Dual Earner Families

This research examined the phenomenon of the dual earner family in the United States. Changes in the patterns of dual earner families were addressed, and explanations of these changing patterns provided by economic theory were discussed.

A century ago, only five-percent of married woman participated in the labor market. In 1940, fewer than one married woman in seven was working outside the home, while 60 percent work outside the home in 1995. Only 17 percent of married couples are one-earner, with the rest having other or no earners. In the mid-1990s, the dual income family is more common than the traditional one-income married household where the husband works and the wife stays at home. In 1980, half of all married couples were dual-income. By 1990, this proportion had increased to about 60 percent.

General equilibrium theory, income adequacy theory, the theory of income distribution, and the theory of international trade all provide some degree of explanation of the increasing trend toward dual earner families in the United States. The most persuasive economic justification lies in the theory of international trade. This theory suggests that trade with less-developed countries could lower the relative wages of the unskilled workers in industrial countries. The ratio of unskilled to skilled workers is lower in industrial than in less-developed countries, and the supply of goods produced by unskilled workers is also relatively smaller. Other factors

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eciles of the population, rather than spreading it over all deciles of the population. Second, the concentration of capital wealth tends to deter labor in the top deciles--high-productivity labor. These results support the concerns being more frequently expressed regarding maldistribution of capital wealth in the contemporary capitalist economy. There are, however ,moderating factors. The first is that the results obtained from this research pertain to the specific model utilized, a model that includes a large number of restrictive assumptions both in the theory and in the numerical implementation. Second, the degree of capital wealth equalization that would be politically feasible might not provide the degree of equalization that would be sufficient to attain a numerically significant gain. Emphasis in this study was on comparing results for perfect capital wealth equality with results for the existing high level of capital wealth inequality. Even "with this extreme a comparison, the relative advantages of complete equality are far from vast, especially for the bottom-line social welfare measure of the sum of utilities." Complete equality of capital wealth could never be attained in the "real world owing to political obs

Category: Economics - D