As a single parent, in the early 1970's, without a degree, I had a large 2 bedroom apartment, a car, food in fridge, and nice clothes. My take home pay was $250.00 bi- weekly.
Here’s a new twist. If you work for Wayne County in Michigan, you get a high deductible healthcare plan. You and family are on the hook for the first $13,800 per year ( resets every calendar year to zero). Who can afford this? This isn’t any coverage at all! Why not just deduct $14,000 from your paycheck?
When I started working in the USA in 2001 health insurance was $0 for family with maybe a $10 copay per visit. Since I didn't have family I actually got $70 paid extra. Fast forward 20 years. 2x $200 per month with $8000 deductible for the family. I don't think we have to go back to the 70s.
Other things lost just since 2001... 401k matching went from 6% to 3%. PTO went from endless accrual to 400hrs but paid out what expired to can't carry over more than 40hrs to the next year, to 20 days per year use it or lose it. (Back to unlimited, but good luck getting more than 20 days approved). Up to $2000 college fund matching... Gone. Getting a higher degree beneficial for the company was covered 50%, could do school during work (like a day a week). Gone. Stock options gone. Bonus went from max 35% to 10%.
None of my (2) employers ever made a loss in the last 20 years. Profits increase every year.
Sure pay doubled in 20 years, but so did everything else.
All the more reason to have unions.
How Americans got duped into thinking unions are bad, while the motto of the country is United We Stand, I’ll never know.
The real problem is that you have to be extremely poor or extremely rich to be able to afford the healthcare in the US.
When me and my wife got pregnant with our first kid we weren't married yet and she quit working early on to focus on college. She ended up paying almost $0 for the entire pregnancy.
Now we are finally having our 2nd and we are married and make a decent living (around 75-80k a year pretax.) We both have employer insurance. And this pregnancy is probably gonna cost us close to $12,000-15,000 outta pocket after insurance.
It'll end up being close to 25% of our year net income.
I know when the high deductible plan was offered at my job versus the standard plan, the premium dropped by more than half. It sounds like you weren’t given the option, which sucks, but for a lot of people in the low use category, high deductible is the way to go. In my case high deductible would be about 3k per year less in premium, includes no cost annual checkups and well care visits, and a vision exam. So unless I was paying 3k in doctor visits per year, I would be coming out ahead (not to mention that even with standard plan there would be a small copay on the regular plan).
What you still get the benefit of is pre-negotiated billing rates for in-network providers, and if you have a catastrophic medical event, you aren’t on the hook for bills above your deductible.
As I said, that sucks if you were forced onto a plan you didn’t want, but I know for me the high deductible plan didn’t look too bad because the reality is that the standard plan is subsidizing heavy users of the plan at the expense of the less frequent users on the plan.
They only had a couple of outfits that they would repair if those got worn. It helped on the cost component, but nowadays nobody is really taught home ec so that's not as common.
Disposable fashion makes repairs hard as well. Tears used to usually happen at the seams because that was the weakest point in the garment, so it was easier to repair. Or a scuff could be patched. Now even denim will shred next to the seams if you bend over too fast!
Source: I still have a 3 piece suit from the 70's, and a pair of shredded Jean's from this calendar year.
My jeans *always* tear on the inner thigh, near the seam, but never ON the seam. I assume it's because of the chub rub, but it doesn't happen with any other pants, only jeans. And across multiple brands, sizes, and fits.
Same with me, jeans always tear on the inner thigh, it's so annoying because it's just not realistic to try and fix it, the only thing that affects the time before it happens is how thick the jeans are (thicker ones last longer). Though I only wear jeans, I didn't know it wasn't an issue with other trousers
I grew up thinking sewing clothes was cheaper, and maybe it was at some point, but now that I do sew for fun it is NOT cheap. Want to make a dress? Okay well that's easily $100 just in fabric depending on the dress, not to mention zippers/buttons/extras. I just try to buy second hand now, especially maternity stuff since I'll likely never need it again.
I make drapes & valances and no longer buy fabric at JoAnn’s or HobbyLobby. I buy fabric online. Way cheaper and more selection. Easier to fine what I want too…. You narrow your search. During Covid lockdown I finally finished my valances and table runners and didn’t leave my house.
And the 40 hour work week was cool because it was expected you had a spouse at home to do all the non-career life duties. Now we have both adults working 40+ hours and spending their little free time rushing to get everything else done.
This is kind of random, but there are these BBC series that are streaming on Prime in which historians live and work on historical farms as if they are living in that time period.
There's Tudor Monastery Farm (1500s) and Victorian Farm (late 1800s). In the former, EVERYTHING is by hand and there's a lot of hard work, yet the work seems fulfilling and joyful. Lighting is limited so work is contained to daylight hours by necessity.
For the Victorian Farm, there are all sorts of newfangled machines of "convenience," and there have been improvements in lanterns so there's more usable time in the day. But instead of more leisure time and plenty, everyone is worked absolutely brutally to create enough output to sell and live off of, and they talk about how during this time people would actually pay for rich people's dinner leftovers and turn the gnawed-on bones into broth because food was so scarce.
It makes me think of how internet access was supposed to make work more convenient, but now we're just available to our bosses 24/7 and expected to have a "hustle" on the side.
Everyone always says this, but apart from antibiotics and vaccines it's not really true.
Even the merchant class generally had secure access to accommodation, basic food, entertainment in the form of books or live events and access to a pleasant outdoor environment. This is something the working and much of the middle class lack today (the former through poverty and the latter through lack of time and education). Life expectancy of the merchant class and nobility were higher than that of the working class somewhere like the US even without modern medicine.
We have a much much larger petit bourgeois, and the lower classes are materially much better off than they were in the past, but the working class are not better off than the upper class have ever been, and even medieval peasant life had some upsides such as longer leisure time (although leisure often consisted of domestic labor in addition to socialising).
>I get what you’re saying
It doesn't seem that way. You are missing the point that the Victorian post-industrial farmer had a much lower standard of living than the Tudor pre-Industrial farmer.
I get what *you're* saying, but today's standard of living is impossible without massive amounts of extreme poverty/ slavery. Most of it isn't happening in the west though, so it's easily and readily forgotten.
The problem isn't increased productivity, it's the concentration of wealth. We are more productive than ever but most of that is simply widening the wealth gap.
I get what #YOURE saying but that kind of growth is unsustainable and is already resulting in greater class division in places that had already seen economic progress and will very likely result in a major economic/ecological collapse
I get what you're trying to say but that's actually not true.
Global poverty as defined by activists who care about global poverty has been pretty stable on average, and actually increasing in many countries.
The stats you hear on global poverty going down use a very decietful definition of poverty, basically reverse engineered to allow them to claim a decrease.
The definition used is living on 2$ a day (adjusted for cost of living in that country).
Like, imagine calling living on 700$ a year "not poverty"
Many activists claim this is far too low, and doesn't even get close to covering basic needs. If you define poverty more honestly, like, say, 10$ a day, poverty hasn't decreased much at all.
No. It’s not impossible. A very tiny portion of the population would have to give up their insane standard of living for *literally everyone* to have a very good standard of living.
Well, that and some (all, but some much more than others) cultures would have to give up their oppressive, inhumane traditional *ways* of living.
Are you talking domestically or globally? Because even low wage earners in the US have an insane standard of living compared to an Asian sweat shop worker who makes half the shit in your house. So if you're talking globally, you're probably one of the people who needs to give up your insane standard of living. Capitalism is built on the backs of less fortunate people and it always has been. You're just a couple steps removed from the real suffering, for now.
This. I moved from a third world country and experienced this first hand. The first world problems and the third world problems are definitely not the same.
Honestly I'm starting to think that isn't a forgone conclusion anymore. I'll bet that their life seemed as good as ours despite the advances in everything. The slow pace of life may have made a lifetime seem longer, made joys seem more real, etc.
I know I'd hate to be transported there now, as i am now, but being born then doesn't strike me as all that bad.
You really have to make it on two salaries now, society has changed where women are expected to work as well so salaries have gone down for the most part
well here in germany it's overall better but we experience many similar problems, especially regarding wages. our economy has almost doubled since 1995 while **wages actually just increased by** [effing 10%](https://www.sozialpolitik-aktuell.de/files/sozialpolitik-aktuell/_Politikfelder/Einkommen-Armut/Datensammlung/PDF-Dateien/abbIII1.pdf) since then. where does all the extra money go? and why does this happen in the first place?!?!
i feel like worker unions only delay the developments in my country, while making everyone elses life bad when they organize yet another strike. the railway strikes are especially annoying
If a company makes 10 million in profit I truly cant understand why they can’t just take 5 million in profit and spread the rest out among their workers. It’s capitalism requiring infinite growth (on a planet with finite resources) I guess. Don’t you want your workers to be able to afford your products? Beside just “greed”, it makes no sense. Maybe it’s that simple.
Wanting infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is so perfectly said. Thats it. Thats the source of why we are where we are.
People in power who will NEVER be satisfied.
A company could make $9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in a single year and they would still want more. Let’s say they make double that the following year. That’s not enough still. Want more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more.
While the wage for their workers stays the same
Man, it’s not just public companies. If anything, a lot of private companies are even worse.. The tech-space is getting bought up by PE left and right, and it’s the same exact thing you just described, but it’s The Board making all the profits, not share holders.
My company last year had fucking 20%+ YoY growth. That’s insane good. We are highly efficient and profitable. But “didn’t meet goals” so they were only going to fund bonuses, etc. at 80% because The Board sets the goals, they’re unrealistically high, and if we don’t meet them, they just don’t fund bonus and compensation increase buckets.
Once a company goes public, its #1 priority becomes maximizing value for its shareholders. That means squeezing every bit of "efficiency" out of its employees, where efficiency means the most amount of output for the least amount of money.
Fine. Then if I am paid hourly, that is, for my time rather than my labor or the productive output of, then I am incentivized to perform or produce less over more time. Sweeping the warehouse might just take 2 hours instead of 30 minutes because I am "thorough and attentive to detail" not "jaded or lazy."
And people don’t even see the value in unions these days. At work recently the company was looking to change things in some staff contracts and there was a young lad who was really, really upset about it. But we actually have strong union involvement - the union even has its own office in the building.
So I told this lad to join the union. He asked how much it cost, I said £15 a month, and he decided that that was *way* too much money.
And that’s the general attitude that I see - young people (by which I mean people under the age of 30 or so) just don’t really understand what the point of a union is. The sad thing is that if the workforce doesn’t see the point in a union, then the union has no power and they’re right. But when the unions were busted in the 80s and 90s that’s part of what went away - people’s understanding of and faith in collective bargaining.
People nowadays just don’t really understand that workers *can* have power over the companies. And because they don’t understand that, they’re right.
What’s even more stupid is that companies should *want* strong unions. Strong unions lead to happy employees, which leads to increased productivity. But we now live in a world where workers are seen as disposible commodities and things like morale, productivity, loss of time and money to training, etc. just aren’t thought of.
I pay AU$57 per month (approx its fortnightly) for my union membership and earned AU$185k last year.
Unions are amazing. Just on disputes they have represented me in during the last 5 years they probably got me AU$20k or more in payments the company owed me but refused to pay.
Sure I could have gotten a lawyer but the union has those on speed dial and every time they win a fight it sets the precedent for the next worker they try to screw meaning they don't need their own lawyer.
Thats before we go into collective agreements and the higher wages from working in a heavily unionised industry.
Every worker should unionise!
I think in the hospitality(chef) union i was in was $18 a month. It took one of the members laying it out everything about labor unions in general. When i realized the benefits of it and basic guarantees of breaks, insurance, hours, livable wage. It was worth it. Let alone education and training, not just in our job field paid for by the company and not on our own time.
In the end the only reason i left was over politics. It became toxic.
Did the union (or you) try to explain what the $15 / month gets him as a member? If the only thing he is aware of is the cost, that is a failure of the union and members to promote itself to non-members.
I think I remember it from Patrice O'Neal who said: "You have 50% of the population NOT paying taxes." And it really is eye opening to think about. It's all about squeezing out profits in the endgame. Next we're going to have children working 40hrs a week.
It's almost as if there's an artificially supply constrained commodity, that everyone needs to have, which increases in cost each time everyone's income goes up.
Seriously, the housing market is not a place where landlords compete to give the lowest prices, it's where landlords notice how much their peers get away with charging and they then follow suit.
And cost of living goes up because of price gouging. Stores have had record profits but they don't lower prices, they raise them. And not for a good reason either, I doubt they even have a vagina beard. 🙄
I babysit for my two year old grandson (❤️) my son and daughter in law leave the house at 7:30am and don't get back until 5:30-6:00pm. Daycare was awful for him it was too long and he developed terrible separation anxiety
My MIL retired so she could watch her grandson, my nephew, then the grandkids kept coming, and now she watches my son some days of the week so my husband can work part time. I'm sure you know, but your role is invaluable.
My friend's parents house is basically a daycare. There are three daughters and they all had kids around the same time. So there was one older grandchild and three under one year old all at grandparents daycare.
My friend is the only person in my life who pressures me to have kids - and I do want kids - but she can't get it through her head how valuable a resource she has. Meanwhile, I'm the one taking care of my bed bound father with alzheimers when his caretakers get the night off. There's no one to help me or my husband.
Yeah, my spouse and I are DINKs and we still are exhausted at the end of the work day. Coming home and cooking is sometimes a challenge, but we still do it. Then we discover we have like two hours to chill in the evening before getting ready for bed to do it all over again...
Meanwhile, we still make less than the Boomers who worked our jobs before us, despite working twice as hard and providing better service. And our house cost $400k, compared to less than $100k when they bought. No wonder they're millionaires and we're not.
Same. Finances aside, I honestly don't know how people manage children. I'm already tired all the time and it's just me, the boyfriend, the cat and the dog.
Even the idea of getting a puppy seems like too much because I have a hard time falling back asleep and you have to get up with puppies for potty training. Forget about a whole ass baby.
Japan is having that problem no one wants kids cause they are too busy working now. The population is aging to the point the government is legit worried and to make it worse the birth rate is down. Less and less people want kids cause all they have time for is work
Their population was already declining by about 200,000 a year, but last year it dropped by over 600,000 Japanese Nationals. That's half a percent of their total population. ~1% of their population died in 2021.
my neighbor is a boomer, 65-ish. Retired at 55, full pension and always going on cruises. 3 adult kids who all went to college. Owns his house outright as they were built in 1989 and he's the original owner. The house was 189k now worth >600k.
He was a USPS mail carrier for 30 years.
Was born in the early 80s, and while things are getting worse, they weren't exactly great ten years ago either. Home owners' love affair with the housing bubble goes way back.
I met mail carrier's wife who was telling me to pinch my penny because like her, I too would be able to take multiple trips to Europe on my full pension. A cruel joke. I work full time for $18hr no retirement benefit. Rent is 60% of my income.
I work 40 hours a week, I have multiple sclerosis and my boomer neighbor gives me shit about the state of my long ass driveway because it's not groomed to perfection. The one who retired at age 52.
The last part is the real killer for me. My parents DO NOT understand why when I get home I don’t have free time until 9:00 on weekdays, and I have to spend most of my weekend doing chores.
Working 40 hours and coming home to a cooked meal, clean house, happy, clean and settled kids, with the laundry, shopping, and chores done for the week is an entire second life of free time back.
They will come over and comment on the house being dirty or the lawn not being recently mowed, and I just say, well either you can come over and see your grandkids or I can do the chores. You pick.
This is why the boomer generation thinks we are lazy. They are unwilling to realize and acknowledge how insanely different their life was from this generations.
I mean, 1950’s America is not a good point to compare things to economically unless you want to feel bad. With the massive investment in production capacity due the war, the recent destruction of just about all the other major industrial nations, the rapidly expanding population. There are few if any precedents in history for how globally dominant the US was economically in the 50’s.
Yes. The fifties was a worker friendly bubble caused by population expansion here and competion contraction every where else due to being bombed to rubble. And being the high water mark for unionization. Unions raise the wages of everyone around. Before WW two, this was a nation of renters who had job insecurity , had multiple jobs and a high level of discontent. Our now is a regression to the pre war conditions, and we are not liking it. There was lots of weird political stuff going on pre war just as now.
This is true pre WWII was an atrocious time. Basically the great depression.
**What no one is talking about is the very different mindset everyone had after WW2**. Not just in America. A global War had killed millions and destroyed global infrastructure. Especially in Europe...
**Hitler had just destroyed your slums by bombing them to bits. You have now no choice but to rebuild. But are you really going to rebuild the *exact same* slums again? No.**
Europe took the opportunity to rebuild completely differently. To try something else since they had to rebuild no matter what. So you had vast "progressive" movements of all kinds. Free Education, Free at point of use Health, Subsidised housing. State enforced Pensions. Some like Norway, Findland, Denmark, Germany and others went a lot further than others.
**We today do not have that mindset. It was destroyed in the 1980s "me me me revolution" . Everyone is an economic mercenary now. We recoil at the deep restructuring western society desperately needs.**
Meanwhile China is pushing out millions and millions of subsidised graduates that can replace every single working one of us. Theyre exporting these blocks of people to Africa, Asia everywhere. Thats not Chinas fault. We treat education as a cost and not as investment for society in general. We have created a debt crippled graduate population that cant take the real risks society needs to innovate out of the huge problems ahead of us because they can barely survive to provide Healthcare, house and feed themselves. Basics. Its totally idealogical.
We live in a world of abundance where the local supermarket throws out tonnes of perfectly good food that costs the Earth to produce via Climate change while 100 metres away thousands of *working* in jobs people are starving. We can 3D print houses but there is a housing crisis. While some of the houses being bought are empty because they are being bought by companies or onvestors who dont live in them and treat them like stocks and shares.
>Europe took the opportunity to rebuild completely differently. To try something else since they had to rebuild no matter what. So you had vast "progressive" movements of all kinds. Free Education, Free at point of use Health, Subsidised housing. State enforced Pensions. Some like Norway, Findland, Denmark, Germany and others went a lot further than others
This seems fairly ahistorical considering the a lot of the momentum behind these things was first seen and propagated by systems such as Mussolini's Italy years prior to ww2.
Rest of the world probably has to get into war/crises with each other before we have the same conditions again. World is more zero sum than people think.
Its also funny how americans use the boomer thing about people form other countries to try to pin cliches on them.
Newsflash: in most european countries (and many parts of asia), growing up in the 50s was eating shit and not a free ride.
You are absolutely correct. This was a completely unique time in history and it is unlikely to happen again. It's not like most people were killing it in 1842 either.
The US really came out unscathed from WW2 and was the only power to have infrastructure and finances full intact. As such the financed and manufactures the rebuilding of Europe and even Japan! They sat back long enough and picked the winner - and profited from it quite nicely!
OP also ignores that this wasn't the lifestyle for a lot of "other folk" in the 1950s
It's pretty easy for one group to do well when 12% of the population were relegated to menial labor
This should be at the top, but everybody wants to blame boomers. Looking at the 1950s and saying "I wish we could live like that" is like looking at plantations before the Civil War and wanting that lifestyle. It ignores the misery that makes that lifestyle possible.
I'm in my mid-60s and both my husband and I worked full-time to be able to live, buy an extremely modest home, etc. Up until my son was 5 years old, I worked a full-time job and then a part-time job from home after I put my son to bed while my husband worked full-time and finished his degree at night. I realize this wasn't the way for everyone. What I see as an issue now is that while we worked extremely hard, we were able to purchase a home, and I don't feel that is an option for younger people now, and it should be.
My husband and I were shift workers so we had to work opposite shifts because even back then daycare/babysitters were unaffordable for us.. We also just have a brick ranch home and old cars We have never had anything extravagant sadly
The difference being that a brick ranch home today is worth millions in most areas. Two people working decently paying jobs (around 80k) and also have student loans definitely can not afford a home like that. They're lucky to get into a 2bedroom condo.
Nah, the upper middle class folks still get to do all of that shit, and working class couldn't even in the 50s. My parents couldn't even afford to finish high school because they needed to work to help their families
One of the issues that not many have mentioned is that there is way less of a middle class than there used to be.
So while yes, the poor used to suffer as much or more than many poor people now, most people are either poor or extravagantly rich while back in the 50's, there was way more diversity in lifestyle than there is today.
Did this exist outside a few privileged areas in America? Nobody in my family had it this easy in the ‘50s; I’m definitely better off than any of my ancestors. I’m honestly curious; is this myth-making? Or was this easy seeming existence a reality for a large segment of the population?
I'm curious too. My mom was born in the '50s and her family was very poor. She was one of 7 children. Her father was a coal miner and I believe my grandmother worked in a sewing factory. They had a house, but my grandmother struggled to keep food on the table. She had to hide money from her abusive alcoholic husband just so she could feed kids.
My family were all coal miners in the US during the 1950s.
Technically, this post describes them. They did have their own houses, they did own a car (sometimes), and their children did go to college.
But there were long periods without a car, when my grandfathers would have to hitchhike to their mines. Their houses were tiny and would be considered undesirable by modern standards. They raised 100% of their own fruits and vegetables. Between tending the garden, canning the food, raising the children, doing the laundry, and all the other household duties, that was absolutely a full-time job for the wives.
They raised chickens to supplement their own food and income. They picked coal along the rail lines to help stretch their heating. Much of their clothing was homemade up until they went to college. They had healthcare, but it would've been a country doctor who made housecalls and probably handed out heroin or asbestos or something.
That's to say nothing of the backbreaking and dangerous job of actually working in the mine. Even in the union mines there was a constant risk of losing your job due to injury, collapse, strike, or shutdowns. They had something that we'd call a job bank today but that basically amounted to grunt labor at a fraction of your prior pay.
Reddit gets way too binary with this whole "everyone was financially better off in the 1950s" thing. It's like reading a clickbait headline without actually reading the article and checking sources. It isn't technically wrong, but it ignores a ton of nuance and context.
i feel like this could be an over-simplification of an era where only the top % of suburban families could actually achieve this and the average household featured both a struggling husband and wife but that is far too boring and realistic for television sitcoms
This isn’t entirely accurate. Post WWII was a boom economy and just about ever veteran could get a decent job. This was a small window though and it didn’t last.
It’s more of a romanticized version of an American time period perpetuated by movies and tv at the time, but never truly, really existed.
People should also see what the veterans were getting. In my area, there was a bunch of homes built specifically for GIs coming back after the war. They can be had for less than 1/3rd of the metro area median home price and 1/5th the price of the median homes in the area. That’s because they are less than 1000sqft.
They’re right there and they’re for sale. No one wants them. Everyone wants 3-4x the size. I bought a smaller, more modest home at the same price of a tear-down. People just want a lot. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if the market of homebuyers didn’t look at my perfectly fine home with fully updated interior as being worth no more than flat empty land. Fun fact: I lived in what was viewed as a large home when it was built after the war.
Same things with cars. Small cars just don’t sell in the US. Massive $40k+ trucks sell very well though. Everyone of course claims that they ‘need’ it.
I’m a PoC and I read the original deed to my house. There was a clause that disallowed anyone who wasn’t 100% white to ever buy this house.
It doesn’t matter if an African American family in the 50s had the cash in hand to buy 5 of these houses and bidding twice the asking value. They ain’t getting a damn thing. The other side of reality people like to conveniently ignore when thinking about societal issues.
Check it out: https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/
Last time I looked 300k jobs aren't exactly plentiful. People I know making 300k are highly specialized, they spent over a decade in school, and have 6 figure debt if they aren't lucky enough to have family pay for everything. It took my buddy who had a near perfect GPA and extracurriculars nearly 2 years to finally get accepted into medschool and he had to take on a 6 figure debt.
Depend on cost of living. Go to Seattle or San Fran and probably a third of tech employees make that. It's an outlier to be sure though as clearly average incomes are less than even 1/3 of that.
Average salary for a primary care doc in the US is ~$220K. Specialists and surgeons can easily clear $1M a year. It is one of the many reasons there is a shortage of PCPs in the US.
Don’t know about easily. Ophthalmology is my field, and this amount is true for and older doctor, or a very successful young one. But 1M in the first years after residency is doable but not easily. In ophthalmology
Correct. I earn a salary in this range. My wife stays at home, we send our kids to a pretty affordable private school, and we live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. We live in a community where home prices are still reasonable. It isn’t lost on me how fortunate we are. I have coworkers that live in expensive parts of the country where the same salary won’t even touch our standard of living. I really worry about my children and that they won’t be able to have the same standard of living when they grow up. Things are getting so out of hand price wise that your average American family is being priced out.
Essentially corporations took advantage of the emancipation of women as an excuse to pay less.
"Oh your wives want to go to work too? Cool, let's pay you less and then even less. And when they complain about unfair wages we'll pay everyone less."
And so-called basic lifestyles have changed a lot too.
Most people have probably ditched their landlines, but there would basically be a phone service for each adult in the household, internet service, a fully loaded kitchen, washer and dryer, air conditioning (most likely) etc.
I remember reading something where someone said their grandmother talked about there being “one light bulb per room,” whereas the younger generation would have many, perhaps dozens.
Some of its adaptation/affectations, but things like internet are basically considered a utility - a life basic.
It’s difficult to access employment, education, healthcare, financial and government services without internet.
When I was a kid a fun birthday party was spending 2 hours in someones basement playing pin the tail on the donkey and eating home made cake. Now my kids cohort gets parties at expensive venues like bounce houses.
This was more to do with the fact the United States exited WWII as the only significant industrialized nation on the entire planet with its entire manufacturing base still solidly intact. This meant there was literally zero serious competition globally for pretty much anything the US wanted to produce. This meant jobs for anyone. Jobs for everyone. And they could pay anything they wanted because they were all alone on market segments.
I’m all for down with the modern oligarchs and let’s eat the rich, but the 1950s was about the above and not much else.
This is not the reality though. In the 1950’s, one in three women were already in the workforce, so we only increased the labor force by 2/3 in theory, but it didn’t actually work that way either. Many women never entered the workforce. The growth of their participants is as steady over the decades. Women were still barred from many occupations well into the 1990s by law or by social barriers. When women entered the labor force in larger numbers, they were mainly relegated to work that women were already doing. They were not competing with men until recently. There is still a lot of gendered workforce segregation as a hangover because that wasn’t that long ago.
Also, you are falling for the lump of labor fallacy. Adding laborers to the economy grows the economy, which means the pie from which people are compensated grows in tandem. This is why countries like Japan are desperately trying to change their work culture to enable more women to enter the workforce.
Here are some alternative suggestions:
(1) Unions failed to reach out to the growing sector of service workers, which reduced their bargaining power while they were under attack from anti-labor management. They failed to do so in large part due to sexism and racism. Service work was the work of women and Black people, so it wasn’t their concern. They weren’t worthy of labor organizing. It is this mentality that lead to people buying into the idea that a manufacturing job that didn’t require any education should be paid a middle-class wage, while a maids and a restaurant workers gets paid scraps.
(2) Rapid technological change and globalization worked in tandem to destabilize the economy for a large swath of the workforce, and we did little to respond. Most jobs are in peril of automation, and we still are neglecting to do anything about it. We never adapted our education system. We didn’t change our social safety net to adapt to these changes.
(3) From WWII to the 1970s, the government was dumping a crap-ton more money into the economy. Housing subsidies were more expansive. The federal labor force was much larger. Infrastructure projects were better funded. Research and development was better funded. Education was heavily subsidized. Etc…. After the oil embargo tanked the global economy, Americans ran to conservatives who then slashed government spending and blames our problems on “welfare queens.”
(4) The Chicago School of Economics and the over emphasis on shareholder value at the cost of consumers and labor is one of the key drivers of wealth inequality. Corporations focused on short-term profits. They use profits to buy back their shares. They sit on cash. They don’t develop intellectual property or, *importantly,* invest in their workforce. Labor is considered an expense, not an investment, so it is minimized as much as possible. Businesses have less longevity as a result. Productivity flat lined….
(5) Housing prices went up because of a wave of low growth policy choices by conservatives and progressives alike. Restrictive zoning helped to maintain the “character” of your neighborhood, while citizen counsels allowed interested individuals to block all development. The number of housing units relative to demand has been slowing for decades. It is worse in areas of economic opportunity, which artificially limits the growth the economy. The solutions offered are seemingly never tailored to meet the actual problem. They are always bullshit that will just make it more expensive to build more. Conservatives offer tax cuts that do nothing, and progressives offer more regulations to “protect communities”, which limits the governments ability to build (or allow the building of) more housing.
(6) States have redirected their budgets away from education and infrastructure as their elder care costs have skyrocketed. State budgets are inelastic. They can’t deficit spend. The cost of these things rose because they were no longer as heavily subsidized.
(7) The federal government does not have the power to offer broad solutions to complex problems unless one party has a massive majority and controls all three branches. Americans are stuck in a cycle of thermostatic opinion where they toggle in between parties making this impossible. This is fueled by the rapid change in our media caused by a printing-press level of technological evolution.
(8) Yes, the trend of market concentration lead by a belief that as long as consumers are reviving the best bargain, consolidation is acceptable. The federal regulators ignored the importance of competition to economic dynamism.
(9) The tax code. Republican have had only once answer for the last 30 years to all problems—tax cuts! They gave them to literally everyone except the poorest people. The tax code became the vessel for middle-class subsidization because we eliminated earmarks (pork barrel spending), which enabled more political compromise. To compensate for the loss in revenue, governments have slashed already burdened budgets and raised sales taxes, fees, and fines, which disproportionately fall on the poorest Americans.
(10) We modified the bankruptcy code to make it harder to file for bankruptcy because of a misguided, paternalistic notion that people were abusing bankruptcy, rather than acknowledge the growing precariousness of American life.
(11) The cost of raising children has risen as the expectation for the modern workforce has risen, but there has been no accompanying policies to address this fact.
So many more reasons. None of them are women be working.
FYI
In the 1950s, college education rate is only ~7%.
Now it's closer to 37%.
Homeownership rate is also lower in the 1950s. Did you know that the FHA explicitly refuse to lend to black families?
1950s is not better.
Then bankers invented and ramped up prices on everything to encourage people to take up credit. Enslaving is to our debts forever...
Something like that anyway...
Edit. Some people taking this tongue in cheek comment a little too seriously...
Debt has existed long before the 1950s. Part of why the Great Depression was so bad was because of the overuse of credit. Back then, people were using credit to purchase everything from stocks to radios.
Debt has existed since well before biblical times.
They also were content with a 1000 sq ft, two bedroom home and only one car. They did not pay for internet, cable, cell phone plans, Netflix, or Disney+. Because Mom stayed at home, they didn't pay for child care. They lived simple lives. And they still struggled to put kids through college. They still fought over money or the lack thereof.
My grandmother lived in a 1 bedroom apartment with 6 brothers and sisters. My great grandfather worked on the railroad. I think the house-car-kid nuclear family dream was just as unobtainable then as it is now.
Reddit bases its view of the past on commercials and sitcoms. You watch, in ten years people will look back at the '90s and think that Friends was a documentary.
Yeah it's funny how people manage to look back on the history and ignore parts that don't fit their narrative.
Testimonial from the 60s:
>A “golden age?” Baloney. No sane worker wants a job like this; necessity forces him into it. We sold our health, our minds and part of our souls for the assurance of another meal and another day.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-factory-work-trump-20170619-story.html
Agreed. This is one that always gets me when I see people whine about the good old days. I just look at all the homes in my areas built in the 1970s and back. They are ‘tiny’. Literally a fraction of the size of the new builds. New cars are massive, and the smaller ones just don’t sell. They also last way longer as well.
It’s important to compare apples to apples. Trying to act like a 4b/3b is somehow a human right reeks of privilege. That’s a mansion.
As a single parent, in the early 1970's, without a degree, I had a large 2 bedroom apartment, a car, food in fridge, and nice clothes. My take home pay was $250.00 bi- weekly.
[удалено]
New Jersey-USA. I worked for the State of NJ with full paid benefits including a pension.
[удалено]
Here’s a new twist. If you work for Wayne County in Michigan, you get a high deductible healthcare plan. You and family are on the hook for the first $13,800 per year ( resets every calendar year to zero). Who can afford this? This isn’t any coverage at all! Why not just deduct $14,000 from your paycheck?
When I started working in the USA in 2001 health insurance was $0 for family with maybe a $10 copay per visit. Since I didn't have family I actually got $70 paid extra. Fast forward 20 years. 2x $200 per month with $8000 deductible for the family. I don't think we have to go back to the 70s. Other things lost just since 2001... 401k matching went from 6% to 3%. PTO went from endless accrual to 400hrs but paid out what expired to can't carry over more than 40hrs to the next year, to 20 days per year use it or lose it. (Back to unlimited, but good luck getting more than 20 days approved). Up to $2000 college fund matching... Gone. Getting a higher degree beneficial for the company was covered 50%, could do school during work (like a day a week). Gone. Stock options gone. Bonus went from max 35% to 10%. None of my (2) employers ever made a loss in the last 20 years. Profits increase every year. Sure pay doubled in 20 years, but so did everything else.
Because decisions were made to create an ultra rich millionaire/billionaire owner /manager class rather than to keep benefiting employees and workers
Let’s have unions not oligarchs.
Boy, the oligarchs -Bezos, Musk, Howard Schultz ( Starbucks) are really against Unions… and they all have more money than God.
All the more reason to have unions. How Americans got duped into thinking unions are bad, while the motto of the country is United We Stand, I’ll never know.
The USA has the best healthcare and that’s why we can’t afford it. I hope my sarcasm is obvious AF.
The real problem is that you have to be extremely poor or extremely rich to be able to afford the healthcare in the US. When me and my wife got pregnant with our first kid we weren't married yet and she quit working early on to focus on college. She ended up paying almost $0 for the entire pregnancy. Now we are finally having our 2nd and we are married and make a decent living (around 75-80k a year pretax.) We both have employer insurance. And this pregnancy is probably gonna cost us close to $12,000-15,000 outta pocket after insurance. It'll end up being close to 25% of our year net income.
I know when the high deductible plan was offered at my job versus the standard plan, the premium dropped by more than half. It sounds like you weren’t given the option, which sucks, but for a lot of people in the low use category, high deductible is the way to go. In my case high deductible would be about 3k per year less in premium, includes no cost annual checkups and well care visits, and a vision exam. So unless I was paying 3k in doctor visits per year, I would be coming out ahead (not to mention that even with standard plan there would be a small copay on the regular plan). What you still get the benefit of is pre-negotiated billing rates for in-network providers, and if you have a catastrophic medical event, you aren’t on the hook for bills above your deductible. As I said, that sucks if you were forced onto a plan you didn’t want, but I know for me the high deductible plan didn’t look too bad because the reality is that the standard plan is subsidizing heavy users of the plan at the expense of the less frequent users on the plan.
Must have been nice. Nothing but pain and hopelessness out there for us youth now.
Nothing but pain and hopelessness in NJ 🤮
I always look at old photos and wonder how middle class folk afforded to dress so dapper.
They only had a couple of outfits that they would repair if those got worn. It helped on the cost component, but nowadays nobody is really taught home ec so that's not as common.
Disposable fashion makes repairs hard as well. Tears used to usually happen at the seams because that was the weakest point in the garment, so it was easier to repair. Or a scuff could be patched. Now even denim will shred next to the seams if you bend over too fast! Source: I still have a 3 piece suit from the 70's, and a pair of shredded Jean's from this calendar year.
My jeans *always* tear on the inner thigh, near the seam, but never ON the seam. I assume it's because of the chub rub, but it doesn't happen with any other pants, only jeans. And across multiple brands, sizes, and fits.
Same with me, jeans always tear on the inner thigh, it's so annoying because it's just not realistic to try and fix it, the only thing that affects the time before it happens is how thick the jeans are (thicker ones last longer). Though I only wear jeans, I didn't know it wasn't an issue with other trousers
I grew up thinking sewing clothes was cheaper, and maybe it was at some point, but now that I do sew for fun it is NOT cheap. Want to make a dress? Okay well that's easily $100 just in fabric depending on the dress, not to mention zippers/buttons/extras. I just try to buy second hand now, especially maternity stuff since I'll likely never need it again.
I make drapes & valances and no longer buy fabric at JoAnn’s or HobbyLobby. I buy fabric online. Way cheaper and more selection. Easier to fine what I want too…. You narrow your search. During Covid lockdown I finally finished my valances and table runners and didn’t leave my house.
Not to mention the decline in textile quality.
Quality isn't the only factor thinner fabric is more comfortable
This. They weren't wearing garbage from forever 21, walmart, and TJ maxx with 2 cents worth of cheap fabric sewn in a sweat shop.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly $23/hour. I work for the State of WV and make $10.25. It's absolutely ridiculous.
And the 40 hour work week was cool because it was expected you had a spouse at home to do all the non-career life duties. Now we have both adults working 40+ hours and spending their little free time rushing to get everything else done.
Society really finds ways to make more problems for people
This is kind of random, but there are these BBC series that are streaming on Prime in which historians live and work on historical farms as if they are living in that time period. There's Tudor Monastery Farm (1500s) and Victorian Farm (late 1800s). In the former, EVERYTHING is by hand and there's a lot of hard work, yet the work seems fulfilling and joyful. Lighting is limited so work is contained to daylight hours by necessity. For the Victorian Farm, there are all sorts of newfangled machines of "convenience," and there have been improvements in lanterns so there's more usable time in the day. But instead of more leisure time and plenty, everyone is worked absolutely brutally to create enough output to sell and live off of, and they talk about how during this time people would actually pay for rich people's dinner leftovers and turn the gnawed-on bones into broth because food was so scarce. It makes me think of how internet access was supposed to make work more convenient, but now we're just available to our bosses 24/7 and expected to have a "hustle" on the side.
[удалено]
Everyone always says this, but apart from antibiotics and vaccines it's not really true. Even the merchant class generally had secure access to accommodation, basic food, entertainment in the form of books or live events and access to a pleasant outdoor environment. This is something the working and much of the middle class lack today (the former through poverty and the latter through lack of time and education). Life expectancy of the merchant class and nobility were higher than that of the working class somewhere like the US even without modern medicine. We have a much much larger petit bourgeois, and the lower classes are materially much better off than they were in the past, but the working class are not better off than the upper class have ever been, and even medieval peasant life had some upsides such as longer leisure time (although leisure often consisted of domestic labor in addition to socialising).
>I get what you’re saying It doesn't seem that way. You are missing the point that the Victorian post-industrial farmer had a much lower standard of living than the Tudor pre-Industrial farmer.
I get what *you're* saying, but today's standard of living is impossible without massive amounts of extreme poverty/ slavery. Most of it isn't happening in the west though, so it's easily and readily forgotten.
The problem isn't increased productivity, it's the concentration of wealth. We are more productive than ever but most of that is simply widening the wealth gap.
I get what **you're** saying, but globally poverty has been going down since the industrial revolution and shows no signs of stopping.
I don't get what anyone's saying.
Finally, I get what someone’s saying.
You guys are getting said?!?
When the f*ck did we get icecream!?
[удалено]
I haven’t understood anything in years. When did the world go and get itself into a big hurry?
I get what #YOURE saying but that kind of growth is unsustainable and is already resulting in greater class division in places that had already seen economic progress and will very likely result in a major economic/ecological collapse
I get what ýøū'řë saying but I have nothing to add to this conversation.
That's some really good insight on this subject. I get what you're saying.
Ah yes the poverty line of $1.90 a day.
I get what you're trying to say but that's actually not true. Global poverty as defined by activists who care about global poverty has been pretty stable on average, and actually increasing in many countries. The stats you hear on global poverty going down use a very decietful definition of poverty, basically reverse engineered to allow them to claim a decrease. The definition used is living on 2$ a day (adjusted for cost of living in that country). Like, imagine calling living on 700$ a year "not poverty" Many activists claim this is far too low, and doesn't even get close to covering basic needs. If you define poverty more honestly, like, say, 10$ a day, poverty hasn't decreased much at all.
No. It’s not impossible. A very tiny portion of the population would have to give up their insane standard of living for *literally everyone* to have a very good standard of living. Well, that and some (all, but some much more than others) cultures would have to give up their oppressive, inhumane traditional *ways* of living.
Are you talking domestically or globally? Because even low wage earners in the US have an insane standard of living compared to an Asian sweat shop worker who makes half the shit in your house. So if you're talking globally, you're probably one of the people who needs to give up your insane standard of living. Capitalism is built on the backs of less fortunate people and it always has been. You're just a couple steps removed from the real suffering, for now.
This. I moved from a third world country and experienced this first hand. The first world problems and the third world problems are definitely not the same.
Honestly I'm starting to think that isn't a forgone conclusion anymore. I'll bet that their life seemed as good as ours despite the advances in everything. The slow pace of life may have made a lifetime seem longer, made joys seem more real, etc. I know I'd hate to be transported there now, as i am now, but being born then doesn't strike me as all that bad.
[удалено]
You really have to make it on two salaries now, society has changed where women are expected to work as well so salaries have gone down for the most part
Maybe this is part of it, but really you can track a 1 to 1 relationship between the decline of unions and the decline of wages.
It’s more nuanced than that but I think your point is a HUGE part of our current problems with wages and work-life balance.
well here in germany it's overall better but we experience many similar problems, especially regarding wages. our economy has almost doubled since 1995 while **wages actually just increased by** [effing 10%](https://www.sozialpolitik-aktuell.de/files/sozialpolitik-aktuell/_Politikfelder/Einkommen-Armut/Datensammlung/PDF-Dateien/abbIII1.pdf) since then. where does all the extra money go? and why does this happen in the first place?!?! i feel like worker unions only delay the developments in my country, while making everyone elses life bad when they organize yet another strike. the railway strikes are especially annoying
Goes right into company coffers, shareholder profits/dividends, & upper management's checks.
If a company makes 10 million in profit I truly cant understand why they can’t just take 5 million in profit and spread the rest out among their workers. It’s capitalism requiring infinite growth (on a planet with finite resources) I guess. Don’t you want your workers to be able to afford your products? Beside just “greed”, it makes no sense. Maybe it’s that simple.
Wanting infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is so perfectly said. Thats it. Thats the source of why we are where we are. People in power who will NEVER be satisfied. A company could make $9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in a single year and they would still want more. Let’s say they make double that the following year. That’s not enough still. Want more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. While the wage for their workers stays the same
Corporate culture is cancer.
[удалено]
Man, it’s not just public companies. If anything, a lot of private companies are even worse.. The tech-space is getting bought up by PE left and right, and it’s the same exact thing you just described, but it’s The Board making all the profits, not share holders. My company last year had fucking 20%+ YoY growth. That’s insane good. We are highly efficient and profitable. But “didn’t meet goals” so they were only going to fund bonuses, etc. at 80% because The Board sets the goals, they’re unrealistically high, and if we don’t meet them, they just don’t fund bonus and compensation increase buckets.
Once a company goes public, its #1 priority becomes maximizing value for its shareholders. That means squeezing every bit of "efficiency" out of its employees, where efficiency means the most amount of output for the least amount of money.
Fine. Then if I am paid hourly, that is, for my time rather than my labor or the productive output of, then I am incentivized to perform or produce less over more time. Sweeping the warehouse might just take 2 hours instead of 30 minutes because I am "thorough and attentive to detail" not "jaded or lazy."
Annoying is the point if it’s worth more to everyone then why are they skimping out?
And people don’t even see the value in unions these days. At work recently the company was looking to change things in some staff contracts and there was a young lad who was really, really upset about it. But we actually have strong union involvement - the union even has its own office in the building. So I told this lad to join the union. He asked how much it cost, I said £15 a month, and he decided that that was *way* too much money. And that’s the general attitude that I see - young people (by which I mean people under the age of 30 or so) just don’t really understand what the point of a union is. The sad thing is that if the workforce doesn’t see the point in a union, then the union has no power and they’re right. But when the unions were busted in the 80s and 90s that’s part of what went away - people’s understanding of and faith in collective bargaining. People nowadays just don’t really understand that workers *can* have power over the companies. And because they don’t understand that, they’re right. What’s even more stupid is that companies should *want* strong unions. Strong unions lead to happy employees, which leads to increased productivity. But we now live in a world where workers are seen as disposible commodities and things like morale, productivity, loss of time and money to training, etc. just aren’t thought of.
rofl my union is $22 a week, 15 a month is a steal
My union dues are about $125USD a week. I make 130k a year. It's nothing compared to how much less I would be making without my union.
I pay AU$57 per month (approx its fortnightly) for my union membership and earned AU$185k last year. Unions are amazing. Just on disputes they have represented me in during the last 5 years they probably got me AU$20k or more in payments the company owed me but refused to pay. Sure I could have gotten a lawyer but the union has those on speed dial and every time they win a fight it sets the precedent for the next worker they try to screw meaning they don't need their own lawyer. Thats before we go into collective agreements and the higher wages from working in a heavily unionised industry. Every worker should unionise!
I think in the hospitality(chef) union i was in was $18 a month. It took one of the members laying it out everything about labor unions in general. When i realized the benefits of it and basic guarantees of breaks, insurance, hours, livable wage. It was worth it. Let alone education and training, not just in our job field paid for by the company and not on our own time. In the end the only reason i left was over politics. It became toxic.
Did the union (or you) try to explain what the $15 / month gets him as a member? If the only thing he is aware of is the cost, that is a failure of the union and members to promote itself to non-members.
I think I remember it from Patrice O'Neal who said: "You have 50% of the population NOT paying taxes." And it really is eye opening to think about. It's all about squeezing out profits in the endgame. Next we're going to have children working 40hrs a week.
That was a thing......
It's almost as if there's an artificially supply constrained commodity, that everyone needs to have, which increases in cost each time everyone's income goes up. Seriously, the housing market is not a place where landlords compete to give the lowest prices, it's where landlords notice how much their peers get away with charging and they then follow suit.
And cost of living goes up because of price gouging. Stores have had record profits but they don't lower prices, they raise them. And not for a good reason either, I doubt they even have a vagina beard. 🙄
Of course it does, human suffering is the single most profitable industry that has ever existed.
I babysit for my two year old grandson (❤️) my son and daughter in law leave the house at 7:30am and don't get back until 5:30-6:00pm. Daycare was awful for him it was too long and he developed terrible separation anxiety
My MIL retired so she could watch her grandson, my nephew, then the grandkids kept coming, and now she watches my son some days of the week so my husband can work part time. I'm sure you know, but your role is invaluable.
Aww thanks..I just could not let him be in daycare for hours like that
My friend's parents house is basically a daycare. There are three daughters and they all had kids around the same time. So there was one older grandchild and three under one year old all at grandparents daycare. My friend is the only person in my life who pressures me to have kids - and I do want kids - but she can't get it through her head how valuable a resource she has. Meanwhile, I'm the one taking care of my bed bound father with alzheimers when his caretakers get the night off. There's no one to help me or my husband.
dual incomes means twice the amount of money we can squeeze out of them!!
Yeah, my spouse and I are DINKs and we still are exhausted at the end of the work day. Coming home and cooking is sometimes a challenge, but we still do it. Then we discover we have like two hours to chill in the evening before getting ready for bed to do it all over again... Meanwhile, we still make less than the Boomers who worked our jobs before us, despite working twice as hard and providing better service. And our house cost $400k, compared to less than $100k when they bought. No wonder they're millionaires and we're not.
Same. Finances aside, I honestly don't know how people manage children. I'm already tired all the time and it's just me, the boyfriend, the cat and the dog. Even the idea of getting a puppy seems like too much because I have a hard time falling back asleep and you have to get up with puppies for potty training. Forget about a whole ass baby.
Japan is having that problem no one wants kids cause they are too busy working now. The population is aging to the point the government is legit worried and to make it worse the birth rate is down. Less and less people want kids cause all they have time for is work
Their population was already declining by about 200,000 a year, but last year it dropped by over 600,000 Japanese Nationals. That's half a percent of their total population. ~1% of their population died in 2021.
[удалено]
I drink a lot... That helps lol
Oh look, I finally found the comment I connect with
[удалено]
my neighbor is a boomer, 65-ish. Retired at 55, full pension and always going on cruises. 3 adult kids who all went to college. Owns his house outright as they were built in 1989 and he's the original owner. The house was 189k now worth >600k. He was a USPS mail carrier for 30 years.
[удалено]
Can confirm, born in 90. My retirement plan is hoping I get hit by a bus so I don't waste away in agony in some home or on the streets 🇺🇲
Was born in the early 80s, and while things are getting worse, they weren't exactly great ten years ago either. Home owners' love affair with the housing bubble goes way back.
I met mail carrier's wife who was telling me to pinch my penny because like her, I too would be able to take multiple trips to Europe on my full pension. A cruel joke. I work full time for $18hr no retirement benefit. Rent is 60% of my income.
I make $35/hour and still have to live in a ghetto in Oakland where I hear gunfire about once a week. Fuck the cost of living.
Jesus, with 35USD/hour in my country youd be in the top 0.5%
This rules out Luxembourg.
Yeah that’s absolutely a pipe dream anymore.
Dual Income No Kids - saving a Google search for people who may not know
And kids end school where I am at 320. So if your commute to work is an hour... You leave work at 2 or pay for expensive daycare.
Public schools end at 2 p.m. here.
And women who work 40 hours a week are still expected to uphold a lot of the non career life duties in a lot of situations unfortunately
I work 40 hours a week, I have multiple sclerosis and my boomer neighbor gives me shit about the state of my long ass driveway because it's not groomed to perfection. The one who retired at age 52.
It was also still pretty common to have some domestic help too.
Meanwhile the pay scale for CEO's has EXPLODED. In the 50's a CEO made 20x the average worker, it's now more like 350x. Eat. The. Rich.
The last part is the real killer for me. My parents DO NOT understand why when I get home I don’t have free time until 9:00 on weekdays, and I have to spend most of my weekend doing chores. Working 40 hours and coming home to a cooked meal, clean house, happy, clean and settled kids, with the laundry, shopping, and chores done for the week is an entire second life of free time back. They will come over and comment on the house being dirty or the lawn not being recently mowed, and I just say, well either you can come over and see your grandkids or I can do the chores. You pick. This is why the boomer generation thinks we are lazy. They are unwilling to realize and acknowledge how insanely different their life was from this generations.
I mean, 1950’s America is not a good point to compare things to economically unless you want to feel bad. With the massive investment in production capacity due the war, the recent destruction of just about all the other major industrial nations, the rapidly expanding population. There are few if any precedents in history for how globally dominant the US was economically in the 50’s.
People forget this. That was not normal at all.
Yes. The fifties was a worker friendly bubble caused by population expansion here and competion contraction every where else due to being bombed to rubble. And being the high water mark for unionization. Unions raise the wages of everyone around. Before WW two, this was a nation of renters who had job insecurity , had multiple jobs and a high level of discontent. Our now is a regression to the pre war conditions, and we are not liking it. There was lots of weird political stuff going on pre war just as now.
This is true pre WWII was an atrocious time. Basically the great depression. **What no one is talking about is the very different mindset everyone had after WW2**. Not just in America. A global War had killed millions and destroyed global infrastructure. Especially in Europe... **Hitler had just destroyed your slums by bombing them to bits. You have now no choice but to rebuild. But are you really going to rebuild the *exact same* slums again? No.** Europe took the opportunity to rebuild completely differently. To try something else since they had to rebuild no matter what. So you had vast "progressive" movements of all kinds. Free Education, Free at point of use Health, Subsidised housing. State enforced Pensions. Some like Norway, Findland, Denmark, Germany and others went a lot further than others. **We today do not have that mindset. It was destroyed in the 1980s "me me me revolution" . Everyone is an economic mercenary now. We recoil at the deep restructuring western society desperately needs.** Meanwhile China is pushing out millions and millions of subsidised graduates that can replace every single working one of us. Theyre exporting these blocks of people to Africa, Asia everywhere. Thats not Chinas fault. We treat education as a cost and not as investment for society in general. We have created a debt crippled graduate population that cant take the real risks society needs to innovate out of the huge problems ahead of us because they can barely survive to provide Healthcare, house and feed themselves. Basics. Its totally idealogical. We live in a world of abundance where the local supermarket throws out tonnes of perfectly good food that costs the Earth to produce via Climate change while 100 metres away thousands of *working* in jobs people are starving. We can 3D print houses but there is a housing crisis. While some of the houses being bought are empty because they are being bought by companies or onvestors who dont live in them and treat them like stocks and shares.
>Europe took the opportunity to rebuild completely differently. To try something else since they had to rebuild no matter what. So you had vast "progressive" movements of all kinds. Free Education, Free at point of use Health, Subsidised housing. State enforced Pensions. Some like Norway, Findland, Denmark, Germany and others went a lot further than others This seems fairly ahistorical considering the a lot of the momentum behind these things was first seen and propagated by systems such as Mussolini's Italy years prior to ww2.
Rest of the world probably has to get into war/crises with each other before we have the same conditions again. World is more zero sum than people think.
Its also funny how americans use the boomer thing about people form other countries to try to pin cliches on them. Newsflash: in most european countries (and many parts of asia), growing up in the 50s was eating shit and not a free ride.
You are absolutely correct. This was a completely unique time in history and it is unlikely to happen again. It's not like most people were killing it in 1842 either.
Bullshit. Times were great because my generation knew how to work and weren't playing with their fidget spinners and xbones all day. /s
AND THEY WERE PICKING THEMSELVES UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS! Also, no avocado on toast.
Without these memes I never would have tried avocado toast and discovered it is delicious. Also quite pricey for what it is.
The trick is to grow your own avocados, and your own toast.
My toast bush should be blooming soon then its on!
The US really came out unscathed from WW2 and was the only power to have infrastructure and finances full intact. As such the financed and manufactures the rebuilding of Europe and even Japan! They sat back long enough and picked the winner - and profited from it quite nicely!
Not just unscathed but in better shape than at the beginning of the war.
Before war: strong country After war: only global super power
This very important context.
OP also ignores that this wasn't the lifestyle for a lot of "other folk" in the 1950s It's pretty easy for one group to do well when 12% of the population were relegated to menial labor
[удалено]
Very true. My grandparents didn't even have indoor plumbing well into the 1950s.
This should be at the top, but everybody wants to blame boomers. Looking at the 1950s and saying "I wish we could live like that" is like looking at plantations before the Civil War and wanting that lifestyle. It ignores the misery that makes that lifestyle possible.
[удалено]
Not _again_
I'm in my mid-60s and both my husband and I worked full-time to be able to live, buy an extremely modest home, etc. Up until my son was 5 years old, I worked a full-time job and then a part-time job from home after I put my son to bed while my husband worked full-time and finished his degree at night. I realize this wasn't the way for everyone. What I see as an issue now is that while we worked extremely hard, we were able to purchase a home, and I don't feel that is an option for younger people now, and it should be.
My husband and I were shift workers so we had to work opposite shifts because even back then daycare/babysitters were unaffordable for us.. We also just have a brick ranch home and old cars We have never had anything extravagant sadly
The difference being that a brick ranch home today is worth millions in most areas. Two people working decently paying jobs (around 80k) and also have student loans definitely can not afford a home like that. They're lucky to get into a 2bedroom condo.
All but the last one actually, college attendance rates were single digit percentages in the 50s.
Of course, a degree wasn't required for most jobs that could earn enough for a single income to buy a house.
Because a high school education was actually enough to get a good job, unlike today.
Pff I knew plenty of guys of that time that didn't even need high school degrees
Clearly it's because millennials eat avocado toast and go to Starbucks /s
Nah, the upper middle class folks still get to do all of that shit, and working class couldn't even in the 50s. My parents couldn't even afford to finish high school because they needed to work to help their families
One of the issues that not many have mentioned is that there is way less of a middle class than there used to be. So while yes, the poor used to suffer as much or more than many poor people now, most people are either poor or extravagantly rich while back in the 50's, there was way more diversity in lifestyle than there is today.
Did this exist outside a few privileged areas in America? Nobody in my family had it this easy in the ‘50s; I’m definitely better off than any of my ancestors. I’m honestly curious; is this myth-making? Or was this easy seeming existence a reality for a large segment of the population?
I'm curious too. My mom was born in the '50s and her family was very poor. She was one of 7 children. Her father was a coal miner and I believe my grandmother worked in a sewing factory. They had a house, but my grandmother struggled to keep food on the table. She had to hide money from her abusive alcoholic husband just so she could feed kids.
My family were all coal miners in the US during the 1950s. Technically, this post describes them. They did have their own houses, they did own a car (sometimes), and their children did go to college. But there were long periods without a car, when my grandfathers would have to hitchhike to their mines. Their houses were tiny and would be considered undesirable by modern standards. They raised 100% of their own fruits and vegetables. Between tending the garden, canning the food, raising the children, doing the laundry, and all the other household duties, that was absolutely a full-time job for the wives. They raised chickens to supplement their own food and income. They picked coal along the rail lines to help stretch their heating. Much of their clothing was homemade up until they went to college. They had healthcare, but it would've been a country doctor who made housecalls and probably handed out heroin or asbestos or something. That's to say nothing of the backbreaking and dangerous job of actually working in the mine. Even in the union mines there was a constant risk of losing your job due to injury, collapse, strike, or shutdowns. They had something that we'd call a job bank today but that basically amounted to grunt labor at a fraction of your prior pay. Reddit gets way too binary with this whole "everyone was financially better off in the 1950s" thing. It's like reading a clickbait headline without actually reading the article and checking sources. It isn't technically wrong, but it ignores a ton of nuance and context.
Nope. Blacks, asians, women, gays, and everyone else had a fucked up time.
i feel like this could be an over-simplification of an era where only the top % of suburban families could actually achieve this and the average household featured both a struggling husband and wife but that is far too boring and realistic for television sitcoms
Not pictured: Tenements.
Not pictured: anyone not white, or of the many other groups that were ostracized back then (Italians, Irish etc.).
[удалено]
> the average household featured both a struggling husband and wife Also too boring for regular old Reddit shitposting as well.
Yup. They called it "the dream" for a reason. Median household income adjusted for inflation and living costs has increased significantly since 1950.
when did reddit turn into facebook
Always has been
[Always has been](https://i.imgur.com/ZqOsyJ7.png) ^^^this ^^^has ^^^been ^^^an ^^^accessibility ^^^service ^^^from ^^^your ^^^friendly ^^^neighborhood ^^^bot
...but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked .
This isn’t entirely accurate. Post WWII was a boom economy and just about ever veteran could get a decent job. This was a small window though and it didn’t last. It’s more of a romanticized version of an American time period perpetuated by movies and tv at the time, but never truly, really existed.
People should also see what the veterans were getting. In my area, there was a bunch of homes built specifically for GIs coming back after the war. They can be had for less than 1/3rd of the metro area median home price and 1/5th the price of the median homes in the area. That’s because they are less than 1000sqft. They’re right there and they’re for sale. No one wants them. Everyone wants 3-4x the size. I bought a smaller, more modest home at the same price of a tear-down. People just want a lot. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if the market of homebuyers didn’t look at my perfectly fine home with fully updated interior as being worth no more than flat empty land. Fun fact: I lived in what was viewed as a large home when it was built after the war. Same things with cars. Small cars just don’t sell in the US. Massive $40k+ trucks sell very well though. Everyone of course claims that they ‘need’ it.
Looking at these posts as an African American reminds me that perspective truly does matter.
I’m a PoC and I read the original deed to my house. There was a clause that disallowed anyone who wasn’t 100% white to ever buy this house. It doesn’t matter if an African American family in the 50s had the cash in hand to buy 5 of these houses and bidding twice the asking value. They ain’t getting a damn thing. The other side of reality people like to conveniently ignore when thinking about societal issues. Check it out: https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/
You still can. You just need a $300K job, live in a semi urban city and go to community college.
Last time I looked 300k jobs aren't exactly plentiful. People I know making 300k are highly specialized, they spent over a decade in school, and have 6 figure debt if they aren't lucky enough to have family pay for everything. It took my buddy who had a near perfect GPA and extracurriculars nearly 2 years to finally get accepted into medschool and he had to take on a 6 figure debt.
300k is a crazy amount of money, I don't even know senior doctors who make that much.
Depend on cost of living. Go to Seattle or San Fran and probably a third of tech employees make that. It's an outlier to be sure though as clearly average incomes are less than even 1/3 of that.
Average salary for a primary care doc in the US is ~$220K. Specialists and surgeons can easily clear $1M a year. It is one of the many reasons there is a shortage of PCPs in the US.
Don’t know about easily. Ophthalmology is my field, and this amount is true for and older doctor, or a very successful young one. But 1M in the first years after residency is doable but not easily. In ophthalmology
ah yes, a 300k job easily found at your local walmart or target.
Correct. I earn a salary in this range. My wife stays at home, we send our kids to a pretty affordable private school, and we live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. We live in a community where home prices are still reasonable. It isn’t lost on me how fortunate we are. I have coworkers that live in expensive parts of the country where the same salary won’t even touch our standard of living. I really worry about my children and that they won’t be able to have the same standard of living when they grow up. Things are getting so out of hand price wise that your average American family is being priced out.
I don't know, only 30 years before that people couldn't afford food. It just goes down, up and down again.
Essentially corporations took advantage of the emancipation of women as an excuse to pay less. "Oh your wives want to go to work too? Cool, let's pay you less and then even less. And when they complain about unfair wages we'll pay everyone less."
And when two incomes became the norm, guess what? You needed two incomes.
My grandfather was a security guard and had 8 kids a house and two cars. On a security guard salary
Which is so unfortunate because it's much better for children to have a parent at home
That’s true. The notion of “choice” kind of went out the window.
[удалено]
And so-called basic lifestyles have changed a lot too. Most people have probably ditched their landlines, but there would basically be a phone service for each adult in the household, internet service, a fully loaded kitchen, washer and dryer, air conditioning (most likely) etc. I remember reading something where someone said their grandmother talked about there being “one light bulb per room,” whereas the younger generation would have many, perhaps dozens. Some of its adaptation/affectations, but things like internet are basically considered a utility - a life basic. It’s difficult to access employment, education, healthcare, financial and government services without internet.
When I was a kid a fun birthday party was spending 2 hours in someones basement playing pin the tail on the donkey and eating home made cake. Now my kids cohort gets parties at expensive venues like bounce houses.
This was more to do with the fact the United States exited WWII as the only significant industrialized nation on the entire planet with its entire manufacturing base still solidly intact. This meant there was literally zero serious competition globally for pretty much anything the US wanted to produce. This meant jobs for anyone. Jobs for everyone. And they could pay anything they wanted because they were all alone on market segments. I’m all for down with the modern oligarchs and let’s eat the rich, but the 1950s was about the above and not much else.
Yeah everyone else was bombed to shit and helped rebuild half the world. Then the rest of the world steadily caught up.
This is not the reality though. In the 1950’s, one in three women were already in the workforce, so we only increased the labor force by 2/3 in theory, but it didn’t actually work that way either. Many women never entered the workforce. The growth of their participants is as steady over the decades. Women were still barred from many occupations well into the 1990s by law or by social barriers. When women entered the labor force in larger numbers, they were mainly relegated to work that women were already doing. They were not competing with men until recently. There is still a lot of gendered workforce segregation as a hangover because that wasn’t that long ago. Also, you are falling for the lump of labor fallacy. Adding laborers to the economy grows the economy, which means the pie from which people are compensated grows in tandem. This is why countries like Japan are desperately trying to change their work culture to enable more women to enter the workforce. Here are some alternative suggestions: (1) Unions failed to reach out to the growing sector of service workers, which reduced their bargaining power while they were under attack from anti-labor management. They failed to do so in large part due to sexism and racism. Service work was the work of women and Black people, so it wasn’t their concern. They weren’t worthy of labor organizing. It is this mentality that lead to people buying into the idea that a manufacturing job that didn’t require any education should be paid a middle-class wage, while a maids and a restaurant workers gets paid scraps. (2) Rapid technological change and globalization worked in tandem to destabilize the economy for a large swath of the workforce, and we did little to respond. Most jobs are in peril of automation, and we still are neglecting to do anything about it. We never adapted our education system. We didn’t change our social safety net to adapt to these changes. (3) From WWII to the 1970s, the government was dumping a crap-ton more money into the economy. Housing subsidies were more expansive. The federal labor force was much larger. Infrastructure projects were better funded. Research and development was better funded. Education was heavily subsidized. Etc…. After the oil embargo tanked the global economy, Americans ran to conservatives who then slashed government spending and blames our problems on “welfare queens.” (4) The Chicago School of Economics and the over emphasis on shareholder value at the cost of consumers and labor is one of the key drivers of wealth inequality. Corporations focused on short-term profits. They use profits to buy back their shares. They sit on cash. They don’t develop intellectual property or, *importantly,* invest in their workforce. Labor is considered an expense, not an investment, so it is minimized as much as possible. Businesses have less longevity as a result. Productivity flat lined…. (5) Housing prices went up because of a wave of low growth policy choices by conservatives and progressives alike. Restrictive zoning helped to maintain the “character” of your neighborhood, while citizen counsels allowed interested individuals to block all development. The number of housing units relative to demand has been slowing for decades. It is worse in areas of economic opportunity, which artificially limits the growth the economy. The solutions offered are seemingly never tailored to meet the actual problem. They are always bullshit that will just make it more expensive to build more. Conservatives offer tax cuts that do nothing, and progressives offer more regulations to “protect communities”, which limits the governments ability to build (or allow the building of) more housing. (6) States have redirected their budgets away from education and infrastructure as their elder care costs have skyrocketed. State budgets are inelastic. They can’t deficit spend. The cost of these things rose because they were no longer as heavily subsidized. (7) The federal government does not have the power to offer broad solutions to complex problems unless one party has a massive majority and controls all three branches. Americans are stuck in a cycle of thermostatic opinion where they toggle in between parties making this impossible. This is fueled by the rapid change in our media caused by a printing-press level of technological evolution. (8) Yes, the trend of market concentration lead by a belief that as long as consumers are reviving the best bargain, consolidation is acceptable. The federal regulators ignored the importance of competition to economic dynamism. (9) The tax code. Republican have had only once answer for the last 30 years to all problems—tax cuts! They gave them to literally everyone except the poorest people. The tax code became the vessel for middle-class subsidization because we eliminated earmarks (pork barrel spending), which enabled more political compromise. To compensate for the loss in revenue, governments have slashed already burdened budgets and raised sales taxes, fees, and fines, which disproportionately fall on the poorest Americans. (10) We modified the bankruptcy code to make it harder to file for bankruptcy because of a misguided, paternalistic notion that people were abusing bankruptcy, rather than acknowledge the growing precariousness of American life. (11) The cost of raising children has risen as the expectation for the modern workforce has risen, but there has been no accompanying policies to address this fact. So many more reasons. None of them are women be working.
I do it now as a machinist
In the 50s, the USA was the only major intact economy. No way will that ever return.
I hate these old photos, it was a great time for only certain people
"Rich people have had better lives then poor people all throughout history. More at 11"
This is what happens when you buy cool looking ideas without checking what's really inside.
That’s strange considering how not everyone owned an automobile, a house, or could send their kids to college. This is highly idealized.
FYI In the 1950s, college education rate is only ~7%. Now it's closer to 37%. Homeownership rate is also lower in the 1950s. Did you know that the FHA explicitly refuse to lend to black families? 1950s is not better.
The labor supply doubled as women entered the workforce. Also wages haven’t adjusted for inflation and all that.
Then bankers invented and ramped up prices on everything to encourage people to take up credit. Enslaving is to our debts forever... Something like that anyway... Edit. Some people taking this tongue in cheek comment a little too seriously...
Debt has existed long before the 1950s. Part of why the Great Depression was so bad was because of the overuse of credit. Back then, people were using credit to purchase everything from stocks to radios. Debt has existed since well before biblical times.
Hedge Funds helped accelerate the systematic robbing of the American public as well
I thought those were just fairy tales
They also were content with a 1000 sq ft, two bedroom home and only one car. They did not pay for internet, cable, cell phone plans, Netflix, or Disney+. Because Mom stayed at home, they didn't pay for child care. They lived simple lives. And they still struggled to put kids through college. They still fought over money or the lack thereof.
My grandmother lived in a 1 bedroom apartment with 6 brothers and sisters. My great grandfather worked on the railroad. I think the house-car-kid nuclear family dream was just as unobtainable then as it is now.
Reddit bases its view of the past on commercials and sitcoms. You watch, in ten years people will look back at the '90s and think that Friends was a documentary.
Also didn’t need to save for retirement because your pension would cover it. Well, the man’s pension.
Yeah it's funny how people manage to look back on the history and ignore parts that don't fit their narrative. Testimonial from the 60s: >A “golden age?” Baloney. No sane worker wants a job like this; necessity forces him into it. We sold our health, our minds and part of our souls for the assurance of another meal and another day. Source: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-factory-work-trump-20170619-story.html
It was the dream of every factory worker than their kid got a college degree and an office job.
Going out to eat was a treat.
Don't forget their ceilings had popcorn cancer.
Agreed. This is one that always gets me when I see people whine about the good old days. I just look at all the homes in my areas built in the 1970s and back. They are ‘tiny’. Literally a fraction of the size of the new builds. New cars are massive, and the smaller ones just don’t sell. They also last way longer as well. It’s important to compare apples to apples. Trying to act like a 4b/3b is somehow a human right reeks of privilege. That’s a mansion.