Wealth & Money Quote by John Fisher

The line lands like an accidental time traveler: a 16th-century clergyman allegedly diagnosing a dual-income trap with the brisk confidence of a morning-news economist. That an ecclesiastical voice would frame family life in the grammar of “today’s economy” is the tell. The intent isn’t romantic or pastoral; it’s managerial. Fisher’s phrasing treats the household as a unit of production that must now scale up to survive, and the family as something you “raise” the way you raise capital.

The subtext is a moral and political squeeze. “More common to need” dodges blame while naming necessity: this isn’t about ambition, it’s about compulsion. It also sneaks in a standard of normalcy. If two incomes are “common,” then one-income households become impractical, even irresponsible, and the burden quietly shifts from institutions to individuals: adapt or fail. For a cleric, that’s a loaded move. Clergy were often expected to speak about order, duty, charity, and the proper shape of domestic life; here the economy is depicted as the author of the rules, and the sermon becomes a budget memo.

Context sharpens the irony. Fisher’s real world was defined by agrarian labor, guild structures, and church-centered welfare, not modern wage work and childcare markets. Read as an anachronism, the quote exposes how thoroughly contemporary life has been colonized by economic logic: even the language of family gets translated into income streams. The rhetorical power is its quiet bleakness: no villain, no outrage, just a “common” necessity that sounds disturbingly permanent.