INCOME = WAGES + INTEREST + RENT + PROFIT.

I suspect, however, that widespread understanding of this law of conservation would deprive many a pundit of something to fret over. Herewith yet another meditation on family wages.

Lisa suggests that it is unworkable because contrary to the principle that the free market should set wages. But if I'm not mistaken, we had the family wage here in America for decades, at least unofficially, and it was the reason that many who grew up in working class families years ago had the same kind of family arrangement as higher-income people, built around a breadwinning father and a homemaking mother. No one in those days decried it as being against the free market, as far as I know, because it was something that placed a priority on care of children and mothers being able to stay at home and fathers as heads of families. Market principles are only one of the ways by which a society allows itself to be guided.

Market prices can only reflect the willingness to offer and the willingness to buy resources traded on those markets. There's a more complete illustrated explanation here.

Left unsaid, however, is whether that division of labor (dad compensated in cash, mom compensated in kind) was one that everybody accepted. Also left unsaid is whether that division of labor was superior to the one preceding it, in which mom, dad, and the surviving kids all participated in a lot of subsistence work.

The idea of the family wage also produced a more egalitarian society in a good way, with less polarization between rich and poor and more of a common experience for all, and it did this not through redistribution but by emphasizing work and the importance of fathers. (Don't worry — the rich still had plenty, although that was perhaps less conspicuous than it is today.)

Would that it were that simple. The technology of the day was more likely to augment the brawn of the men rather than the brains of the men and the women. Compare a hand-fired steam locomotive or a horse-drawn plow with a Dash-8 or a tractor with air-conditioned cab.

Also, as soon as mothers began to work in large numbers, the prices of everything went up, as a real estate agent in Westchester County explained to me, making it more necessary for a family to have two incomes to afford what one income once bought.

See the title of this post.

Catch also that Westchester County reference. Next we can probably look forward to another round of fretting about assortative mating. Here's a corrective.

As bright and intelligent women go and get those careers that they wish to have (as is of course their right to pursue) we find that they tend to marry those bright and intelligent men who also pursue similar types of careers. We thus have a group of families with two high incomes, increasing the income gap.

What a difficult problem for someone who is both feminist and egalitarian. Which is to be decried, if either? That women now have the same freedoms in work and selection of a partner that men have historically had? Or the effects of this upon the income distribution?

When one faces choices, with good points and bad points to each, one must make trade-offs.

Or, perhaps, to get somebody else to pay for the consequences?

So, if two incomes are mandatory for the basics of middle class life -- home, car, kids, dog, then childcare is now a necessity for most families. Those babies don't raise themselves. Yet, where is the child-care discussion in this presidential debate?