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Decline in Dual Income Families

I have been occasionally commenting on the nature of the workforce in the United States. I was browsing around BLS Data on women in the workforce.  A fact surprised me, even though it is a trend that has been happening for a decade, right under my nose, but I hadn’t noticed.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

In fact, the percentage of married couples has been falling since 2000.  In fact, you see that after the 2008 recession there is a big drop of married couples (accompanied by a corresponding increase in single-earner families, particularly an increase in wife-only families).

I suppose that there is (obviously) interaction with the trend in income inequality. Perhaps, richer families are more likely to be single-income families than before? If so, it rationalizes some of the culture-wars about working moms and stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) that used to frequent us in pre-COVID times.

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Published in Work