It is, if we measure it against the average (or even worst) of the past (and go quite far back), and also include things like slavery, etc. as if they are non-separable parts of the past, and not something we could have skipped even in the past (and many places did).
>My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Is it? I'd take the 60's or 80's any day - less rat racy, easier employment, more value for your money, more optimism, less wage inequality, better off middle class, less surveillance, less bureucracy, more relaxed life, and so on. Also a better top-10 and nicer looking cars. And I (and perhaps others) would also gladly take fewer modern technology items over a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle.
I don't consider things like some improved smart fridge, or smart bulbs, or a car GPS and mobile phone much of a quality of life improvement. If anything, some of those are net negatives.
And things that have been worse, e.g. seggregation, they were not "1960s didn't have advance technology to avoid that", they're just cultural choices. We often mix these two ups, like we couldn't have, say, 1980 living, technology, etc. AND gay rights.
Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is 4.2% now. Only the last few yeas of the 60s had lower unemployment than 2021. In 1960 people spend 24% of their income on food, vs 8.6% today. And for most Americans the food was FAR worse in 1960s, cold chain and logistics improvements mean that average Americans have access regularly to foods that were luxuries in 1980.
> nicer looking cars
Those cars were death traps. There were twice as many fatalities per 100k Americans in 1960 vs today with fewer people driving fewer miles per capita.
> more sustainable lifestyle
The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution that Nixon created the EPA. Cars now get 2x the mpg vs 1960. Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
> better off middle class
The middle class wasn't better off, it was larger. The poverty rate in 2017 was half of what it was in 1960. And since 1960 many families have moved from the middle income quintile to one of the top quintiles. The middle class in the US didn't disappear into poverty, most of it just became more wealthy.
The 1960s sucked, there was political upheaval, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations, Jim Crow, and on and on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Its-Better-Than-Looks-Optimism/dp/161...
That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks the neoliberal governments (which includes both Rep and Dem, and any major party in Europe on the last 30+ years) have agreed on to make it appear so. Makes them appear as having done their job (no pun intended).
Things like not counting people giving up on job hunting, and especially avoiding any qualitative comparison, and counting any kind of shitty precarious non-job as a job. Hell, if it isn't the case already, I'm pretty sure "Uber Driver" and "Amazon Mechanical Turk signee" will also sure count towards reduced unemployment.
>The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution
Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
We could go back to 1960 levels CO2 production, less consumption (e.g. no fast fashion, less fast food) and so on. And we could do it without giving up modern exhausts, hybrids, and electric cars.
>Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
>The 1960s sucked
Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age, or even many who didn't live them, and still consider them so.
>there was political upheaval
Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
>the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations
So, business as usual. Though I'm not sure what bearing exactly the have in this conversation. We can have the positive things I've mentioned about the 60s (which were about levels of employment, consumption, sustainability, etc.) without the "cuban missile crisis" and "frequent political assassination" and so on. Those are historical incidents. The things I pointed at are things we can adopt or not.
>Jim Crow, and on and on.
The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
This is frankly, an absurdly ridiculous comparison. Pittsburgh and Lorain, Ohio, where I had relatives working in the steel mills were completely choked out by smog/industrial pollution. The sky routinely glowed orange as in a volcanic eruption or the Great Day of Orange during the wild fires in the Bay Area! Everything and everyone was covered in soot. Buildings turned black. My old landlord's personal entertainment as a kid was watching dump trucks pour slag onto heaps - watching the molten embers cascade. People heated their houses with coal, which was dumped directly into their basements. Houses in Pittsburgh from that era have a lone, unenclosed toilet and often shower in their unfinished basements (Pittsburgh potty), so the workers could hose down without ruining their house. Rivers were treated as interstate highways at best - the Cuyahoga caught on fire for the Nth time in Cleveland (the EPA is created in the 1970s). Loads of kids routinely died from now treatable diseases! It was just a routine part of life. Cities were violent. Police just shot fleeing suspects in the back! 1973 saw multiple bombings daily. Police stations being bombed was so quotidian, it didn't even make the front page!
[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/pr/2010_fdr_preli...
Not really relevant to the claim, is it? 1880 England cities were also filled with coal smoke, but still had less CO2 production...
Locally? Probably not. As a nation, sure. More importantly though, their quality of life was terrible.
The BLS has been measuring the unemployment rate the same way since 1940.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
The was more of almost every type of type of non C02 industrial pollutant. There was acid rain, and we were punching a hole in the ozone with refrigerants. Pesticides in use then were far more toxic to people and wildlife. Asbestos was everywhere, and lead was in everything.
We could certainly consume fewer disposable things, but the tradeoff is that being poor today affords people a far higher material standard of living than in 1960 by literally any metric.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production
This is almost entirely solvable over the next few decades.
> 2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
You could and you'd find that numerous large charismatic species on the verge of extinction by the mid 70s have recovered in much of the world. The US has become so rich that we're re-wilding and re-introducing displaced species. The rest of the world could follow.
> Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
We started a drug war and the expansion of the carceral state in the late 60s[1]. MLK, JFK, RFK, and Malcom X were all assassinated so I wouldn't call that progressive upheaval. And the progressive upheaval caused by the likes of The Weather Underground or the SLA is hardly impressive.
> Those are historical incidents
Everyone living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust was kind of a wer blanket.
> The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
By the end, and replaced it with a drug war.
In the 60s crime was higher, material wealth was less plentiful, more people lived in poverty, life expectancy was shorter, and most people in society had few options. Localized environmental pollution was worse. Cars were far less safe, and mortality by all causes was higher.
> Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age
Nostalgia does that to people, but basically all objective measures of life quality were worse.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
Men in their 30s and 40s commonly having debilitating heart attacks with few options? No thanks.
Also the 1960s was full of smoky offices and literal poison leaded gas fumes in everyone's blood stream. Gross
I really don't think this is the case. In the US, the cost of many fundamental necessities like healthcare and housing are becoming further out of reach for more and more people. In addition, the suicide rate has been increasing among youth, which shouldn't be happening in a world where modern life is incomparably better. If a "modest salary" is equivalent to the minimum wage in the US, then you're automatically spending above the generally accepted 30% rule for housing spending if you choose to live in a city, which is where the jobs are.
I think certain aspects of life have improved: entertainment has become cheaper, consumer technology is becoming more accessible (although the pandemic has really strained families that don't have access to a good internet connection, which is not a given in this country.)
I really don't think life has demonstrably improved in the US from the 80's to today, it was much easier to have a comfortable life on a lower salary back then than it is today.
For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up. Today, even a person working a minimum wage job can have all of those.
But if healthcare, college education and rent have got more expensive over the same period, is that a net improvement in quality of life?
Do you really seriously consider any of those a measure for quality of life? When I think of quality of life I want the basics: secure housing, healthy food, free time. Perhaps meaningful employment. And pretty much everything else comes down to the people around me.
In 1990, a worker who wanted a TV had to save up two weeks' pay. Today, someone doing the same job could get a better TV for a day's pay. That gives them nine days of free time to spend with their family - or the chance to buy nine more TVs, if they prefer.
Where in 1990 I would have had to go to a library to look something up in an encyclopedia, today I can access a much more detailed encyclopedia, completely free, from a device in my pocket.
In 1990, if you wanted to talk to a loved one on the other side of the world, it was a very expensive phone call. Today it's a video call, in high definition, and it doesn't cost a cent.
In 1990 if you wanted to learn from professors at top universities, you had to get accepted, move house and pay a bunch of money. Today I can get more lectures than I could ever watch, and more than enough education to land a six-figure programming job, all for free.
In 1990, web browsers don't exist.
Obviously no single number can fully represent the incredible richness of human existence. But I think ignoring 30 years of technological process because you can't eat it is a bit short sighted.
I think this is a perfect microcosm of the discussion. The whole point is that you don't get nine days of free time to spend with your family just because TVs are cheaper, and if you did we wouldn't be having this conversation. And what is the use of 9 TVs?
Well, they double as monitors, so you can combine them with your work laptop for that 10-display setup your boss likes...
Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had.
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old woman who'd had many, many children; she said that... well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
Nowadays, you can have sex with zero risk of pregnancy.
The context of the conversation, however, was that people had children as a non intentional byproduct of having sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of other entertainment options.
To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just having sex, especially for the demographics in which birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to still decline.
Is it more economical to share a 2-bedroom apartment when you're starting out? Of course, and many new grads share apartments both for money and, just as importantly, social benefits in a place where you might not know anyone else.
It's a thing, look it up.
It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more people want to use full force of law to press charges or sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it right).
I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free run, but the independence and responsibilities that came with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are living in these days. Just my opinion.
I see a lot of kids out on balance bikes. My kid was playing with his stomp rocket in the local elementary school playground, and a little girl (about 5) - unattended, on a bike, I assume her mom was a couple hundred yards behind - came up to him and said "I've got a stomp rocket at home too, but my house is being renovated so we're living in a hotel." Playgrounds today are made to be much more about sensory experiences - there's a lot more water play, and places for free play like castle theaters, and plain logs or rocks or other obstacles to climb on. It's more typical for parents to go sit on a bench 50 feet away rather than hovering right over the kid.
Much of this is a very deliberate rejection of post-9/11 parenting standards, and may be generational as well. I think it started to change around 2015-2017; I remember there were articles on HN about a free-range parenting movement in Salt Lake City, or new playgrounds specifically designed to be dangerous in NYC. Also the people having kids now are early/mid-Millenials, while the parents of Zoomers are generally Gen-Xers, who were themselves termed the latchkey/TV-dinner generation. There may also be some survivorship bias where all the kids whose parents never let them do anything themselves failed to launch and have kids of their own, while those who did have kids often had fond memories of independent free play.
I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our fingertips in a way it never was before.
It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having your cell phone solve it for you).
My friends and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports, etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-up later on. But we were out in the world, being active, and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much more formative than consuming content created by someone else.
I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are different than those that were had pre-internet, but I will absolutely push back against the notion that they are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly a cherished childhood experience for many, but just because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I would say they're thinking for themselves even more since the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?
Kids used to be way less of a time investment. There were more around, and they very easily latched on to playing with other neighborhood kids all day which acted like free daycare. You could send them out and tell them to be back before dark, feed them food, have family dinners, fix their boo boos and not much else. Now in today's limited age, kids can only play with their literal line of sight neighbors unsupervised and are mostly stuck inside, dependent on a parent to become a playmate because they eventually get bored of the video games. Or they get obsessed to an unhealthy degree.
The independence you talk about is another kind, but still a dependent kind on the parents. I think a cell phone coordinated childhood with the permissiveness of the 70s is the ideal + all the info of the internet, but it's not something you can do in english countries.
There is also a curse-of-knowledge aspect to today's age. The average teen does not seem to deal well with instagram and cell phones, especially girls. It's unique. I think society will eventually create an immune system to universal cellphones and social media, much like we did with TV, but until then we are dealing with it downside more than we should.
Is building software that much different from construction? I think so.
"If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it."
True, but most of the content is just someone else's. If you wanted to find something out when I was a kid, you formed a hypothesis and tested it - not just taking the word of someone on the internet. The internet can be useful for information, but not as much for knowledge and possibly even less for wisdom.
"Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder."
Maybe sort of. I don't think it's quite the same as in-person. I think we are seeing this on a mass scale with pandemic restrictions too - that virtual presence isn't the same as physical presence. How does one learn to handle emotions in person rather than just shut if the computer when an argument arises?
Really I think this comes down to what you think makes experiences valuable. Obviously virtual and physical construction aren't the same, but do they provide the same benefits? It seems to me that building things is a valuable experience because it teaches kids about hard work, grit, teamwork, perhaps curiosity, and makes all those things fun. Building things virtually seems to me to provide all those same things. Maybe you think getting your hands dirty had some value, in which case yea kids are missing out, but I generally think they're able to get many of the same things with the added benefit of increased use of imagination since they can literally build anything.
Now obviously the internet is what you make of it. Like anything the the internet can be a crutch or a tool. Kids can sit in front of youtube for 10 hours a day and learn nothing from it, but I'm not sure that wasn't also the case in the past. Keeping children on track probably requires more parental oversight than in the past, but I'm not exactly sure that's a bad thing either. Exploring the internet together with your child can easily be a way to bond with them while also creating a lifelong love of building and curiosity.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...
> The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Material comforts and the bare necessities are ONE THING, but if you buy into the idea of "Maslow's hierarchy of needs", we have a huge and growing problem with those higher-level needs (and perhaps even the most base one, psychological) in recent times.
Where do you live? I don't think my kids' day-to-day lives are any better than mine was at their age in Ireland in the 80s.
edit: ah sorry, you're in the UK, I hadn't noticed. What about your kids' lives is better than your life was?
I was very lucky to have access to a computer running CP/M and MBasic on my dad's computer back home, but even as a computer science student in the late 80s I had no computer. All my programming was done on minicomputer terminals or lab PCs you had to book in advance, so I only had access for a few hours a week.
For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment and abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw people get away with it. Being homosexual was still a career ender for many people. Open and accessible communications technology, and rising living standards has I think been crucial to connecting people and fighting these prejudices. I still remember the gleeful way US politicians and religious figures spoke about the impact AIDS was having, 'punishing' gay people. They thought it was funny. It fundamentally changed my attitudes to a lot of things, socially and politically. I'm still a fiscal conservative and believer in liberal capitalist economic freedoms; but I have no trust whatever of conservative social instincts anymore, that died 35 years ago.
If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified.
Ah yes indeed - there has been some genuine progress here
> If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified
... but this would really be just an aversion to change, right? Does the average modern teenager have any more fun? Have more joy and less sorrow in their lives? I'm not convinced (unless they're gay)
That must have been pretty rough - I was a CS student from 84 to 88 (Scotland so 4 years first degrees) and we had pretty much unlimited access to kit (HLH Unix minis, BBC micros, Atari STs) and we all got keys so we had 24 hour access.
If there were any issues with access to stuff, being based in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, we'd just go to one of the many excellent pubs in the vicinity.
I agree there are some things about today's society that are terrible, but a lot of those problems, we bring down on ourselves.
Nowadays, every worker is subsidizing corporations; subsidizing their own slavery within the corporate system - Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes against their will because in many countries, retirement contributions are compulsory and deducted from incomes; this money is 'invested' into corporate stocks and straight into the pockets of big executives who get huge bonuses thanks to the rising stock prices; driven by all the big pension funds propping up stock prices using workers' money which was taken out of their salaries without their explicit consent.
Your parents probably lives through a transition from extreme scarcity to abundance. As scarce as things were for them in the 80s, they were probably at lot more scarce in the 50s and 40s. Maybe your parents didn’t experience that directly but their parents did for sure.
From our grandparents generation and before, a much higher proportion of them were directly affected by things like war.
If you’re lacking hope because you’re afraid of something like war, I would consider that a luxury compared to actually being in a war.
If you had the skills to produce something useful, the market was less competitive so it was possible for essentially anyone to improve their standard of living through education and hard work. Also, employees had stronger bonds with employers and it wasn't uncommon for the business owner to sell or handover management of the business to their top employees (and the pool of employees was far smaller/less competitive). Nowadays, it's not possible for certain people to climb out of poverty because their competitors are big corporations who have access to easy money from banks and governments. Also within corporations, the level of competition is extreme, often counter-productive and the environment is toxic, suppressed and censored. Also, there is constant gaslighting in the media telling everyone how good things are when it doesn't match observable reality at all.
That said, there is certainly plenty of truth to the house building/land use issues. I don't think anywhere has fully handled the new technology of the automobile well as the handling of automobiles has been a major driver of the issues in housing. Unchecked automobile use allows much more land to be used, but conversely encourages dumb land use rules that encourage sprawl and add miserable amounts of noise, pollution, and render most public space (roads) uninhabitable by people. I think the next century will have society figuring out a better balance or some new solutions.
You obviously haven’t eaten British food from the seventies. It was dire.
I lived in a country near the equator with year-round good weather so we didn't have this problem. Many people had land and small vegetable gardens. Fruits tasted amazing. I remember bananas used to be my favorite fruit; that was before the Cavendish variety took over. Nowadays, bananas mostly just taste very sweet with a not much other flavor. Nothing like it used to be. I don't even like bananas anymore. Mangoes also tasted amazing. Now it's hard to find good ones (though still possible but hard). Same with most vegetables; Tomatoes often taste bland nowadays; they're optimized for color, not flavor and they're picked when green/unripe to avoid damage. In many countries in the EU, meat is terrible nowadays. A lot of meat products are heavily processed; sometimes a hamburger patty tastes more like a tough sausage and chicken tastes fatty and rubbery.
The cost to construct brand new housing is considerably under US$100k per person where I live (US smaller coastal city, considering a smallish walk-up building), if you exclude land costs. At current interest rates, that could be financed at around $200/month, around $1/hour of full-time work.
In reality, a unit that costs $200/month in construction financing might cost ten times that to actually rent. Most of that reflects the cost of acquiring the land.
In principle, there is no reason that land needs to be particularly expensive in a lot of the places where it is. My guess is that a lot of the current price reflects land's status as an investment vehicle, which is largely an intentional policy choice (albeit one that might be politically infeasible to substantially change).
Either land keeps its value, in which case income and capital gains tax are no longer needed as government income would be enourmous
Or land loses its investment appeal, and is instead just the competition between different people in how well they can use it
It seems crazy to me that there are acres of land in Manhatten than are used for street level parking
At the same time, it's hard to fault buyers for this. Commuting sucks (what price do you put on 2 hours out of your day?), and the difference between a "good job" and an "okay job" can be an order of magnitude in income these days.
It highly depends. I'm in my early 40s now, still not owning a property, me and my SO are finally one step away from getting into (quite considerable, for our standards) debt so that we can take that out of the way. 30-40 years ago property was a lot more easier to get hold of, even for the less financially fortunate. Forgot to mention that we do not have kids, partially because of the stress of not owning a property just yet.
Because the prices will only go up, judging by what happens further West (I live in Eastern Europe). Five, six years ago I used to believe that wouldn't have hold true going forward, reality contradicted me.
I do not want to "chase better" jobs into my 50s or, God-forbid, into my 60s, I'm content with what I have on that front. No, we do not have (more than emergency) savings, no, we do not have a strong family-support network, no, I don't believe we're the only ones in our age cohort that are in that situation.
Kids need stability, and renting does not provide that.
Well yes, prices rise to the maximum amount that people can afford because the alternative is not living at all. Quite simply there aren't enough houses in the place where the jobs are. The only way to change that is to build more houses or move jobs.
40 years ago the average 18 year old could look forward to owning a modest 3 bed semi with a nice garden with a couple of kids and an annual holiday, all from a single wage
Today they can look forward to hopefully being able to afford somewhere if they get 2 incomes, both in the top 80%ile range. Kids are unaffordable as both parents have to work to pay the mortgage, and there's no extra for a holiday, let alone childcare costs.
But you can veg out in front of netflix after your 2 hour commute instead of watching Neighbours at half five.
One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.