I think that is dangerous mindset. It is unnecessarily idealizing the past while glossing over any potential flaws. It insinuates that people were happier in the past and it ignores that the standard of living for most Americans has gone up over the decades (due mostly to technology and globalization even with little to no increased income). There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things, but lamenting about the good old days is further delaying that progress.

EDIT: I changed up the first sentence to be less political as the downvotes reminded me HN is probably not the place for that sentiment.

But it is true that in the past a lower-middle-class family could live on one salary, and office workers would often work less than 36 hours per week. Nowadays two salaries per family are required to stay just above the poverty line, and jobs require a minimum of 40 hours everywhere. This not just in America btw, the same happened all over Western Europe too.

It's ridiculous, because clearly automation and IT have increased output by huge factors; but clearly a number of forces (increased competition due to female candidates entering the workforce and lower-class candidates getting good education; adjustment of consumer prices over two salaries per family; etc etc) made it so that, on average, we "work" more for less pay. The work might be lighter on our bodies, and we all have running water in our homes, but apart from that we are not actually improving that much.

If you dig through the data here [1] you will see that the annual average hours worked by Americans has decreased over the years. The same is true for the French, British, and Germans. Some of that more recent decline might be due to underemployment, but I think it stands in contrast to your accusation that longer hours are some type of new norm.

"We all have running water" is also a huge understatement on the improvements that have been made to American living conditions over the last several decades. As a nation we have bigger and better homes, safer and more reliable cars, cleaner air and water, unlimited access to knowledge, and the list goes on and on.

[1] - https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

I think healthcare causes a big split. Lower income would-be full time jobs get split into multiple part-time slots when employers don't want to pay healthcare. That drives even lower compensation on already low paying positions. It would be interesting to see a graph over time of hours worked by income deciles for example...

Like I said in my first post, there is still lots of room for improvement, but there is no question that these things are trending in the right direction when measured over generations. Medicaid and Medicare were both huge steps and the ACA built on them for states that were willing to participate.

What is your take on what you've said above when you factor in unpaid labour?

I was struck by my grandmother's stories about the sheer amount of totally manual labour she had to do in the early years of her marriage. Now I have automatic washer/dryers and don't have to make all my food from total scratch.

Where is the lower quality-of-life locale in which less ambitious people can live in peace? I suppose there are some places (cue the Amish Paradise), but it might require relocation. That has to remain an option until people voluntarily decide to "progress up."

That place used to be America.