Cliff’s Book Notes

Elizabeth Warren, “The Two-Income Trap” (2003)

(Cliff’s subtitle: “Conservative things Pocahontas said 16 years about feminism and the family that she won’t say today.”)

This is an interesting time capsule of Elizabeth Warren’s views on the family, working mothers, and what I think is probably the biggest socio-economic change of my lifetime – two-income families. 

How did two-income families get started? Citing her own studies and those of others, Warren says it was not because these families were greedy, big spenders or wanted to live an outlandish lifestyle. 

Rather the prime cause of the two-income family was – SURPRISE! - Betty Friedan and feminism, which shamed mothers for staying at home and not going out into the workforce (paperback pp. 67-68). 

While it is one thing for unmarried women or women in marriages without children to enter the workforce, Warren says feminism “grossly miscalculated” and wholly failed to understand that two-income families with children are at far more economic and social risk than one-income families because, for example, if the one-income family’s wage earner gets laid off, injured, sick, etc., the one-income family’s non-working spouse can get a job to tide the family over. 

To compound the two-income family’s precarious financial situation, the ever-increasing number of two-income families meant more competition for homes in better school districts, rising home prices fueled by easy credit thanks to deregulation, and then huge mortgages that a one-income family could not afford. (Although written before The Great Recession, Warren’s comments about easy credit, deregulation and greedy banks were prescient.) 

Hence, “The Two-Income Trap.