Generational Living Standards Debate

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work.I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wea

And the richest person in the world 30 years ago couldn't afford a single iPhone because it didn't exist.Shelter 500 years ago was barely better than a single-room, unheated hut. And you probably didn't even own it. You were a serf beholden to a feudal lord. (And that feudal lord didn't even have air conditioning)And your food was whatever you could grow. In a good year maybe you made a little more than you needed. In a bad year you starved to death.Even the bottom 1

You need to reread the thread. There are some things that are significantly better for common people today. So much better that the richest people would have given up significant chunks of their fortunes for them in the 70s.This does not mean it’s still difficult to get housing. It’s just a point that one aspect of our lives is unfathomably better than before and now we take it for granted.

If you're invoking the early 20th century you're looking too far back. You might as well look back to serfs working 6 days a week dawn until dusk year-round for their lord and say "look how good we have it, our modern problems are insignificant" even if people are legitimately suffering today. Or go back 20,000 years and talk about how hard it was to be a nomadic hunter/gatherer. Standards go up over time.There was an incredible period of American prosperity starting

I'm not convinced that there's been a dramatic drop in living standards in the US over the last several decades (or that, where there has been, it's not mainly a matter of individual choice).Think about life in the USA 70 years ago:Do we think that much fewer than 34% of 20-to-30-year-olds lived in multigenerational households? The average square-footage of new homes more than doubled between 1970 and 2015.Certainly people spend far more on healthcare, education, and tra

> Very few of the things that were available to the middle class 25 years ago are available to the best and brightest today.This is such millenialist bullshit. Overall people are better off now than ever before. Yes, there are problems now, but there have always been problems. 25 years ago, the internet was unknown to the general public. Housing is more expensive, but food and clothing are cheaper, something these statements usually ignore. Civil rights for women and minorities are

It's kind of interesting, house prices have exponentially gone up while wages remain stagnant and there's more commodities to spend your money on. I don't necessarily think our parents' generation would've been off much better if we adjusted them for our current conditions now honestly. They had less credit compared to our buying power parity, so I think ultimately down the line we probably represent the same economic spending potential despite having access to a lot mor

My grandmother couldn't afford a chair. Most people today have reasonably furnished apartments, smartphones, some kind of vaguely functional computer with (low speed) internet access, and probably a car.Food went from being very expensive (people actually died of starvation not that long ago!) to being so cheap that obesity is a major epidemic among the poor.Since 1940, the percent of the US with a high school degree went from < 50% to over 80%. The percent of the US population wit

Back in the 70's and 80's people were pretty frugal. The average person was experienced with Lay-away, balancing checkbooks and not a lot of people had credit (high interest rates). What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... But in no way shape or form are millennial's in a worse place than people were in the late 70's early 80's

>The argument that kids today live worse than their parents is insane. Yes, it seems so in the real GDP numbers, but it defies the rising standards of living that surround us, showing up everywhere but the numbers. Would anyone here want to live like the average Joe of the eighties, using only goods and services available then?Because it's not about whether you can have Netflix and modern gadgets and Uber, but whether you can afford shelter, whether you can provide for a family