Better medical care does, but it's expensive medical interventions that bankrupts middle class families. Also: Real estate - much further out of reach. Education - much deeper in debt. These are the things that really matter.
I'll give you cheap air travel, though. That stuff is great. Hooray for cheap jet fuel.
Medical incentives may be messed up in the US, but most people on the planet who have access to healthcare don't have to worry about it bankrupting them.
Yes we "need" 2 incomes to buy a house, but that house is nearly TWICE the size of the one our parents had on average, and MUCH fuller with the things we want.
Nobody claimed we are brainwashed sheep most of all me -- the claim is that quality of life is reduced, and you suggest it's in exchange for an increase in consumer goods that we want. I respond that we don't actually want these goods; our recent ancestors did not want them, the desire has been manufactured by a well-paid hard-working team of expert psychologists. So we are not now meeting a desire that existed; a desire has been manufactured and then met. So when you compare our circumstances to that of the past you must consider the fact that advertisers had not become yet sophisticated enough to force us to want things we do not truly want, so our wants were different; driven by life, not driven by profit.
If you'd like to pretend you don't understand the difference between "having a happy life, supporting a family and taking care of yourself and those close to you" and "having expensive toys" then you are free to do so, just don't ask me to indulge your absurdity by pretending it's reasonable.
This is not true everywhere: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2398714/The-incredib...
Tech progress is learning. The "economy" is the act of economizing; learning to do more with less. It's a virtuous cycle.
Could our parents afford to own a home, have children, live comfortably off one income? Can we? I guess we have plenty of fun cheap toys made by slave labor that we can't play with because we're always working so if that's how you measure richness then sure.
Part—not all, but part—of the supposed increase in quality of life due to cheaper goods is because entry level quality has dropped, for certain categories of goods.
Yes we can. But it means tradeoffs most people aren't willing to make.
Sure, we have cooler, cheaper toys and food is easier to get, but the rest of it makes it much harder to get by, in general.
Richness, wealth, is not money. It's the things we want. My parents never had $2/lb strawberries in February, or MRI machines, HIV drugs, discount airlines, etc, etc.
We are insanely more wealthy than our parents.