>So what would be enough to live on? That would of course depend on where someone lived, and how much that place costs. And so Glasmeier rounded up some of her best graduate students to create, basically, a giant spreadsheet. They loaded it up with the best regional data available, from government and industry surveys, on costs for housing, food, child care, medical expenses, and transportation.<p>I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services.<p>I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.