What is a “decent” standard of living?
If full-time work should provide a decent standard of living, then we need to define what constitutes such a standard. The key problem in defining a “livable wage” is that it is always going to vary by how many people have to live on that wage. For a long time it was assumed that one worker should have a wage sufficient to support a family of four, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tried to determine what constituted a “modest but adequate” income for this four-person “reference family.” This activity was ended by the Reagan administration in 1981, and until recently there was little work on prescriptive family budgets — that is, on determining what a household or family needs to live “decently.” Fortunately, recent sustained study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) have restored the social science tradition of relating living standards to family budgets. Though this gets very complicated very quickly and is going to make it difficult
