While the new corporate culture afforded America's plutocrats an obscenely decadent existence, for middle-class Americans life became an increasingly-intolerable struggle- both at the office and at home, what little time was spent there. A study by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren showed that even though the average two-income middle-class family earns more than the single-breadwinner from a generation ago, given mortgage costs, car payments, taxes, health insurance, day-care bills, tuition costs, the need to move into an area with a good school district (due to the increasingly unbearable competition among kids), and so on, the average two-earner family has actually less discretionary income today than single-income families a generation ago.
Elizabeth Warren