A Year Is Too Short for a U.S. Worker to Earn Middle-Class Life

The typical American man needs to work 53 weeks to pay for the basics of middle-class family life, and that rises to 66 weeks for a woman who’s the sole breadwinner, according to a new study.

Those figures for 2018 compare with just 30 weeks for males at the median weekly wage in 1985, according to research by Oren Cass at the Manhattan Institute. For the median female worker, the figure rose from 45 weeks.

In the paper, Cass -– a conservative scholar and adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign -- attempts to build a “cost of thriving” index. His basket of middle-class basics consists of a 3-bedroom house just below the mid-range of market prices; family health insurance; the operating cost for a vehicle; and a semester at public college.

To be sure, households are much less likely to make the attempt to pay for all those things on one income today, after decades of rising participation by women in the workforce.