Similarly we are "richer" because we have nice cars, but also you can't do almost anything in the US without a car (outside of a few cities). So the cost of the car is not a luxury, it's a basic requirement to participate in society.
In other words, in 1940 you might have been able to opt out of a car and post high-school education and have a normal life. In 2023, you arguably can't.
In the city you had a good chance of living in a tenement building under cramped conditions with other families. You were desperately afraid your kids would acquire polio or that everyone else would acquire TB.
Regardless, your building was probably rundown and in need of renovation that wasn’t possible since the depression and WW2 made materials impossible to get or afford. Meanwhile the cost to live in the city was still relatively high, hence why so many people cramped together.
People moved to the suburbs in the 50’s to escape this. (Moving to flee blacks is more of a myth.) We has breakthroughs in manufacturing houses (which only wealthy people could really afford prior) in terms of materials and methods and the automobile and road network became viable.
You could stay in a cramped, expensive, outdated, and dirty city or you could get a plot of land and a spacious (for the time, average home sizes are twice as large today) home and a new car. This is what people did because it’s a much better way to raise a family.
You can live in a small place and work a job that doesn’t require an education. Tons of people do today. You’ll still have better conditions than people back then.
> You can live in a small place and work a job that doesn’t require an education
Indeed, you can get by with a little bit of training post high school, but even those jobs are drying up. Notice they are already at the margins of society. Previously high school was a significant achievement. You didn't address the car example.
I can tell this isn't going to go anywhere. Good luck.
I don’t even know what that means.