An immigrant friend of mine was surprised to learn that my mother, holder of two degrees from Harvard University, was a stay-at-home mother and that, moreover, we had a full-time housekeeper. “How could you afford it on just your father’s salary?” she asked, not having experienced American life in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father worked as an economist for the federal government (not nearly as lucrative back then as it is now). Neither of my parents had any family money. So how did we do it?

I pointed out that there wasn’t much to buy back then. We couldn’t buy cable TV. We couldn’t buy mobile phones or personal computers. We had just one car, like most other American families. My dad took the bus to work. We took the bus to school. In any case, even if one wanted to splurge on a car, the most expensive cars available (e.g., Cadillac) were not more than twice as expensive as the average car (compare to today when most cities have dealers selling cars that cost 5-10X the average car’s price). Ordinary families did not aspire to live in 5000 square foot houses.

How about the housekeeper? “Her husband didn’t work, so she really had no choice but to work,” I replied. “Though her blood pressure was high and she developed some health problems later.” In thinking about it I realized that she would not have been a member of 2013’s American workforce. Both she and her husband would have qualified for disability benefits. So a big part of the answer for why our middle class household could afford a housekeeper was that we did not have to compete with the federal government for our housekeeper’s labor.