“The Simpsons” strikes many Americans as unrealistic. Not because the characters are an odd shade of yellow or because Homer Simpson, an incompetent klutz, is a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant. The real credulity-stretcher is that his family are comfortably middle-class—two-storey home, car, holidays to Itchy & Scratchy Land—on the wages of a single breadwinner with only a high-school education.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The decline of single-earner homebuyers”
From the February 14th 2026 edition
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