The average home now would be 150% to 300% of the physical plant of the average home available in the 30s. The standard 1930s chore load of labor intensive washing and ironing, preparing and cooking all meals from scratch, and labor intensive house cleaning added enough time to the homemakers day beyond what those same chores require today to free up at least an eight hour shift. The well off upper middle class (or lower upper class might be the more accurate term) had housekeepers to handle much of this, working class families handled it all themselves. Women raising the larger families of that time worked no fewer hours then than woman raising families do now.

The running around built into our current lifestyle is what really sucks the time out it, and most of that is brought on by our automobile centric system, the system we built in the glorious 50s and 60s.

A great many of the woman raising smaller families with a more mechanized chore load in the fifties and sixties had worked in the war plants and wanted out of the house and back on the job where they got a paycheck for their efforts. Of course the wage differential put in place by that time made sure their out of the house labor never matched up to the men's income wise so the slippery slope had begun.

Households had very little disposable time or money in the thirties. Its the mid fifies and early sixties post war boom years (in the victorious USA anyway) that are the good old single earner income days-with the perfect June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson kept homes-which are held up as some lost ideal. They were an anomaly not the norm, and we are still suffering from their hangover. Husband and wife teams have traditionally worked very hard except of course for the relative few of the upper crust, like those idle, bored gentlefolk of the Victorian novel who wouldn't stoop to a days labor (god had created the rabble to do that for them).

It is a travesty that it takes two incomes to run an average family household!

You can say that again. Most people don't seem to realise the squeeze that has occurred over the past 2 decades or so.

Bellistner, I am currently reading Tainters book 'The Collapse of complex societies.' Although not finished yet I believe his thesis is that some societies reach a point of complexity which cannot be sustained due to the law of diminishing returns and the society reverts or collapses to a simpler form. I think that this can be related directly to what is happening in the world today. Our current world has got too complex, requires too many resources of all sorts for little or no gain and as a result is starting to collapse back to a simpler form. Relating that to this post, I think most peoples worlds are going to become much smaller and as a result there won't be the need for longer commutes, international travel etc. And of course this means that the demand for aviation will fall.

Think of it like a treadmill. You have to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. If you look at just employment, mobility certainly gives you a competitive edge over other applicants. It gives you a choice of workplaces over a wider area than an applicant limited by mass transit. However, it's only an advantage until everyone gets a car and then it becomes the minimum ante to get in the game. The only counteracting force is the expense of fuel and parking, but outside of crowded downtowns, most businesses treat free parking as a price of doing business.