several hundred year period a large fraction of the people in Europe who were willing to risk financial ruin for a chance at a better life wound up here and our culture reflects that.

What you experience is still quite common. Some of my siblings live 5 minutes from my parents and my nieces & nephews basically stay with their grandparents while their parents are working. A lot of my coworkers claim similar situations as well.

That being said, multigenerational households were really common up until the postwar period, at which point the US really started pushing the standalone suburban nuclear family as a way to avoid another case of excess industrial capacity. It takes a lot of workers and goods to build all the highways, infrastructure, and houses to support a two-story house with a white picket fence and a car in the driveway.

Go west young man was not just a saying but part of America. Look at post WWII information on families moving to California for example.

But this means that when your children decide to have children, they will have to move away. If they are lucky, they can buy a house near you; but if there are many people who want to live in the city, and the new houses are not built often, or at least not near you, then they will have to move further away from you. And this is still just talking about living in a city... I haven't mentioned proximity to job opportunities or schools yet.

If you don't live in the larger metro areas, there aren't the same number of jobs paying good wages. So you move to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs you want are. If you're a software developer you probably don't want to live in Ohio, and if you're a defense contractor you probably don't want to live in Wyoming.

And there's the problem. I'd be totally comfortable if my future wife ended up being the financial supporter of the family. There's technical things I'd like to invest time and mental resources in that wouldn't necessarily make money, but would be fulfilling, and housework is already something I do a lot of and wouldn't mind being more responsible for if I wasn't spending 40+ at the office.

I can't imagine dumping my career whilst I'm the higher earner, but if she ends up making more than me (kinda likely actually, given some time), it might be the most sensible solution. Marriage should be a team activity where either partner is willing to take on whatever role is best for the family.

It must have been fulfilling to start out a young inexperienced women in your village and eventually become an influential matriarch, with knowledge in herbal medicine, nursing, textiles, pottery, basketry, child development, leadership, storytelling, etc.

Stay at home moms are always having get togethers, play dates, catching up for coffee, etc.

The more of your friends who are stay at home moms the easier it becomes to be a stay at home mom.

For a lot of people including women housework is actually boring and they would rather have a fulfilling career.

Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

For the vast vast majority of people there is no fulfillment in a career either.

> Perpetuating the idea that men should work outside and women should work inside really makes life really hard for men and women that don’t think that way.

I'm making an observation - I don't like it either.

I’d love to send my wife out to work for the family.

In fact I’d love to get multiple wives and send them all out to work.

I think the problem is cultural and genetic. After all, we have thousands of generations where men were molded for the breadwinner role. Lots of scholarly articles on that topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=genetic+influence+on+br...