There is greater inequality and that is a real problem, but the bottom is still rising, helped along by the very things you seem to mock.
It's a really big stretch to say that some people are somehow worse off now than before because of a lack of public bathhouse (we do have public shelters and bathrooms) and lack of cell phones (we do have libraries, subsidized phones, social services, etc) and just comes off as disingenuous.
I won't argue for the entire world, but I have some numbers for the US - all adjusted for inflation:
- Housing: real-estate prices have increased 4x since the 40-s. The median age of purchasers jumped up by more than a decade.[1]
- Healthcare: per-person spending has increased 9x since the 60's[2]
- Education: the higher education cost has increased by at least a factor of 3x[3]; that article doesn't take into account mandatory fees and living expenses. Or that's 2x if you account for increase in salaries[4]. Should I even talk about jobs available to people without college degrees? You could support a family with a high school diploma back in the day.
- Transportation: public transportation has been in decline in the US. It is by far less available to people today. Read this article for a bigger picture[5]. In particular, the section titled "Death of interurbans and streetcars".
Car prices have remained somewhat stable[6], but that doesn't help people who can't afford one. They are really screwed in a society where car ownership is pretty much expected and public transportation is nonexistent, especially in the suburban areas and small towns.
- Income security: it's hard to characterize that with a single number, but long story short - we are worse off now than in the 70's[7][8]
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To sum it all up: in the past 5 decades, housing, healthcare, education have increased in cost several times, public transportation died, income stability is down the drain.
To answer your question:
>What?
That. The comparison is not to middle ages here.
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[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-have...
[2]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-average-a...
[3]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...
[4]https://college-education.procon.org/view.resource.php?resou...
[5]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-k...
[6]https://wgntv.com/2016/04/25/the-average-car-now-costs-25449...
[7]See page 7 of: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/32896/...
Plenty of people are still buying homes (unless you think those prices just rose without any buyers) and higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs that remain open in the US today. You can't just look at some isolated negatives and yet ignore all the positives of change with the immense amount of opportunity available today.
Talking about a country with population of ~325M which we both happen to live in far from being merely "random examples" in my opinion.
>higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs
6M jobs in a country of 325M. That's 2 years worth of high school graduates for you. Not exactly inspiring, don't you think?
>The people at the bottom [...] are much better off than the people at the bottom even 50 years ago.
I made my case above why I can't agree with that statement, with sources. If you have a different metric, please provide it, with sources. Then we can discuss that.
>You can't [...] ignore [..] opportunity available today.
Sure, there' plenty of opportunity for some people - including you and me, given that we're on HN. Arguably there's less opportunities for vast amounts of others. Less opportunities than there was in the 70's, in particular.
You can ignore that, but that's a part how we got Trump. Saying that the lives of poor people are improving doesn't seem to bode well with the said poor people.
If you must scope your argument that narrowly, it does not hold. The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world and this has only improved. Your attempting to piece together a narrative from disparate data while ignoring the world, even though we already track measures for what you're talking about and they all show great improvements.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
>The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world
Hahaha no. We are lagging behind Canada, Australia, Spain, for example, and not by a small margin[1]
>we already track measures for what you're talking about
Yes! That's my point!
>and they all show great improvements.
No they do not! They do the opposite!
See the little numbers in square brackets, like [1]? They refer to footnotes. There are links in the footnotes. There's data there, data that supports what I'm saying.
Try arguing in the same way: make your statements quantifiable, and follow up with references that support your statements. It's fun, and we all learn something!
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
Ah yeas, the good ole "TV's and refrigerators" argument[0]. They have luxuries! Even homeless people have cell phones, what a world!
Now how about things that actually matter:
* Housing
* Healthcare
* Education
* Transportation
* Income security
All these things are less accessible now than they used to be.
As for the "luxuries": when everyone is expected to have something, it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity.
Before most people had a fridge and a car, daily grocery delivery and grocery stores a walk away were the norm. It isn't now because cars and fridges changed the infrastructure. You are screwed without either in most places (and yes, relying on McFoods instead of a fridge is "being screwed").
Public bathhouses aren't the norm because most people aren't homeless and have access to those at home. In that regard, the very poor are worse off than a hundred years ago when a lot of tenements didn't have showers/bathtubs[1].
Before everyone had a cell phone or a computer, people weren't expected to find jobs online. Now this is a requirement to be a member of the society in most cases.
And so on, and so on.
In short, "Poor people now have ________, so we're better off!" is a bad argument. If these people had good lives, you wouldn't call them poor. Their lives suck. Yes, in a different way than a 100 years ago.
But back then, nobody would be out of job because they couldn't answer recruiters' email either.
[0]https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/poor-people-having-nice...
[1]https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/download/2244/2203