How materialism has changed the American way of life
Acquisition of material goods exceeds desire to raise children
JoeUser Forums
We live in a society that has increasing access to information but seemingly less willing to actually make use of that information. Every 4 years politicians will argue that things aren't as good as they were in some past golden age in an effort to win the election.
Nowhere is this myth propagated more than in the area of standard of living. People are told by unscrupulous politicians that today you need two wage earners to make ends meet. Politicians don't want to blame voters for their own material greed. In reality it is our own greed that causes us to need 2 people to work in order to "make ends meet". Our material greed has created life style expectations that we simply can't achieve with one age earner. Any serious study of the past makes it pretty apparent that the difference between life in the 50s and today isn't that we need two wage earners but that we aren't willing to live anywhere near the same lifestyle as people did in 1950.
In 1970, the average new home was only 1,400 square foot. In 1950, the average size was only 900 square foot. Today, the average size is 2,200 square foot. A 2,200 square foot house is going to cost a lot more than a 1,400 square foot house or a 900 square foot house. Similarly, owning 2 cars instead of 1 car costs twice as much, particularly if we insist, as many do, on owning new cars every few years. We also have a great deal more arbitrary expenses such as cable, renting movies, going out to eat and more that all quickly add to the expense tab. We also now demand air conditioning and other home comforts which can add several hundred dollars more per year in costs.
When you add all these things up, you suddenly reach the point where the average wage earner just can't keep up. It is true that wages, when adjusted for inflation, have remained relatively stagnate. It is also true that essential costs have gone down in cost such as food, housing per square foot, etc. The blame lies with us and our increasing materialist desires.
Most people don't realize how materialist they are because their definition of materialism is based on comparing themselves with a contemporary. That is all well and good until people begin complaining about the "good old days" when a single wage earner could support a wife and 2 kids. The mean American salary could still easily support a spouse at home and 2 children if they were willing to live in a lifestyle that was similar to that during the supposed golden age. Buy a 900 (or even 1200 square foot home), go without cable, don't get air condition and don't go out to eat except on special occasions and a salary of $28,000 will do the job just fine. But few people today are willing to live that way. We want to have the DVD player, multiple TVs with one of them a big screen, we want to go out to lunch at fast food restaurants or go out to a nice restaurant on occasion.
The problem just is that we don't want a 900 square foot home, we want the 1800 or 2000 square foot home. We want to be able to buy movies and CDs and computers. We want to have the $20 per month cable TV and the $20 per month internet connection. You'll probably want another car too. Which is fine but odds are it'll take more than one wage earner to afford all those nice things. Things that many of us take for granted today. We have lost the ability to differentiate between WANT and NEED.
At some point, possibly when the baby boom generation came into their prime, the acquisition of material wealth superseded the importance of raising children by a full time stay-at-home parent. I don't really have much opinion over whether that is a good thing or not. What is clear, to me anyway, is that this is what has happened. We want our stuff more than we want to have a parent raising our children full time.
