AEI’s Michael Strain weighed into the debate over whether living standards stagnated in recent decades with The American Dream is Not Dead, which I reviewed. In the end, I wrote
In the 1950s, the ideal for young Americans was to marry, have children, and move to a house in the suburbs. Today, marriage rates are low, fewer children grow up with married parents, and many young people are urban renters.
The decline of the Fifties Dream raises questions that go beyond Strain’s statistical analysis. Has the Fifties Dream lost its appeal? Or has it become harder to obtain, and if so, what are the cultural or economic impediments that are standing in the way?
I would say it has definitely lost a lot of its appeal, and young people living in cities wouldn’t (mostly) be living in suburbs if housing was cheaper. It seems like the wealthier yuppies who could afford to live anywhere they want prefer to live in cities as much as the poorer ones. Personally, after growing up in a suburb, I never want to live in a suburb again. As an adult I think I’d find living in a suburb boring (I find my home suburb kind of boring nowadays when I visit my parents). Even if I got married and had kids I’d still probably just move to a smaller less dense city and live fairly centrally.
As with many things in life, I think once many of us grew up in the traditional suburban ‘American Dream,’ often the first generation in our families to grow up in suburbs, it just didn’t seem as much thoroughly amazing as it did to people who hadn’t yet attained it. So I don’t think the loss of interest in suburban living among young people is mainly due to constraints. If anything I suspect with fewer financial constraints more would opt for the city. Re marriage in family: again, are wealthier young people for whom material constraints aren’t that bad or are nonexistent getting married and having kids more? It doesn’t seem like it. There may be constraints but I don’t material constraints are the most important ones. Sociological explanations are probably more relevant there.
Answers to questions like these generalize over too many particulars; America has become too socially fragmented for that game to make sense. It reminds me of fools generalizing about Baby Boomers or Gen X: useless nonsense.
Do the suburbs offer a net gain in quality of life? Workers may face a huge time cost if living in the suburbs increases driving time. In the 1950s financial markets were less developed so it made more sense to put more net worth into a home. That doesn’t apply today when financial markets give you diversification and lower costs. Did people properly account for the cost of a house or did they overlook the cost of their own time spent maintaining the house and yard? Having a yard will always be nice but how much of the demand for that was driven by higher electricity and air conditioning costs of the past? Did people maintain their houses simply because there were fewer entertainment options in the past? For many people buying a house is taking on a new hobby.
I think a lower prevalence of marriage reflects greater a ability to afford housing (after income redistribution) in some cases and in other cases a belief that quality of life might be improved through flexibility.
Haven’t wages been rising pretty strongly for women over the past 50 years? I would say that if true, that as much as anything else would explain a lot of this.
Whether you wanted to or not. Too bad if you weren’t white or hetereo, were a female with aspirations beyond being a stay at home mom, didn’t want kids, wanted to travel, wanted a culturally rich life. What price does one put on this giant bundle of options? Definitely not zero.
Isn’t the trend towards later marriages, fewer kids, more never married women, more single moms, and more young people living in big cities true of most places in the world? I am pretty sure that it is true for Europe, East Asia, and Iran as well. Since it is happening in many places with quite different cultures, I would look for an explanation that isn’t culturally specific.
To Arnold:
Of all that you are seeing written: articles, papers, studies, books . . . do you see any enquiry about changes in the factors that set initial individual motivations and those that shape the development (vel non) of individual evolution?
Would not a scholar, comparing current to those ’50s conditions, examine the factors that shaped and developed the motivations for those earlier “streams” of social conduct; not just correlations (Sunday School attendance, e.g.)?
There are observations of the differences in motivation (and lack thereof) amongst individuals and groups; even studies of “conditions” that may generate differences.
Still, beyond those observations are what appear (in social trends) to be changes in the factors that produce motivations – or – result in teir demise.
I don’t think it’s about the suburbs vs city so much as the coasts vs. the rest of the country. For many young people, it is better to struggle in a crappy NY or SF apartment than have a nice house in Indiana or Arizona. And they are willing to put off marriage and kids to go for the self-actualization dream in Sin City. It is that dynamic that is killing the old American Dream. In some ways it’s more winner take all. This is especially driven by women who delay marriage by asking for both a great job and also waiting for The ONE, while looking down on those who settle. 60 years ago, most women didn’t think it was so bad to settle for a nice guy, with a stable job, and a house in the suburb of a non-fashionable city even if everything wasn’t perfect.
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