We used to use the MIT Living Wage calculator but we have stopped for two reasons. Between 2019 and 2020, they calculated living wage in a new way, add a cell phone and internet access as essential items, a decision that I totally agree with, and then also adding an opaque category called “civic” which in the definitions included having a pet, toys, hobbies, attending events, etc. The internet and cell phone part was carefully calculated, the civic add-on, not at all. This also meant that 2020 is not comparable to previous years. The second reason that we stopped using MIT living wage was that they don’t save previous data, so when we missed pulling the county level data for 2019, they were not able to retrieve previous year values. See page 7 of their technical documentation, https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide-Technical-Documentation-2021-12-28.pdf
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