Also, my grandparents came from families with 8 or more children, and many of them died as children. This was normal for those days.
You are expanding upon my example without explaining it. My point remains: has the standard of living gone up? If people could do productive work at the age of 10, but now they have to wait till they are 25, then what metric do you use to prove that the standard of living has gone up? If you want to argue that leisure has expanded, can you prove that the expansion of leisure is entirely experienced as a positive thing? Are young men happier now that they can't find good paying work till they are in their late 20s, rather than finding such work in their late teens?
It remains true that it was easier to raise children 100 years ago than it is now. Is there a metric that shows this as a decline in the standard of living?
My point is that there is a lot that is left out of these metrics. A simplistic look at median wage and the Consumer Price Index suggests that the male median wage peaked in 1973 and family income peaked in 1999. But if you were to measure those factors that are specific to raising a family, the decline in the standard of living, for families, would show up earlier than 1999.
As to the "half the children died" argument, the steepest part of the decline in childhood death was 1850 to 1900. Of the 16 children my great grandmother gave birth to, 15 lived till at least their 18th birthday.
> what metric do you use to prove that the standard of living has gone up?
Average height, longevity, infant mortality are good proxies. Median wage doesn't mean much as it doesn't say what you can buy with it.
Have you ever been to Disneyland? Yellowstone? Traveled internationally? Only the rich could do that in 1900. People didn't even brush their teeth until after WW1. Few my age would have any teeth.
No birth control, no living together before marriage. Would you be happier with that?
No radio, no TV, no Hackernews, no movies, no stereo, no Beatles, no disco (!), are you sure you want all that?
Your point about polio is bizarre, as it was never the dominant factor in childhood mortality. The steepest decline in childhood mortality was during the period from 1850 to 1900.
You want to believe things are worse in America, I can't change your mind. In my own lifetime things have gotten visibly better. My father lived into his 90s, and he'd recount how things have gotten quite a bit better. Sure that's anecdotal, but you can look up statistics, too.
A "bunch of neat stuff" does improve standard of living. I'm almost never bored, for example.
We can easily list cool stuff that happened over the last 100 years: radio, television, cell phones, the Internet.
We can easily list bad stuff that happened over the last 100 years: environmental degradation, global warming, the increase in the percentage of income spent on transportation, difficulties in raising children.
What do we get when we subtract the bad stuff from the good stuff? Until we have good metrics for doing that, we are like the CFO who confuses gross revenue with net profit.
I don't think everyone--in this time or others--would agree with this. I certainly don't believe in being "better off", I think that's an illusion born out of minimization of our greatest fears. Just because you aren't about to die of tetanus does not mean your quality of life has improve at all.
I do. Archeological evidence of American colonists' bones reveal that they worked extremely hard and died young. Look at their clothes in a museum - they look like childrens' sizes. Look at their teeth in bones in museums. Do you prefer teeth like that?
I can buy an orange any day of the year. I have hot/cold running water. I'm warm in winter. I have clean water to drink. I have ice cream in the summer. I have endless entertainment at the push of a button. I can talk at any time to any family/friend anywhere in the world at my whim.
I'd probably be dead by my age if I lived 200 years ago.
I really should have framed my example in terms of happiness rather than quality of life.
I have asthma and require corrective lenses. My quality of life is orders of magnitude better now than it would have been even 100 years ago.
Disease is unfortunate. So is the destruction of our earth. The people dearest to me live thousands of miles apart and talk to me through Facebook. That too is unfortunate.
I simply wish i could dictate the terms of my lifestyle and I cannot. I understand most do not grapple with this problem.
Robots do things cheaper. This allows prices to fall.
Also, if a business has nobody to sell to, then they themselves are in trouble. That they remain profitable is a sign that things are fine.
Humans are adaptable creatures and we find other things of value to do.
People from some industries will experience short-term pain. But pre-empting that with politics runs the risk of creating socioeconomic cruft that unnecessarily and inefficiently drains more resources in the long run.