Owen Gregorian

But now that we've evolved to having these two income households, where did all that money go from that extra income?

It didn't go into the bank.

They didn't save it.

They spent it on a better home for their kids in a better neighborhood.

And so what really happened was we bid up all the real estate prices higher in these good neighborhoods.

And so you ate up essentially all that extra money.

And what that means is now if the husband loses his job temporarily, back in the 50s, what that meant was maybe that wife could do some extra job on the side, like be a secretary or do some other...

job on the side to fill in until her husband could go back to work.

Like you had that extra person available to potentially chip in as a sort of an insurance policy, but it wasn't part of their normal budget.

But now you have the budget is based on both incomes.

And if either one of them loses their job, there's no one to fill in, right?

You just have to hope that that person gets another job quickly.

And so the point they make is that this, you know, it made everybody worse off.

Because, you know, you probably also made wages go down because you have twice as many people competing for the jobs, which economically would follow that employers don't have to pay as much because they have twice as many jobs.

Yeah, and...

So it seems like it was kind of a hoodwink sort of thing.

I don't know if anyone even intended for it to happen, but that's how it played out, right?

It was like all these families that are depending on two incomes and all the money just went into the real estate.

It didn't benefit the families.

And it left them in a very precarious position.