Do you have any data to support this? My understanding is that it has been the exact opposite, with women entering the work-force in large numbers in the past two-three decades. And as far as I know, men have not been leaving the workforce, except in relatively rare situations where they become stay-at-home dads.
Of course, that probably isn't a popular way to look at it, because the immediate inference is that we could realize significant improvements by shifting society back towards two-parent households, and that grates against current social trends.
You say household income is stagnant and people think "wages haven't increased", when in fact wages have increased, it's just that there are fewer wage earners per household.
That's an important distinction that points to very different solutions.
I think a good set of metrics to measure what household income is trying to measure would be income-per-employee, incomes-per-household, and household size.
I wouldn't categorize this shift[1] as "large" and given the relative sizes of the groups of households I don't believe it can be having the affect you suggest.
[1]http://i.imgur.com/j3CF9lk.png (from http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-14.pdf)
I agree there wasn't much of a shift from 1990s onward, but there was from the late 1970s.
You also have to remember that household income doesn't take much of a shift in household structure in order to flatten out income.
If you had 10% of households go from two income earners (say $80K) to single income earners ($40K) each, that would pull down the average substantially.
Your point about households vs individuals is clever, because it ignores how the distribution of individual income growth across any other demographic factors.
My point is just that you need to be care drawing conclusions from the data presented. Unless you control for other variables, you may draw erroneous conclusions.
One big demographic shift to keep an eye on is the retirement of the baby boomers. Right now, they are in the highest income earning period of their lives. As soon as they retire, their income drops substantially and they are replaced by fewer and fewer individuals from lower age brackets.
I would imagine that overall per capita income will continue on a downward trend until after all the baby boomers retire, even though on an individual level, people are seeing increases in income level.
I think dvanduzer's point is that this may not necessarily be so when looking at low-wage earners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_warren#Books_and_othe... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A#t=8m25s
The best example of this is household income. If you look at the data, it looks like household income has been flat since the 1980s. However, during that time, there has been a large shift of two-parent (where both parents worked) to single-parent households. In fact, if you look at the individual incomes, they have grown substantially over the same time period. It's only when you obscure the data by talking about "households" do you see the lack of income growth.