I have never been a high wage earner. Thirty thousand dollars was my ceiling, although it was never my choice.

More to the point, I strongly believed in the “how to balance family and work” plan popular among baby boomers during the late ’60s and into the early ’70s, which was both partners in a marriage would engage in either part-time or shared-time professional work, with both minding the house and rearing any children.

The captains of industry would hear nothing of 20-hour workweeks.

Looking back, I see that having been raised in Michigan, where strong labor unions meant higher wages, fed our optimism. Our first jobs, whether we were hired as teachers or welfare case workers, earned us an average of $1,000 more than our nearest neighbors in Ohio who held the same jobs. Law school graduates could expect a salary of $10,000 if they went to work for the public defender’s office.

Beginning in 1969, the full-time jobs I landed paid slightly more than $8,000 per annum. That was sufficient to own a new car and, if one were diligent enough to find a good, inner-city building, one might live in an apartment without the support, and perhaps the hassle, of a roommate.

I was part of the earlier peacetime increase in births. College was affordable, despite the rising enrollments. In 1965, my high school classmates, who chose Detroit’s Wayne State University, paid only $10 per credit hour. Miniscule compared to Harvard’s then tuition of $2,000 a year.

However, by the time our younger siblings were ready for college, prices were rising. Those born in the peak birth year of 1957 shared hospital nurseries with 4.3 million newborns. More were born in the U.S. during 1957 than in any other year. Those kids — remember this was before taking a gap year — would graduate with degrees in 1979.

I have never spoken with an economist on prices for food, transportation, education and domicile. However, the American population in 1945 was 139,928,165. The baby boom ended in 1964 due to an economic slowdown that made jobs difficult to find. By then, the population was 190,895,000. Last year, the population was estimated to have reached 334,233,854.

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What I witnessed for myself was that the same apartment that rented for $100 a month in 1970 cost an additional $40 in 1974. It had a single bedroom and a kitchen the size of a large closet. If you wanted more, particularly in the suburbs, the price was higher, as was the cost of commuting to work at an office or school that still paid $8,000.

More people were chasing the rentals. Of course, more apartment buildings were rising in the further suburbs with dishwashers in the kitchens and, perhaps, laundry machines in the apartment itself and not in the basement, where coin-operated machines were the rule.

In other words, the quality of life rose along with the rent. With a rise in the quality of life, few would be willing step back into 1970.

Would the hippie dream of couples sharing all aspects of life have made a difference? The more I think about it, the more I realize that it was just a dream. Eight years after my graduation, I noticed a change in the rising generation of parents. They told their children to major in business. Quelle horreur!

My daughter, who had wanted to teach foreign languages since she was 5 and who is fluent in both French and Spanish, found, as a newlywed with a husband who was slowly changing careers, that a teacher’s salary was insufficient. When teaching left her burned out, she found work with a textbook publisher. Within a month of working there, she noticed a redundancy in one of their methods and explained how the process could be streamlined. Without a business degree, she saved a small company $10,000 a year.

My thoughts on the economy made me realize that the $30,000 I earned by teaching and working weekends in retail would take the individual worker nowhere. The new $30,000 salary was not $50,000. Then, as I gathered the paperwork needed to file an income tax return, I saw in the instructions that the dividing line between poverty and stability is now $45,000.

What brought that about? Simple. The growth of the American population. The siphoning of wealth into the hands of a few. The diminution of competition as companies are literally gobbled. The erosion of respect for knowledge through greed. Perhaps, we would have been better off if we adopted the hippie ideal.

Susan Wozniak has been a caseworker, a college professor and journalist. She is a mother and grandmother.