[HamiltonJay]

No that’s not the driving force behind it... a factor? Yes, the driving factor? No.

Median household income has flatlined since the 70s while at the same time we went from almost exclusively a single income households to majority dual income.

You can’t spin the general economic decline relatively speaking in the US.

[fhayek]

I respectfully disagree. When I was a kid, my dad worked, my mom didn't. We were working class. One income paid the bills. BUT, we didn't have a second car. We didn't have cable, we didn't have computers or the Internet. We didn't have microwave ovens, air conditioning, televisions in every room, video games, swimming pools in every yard, yearly trips to Florida, daily visits to fast food places, multiple advances in medicine (pharmaceuticals, joint replacements, laser therapies, chemotherapy's, nanotechnolgies, etc), robots, cell phones, satelite communication, fresh foods that were out of season, dvr, and a lot of things I didn't think of.

Our standard of living, our economic choices have never been more spectacular. We can enjoy so much more out of life. Unfortunately, it takes two incomes to enjoy it.

[Alberta's Child]

There's not a direct correlation between income and GDP, though.

GDP has grown even as household income has flatlined (or even declined) over the years -- for reasons that are tied to how GDP is defined.

Think of a married couple with a couple of kids. If one parent stays home and raises the children, the child care arrangement contributes almost $0 to the nation's GDP. But if both parents work and they pay a day care center to raise the kids, then suddenly you have "economic activity" that is measured in the GDP.

I've said for a long time that a lot of our GDP growth has been "fake" -- because it doesn't really measure real value. Instead, it simply values the monetization of normal everyday activities that we used to do ourselves instead of paying someone else to do it.