Re:No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectivel...
by majormajor on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @12:30PM
(#34985272)
I wouldn't call most of what you're talking about "cultural" I'd put it down to relativity and zero-sum (to most players) rat-races.
No medicaid; but also health care was far simpler and cheaper. That meant some died, yes, but less of a constant weight of "because I don't have a better job I won't be protected like those higher income people are."
No student loans; less need for them. Almost nobody went to college - but they got jobs anyway.
Not having to take out a bunch of debt to go to college to do a job that doesn't require specialized knowledge is a materially better prospect even in a pure economic sense than having to do a bunch more work to get a mostly-unrelated credential for squarely-lower-middle-to-middle-class-jobs. It's simply lower personal cost.
You had much lower costs because the frontier was much more accessible and growing cheaply, too. Fewer people in the country. More un- or barely-developed land in growing areas. Less competition for more resources = lower personal cost. Materially better.
We also have new forms of peer-to-peer mass communication so any relative advantage someone has today is magnified and amplified. None of your old buddies were hopping on private jets and traveling across the world doing influencer stuff and able to shove it in your face constantly back then. We've coupled increasing inequality with increasing visibility of that inequality. I don't think you have to pull in broad cultural things beyond just (failing) keeping up with the Joneses.
No medicaid; but also health care was far simpler and cheaper. That meant some died, yes, but less of a constant weight of "because I don't have a better job I won't be protected like those higher income people are."
No student loans; less need for them. Almost nobody went to college - but they got jobs anyway.
Not having to take out a bunch of debt to go to college to do a job that doesn't require specialized knowledge is a materially better prospect even in a pure economic sense than having to do a bunch more work to get a mostly-unrelated credential for squarely-lower-middle-to-middle-class-jobs. It's simply lower personal cost.
You had much lower costs because the frontier was much more accessible and growing cheaply, too. Fewer people in the country. More un- or barely-developed land in growing areas. Less competition for more resources = lower personal cost. Materially better.
We also have new forms of peer-to-peer mass communication so any relative advantage someone has today is magnified and amplified. None of your old buddies were hopping on private jets and traveling across the world doing influencer stuff and able to shove it in your face constantly back then. We've coupled increasing inequality with increasing visibility of that inequality. I don't think you have to pull in broad cultural things beyond just (failing) keeping up with the Joneses.