WE COMPETE AS PRODUCERS, BUT WE ALSO COMPETE AS CONSUMERS.

Perhaps an illustration will help.

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson (via Craig Newmark) comes to terms with what economists have long understood.  "Families find it much more difficult today to have a stay-at-home parent mostly because the labor market now values women's labor much more highly than it once did."

Reality is more subtle.  "[T]o hope that a family can 'get by' on one income with current levels of labor force participation by women is to hope that the laws of conservation in economics don't work." That would be true whether that increased labor force participation is as domestic workers or riveters in shipyards or circuit-board assemblers or high-powered attorneys and investment bankers.

I'm sure the culture-studies types will find all sorts of reasons to rage against Mr Williamson for this.  "If you want to have a stay-at-home mother (stay-at-home fathers are a thing, too, but let’s not pretend that this is a sexually neutral question), then dear old Dad has to earn enough to do two things: 1. Provide the desired standard of living for the family, and 2. Buy Mom out of the labor force on behalf of the firm of Family, Inc."  Once upon a time, there was a division of labor in which the male worked outside the house (whether in the fields or at shop or office; the second shift at home was maintaining the lawn and changing the screens to storm windows and such) and the female maintained the house; now that comes after a hitch of paid work and the battle of the sexes goes on.  But the prices of food and house paint and lawn fertilizer and such reflected the incomes earned by paid labor.

It's the nature of the changing labor force participation by women, particularly married women, that's really at the heart of Mr Williamson's essay.

An Eisenhower-era lawyer was less likely to be married to another lawyer than a contemporary lawyer is. In situations in which the wife’s potential earnings were only a small fraction of her husband’s, having her stay at home imposed only a very modest opportunity cost.

I can hear some of my populist friends already demanding, “Why should my family have to compete with the Fortune 500 for my wife’s time?” That’s just another way of saying, “Why should I have to live in a world with scarcity in it?” And scarcity is real — it is not optional, it is not something invented by economists, nor something that has been foisted on the world by conniving capitalists.

If you want a world in which women’s work is highly valued in the labor market, the opportunity cost of taking women out of the labor market is going to be high.

It's more subtle than that: relax the constraints on the sorts of labor markets women might participate in, and watch people respond to those incentives. Say what you will about "late capitalism:" that people might increasingly find marriage partners who are temperamentally and intellectually more compatible is probably a step toward a general increase in human welfare: the real problem might be that all that assortative mating is exacerbating social stratification.

[O]ur houses are bigger (both in absolute terms and in per-resident terms) and better appointed than they were a generation or two ago, and shopping the elite school districts is something characteristic of relatively affluent families rather than struggling ones — another example of the fact that our policymaking discussion is dominated by and reflects the interests of elites who are well-off but not as well-off as they would like to be. That’s why middle-class tribunes such as Senator Warren spend more time talking about college loans than high-school dropout rates.

Put another way, the work the senator and her daughter once did about The Two-Income Trap, work that now might be disappearing into the memory hole, is really (to return to another of my regular themes) about the absence of a success sequence outside the richer quarters, and about an educational establishment that is doing everything apart from inculcating that success sequence outside the richer quarters.

Modern "progressive" politics: student loan forgiveness in the suburbs, more squalor in the slums.