Was there ever a time when your average nine to fiver could afford the American Dream?
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Anonymous
| The ability of ordinary workers to attain the American Dream rose and fell with the labor union. |
Anonymous
In some cases. Dad worked retail, mom stayed home in the ‘80s. Mortgage interest rates were sky high plus PMI but we had a 3-bedroom house and large yard as was common in our metro area. Highly rated schools. Dad had no pension. |
Anonymous
The price of essentials...shelter, education, healthcare and childcare have exploded. Harvard cost $800/year tuition in 1955 and is $54,000 today. UC schools were all free in-state until the 1960s (and are still a tremendous deal compared to many other state schools like UVA). Heck, Sidwell used to cost $4,500 / year back in the 1990s and now is around $52k. Housing costs have increased far more than overall inflation. Now, a bunch of that is related to the zero-interest environment we had from 2008 - 2022. The acceleration really started in the late 1990s. The average DC daycare cost is now $24,400/year for one year for one kid. |
Anonymous
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You can have that right now with a working class job. I have relatives in Kentucky working at a major chain hotel who own their own home, and their kids went to college on scholarships. I have other relatives who own their own home in Damascus Md, working as fast food managers. Their son went to med school on loans. They moved there on purpose with a plan. They focused on launching their kids. Now the next generation are all professional high earners.
Anyone who is sound of mind and able bodied could attain the American dream. My opinion is that the major barrier for most people is that they haven't learned the value of delayed gratification and strategic planning. |
Anonymous
| Of course. My ILs raised 6 kids in a medium sized town in the upper Midwest- FIL was a public school teacher, MIL worked PT (secretarial jobs) once all the kids were in school. Had a large but modest home on a piece of land, and 2 cars, lived frugally otherwise. Put all 6 kids through college- 4 did undergrad at the local state university and 2 chose the local community college instead (all lived at home while attending). Kids worked PT once teens if they wanted a car or expensive clothes etc. FIL retired at 58 with a full pension, MIL worked until 68 by choice (enjoyed her work after being home for so many years). As for timeframe, their 6 kids were all born in the 70s. |
Anonymous
This story could happen today |
Anonymous
No- not with current healthcare and college costs. |
Anonymous
I know people who are doing it. Their lives are very basic, but their priority is launching the next generation. |
Anonymous
State college tuition is affordable. Ivy League is a choice not mandatory! It took me 6 years to get a BA. I saved for my freshman year, lived at home. Next year I worked as a secretary for a law firm and took as much as OT as available. Sophomore year, worked at law firm on Saturdays for spending money. Did this until I graduated. True, not much of a social life but I had no debt when I graduated. I had also saved enough for a good down payment on a new car. When I got married, I worked for four years (through first pregnancy) and my salary was banked so that there was enough of a cushion for me to stay home We were married 15 years before we bought a house. It can be done with delayed gratification. |
Anonymous
Back in the good old days, the average person didn't have much in the way of healthcare or college. |
Anonymous
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One significant difference between the 1950s - 1970s and now is that there were very few corporate leaders and foreign businesses that were purchasing real estate in the US. The real estate boom where wealthy investors (both domestic and foreign) purchased real estate and either flipped or rented to profit did not happen until the 1990's-2000's. So, housing prices had not skyrocketed like they have in the last 20-30 years.
Looking at fiction, Willy Loman (Death of a Saleman) is the classic middle-class American of the 1950's and one of the tragedies is that he killed himself just as Linda was about to make the last house payment. As she says, they were "free and clear" of the bank. In Happy Days, Howard Cunningham owns a hardware store and his own house. Archie Bunker was a blue-collar worker and owned his house. Note that none of these character's wives worked outside of the house. in real life, I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and 1980s. Although we were UMC instead of middle class, I had many friends and classmates who fit the OPs description. One of my closest friends, father owned a printing shop (printing flyers, posters, leaflets, pamphlets, etc), another friend's father was a plumber. I knew a kid whose father was a professional office assistant, like an office manager, but he didn't make that much as he never went to college. One classmate's dad was the mechanic at a local gas station. Another was a high school teacher (who I had for a class). All of these professions were standard middle class; all of their mothers stayed at home; and all of them owned their homes. Like the PP who posted a meme, the key was that most of these friends grew up in homes that were essentially 3 BR, about 1100-1400 sf and small. Many were the standard post-WWII standard houses. One story homes with LR, DR, kitchen and three BR and 1 ba down the hall and a basement. Or small first floor with LR, DR, kitchen and powder room, upstairs three BR and one full BA, sometimes with, sometimes without a basement. Many, many of these types of tiny houses. But the families owned them (usually with assistance from the bank). |
Anonymous
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I agree that college costs have gone up and that housing costs have too, in most places -- though my parents bought their house in the midwest for around 30k in the early 1970s, around 216k in today's dollars, and that is around the price it would fetch today.
But it's also true that people's standards of living have gone up, too. House sizes have gotten way larger than in the past even though families are smaller. People expect to travel more and own more things, more clothes, more cars. And when my parents got married in the 1960s they paid less than $100 for an afternoon cake and punch reception in the church basement, so less than $1000 in today's money. Today the average cost of a wedding reception is somewhere around 30k. And engagement rings are bigger, expensive, and more ubiquitous than in the past. But totally agree that many salaries have stagnated over the decades even as the top salaries have soared. And that the weakening of unions is a contributor to this problem. All of these things can be true at the same time. |
Anonymous
Either you worded this oddly or your parents weren't boomers. You say your mom "didn't start working until..." as if it was later in life that she started working. But in the late 70s, even the oldest of boomers were only in their early 30s. |
Anonymous
+1 And the percent of those going to college was even lower for women - around 37% who enrolled in college in 1960 (doesn't mean finished). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_191.asp |
Anonymous
Re: colleges -- they didn't have as much amenities as they do today. Dorms were a lot more basic. So was the dining option. And athletic buildings. State schools generally received higher percentage of their funding costs from the state than today. And most people didn't go or finish college in 1955. |