Up until this year our standard of living allegedly doubled since the seventies. When the costs of housing, health care and education all rise faster than the consumer price index, while wages increase more slowly, you have to wonder about the legitimacy of the indicators they use. Let us come up with our own.
I provide a lot of data on both The Middle Class Forum and Systems out of Balance that the ratio of expensive and essential goods such as housing to median income is rising. Debt has increased as well, as has the proportion of people in a household working, and the proportion of people with multiple jobs. I’ve mulled over for awhile what might be the best type of indicator to use to truly gauge our standard of living, and I think I’ve got it.
There are three components to it. The first is the ratio of essential costs to income, which has been presented in various forms and discussed already. The second is the amount of wage earners per household needed to meet those costs. The fewer wage earners needed to meet costs the less stress and greater adaptability for the household. The third is the ratio of hours in a work week to a norm of 40. If more wager earners in a household yet works fewer hours they have gained time for family obligation, community service, political involvement, and all those other areas of good citizenship besides just economic productivity that requires our time.
I know already that the average work week per single job has not changed that much from the seventies until now and I may omit it. The rest I will combine into a single indicator, and even explore if I can compute this indicator for different states and/or metropolitan areas. In other words, I plan this to be an ongoing project, partly to provide constant reminders as to where our real standard of living stands.
