The American standard of living was drastically better in the mid 1960s in fact.
It took one worker in the household to pay the bills; now, two people work and can't make ends meet. Mortgages were 15 years, not 30. The savings rate was extremely higher; now the savings rate is negative. America had little debt, and consumers had little debt. College education could be paid for with a part time job; now we're sitting on $1.2 or so trillion in debt on that end alone.
The minimum wage was equivalent to over $40,000 in 1967. Now a decent job pays that.
Using nearly any measurement, even the bogus CPI from the Feds, you find that wages peaked in about the late 1960s to 1970. And meanwhile, we've had to accumulate vast amounts of debt just to maintain these levels, so in real terms the standard of living has plunged.
In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages.
Now, welfare program dependency is at all time highs. Poverty rates are at multi-decade highs. The split between the rich and the poor is up dramatically, as workers drown, good jobs disappear and the rich shift capital to avoid the devaluation of the dollar. The % of the population dependent on food stamps is off the charts. The labor force participation rate is at multi-decade lows. The Federal Government is running a 3/4 trillion dollar deficit, propping up millions of jobs. Interest on all of our debt is as low as it can possibly go, and won't stay this cheap, that includes student loans, consumer debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt. Add it all up, and there has been an extraordinary real erosion of the standard of living over four decades.
It took one worker in the household to pay the bills...
While the "other worker" sat around and had her nails done? No. There's a reason women joined the work force en masse, and it was because the money they could make and the satisfaction they could attain in the work force was worth more to them than whatever value they produced scrubbing floors and steaming vegetables. Was that a mistake? I don't think any of the working women I know would say so. Why leave money and fulfilling work on the table?
This nostalgia is absurd. Look around. Go ahead and even ignore whatever revolutionary device you're using to browse HN. Ignore whether you're black or Hispanic or Asian. Ignore your extra eight years or so of life expectancy. How much of the modern world simply disappears if you remove what wasn't available in 1963? And if debt is the catastrophe waiting to happen that you seem to believe that it is, you will be comforted by the fact that Americans have decreased their indebtedness by over a trillion dollars since 2008.
>There's a reason women joined the work force en masse, and it was because the money they could make and the satisfaction they could attain in the work force was worth more to them than whatever value they produced scrubbing floors and steaming vegetables.
I'm usually not one to demand a citation in casual online conversations, but this is just screaming out for one. Did women really join the workforce en mass for "meaningful work", or was it out of economic necessity. I can imagine the majority of jobs available to women in that time weren't exactly what anyone today would call "fulfilling". Nor would I consider a survey of your female colleagues who themselves are likely well educated professionals, and thus a non-representative bunch, as a useful statistic. No, it is very much not obvious that women joined the workforce because working is more fulfilling than "scrubbing floors" (aka watching your children grow up).
If staying at home to watch the kids and scrub floors was so much more satisfying than a "real job", why didn't more men stay home in the 1950's and send their wives to work? It wasn't possible? But the '50's were the height of American economic achievement, no?
The trend is clear: As more satisfying and economically rewarding career options became available to women, more women educated themselves for those careers and took them. A young middle class girl today doesn't take $40,000 in college loans to become an accountant because she's desperately in need.
Wow that's terrible. Stay at home Mom's don't just "watch the kids and scrub floors". There is an incredible amount of work and responsibility that comes from maintaining a home and raising children. To be dismissive of the work that they do because you have a naive understanding of it is simply being shallow and unkind.
I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'm saying that objectively, most men and many women free to do either choose to work instead of practice full-time homemaking. Others in this thread are arguing that the 1950's was an economic golden era because of course women would rather be homemaking, but that the modern cruel world has forced them out of the home and into the piecework shop.
That just defies economic reality: As you say, there is a lot of value produced in keeping a home and raising kids. A job has to return a solid amount of income to make up the difference, and yet women continue to go to college at a rate outpacing men, and before the recent recession, they were on a pace to have more jobs than men. There's no economic gun to their head: In fact, as the economy got worse, women chose to stay home at a greater rate.
"If staying at home to watch the kids and scrub floors was so much more satisfying than a "real job", why didn't more men stay home in the 1950's and send their wives to work?"
Um... because women didn't have the same opportunities then so the household would make less money, and it was considered really bad for the man to be a stay-at-home "bum"?
But this whole argument is about how great the quality of life was in the 1950's. Women not having the same preferred economic opportunities as men sounds like a pretty damning quality of life indicator to me.
Again, how much of that is economic necessity, social norms, expectations, etc etc. There are so many reasons that could explain the trend of higher female employment over the last 50 years that simply assuming that they all just wanted to work is absurd.
Working for the purpose of satisfaction is high up on Maslow's hierarchy. The point is, a household could live comfortably on one income, including buying a house, college, etc, and anything more than that was gravy. Now many households have two incomes and struggle to make ends meet.
This is so wrong it is ridiculous. Take this example. In 1959 it took one month of an average income to buy a Sears washer dryer. In 2012, it took less than 4 days average income to buy a far, far better washer dryer. http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-...
Yes! This is the point that always seems to be missed when we talk about abundance economics. There are some goods that aren't abundant - housing is one of them. If we can't find a solution to long commutes to work / restaurants / theatre / the beach etc then housing Ina good area will remain a scarce good. It will take a bigger and bigger slice of our income, because we are competing with other people, and the abundance of other products, freeing up that money to be spent on housing. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere, you can buy a house very cheaply - they don't cost very much to build these days (thanks abundance!) but if you want to live on the river front, or in the cafe district, well, be prepared to sink a large percentage of your income into your house.
Of course we may end up finding a solution to the constrained housing supply - maybe populations will decrease, or robotic cars will make commutes shorter / less painful, or maybe we will develop virtual living, with people hanging out / working in virtual reality, not real reality.
Housing isn't the only scarce good. Being able to go to a live performance of your favourite band, and indeed the host of things that you can't do today at any price are other examples. But housing is far and away the scarce good that has the largest impact on most of us, and that is only going to continue to grow in importance in the near term.
A quick google search suggests home ownership has increased, and people are buying much larger houses than before. So no, looking at buying a house gives the same conclusion.
You'll also find more households with two incomes. The quality-of-life arguments about the 50s and 60s are that a family with a single income from a blue-collar worker could afford a nice middle-class lifestyle, including buying a house.
I understand where you're coming from, I'm not so sure though.
Everything that isn't housing, healthcare, or higher education is vastly cheaper today than it was before. Food especially.
The 1960s was also the same time that rivers were so polluted they were catching fire. That would never happen today- and that has a cost associated with it. Your food is significantly safer. So is your water. So is your air. So is the building you're reading this in.
There is vastly less crime. This has been expensive- we've locked a lot of people up to get there, and paid lots of money to police. The mafia is basically gone, and modern criminal organizations are pretty limited in scope north of the border. There are still bad places in the US, but there are awfully few no-go zones.
Media is better now. It's cheaper, it's broader, it's better, it's more democratic. This is true both for news and entertainment.
The nation owes debt in USD, but controls the supply of USD and can always print more. This causes inflation as a side effect, which is not a problem, or you would have noticed it.
I don't see why you should care about city debt either, unless you live somewhere near bankrupt. Interest rates are incredibly low meaning there is no better time to be in debt, and you probably have some crumbling public infrastructure in the area.
The flipside of that if course is if the rest of the world finally gets its act together and starts to trade oil in some other currency, the US implodes overnight. You're in a powerful position right now, but it is more precarious than you think.
What about the standard of living for women, whose wages were legally a fraction of men's wages? The ostracism women had for being single? Even being pregnant in public was a taboo. Medicine wasn't available to everyone, and things like pain management had yet to really hit its stride. Social issues like wife-beating were verboten to discuss, and there was little in the way of escape for the victims. Workplace OH&S laws made factories and similar much safer. Vehicles are safer, and accidents less life-destroying. The fear of MAD is gone. There is no conscription - soldiers in today's wars are volunteers. There's a much wider variety of food available. The same is true of music. Travel is far easier. Even shopping is easier - wider choices, easier to carry stuff home. Then there's the internet, for pity's sake.
Life now ain't perfect, but it sure as shit is better overall than it was in the 60s.
In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages.
And today we produce 2.5x more than we did back then. Manufacturing has not declined, it's merely become more efficient.
People also lived much more pragmatically. They had smaller houses, only one family car, and rarely went out to eat. If people made the same choices today, one income would suffice. Most families don't like living in 1400sqft houses with no cable, and no a/c. Most parents don't like spending 12hours a day cooking food from scratch while providing childcare.
Well, you have to forgive them - the TVs in the 60s were crappy little things, black and white as often as not, whereas today they're giant affairs full of colour and motion, and you can't get a B&W one. You could tick off a checkbox saying "Has TV?", but that's missing part of what standard of living is about.
It took one worker in the household to pay the bills; now, two people work and can't make ends meet. Mortgages were 15 years, not 30. The savings rate was extremely higher; now the savings rate is negative. America had little debt, and consumers had little debt. College education could be paid for with a part time job; now we're sitting on $1.2 or so trillion in debt on that end alone.
The minimum wage was equivalent to over $40,000 in 1967. Now a decent job pays that.
Using nearly any measurement, even the bogus CPI from the Feds, you find that wages peaked in about the late 1960s to 1970. And meanwhile, we've had to accumulate vast amounts of debt just to maintain these levels, so in real terms the standard of living has plunged.
In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages.
Now, welfare program dependency is at all time highs. Poverty rates are at multi-decade highs. The split between the rich and the poor is up dramatically, as workers drown, good jobs disappear and the rich shift capital to avoid the devaluation of the dollar. The % of the population dependent on food stamps is off the charts. The labor force participation rate is at multi-decade lows. The Federal Government is running a 3/4 trillion dollar deficit, propping up millions of jobs. Interest on all of our debt is as low as it can possibly go, and won't stay this cheap, that includes student loans, consumer debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt. Add it all up, and there has been an extraordinary real erosion of the standard of living over four decades.