The gilded age made some robber barons insanely rich (though not as rich as the current American oligarchs)
There was a huge economic crash, called the Great Depression, during which the excesses of the rich were incredibly unpopular and the rich felt in real danger
To get out of the Great Depression, the US Government created all kinds of "socialist" programs to help people get back on their feet, strengthen unions, regulate business, make massive investments in US infrastructure, etc.
Right as the Great Depression was ending, WWII began
For a while the US was "neutral", and was manufacturing war materiel for the various countries at war, though mostly for the Allied side. This involved huge amounts of government spending.
Then, a few years after WWII began, the US entered the war, and spending ramped up even more.
Virtually every other modern economy in the world had its infrastructure destroyed during the war. Britain was bombed relentlessly, Germany was flattened, Japan was nuked, France was turned into Rubble, the USSR's factories were destroyed as Germany advanced and partially rebuilt in the middle of nowhere.
The war ended and while every other country was rebuilding their shattered infrastructure, the US infrastructure was running hot and able to supply the world's needs
American workers were massively in demand because it was almost the only remaining industrialized country with intact factories
American workers still retained the massive worker benefits and union membership that was the result of the New Deal economy
So, take that sequence, and for a brief moment a white, male worker in the US could support a family on a blue-collar salary in a way they hadn't ever done before that. Once other countries rebuilt their infrastructure, the US lost that edge. Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
Don't leave out the part that after this American renaissance, where those returning soldiers became workers who reaped the rewards of that one in a million economic boon, their children started fabricating narratives about 'hard work' and 'grit' being the reason their inherited wealth was justified.
Then they shoved that narrative down the next three generations' throats while exclaiming "kids these days are lazy" and "I worked a summer job to pay for college, why can't you?". All the while pulling up every ladder that had been constructed to put them in that position.
True enough. The men who had great jobs in the 50s had frequently been soldiers in the 40s. They'd been raised in the 30s during the great depression. They'd been through hardships. It was their kids who grew up in relative luxury. I'm sure some of it was pulling the ladder up after themselves. But, in addition they hadn't had to fight to establish their union, it was just there when they joined the job. Because of that, they didn't know how important it was, and so they didn't know they should be fighting to keep it strong.
And, to be fair, there was some corruption in unions. But, they could have rooted out that corruption and had a union that represented them. Instead they abandoned unions and embraced "rugged individualism".
There's corruption almost everywhere. The unions only survive because there's corruption in the companies, so the union corruption is usually a lesser evil.
For what good the market is, as long as unions aren't illegal, they should always balance out the corporate greed.
Sure, there's some corruption everywhere. But, for example, the teamsters union was massively infiltrated by organized crime. Unions are good, but like companies they need oversight.
Unions are good, but like companies they need oversight.
What we need then is a union union, which negotiates with the union to make sure they do their job and keep fees nominal, and if they refuse, it holds their dues. Of course, we can't have that for free, so .... unions all the way down?
And since then, productivity exploded. Machines and automation everywhere. We are in the age of overconsumption. And value is created at an always acceleratind pace.
But then things started to slow down. But wealth growth can't slow down! It has to grow, always, and always faster. So when "produce more" stopped working, they turned to "produce for cheap".
They started cutting spendings and benefits. But it wasn't enough. And they told western workers that they were no longer competitive. Yes, that plant they're shutting down was making money. But it would make MORE money in China and other third world countries.
And while plants were going away, salaries got stagnant. Wealth was growing again!
But then the growth slowed down again. So they bought governments to get huge subsidies they could funnel in their wealth growth again.
And now plants are "optimal". Wages are low. Govs hand out money. Why is it not working?
Because they impoverished so much the working class that there is no one left to buy the goods they produce.
The problem is obvious to anyone looking: money is needed for the economy to run. If it's all locked up by oligarchs, then it serves no purpose and the economy suffocates. And there is no remote way a handful of people can manage the world's economy. "Trickle down economy" has failed everywhere and everytime it was attempted. So they're terrified. Terrified of the working class, terrified of common good, terrified of common sense.
So to make sure they can keep hoarding whatever is left to get, they turned to fascists and propped them across the world, by controlling medias and flooding social networks.
And here we are: in the age of overproduction and mass poverty combined, with a class of scared oligarchs ready to take the world down with them as long as no one stops their wealth hoarding.
It's interesting watching how China has reacted to having the same problem. By helping build infrastructure in other nations they help create the economic conditions required for permanent job creation. More jobs leads to more pay, more pay leads to more purchasing power, and more purchasing power leads to more imports.
China is creating consumers rather than juicing them. Not that their ideas are innocent, but they are more coherent and beneficial.
You'd think that productivity would explode, but the productivity paradox says that it really has stalled out. It stalled in the 70s to the 80s, and then stalled again around 2000 and hasn't really grown since.
Wealth has continued to grow unchecked, but for some reason even though computers are getting more and more powerful, workers aren't getting more done. AI is only making this worse.
Yeah the position of privilege that America occupied globally for the last 75 years minus the last ten or twenty years is not something that's talked about enough in "they" took the American dream from us
And what that position of privilege cost the rest of the world. For example, Eisenhower was president from '53-'61, is often seen as a great president by Americans, and that decade is seen as a golden age by plenty of Americans (especially boomers).
Outside the US, Eisenhower had Lumumba assassinated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The replacement they helped install, Mobutu, basically continued the brutal rule and many of the atrocities that had occured in the Congo Free State (death toll as high as 10 million), so that minerals could continue to be extracted. Ultimately this would lead to the first and second congo war and an additional 5 million deaths. Fun fact: a few years ago Tesla/Musk signed a large contract with a company which was formed from a merger of companies including the successor of Compagnie du Katanga. The latter was a concession company that operated in the Congo Free State and is responsible for plenty of the worst atrocities committed during that time. Just in case anyone here thinks colonialism was a long time ago. There's also stuff like the Guatamalan genocide which was a result of the CIA instigated coup of 1954, the 1953 Iranian coup which would ultimately result in Iran becoming an Islamic theocracy, and his signing a deal with Franco which arguably prolonged his rule.
So the take away from what you're saying is, we need to fast track WWIII, and sit out of it. Let the world nuke each other while we sit back and eat popcorn while we sell them even MORE bombs to blow each other up!
........oh my god. I was being dramatic, but that sounds exactly like Bidens plan with Ukraine. Sell them weapons, but not enough to end the war. Just prolong it. I am baffled that trump hasn't gone the opposite route and sold russia nukes. I was fully expecting that.
If there is a WWIII, the US will be at the center of it.
What's happening in Ukraine is most likely going to prevent a wider war. If Russia were to win easily, there's a good chance the lesson they'd learn from that is that nobody will stop them if they invade a weaker neighbour. Eventually that might lead to WWIII. The war being prolonged and limited to just one country is a way to drain Russia of fighting age men and war materiel without the war spreading. Even the war ending too quickly might mean Russia is able to regroup and launch another attack on a neighbour.
Biden's plan was one that was extremely unlikely to lead to a wider war. Besides, Biden was giving them weapons, not selling them. If anything it was a give-away to the defence companies on behalf of the US tax payers. But, maybe that's OK if it keeps US soldiers out of the war and prevents Americans from getting killed.
Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
Even if you weren't. The economic boom of the 20th century gave birth to lots of prosperous minority communities.
Only problem was that if you ever got too prosperous, neighbors might come by to burn the place down.
But a lot of the so-called economic anxiety kicked off by mass migration to California, Texas, and Florida (and to London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Beijing, Tokyo, and Mexico City) was the result of war refugees, political dissidents, and victims of a shifting market economy finding real serious economic benefits to relocating inside the fence of one of the world's premier powers. You didn't need to be white to achieve a marked improvement in quality of life, you just needed to be within arm's reach of all the advanced industrial capital and its benefits.
The Two Income Trap that began to rear its head in the 80s/90s was a consequence of housing, higher education debts, and child care costs that prior generations hadn't historically dealt with. One could plausibly argue that the extended adolescence of college demonstrates an overall improved economy, as people are no longer joining the workforce in their teenage years and trying to outproduce a historically high infant mortality rate.
But the benefits of the economy have gone disproportionately to the leisure and professional managerial classes, while the working classes absorb higher debts/rents and defer accessing the industrial improvements until much later in life. It isn't that non-white people never see them. It is simply that they are much older when they finally do and enjoy the benefits for less time, due to higher mortality rates.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon's Vietnam spending.
Kennedy's Vietnam policy was containment; we supplied 'military advisors' and propped up the South to appease the French. We were focused on the soviets and Vietnam was a sideshow.
LBJ wanted a massive knock out punch to wipe the Viet Cong out fast. Instead he got a quagmire. Johnson had to print money to pay for the war because he didn't want to raise taxes. Nixon ran as a 'peace candidate' and then doubled down on Johnson's spending. Remember, we were dropping something like a dozen Hiroshimas a day on jungle.
Inflation is getting bad, and then OPEC hits the US with the Oil Boycott. That devastates the US economy. All those cool loft buildings in places like New York's TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn't afford to runt them anymore.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon’s Vietnam spending.
That's more complicated, since the Vietnamese War-Time economy was itself a driver of domestic growth. Stagflation by way of the OPEC crisis didn't force people into second jobs so much as it put the breaks on 50s/60s era rapid industrial development and the modernization of the consumer economy. Women in the professional workforce was more a novelty of the 1970s and the Feminist wing of the labor movement. And that's when a woman's college degree began to matter more, women were able to take on personal debt legally, and birth control allowed women to have sex without getting pregnant (thus ending the Baby Boom era).
Had Nixon not dropped billions onto Vietnam, we'd have spent our petrodollars somewhere else. Military Keynesianism wasn't the only kind.
All those cool loft buildings in places like New York’s TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn’t afford to runt them anymore.
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers. Mass transportation innovations allowed more and more labor to be moved across state lines. More of the urban economy became sales/marketing, banking, and bulk shipping. Its not like the jobs disappeared. It isn't even as though these businesses failed. They just migrated closer to the agricultural source material (which - conveniently - was where employers could find cheaper labor).
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers.
The 'transitioned because the price of being in a city was too high. The businesses first moved to the American south where the Unions were weaker, and then overseas. I live in New York and you still hear stories about how fast it happened. "SoHo" was a name dreamed up by the artists who started moving into the empty factories. All the folks who'd been priced out of Greenwich Village started moving in.
Also, Vietnam didn't 'grow' the economy. It was more like steroids. The old steel mills that should have been renovated years before were now running 24/7 to make enough bombs.
When the US mills couldn't produce enough for the Germans and Japanese markets, those countries started building their own plants. These new plants used way less oil than the older American plants, so when the Oil Crisis hit German and Japanese cars became a much better bargain.
If Nixon hadn't been pumping money into the steel industry it might have transitioned to lower cost plants on its own.
Well, large parts of the US had literal apartheid, concentration camps and what amounted to slavery of black people well into middle of the 20th century. So some were definitely automatically exempt from that prosperity from the moment they were born on account of their skin colour.
It is true, this post is true only for mostly white for people in the imperial core.
My parents grew up with a literal open sewer on their block where they would dump their shit in then the city would "flush" it with a pass of water then send down the water they would collect for drinking. They had to boil it first. This was in the 50s.
The layup for Reagan effectively began the moment WW2 ended and it's important to acknowledge that so we understand the villainy runs so much deeper than just him. Reagan was just the one in power when the time came to land the dunk with the help of the Chicago boys and a weakening socialist presence. Neoliberal economics would see many western nations begin to sell off their assets and begin an era of hyperindividualism completely alien to humans.
Some countries caught on to the damage earlier than others and have been struggling against the neoliberal world order being held up by the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc.. The anglosphere however is subject to America's cultural exports as well and that has left us particularly weak.
I'm only in my 30s. My dad supported our family on a high school education. I don't have a college education but I did two different certification programs to work in my field. I'm single with no kids and live alone and I'm still struggling. I don't know how anyone has a family right now. I can't even afford me. I'm so mad that my dad raised an entire family and bought and paid off a house and I can barely pay my damn rent and buy groceries with a better education and job than what he had.
I was the first in my family to go to college. I lived an intensely frugal life to minimize my debt, which was successful: I graduated with $3 in my pocket and no debt.
All of that effort got me, after 3 years of job hunting while making minimum wage, a $20 hour job. Almost twice our minimum wage at the time and I didn't even have the purchasing power my mother did at the start of her career, despite starting mine years later with an education and a whole stack of certificates.
This is the joke that capitalists think is acceptable.
Not to mention how much other stuff was stolen from young people, like how awesome the internet was in the mid-2000's before it got absolutely destroyed by corporations - game consoles that didn't require 35 accounts to play a game ONLINE ONLY and a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life. Sure, it's always been bad (because capitalism) but not THIS bad. And it'll only get worse as the population becomes less tech literate.
Kids just go with it now, and it's really sad, they don't know anything different.
Adjusted for inflation, an NES would cost $600 dollars today. An NES game would cost $150. You had to go to the mall to buy the games.
Thanks to spotify, youtube, and piracy music is now essentially free and available almost everywhere. Adjusted for inflation a CD/tape album you bought in 1985 would cost $30. You would had to travel to the mall, but an entire album just for that one song you liked, and listen to it on repeat for an entire month or stay up late to tape a particular song from the radio.
Don't glorify the past too much. We have never had such easy and cheap access to such a wide variety of media and games. Napster and early torrenting worked well, but the quality was often shit for plenty of stuff.
Guys! It's ok! We can't buy houses, we no longer own our own computers, and everything we have is rented, not owned.......but it's ok! Because now music is freeeeeeeee!!!!!!
Phones, computers and screens are still very affordable from a historical perspective and compared to the 2000s, you can easily pirate all media and games and own them in perpetuity, and it's incredibly affordable to buy stuff online direct from the manufacturer. Buying second hand components and stuff has arguably also never been easier. If you're not an idiot, it's also still relatively (RIP specialised forums) easy to find the information to repair most things yourself online too. Especially with parts being so readibly available. Freeing yourself of Microsoft has also never been easier.
I went to a shop recently, was quoted 2500 for something. Twenty years ago I would have had no alternative. Now, I simply went on the internet and ordered direct from the manufacturer for 500.
everything we have is rented
I mean, housing is ridiculously expensive, sure. But what are you renting except your home?
a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life
I mean, honestly... You're quite clearly too young to have been paying bills in the 2000s aren't you?
Streaming is getting more expensive, but if you adjust for inflation, it's still cheaper than cable/internet was back in the 2000s. I mean, my mobile plan costs me 5 euros a month for limitless calls, data, and calls. Back in the 2000s I would have been able to send 20 text messages for that amount.
And it's not as if you need to pay for streaming. You need an internet subscription, a phone plan, and a VPN (which is also incredibly affordable).
Also, a reminder that hetero white male America is not the world. It really wasn't that great in the 2000s for a lot of us.
Sometimes I feel like the difficulty of access for old video games and music made it even more exciting. When everything is a button click away, it loses some luster.
My kids can watch literally anything on tv. I try to tell them about a time when, sure, there were 30 or 40 channels, but only a handful of them catered to me. Maybe TGIF on ABC, or Sunday nights on Fox, and Nickelodeon was always good. Disney was pay to play. Might get lucky and get something good on TNT. When you flipped to a channel and something good was on, it was awesome. Even when they started putting guides on the channels, or the TV Guide channel, you could get lucky and find something, and that was nice.
Obviously same goes for radio, and not counting the whole station not coming in and the song being half static.
Both parents in that show worked (though if I recall correctly Hal sometimes had trouble with employment) and the joke was the two of them were simply dysfunctional as hell. There is an episode where they stop having sex for a while and they fix everything up.
Side note but the scene where Hal goes to change a light bulb is one of my favourite ways to illustrate what ADHD can look like for people: not laziness so much as misdirected energy.
It's an interstate show that takes place in the middle of the transition to more modern situations.
Lois specifically works at a terrible job part-time. I remember her going on a rant mentioning that she works 39 hours a week, which is them saying the store works the staff as hard as possible while denying them full-time benefits. But they also manage to pay for boarding school for Francis for a few years of essentially 1.5 incomes.
But even after Francis has moved out on his own, Malcolm and and Reese have to eventually get jobs to help support the family.
I'm actually rather surprised by all of the negative responses to this post. Having lived through part of this period of time (gen-x), I can attest to the accuracy of this. This standard of living or quality of life, or whatever you want to callout absolutely was achievable for most. No, it was not perfect by any means - people did struggle, yes, racial discrimination was worse. Poverty was still there, but none of it was on the scale that we see today. People were NOT beat down and discouraged. Young people got out of high school, found jobs and could rent an apartment on their own. Small towns did not have people sleeping in the woods. Cities had homeless people but it was nowhere near the level we see today. Seriously, not even close. Medical care was much more affordable. If you had insurance, they just paid your doctor's bills without engaging in a protracted fight over copays, out-of-pocket nonsense or other methods of exploiting the fine print of your policy. You just didn't hear about people losing their homes over medical costs.
For a good portion of my childhood, I was raised by a single mom who was able to make rent on a 2 bedroom apartment working a job waiting tables. She was able to later buy a house on a non-union factory job and make payments on a car. One income, one person. We were very much on the lower end of the scale.
I think many of you have been gaslit by the current state of affairs. Everything sucks and seems to actively be getting worse. I really feel bad for the millennial generation and those that followed because the system is rigged, inequality is off the charts and basic living as we knew it is not achievable for a much larger portion of society. It's difficult to overestimate how far we've fallen over the past 40 years.
As an "elder millennial", I too, saw this happen. I grew up in a very middle class home. About the only thing we didn't regularly do from the list in the OP, was modest vacations.
My dad was a teacher.
We didn't have anything overly special, but we had what we needed and we were not struggling. I have two siblings, and the entire family was a family of five. My mother did not have a job throughout my childhood and well after my teenage years, and I'm the youngest.
Now, I can't fathom having a kid. I can barely pay to keep myself alive.
When I was a kid, my high school educated dad worked in a machine shop and I had a stay at home mom. There were 3 of us kids. Back in the late 80s my parents bought the 4-bedroom home with a 2-car garage on 1+ acre of land that they still live in today. The size is still great for hosting holiday gatherings and with the extra bedrooms they can have play rooms for the grand kids and an empty bed for when my brother visits from out of town.
Once I was in high school and could be home alone, I remember my mom getting a job for a few years.
Today, I have a small family and my wife is a stay at home mom and helps at our son's elementary school and stuff. But there are some differences!
My family is smaller, 1 kid vs 3.
My education and field of work are much higher up the percentiles. I have three university degrees from big schools and work in tech. He was a high school educated machinist that eventually worked his way up into management when I was older.
My house is smaller. I own a small single-floor home with no basement or garage, a standard 1/4 acre lot, and I live in a blue collar neighborhood that's sprinkled with elderly folks and young families.
We have two cars and they are both basic non-luxury brands and they are both over 10 years old.
I was intentionally being pretty conservative with my finances, and to be fair we were in a pretty good situation with an emergency fund and no non-mortgage debt and all that. But then in the past several years I've had three different financially cataclysmic events where any one of them would have obliterated the safety buffer. Two of them were thanks to covid.
Today I am in the same house and in much better health and mental state, and I even have a much better job, but our finances are a fucking nightmare.
My folks got married in the 60s. They bought their first house in the early 70s for 32k. 3 bed / 1 bath house with a big backyard in a decent neighborhood (albeit on a busy street). My mom and dad both worked, but my mom stopped when I was born (early 70s). House was tiny, about 800sq ft. They upgraded in the mid eighties for 120k. Bigger place on a quieter street. Mom was back to working again but we were able to take multiple vacations a year. Camping, Disney, etc. Today, I'm not sure they could do it. Sure they would be making more but the first house? 640k. Thats a 1900% increase. Thats about 6% increase year on year compounded. How has the salary growth been for the same period? 1% - 1.5% compounded yoy (inflation adjusted). Fucking gross.
When I was a whipper snapper you could go to the two screen movie theater that got the movies once they left the new theater and watch a double feature matinee for a dollar. But not if you had an onion in your belt.
I grew up in the 80s. I can’t think of a single minority family that had an income of one and did what was described in the posr. I also grew up in a large city, so this may also be referring to suburbs and more rural areas.
As far as I've read, the wealth gap between black and white people in America (I don't know much about other minorities) has been slowly shrinking since the late 1800's, where it stagnated following a century of rapid shift after the civil war.
In fact, the gap has grown(a little) in the last 20 years.
The slow progress shows that new deal policies aided black and white people, with the civil rights movement further closing the divide. So yes, this ideal single-income lifestyle applies more to white folks, but both demographics have suffered from the stripping away of those policies, which was already happening before Reagan's evicerating reforms in the 80's.
Yes but it wasn't white supremacy that upheld this standard of living, white supremacy was not the direct(*) reason that lower middle class families were able to live like this, it was the disciplining of capital by elements of a social democratic policies, high taxes and stronger unions.
So, you're describing correlation, not causation. The nostalgia here is for the disciplining of capital not for toothier white supremacy.
In other words, if you bring back the high tax regime, strong unions, and strong regulations today, there is nothing that will require you to also bring back the strong white supremacist policies.
(*) Indirectly, historically, sure. But for these classes of people during that period, the historic effect compared to disciplining of capital is marginal. We are not talking about rich white landowners, we are talking about people whose parents/grandparents were in deep poverty themselves.
The issue with the post is that it is nostalgic of a time that didn't exist for non-white families. You talk as if white families didn't directly benefit from the fact non-white families had less, as if it was only rich capitalists sacrificing so lower class families had more in that era. It is a direct causation.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
Heck, the OOP* is even misogynist here whether they realise it or not. Capitalists realised they could get away with paying workers half as much if women were going to enter the workforce, and families would need two working parents. Recognising and acknowledging that it links back to homemaking labour being treated as without value to society more generally as well.
You talk as if white families didn’t directly benefit from the fact non-white families had less, as if it was only rich capitalists sacrificing so lower class families had more in that era.
No, I do not, you are misunderstanding or misconstruing what I'm saying. I am saying that the bigger factor was the partial disciplining of capital in the post WW2 era. I am talking about relative importance of multiple factors in achieving an outcome. To put it differently: white supremacy in the post-WW2 era was not more aggressive than in the past, so we cannot reasonably claim that the increase in standards of living for the lower middle class is attributable to white supremacy. White supremacy was in fact even more aggressive in gilded age. If white supremacy explains lower middle class prosperity, the gilded age would have been a better time to be lower middle class than the post-WW2 era. It wasn't, and it doesn't.
Same applies to the misogyny allegation. Women were even more repressed in the previous eras. Did that mean that a typical lower middle class white dude was better off before? No!
Again, I am being very careful here: I'm not arguing against dismantling off networks of power that intersect with capitalist domination here. I am saying that if you want to talk about economic standards of living, you have to talk about economic policy. Antiracism and antisexism are necessary but they are not sufficient. Without a socialist backbone, we know now empirically that they just get coopted by corporate shills and all you get the kind of "corporate diversity" of the Democrats.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
I understand the distrust of nostalgia. But I don't share it in the general sense. Nostalgia is a form of memory and it helps keep movements alive when they have been defeated hoping they can fight another day. The past is of course a space of struggle. Which is precisely why we should refuse to cede it to the far right. The answer to someone being nostalgic for a better quality of life cannot be to attack them for not mentioning that it was not good for everyone. Without nostalgia for their homes, the Palestinians would have long ago given up the dream of freedom. When they lovingly hold on to their house keys, they don't miss the imperialist, authoritarian, genocidal Ottoman fucking Empire, they miss not being dispossessed, displaced and oppressed by Zionism. Would it not be counter-productive to get in their faces every time they become nostalgic about the past with "yea but while you were cozy in your houses before the foundation of Israel, the Ottoman system you were part of was genociding Armenians and Greeks"?
Here you have members of the contemporary precariat pining for a time when they didn't have to work shitty gig jobs. Punching them in the face with the shitty things from the past is entirely counter productive. It in fact strengthens the fascist narrative because it reinforces the lie that in order for a white person to have a good quality of life, white supremacy has to also be in place. It cedes the past to the far right.
=====================
EDIT, to synthesize a bit:
Postwar one-income stability was real, but it also wasn’t universal. The engine was political economy: high worker bargaining power (unions), regulation, and a state willing to tax and spend. When those institutions eroded, typical pay stopped tracking productivity. The distribution was racialized and gendered: a huge chunk of "normal" middle-class security was homeownership and cheap credit, and Black veterans and families were systematically blocked from GI Bill and housing pathways in many places.
So the honest slogan is: bring back the disciplining of capital, this time without segregation and patriarchal dependency.
I'm not reading this long of a comment when you're just trying to justify away racism.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
*taps the sign*
Edit: I also NEVER SAID that white supremacy was the reason, as your first comment seemed to posit, so this just all feels like mansplaining. Have a nice day. 🫡
"I didn't read all that but it's definitely racist and mansplaining" is a hell of a take. Imagine a world where book reviews were all based on number of pages and a subjective opinion of the author.
I thought the comment was good reading. I'm pretty informed and I learned a few things.
Particularly enjoyed this part:
...It in fact strengthens the fascist narrative because it reinforces the lie that in order for a white person to have a good quality of life, white supremacy has to also be in place. It cedes the past to the far right.
As a feminist, please, for the love of fuck, stop using the term "mansplaining" whenever someone disagrees politely in a debate.
Oh I'm sorry, I guess I'm not a feminist? I'll defer to your authority :)
Maybe just no longer in the mood to be charitable because of all the people in this thread jumping down mine and other's throats for saying this was only true for white families. Maybe not in the mood for someone splaining to me that nostalgia is good actually and not a well-studied tool of the far right. It's almost like the fascist in the White House uses "Make America Great Again" as his campaign slogan.
Maybe I'm just sick of this awful platform and it's "progressive" but actually very neoliberal conservative userbase.
Nobody's forcing you to be here if it's so awful. You can always try going outside instead or finding an echo chamber somewhere where you can safely ignore the reality of not everyone always agreeing with you.
I’m not reading this long of a comment when you’re just trying to justify away racism.
Oh OK, the comment is long so just accuse me of trying to justify away racism instead. And of mansplaining. Super reasonable.
By the way, the TLDR version of my too-long comment is in the EDIT above. Tweet sized: «The engine was political economy, the distribution was racialized and gendered. Let's do the former without the latter.»
Part of mansplaining is inventing a position to argue against so you can 'splain to someone like you know better than them. All I said was that it was only true for white families. Which you've admitted was the case. So what else are you doing here trying to explain away what was still a fact due to racism?? Sure, it wasn't necessarily the driving force, but it was a fact, and it's weird to be nostalgic for a time that actually sucked for a broad segment of the population. White families had it better than black families, and capitalists wouldn't have given up all that they did if those benefits had to actually be for everyone.
Not sure how to respond without a long comment, but here goes. Basic idea: we agree on the facts. We disagree on their interpretation and on the usefulness of nostalgia.
Now its your fault you can't make ends meet if you don't even have a "side hustle."
Living in cars is now such an accepted lifestyle, that I recently read about a college that was building a multi-level parking lot for students who live in their cars. They could build an affordable living facility, but it's better to normalize living in your car when they are young. And in college. That way, when that college degree that you went $60K in debt for doesn't turn into a real job, and you are working a minimum wage retail job, and door dashing, living in your car will feel perfectly normal.
I saw another post by guy discussing his strategy of living in his car for a few years, so he can save up the money for a house. We used to do stuff like that, too, except we wouldn't live in our car, we'd just get a roommate.
I have no doubt that soon we'll be seeing YouTube videos about couples living in cars, and even raising families in cars. Look how resourceful they are!
I was making 15 an hour when Clinton was President, no degree. I had to have roommates, it really wasn't that much money where I lived.
There are something like 40 MILLION workers making less than 17 an hour now.
And for the "but most are teens" crowd, number one they are not mostly teens, and number two teens need to be able to afford housing, transportation, food, and the doctor, like everybody else, and their family needs the money too because minimum wage is freaking seven bucks an hour.
Sorry kids, we need a new ballroom and you would not believe how much gold paint.
Huh. We were stuffing 5 minimum wage workers into one house to make rent, which was a little lower than a mortgage was at that time. Early 1990s.
College, though? I did cover that with the Pell Grant. 3k a year. Just the classes - I did have to work to live. Nobody now is able to cover their classes with the Pell Grant now because it's still about 3k.
I had a big break in my college years. My first year of college in 2002 at a state school, tuition, dorm, and a meal plan combined came out to about 10k a year. I remember that the dorm and meal plan combined was $1419 a semester, and ALL unmarried students with fewer than 60 hours under the age of 25 were required to live in them unless they had immediate gamily within 30 miles.
By the time I went back to college and graduated in 2016, just the tuition at the same school was over 1,000 an hour, and the dorms were like like 4k a semester with no meal plan and there was a lottery to get to live in them because they tore most of them down to cut costs and increase rent.
The idea that it was common because that's what was depicted on TV ain't really so. Think about how many shows right now, and over the last 30 years, have had people living in NYC, in huge, modern apartments, while working as a cab driver. Or a waitress.
The truth is that our standard of living has increased; real purchasing power has gone up. But we also expect to do more, and have more. And the cost of essentials has increased faster than the cost of non-essentials, which makes the gains feel like they're being chewed up and spat out.
The answer to why resides in the way wealth is allocated in society. If you look at the graph of the wealth of the 0.1%, the median income and the economical growth, those three numbers were growing at a steady pace up until the 70~80s. Now our economies are growing at a similar rate but median income plateaued/is decreasing while the wealth of people at the top has skyrocketed.
It's not hard to figure out where all that growth went.
We could still afford such a lifestyle. Or we could learn to share more and end poverty and respect the Earth. But instead we're allowing a small village of cunts to each have more money and power than entire countries.
The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn't been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan's great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.
In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.
When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.
"But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!" is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today's economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.
So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.
The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.
Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.
If they don't cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won't like that one bit. We're already seeing the beginnings of it.
I am pretty old & my mom and dad both worked at jobs. My grandmas did not BUT their moms did, so I think the one income nuclear family thing was a blip in history. Mostly people lived in larger family groups, more than one person was working even if someone was at home.
I would suck at being a housewife, don't mind working but yeah it should mean we are raking in cash, not just surviving.
You're right but you've also framed this in the most inflammatory way possible.
The life being described by OP was very much a privilege of a vast global minority. Sure it's something everyone should have but it's not something that's ever existed for most people.
Is it something that can be had again? Absolutely. But we can dream bigger than bringing it back for just Americans/Westerners (even if the West only got there via exploitation of others).
It is inflammatory because this conservative bullshit is fucking offensive as fuck to everyone on earth who were exploited by the US and its allies to make that life possible.
Is it something that can be had again? Absolutely.
No, it can't, not in the way it happened. It happened by extreme exploitative capitalism and it ended in the exact way you are living now. Those same people are the ones who had their wealth transferred up. Those same people are the people who got foreclosed in 2008. There is no alternate ending to what happened then than the world you live in. To think you can go back to the past and live a way of life that doesn't exist from an idealized past is conservative thought.
No one on earth will ever have that again, you need to dream much bigger where you aren't profiting off the backs of my family with a better world for everyone that looks nothing like the regressive 1950s fantasy your boomer parents and grandparents lived in or you get the shit you have now.
If you're saying you want a better world for everyone then we're in agreement.
I won't speak for people whose parents lived in the West in the 50s, that's not my experience. But I hope that they also want shared global prosperity and safety, which is not how I'd describe the past 75 years or more.
the imperial core is the primary beneficiary population in an imperium. the three main imperial cores are New York City, Moscow, and Beijing. in these places wealth stolen from the fringes are used to placate the masses. there are still people who suffer in the imperial core, but the material conditions of the populace convince the masses that some of that suffering will be resolved soon and then the comfort will be extended to all.
it's like… you know how people in the nordic countries are happier than most of the rest of the world, but then within those countries there is hardcore ignored racial bias and sami people don't have access to ALL the benefits of their society? and then when you look into how wealth moves in the nordics you find that much of their comfort comes thanks to an extractive petrochemical industry that is not sustainable? that's this concept in micro. in macro, the nordic countries are part of a three empire system that isn't immediately obvious thanks to neocolonialism hiding who's exploiting who behind multinational trillion dollar companies.
This was "middle class" and not everybody. The goalposts moved and middle class is now in the mid 500ks take home. Wages never kept up, so the classes shrank by default. It was and is all planned by those at the top to syphon off more and more so they can elevate themselves from us common plebs. Almost like cycles in nature? We fight and gain concessions, they slowly roll them back until we start again...
This is the natural tendency of capitalism. Paying workers more is less profitable, therefore companies that do so are less attractive to capital.
At the same time, to remain competitive, capital requires greater and greater investment, eg 20 years ago a grocery store needed 10 cashiers and $10,000 worth of machinery, now it needs 2 cashiers and $100,000 worth of investment to remain competitive and obtain the same revenue.
So per dollar invested, the rate of return goes down over time if the market doesn't expand.
But you don't need an income that high for the lifestyle described, outside of major cities anyway. UK here for context, I would only really expect needing a high income in London. I live on the south coast, if it wasn't for house prices and mortgage rates 1 minimum wage part time income would cover this lifestyle. Unfortunately I need to pay £1100 a month for decades instead. Maybe after a while inflation will make that easier.
All other expenses a month? £170 council tax (sorta like property tax but far more regressive), £100 energy, £24 internet, water is so cheap I haven't really tracked it, under £20, food £100 or so for 2. All essentials for aboit £420 a month or 34 hours at minimum wage - for the month!
Unfortunately stuck paying the majority of my income on a mortgage.
100pounds a month for food? What are you, a bird? Those prices are unreasonable in western Canada. I spend over $400/mo on food as a single individual. Could I spend less, sure, but not a whole lot less. Cost is certainly derivative of lactation, but housing alone kills your theory, and we all need a roof over our heads. This is the major cost inflation, but that plus everything else is an avalanche.
Comparing then to now is hard. I don't doubt workers were compensated better when unions were stronger but it's an apples to oranges thing. Off the top of my head:
Multiple generations lived in a single house that was much smaller.
Households shared a single car.
Most had a single television set that picked up 6 channels.
One phone per household. Calling a couple towns over was expensive.
Family vacations were within driving distance.
Photographs were expensive. Video nonexistent.
Eating out was a rare treat
People were so poor in 2025. Most households didnt even have multiple VR headsets. And those most had only remote controled lighting in one room. So poor.
The multi-gen household fact is simply not true for many places, same as the size of the houses. The number of cars and phones and TVs are all a result of the same thing. They never needed a second one. You don't need two cars if only one person is working and is home early enough to finish erands after work. Photographs, travel distance, Videos, that's all technological change. They couldn't afford it because it don't exist in a consumer form.
That doesn't change the fact that the high standard of living of that time was affordable while the high standard of living of today isn't affordable.
Multi generations in a house was certainly a thing though it varies depending on what decade you're talking about. The houses definitely were smaller as were the yards. Look at the new construction now, there are no modest sized homes being built then drive through an older neighborhood. There is simply no comparison. My aunts and uncles all shared bedrooms.. Rarely did houses have more than one bathroom. Nobody had central air conditioning not homes, not schools. Plenty of teenagers have cars these days though they're still in school. Nobody walks or rides bikes unless they're electric. Most people are overweight and plenty of young folks are diabetic. Those factory jobs that everyone thinks were so great? They were often dangerous before OSHA and unhealthy before the EPA. My older neighbors in Cleveland told me about the soot from the nearby steel mills. BTW those jobs were plentiful until recently where I live. They're miserable places to work still. They'll make you work 6-7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. My sister just got fired from one making $25 an hour, she lost a similar job year ago. Everyone is doing Adderall to cope, management looks the other way.
Multiple generations lived in a single house that was much smaller.
is there any source on this? Especially it being smaller. Because a lot of single-family houses (especially rural) more than a century ago very really big, because they were essentially small farms.
Drive through older neighborhoods and look for yourself. Also you can look up real estate property info on most county websites in the US. They'll tell you square feet and also the year built. Builders these days don't build reasonably sized homes unfortunately. I wonder if cities don't want them because it'll attract lower income folks. As for multi generations in the same home, I recently had a subscription to Ancestry.com and could see all the people living in one house as was recorded in the census data. Families had more kids too.
Builders these days don't build reasonably sized homes unfortunately. I wonder if cities don't want them because it'll attract lower income folks.
The economies of scale of setting up a job site, lining up all the contractors' schedules, getting all the materials and equipment in place, plus the paperwork of permitting, inspections, etc., mean that each additional square foot/meter of space is much, much cheaper than the first. That just naturally pushes towards bigger single family homes.
Multifamily is different, though, which is why many multifamily buildings gravitate towards 1- or 2-bedroom units.
A lot of those rural homes had an addition with each generation. Most families lived in 1200sq ft or less. The average size of a home has risen pretty dramatically.
Shows and sitcoms don't portray mundane life, they portray what people want to see, not perfect, but not reality either. Similarly to how "backdrop" style in mall buildings and such isn't normal life. It's glossier, even if not palace-like.
USA. The country that is known elsewhere as having been filthy rich relatively to the rest of the world those years.
The "normal" good life was, yes, more common. But that life was also more labor, it required you to know how to fix your shoes and clocks and wiring and plumbing, even if you'd be able to call plumbers and electricians, - because calling someone to do a job wasn't what it is now, you didn't have the Internet and aggregators and contact centers.
There were no Google. You'd do more work on decisions and relationships, and every action would be more unique. Cost you more and give you more. You still can find such life for yourself. You will be happier, but it will be harder. Of course, you won't change the economy in general.
Stolen ... Well, what are you going to do about it? Your life is approaching what's normal elsewhere (still bigger living spaces, bigger food portions and more pretentious communication are normal in the USA as compared to Europe). I agree that things becoming worse are, ahem, not good. So what will you do?
I'm reading Saint-Exupery's "Citadel" now, and he's right about one thing, just sharing everything equally is not the way to improve your life or anyone else's. Happiness will follow work leading to something. You feel happier when participating in building a railway bridge, not so much when making a restaurant's website. Level of life, I think, follows happiness. It's not about what the society as a whole has, it's about bravery and ability to dream of all people in it.
I grew up in basically the situation the OP describes and my dad, a high-school teacher, bringing in the only income for the family, never touched any of the things mentioned in #3.
He was a post-polio survivor with a permanent limp from the disease. He needed lifts in his shoes. He had a shoe guy that made his custom stompers. Some would call that shoe guy a cobbler. In any case, as a classifiably disabled person, he didn't do handyman stuff at all. If the plumbing or electrics went out, he called a plumber or an electrician to handle it.
He always had some money tucked away for that sort of problem.
I'm the youngest of three siblings and through my highschool years, my dad was the only earner in the family.
Yes, see the part about USA (and anglosphere in general) being quite richer than the rest of the world. Yes, it was so, but whether it was "normal" can be discussed.
#3 is subjective enough to be innacurate, handy skills throughout the 1900's depended on what you did and where you lived. High population density and earning power will always end in more specialization.
It's interesting to see a shift back to fixing/making skills in North America now that people just can't afford hiring it. My mom and her parents can't cook, sew, grow, mend or repair for shit, and here's my ass with preserves from my garden in the pressure cooker, replacing the copper pipes under her sink with PEX.
Hell, there's even a movement for home biolabs to synthesize drugs.
OK, I might just have skewed perspective, being born in 1996 in ex-USSR, and remembering that in my childhood you were expected to have some idea how to fix everything you use or at least how the person with necessary equipment and skills will do that.
You guys are basically looking at ads produced by Madison Avenue in the 50s and think it's a realistic depiction of the past.
The poverty rate during the time you're talking about was 35% compared to 12% today.
The rate of malnutrition was similar.
Half the population were essentially domestic slaves. Would you want to be a housewife in the 1950s? Imagine being totally dependent on a much stronger other person who has societies okay to rape and beat you as long as it stayed quiet.
That's the supply side story. Nobody tells the demand side story. If every family could do it, they wouldn't be able to. Prices were low because not everyone could do it. You live in a capitalist society. Learn economics, don't be a sucker.
Fine ill break it down into smaller pieces for you kid.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.
This isn't just the '50s and '60s. This lifestyle existed in the '80s and '90s, although presumably that was the beginning of the end.
I'm curious, are you suggesting it was crimes against women being taken seriously that brought about this economic downturn? Just trying to find a nexus between the post and your comment.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.
And to make that happen:
So, take that sequence, and for a brief moment a white, male worker in the US could support a family on a blue-collar salary in a way they hadn't ever done before that. Once other countries rebuilt their infrastructure, the US lost that edge. Once American businesses pushed for the roll-back of worker protections, blue-collar workers lost that benefit. Bit, by bit, the world returned to the way it has normally been, where the lowest class barely survives and both parents work hard, while the rich benefit.
Nice breakdown.
Don't leave out the part that after this American renaissance, where those returning soldiers became workers who reaped the rewards of that one in a million economic boon, their children started fabricating narratives about 'hard work' and 'grit' being the reason their inherited wealth was justified.
Then they shoved that narrative down the next three generations' throats while exclaiming "kids these days are lazy" and "I worked a summer job to pay for college, why can't you?". All the while pulling up every ladder that had been constructed to put them in that position.
True enough. The men who had great jobs in the 50s had frequently been soldiers in the 40s. They'd been raised in the 30s during the great depression. They'd been through hardships. It was their kids who grew up in relative luxury. I'm sure some of it was pulling the ladder up after themselves. But, in addition they hadn't had to fight to establish their union, it was just there when they joined the job. Because of that, they didn't know how important it was, and so they didn't know they should be fighting to keep it strong.
Yeah they just saw money coming out of their check for union dues and propaganda about how union reps were corrupt
And, to be fair, there was some corruption in unions. But, they could have rooted out that corruption and had a union that represented them. Instead they abandoned unions and embraced "rugged individualism".
There's corruption almost everywhere. The unions only survive because there's corruption in the companies, so the union corruption is usually a lesser evil.
For what good the market is, as long as unions aren't illegal, they should always balance out the corporate greed.
Sure, there's some corruption everywhere. But, for example, the teamsters union was massively infiltrated by organized crime. Unions are good, but like companies they need oversight.
What we need then is a union union, which negotiates with the union to make sure they do their job and keep fees nominal, and if they refuse, it holds their dues. Of course, we can't have that for free, so .... unions all the way down?
And since then, productivity exploded. Machines and automation everywhere. We are in the age of overconsumption. And value is created at an always acceleratind pace.
But then things started to slow down. But wealth growth can't slow down! It has to grow, always, and always faster. So when "produce more" stopped working, they turned to "produce for cheap".
They started cutting spendings and benefits. But it wasn't enough. And they told western workers that they were no longer competitive. Yes, that plant they're shutting down was making money. But it would make MORE money in China and other third world countries.
And while plants were going away, salaries got stagnant. Wealth was growing again!
But then the growth slowed down again. So they bought governments to get huge subsidies they could funnel in their wealth growth again.
And now plants are "optimal". Wages are low. Govs hand out money. Why is it not working?
Because they impoverished so much the working class that there is no one left to buy the goods they produce.
The problem is obvious to anyone looking: money is needed for the economy to run. If it's all locked up by oligarchs, then it serves no purpose and the economy suffocates. And there is no remote way a handful of people can manage the world's economy. "Trickle down economy" has failed everywhere and everytime it was attempted. So they're terrified. Terrified of the working class, terrified of common good, terrified of common sense.
So to make sure they can keep hoarding whatever is left to get, they turned to fascists and propped them across the world, by controlling medias and flooding social networks.
And here we are: in the age of overproduction and mass poverty combined, with a class of scared oligarchs ready to take the world down with them as long as no one stops their wealth hoarding.
It's interesting watching how China has reacted to having the same problem. By helping build infrastructure in other nations they help create the economic conditions required for permanent job creation. More jobs leads to more pay, more pay leads to more purchasing power, and more purchasing power leads to more imports.
China is creating consumers rather than juicing them. Not that their ideas are innocent, but they are more coherent and beneficial.
You'd think that productivity would explode, but the productivity paradox says that it really has stalled out. It stalled in the 70s to the 80s, and then stalled again around 2000 and hasn't really grown since.
Wealth has continued to grow unchecked, but for some reason even though computers are getting more and more powerful, workers aren't getting more done. AI is only making this worse.
No paradox. The wealthy didn't want plenty; they wanted control.
Yeah the position of privilege that America occupied globally for the last 75 years minus the last ten or twenty years is not something that's talked about enough in "they" took the American dream from us
And what that position of privilege cost the rest of the world. For example, Eisenhower was president from '53-'61, is often seen as a great president by Americans, and that decade is seen as a golden age by plenty of Americans (especially boomers).
Outside the US, Eisenhower had Lumumba assassinated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The replacement they helped install, Mobutu, basically continued the brutal rule and many of the atrocities that had occured in the Congo Free State (death toll as high as 10 million), so that minerals could continue to be extracted. Ultimately this would lead to the first and second congo war and an additional 5 million deaths. Fun fact: a few years ago Tesla/Musk signed a large contract with a company which was formed from a merger of companies including the successor of Compagnie du Katanga. The latter was a concession company that operated in the Congo Free State and is responsible for plenty of the worst atrocities committed during that time. Just in case anyone here thinks colonialism was a long time ago. There's also stuff like the Guatamalan genocide which was a result of the CIA instigated coup of 1954, the 1953 Iranian coup which would ultimately result in Iran becoming an Islamic theocracy, and his signing a deal with Franco which arguably prolonged his rule.
Fantastic post, well done, sir.
So the take away from what you're saying is, we need to fast track WWIII, and sit out of it. Let the world nuke each other while we sit back and eat popcorn while we sell them even MORE bombs to blow each other up!
........oh my god. I was being dramatic, but that sounds exactly like Bidens plan with Ukraine. Sell them weapons, but not enough to end the war. Just prolong it. I am baffled that trump hasn't gone the opposite route and sold russia nukes. I was fully expecting that.
we'll try anything but another New Deal, eh?
If there is a WWIII, the US will be at the center of it.
What's happening in Ukraine is most likely going to prevent a wider war. If Russia were to win easily, there's a good chance the lesson they'd learn from that is that nobody will stop them if they invade a weaker neighbour. Eventually that might lead to WWIII. The war being prolonged and limited to just one country is a way to drain Russia of fighting age men and war materiel without the war spreading. Even the war ending too quickly might mean Russia is able to regroup and launch another attack on a neighbour.
Biden's plan was one that was extremely unlikely to lead to a wider war. Besides, Biden was giving them weapons, not selling them. If anything it was a give-away to the defence companies on behalf of the US tax payers. But, maybe that's OK if it keeps US soldiers out of the war and prevents Americans from getting killed.
And what's wrong with letting Ukrainians use those weapons to end the war quickly be defeating russia?
Huh?
Neat history that mostly erases billionaire actions.
You're really great at underhanded billionaire propaganda. How much do they pay you?
Are you Malcolm gladwell?
You need to touch some grass
at high velocity
Sorry, which bit in that erased the actions of capitalists?
What's not on there.
There's a lot missing. From the bad, I mean.
If you were white*
Yuuge detail
Even if you weren't. The economic boom of the 20th century gave birth to lots of prosperous minority communities.
Only problem was that if you ever got too prosperous, neighbors might come by to burn the place down.
But a lot of the so-called economic anxiety kicked off by mass migration to California, Texas, and Florida (and to London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersberg, Beijing, Tokyo, and Mexico City) was the result of war refugees, political dissidents, and victims of a shifting market economy finding real serious economic benefits to relocating inside the fence of one of the world's premier powers. You didn't need to be white to achieve a marked improvement in quality of life, you just needed to be within arm's reach of all the advanced industrial capital and its benefits.
The Two Income Trap that began to rear its head in the 80s/90s was a consequence of housing, higher education debts, and child care costs that prior generations hadn't historically dealt with. One could plausibly argue that the extended adolescence of college demonstrates an overall improved economy, as people are no longer joining the workforce in their teenage years and trying to outproduce a historically high infant mortality rate.
But the benefits of the economy have gone disproportionately to the leisure and professional managerial classes, while the working classes absorb higher debts/rents and defer accessing the industrial improvements until much later in life. It isn't that non-white people never see them. It is simply that they are much older when they finally do and enjoy the benefits for less time, due to higher mortality rates.
The two income family came as a direct result of Nixon's Vietnam spending.
Kennedy's Vietnam policy was containment; we supplied 'military advisors' and propped up the South to appease the French. We were focused on the soviets and Vietnam was a sideshow.
LBJ wanted a massive knock out punch to wipe the Viet Cong out fast. Instead he got a quagmire. Johnson had to print money to pay for the war because he didn't want to raise taxes. Nixon ran as a 'peace candidate' and then doubled down on Johnson's spending. Remember, we were dropping something like a dozen Hiroshimas a day on jungle.
Inflation is getting bad, and then OPEC hits the US with the Oil Boycott. That devastates the US economy. All those cool loft buildings in places like New York's TriBeCa and SoHo? Those were originally small factories. They emptied out because the owners couldn't afford to runt them anymore.
That's more complicated, since the Vietnamese War-Time economy was itself a driver of domestic growth. Stagflation by way of the OPEC crisis didn't force people into second jobs so much as it put the breaks on 50s/60s era rapid industrial development and the modernization of the consumer economy. Women in the professional workforce was more a novelty of the 1970s and the Feminist wing of the labor movement. And that's when a woman's college degree began to matter more, women were able to take on personal debt legally, and birth control allowed women to have sex without getting pregnant (thus ending the Baby Boom era).
Had Nixon not dropped billions onto Vietnam, we'd have spent our petrodollars somewhere else. Military Keynesianism wasn't the only kind.
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers. Mass transportation innovations allowed more and more labor to be moved across state lines. More of the urban economy became sales/marketing, banking, and bulk shipping. Its not like the jobs disappeared. It isn't even as though these businesses failed. They just migrated closer to the agricultural source material (which - conveniently - was where employers could find cheaper labor).
They emptied out because businesses transitioned manufacturing outside of the major city centers.
The 'transitioned because the price of being in a city was too high. The businesses first moved to the American south where the Unions were weaker, and then overseas. I live in New York and you still hear stories about how fast it happened. "SoHo" was a name dreamed up by the artists who started moving into the empty factories. All the folks who'd been priced out of Greenwich Village started moving in.
Also, Vietnam didn't 'grow' the economy. It was more like steroids. The old steel mills that should have been renovated years before were now running 24/7 to make enough bombs.
When the US mills couldn't produce enough for the Germans and Japanese markets, those countries started building their own plants. These new plants used way less oil than the older American plants, so when the Oil Crisis hit German and Japanese cars became a much better bargain.
If Nixon hadn't been pumping money into the steel industry it might have transitioned to lower cost plants on its own.
Well, large parts of the US had literal apartheid, concentration camps and what amounted to slavery of black people well into middle of the 20th century. So some were definitely automatically exempt from that prosperity from the moment they were born on account of their skin colour.
It is true, this post is true only for mostly white for people in the imperial core.
My parents grew up with a literal open sewer on their block where they would dump their shit in then the city would "flush" it with a pass of water then send down the water they would collect for drinking. They had to boil it first. This was in the 50s.
This is why the GOP hates Unions.
There were plenty of non-white people who got good jobs through Unions.
Everyone who remembers was!
It's. The. Capitalism.
You can blame Reagan for a large part of this, among many other issues.
Where's that unlabeled graph of a line going steadily up and then at a point marked "Reagan" everything falls off a cliff?
The layup for Reagan effectively began the moment WW2 ended and it's important to acknowledge that so we understand the villainy runs so much deeper than just him. Reagan was just the one in power when the time came to land the dunk with the help of the Chicago boys and a weakening socialist presence. Neoliberal economics would see many western nations begin to sell off their assets and begin an era of hyperindividualism completely alien to humans.
Some countries caught on to the damage earlier than others and have been struggling against the neoliberal world order being held up by the IMF, World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc.. The anglosphere however is subject to America's cultural exports as well and that has left us particularly weak.
The Behind the Bastards episodes with Raygunz are my favorite.
I'm only in my 30s. My dad supported our family on a high school education. I don't have a college education but I did two different certification programs to work in my field. I'm single with no kids and live alone and I'm still struggling. I don't know how anyone has a family right now. I can't even afford me. I'm so mad that my dad raised an entire family and bought and paid off a house and I can barely pay my damn rent and buy groceries with a better education and job than what he had.
I was the first in my family to go to college. I lived an intensely frugal life to minimize my debt, which was successful: I graduated with $3 in my pocket and no debt.
All of that effort got me, after 3 years of job hunting while making minimum wage, a $20 hour job. Almost twice our minimum wage at the time and I didn't even have the purchasing power my mother did at the start of her career, despite starting mine years later with an education and a whole stack of certificates.
This is the joke that capitalists think is acceptable.
Not to mention how much other stuff was stolen from young people, like how awesome the internet was in the mid-2000's before it got absolutely destroyed by corporations - game consoles that didn't require 35 accounts to play a game ONLINE ONLY and a subscription to EVERYTHING in your life. Sure, it's always been bad (because capitalism) but not THIS bad. And it'll only get worse as the population becomes less tech literate.
Kids just go with it now, and it's really sad, they don't know anything different.
Adjusted for inflation, an NES would cost $600 dollars today. An NES game would cost $150. You had to go to the mall to buy the games.
Thanks to spotify, youtube, and piracy music is now essentially free and available almost everywhere. Adjusted for inflation a CD/tape album you bought in 1985 would cost $30. You would had to travel to the mall, but an entire album just for that one song you liked, and listen to it on repeat for an entire month or stay up late to tape a particular song from the radio.
Don't glorify the past too much. We have never had such easy and cheap access to such a wide variety of media and games. Napster and early torrenting worked well, but the quality was often shit for plenty of stuff.
Guys! It's ok! We can't buy houses, we no longer own our own computers, and everything we have is rented, not owned.......but it's ok! Because now music is freeeeeeeee!!!!!!
I'm certainly not renting my home computer...
What are you even on about?
Phones, computers and screens are still very affordable from a historical perspective and compared to the 2000s, you can easily pirate all media and games and own them in perpetuity, and it's incredibly affordable to buy stuff online direct from the manufacturer. Buying second hand components and stuff has arguably also never been easier. If you're not an idiot, it's also still relatively (RIP specialised forums) easy to find the information to repair most things yourself online too. Especially with parts being so readibly available. Freeing yourself of Microsoft has also never been easier.
I went to a shop recently, was quoted 2500 for something. Twenty years ago I would have had no alternative. Now, I simply went on the internet and ordered direct from the manufacturer for 500.
I mean, housing is ridiculously expensive, sure. But what are you renting except your home?
I mean, honestly... You're quite clearly too young to have been paying bills in the 2000s aren't you?
Streaming is getting more expensive, but if you adjust for inflation, it's still cheaper than cable/internet was back in the 2000s. I mean, my mobile plan costs me 5 euros a month for limitless calls, data, and calls. Back in the 2000s I would have been able to send 20 text messages for that amount.
And it's not as if you need to pay for streaming. You need an internet subscription, a phone plan, and a VPN (which is also incredibly affordable).
Also, a reminder that hetero white male America is not the world. It really wasn't that great in the 2000s for a lot of us.
Sometimes I feel like the difficulty of access for old video games and music made it even more exciting. When everything is a button click away, it loses some luster.
My kids can watch literally anything on tv. I try to tell them about a time when, sure, there were 30 or 40 channels, but only a handful of them catered to me. Maybe TGIF on ABC, or Sunday nights on Fox, and Nickelodeon was always good. Disney was pay to play. Might get lucky and get something good on TNT. When you flipped to a channel and something good was on, it was awesome. Even when they started putting guides on the channels, or the TV Guide channel, you could get lucky and find something, and that was nice.
Obviously same goes for radio, and not counting the whole station not coming in and the song being half static.
Roseanne was a show in the 80s about a hard-working blue-collar family that was often struggling to get by.
They had a house with a detached garage and 3 kids.
Another example is Al Bundy in Married With Children. He was a shoe salesman with a stay at home wife and two kids but managed to own a nice home.
But they joked about money all the time! The struggle!
Oddly enough, they don't joke about that in shows as much anymore. Wonder why?
Malcolm in the Middle
Massive by today's standards, though I think it was fairly typical house in the 2000s at the time
Both parents in that show worked (though if I recall correctly Hal sometimes had trouble with employment) and the joke was the two of them were simply dysfunctional as hell. There is an episode where they stop having sex for a while and they fix everything up.
Side note but the scene where Hal goes to change a light bulb is one of my favourite ways to illustrate what ADHD can look like for people: not laziness so much as misdirected energy.
It's an interstate show that takes place in the middle of the transition to more modern situations.
Lois specifically works at a terrible job part-time. I remember her going on a rant mentioning that she works 39 hours a week, which is them saying the store works the staff as hard as possible while denying them full-time benefits. But they also manage to pay for boarding school for Francis for a few years of essentially 1.5 incomes.
But even after Francis has moved out on his own, Malcolm and and Reese have to eventually get jobs to help support the family.
That sounds right. Honestly it has been a long time since I watched it. It felt pretty real at the time though, being house poor ourselves.
Don't worry. It'll get worse.
I'm actually rather surprised by all of the negative responses to this post. Having lived through part of this period of time (gen-x), I can attest to the accuracy of this. This standard of living or quality of life, or whatever you want to callout absolutely was achievable for most. No, it was not perfect by any means - people did struggle, yes, racial discrimination was worse. Poverty was still there, but none of it was on the scale that we see today. People were NOT beat down and discouraged. Young people got out of high school, found jobs and could rent an apartment on their own. Small towns did not have people sleeping in the woods. Cities had homeless people but it was nowhere near the level we see today. Seriously, not even close. Medical care was much more affordable. If you had insurance, they just paid your doctor's bills without engaging in a protracted fight over copays, out-of-pocket nonsense or other methods of exploiting the fine print of your policy. You just didn't hear about people losing their homes over medical costs.
For a good portion of my childhood, I was raised by a single mom who was able to make rent on a 2 bedroom apartment working a job waiting tables. She was able to later buy a house on a non-union factory job and make payments on a car. One income, one person. We were very much on the lower end of the scale.
I think many of you have been gaslit by the current state of affairs. Everything sucks and seems to actively be getting worse. I really feel bad for the millennial generation and those that followed because the system is rigged, inequality is off the charts and basic living as we knew it is not achievable for a much larger portion of society. It's difficult to overestimate how far we've fallen over the past 40 years.
As an "elder millennial", I too, saw this happen. I grew up in a very middle class home. About the only thing we didn't regularly do from the list in the OP, was modest vacations.
My dad was a teacher.
We didn't have anything overly special, but we had what we needed and we were not struggling. I have two siblings, and the entire family was a family of five. My mother did not have a job throughout my childhood and well after my teenage years, and I'm the youngest.
Now, I can't fathom having a kid. I can barely pay to keep myself alive.
Looks to have been brigaded by some fasc types with next to no post history tbh
Which is also why there's suddenly a lot of deleted comments, they were patently obvious and the mods deleted that shit
I'm a middle-aged american.
When I was a kid, my high school educated dad worked in a machine shop and I had a stay at home mom. There were 3 of us kids. Back in the late 80s my parents bought the 4-bedroom home with a 2-car garage on 1+ acre of land that they still live in today. The size is still great for hosting holiday gatherings and with the extra bedrooms they can have play rooms for the grand kids and an empty bed for when my brother visits from out of town.
Once I was in high school and could be home alone, I remember my mom getting a job for a few years.
Today, I have a small family and my wife is a stay at home mom and helps at our son's elementary school and stuff. But there are some differences!
My family is smaller, 1 kid vs 3.
My education and field of work are much higher up the percentiles. I have three university degrees from big schools and work in tech. He was a high school educated machinist that eventually worked his way up into management when I was older.
My house is smaller. I own a small single-floor home with no basement or garage, a standard 1/4 acre lot, and I live in a blue collar neighborhood that's sprinkled with elderly folks and young families.
We have two cars and they are both basic non-luxury brands and they are both over 10 years old.
I was intentionally being pretty conservative with my finances, and to be fair we were in a pretty good situation with an emergency fund and no non-mortgage debt and all that. But then in the past several years I've had three different financially cataclysmic events where any one of them would have obliterated the safety buffer. Two of them were thanks to covid.
Today I am in the same house and in much better health and mental state, and I even have a much better job, but our finances are a fucking nightmare.
Those same people also had pensions for life once they retired in their 50s. They also didn't have to pay for health insurance.
You know a sitcom that could realistically contrast the two lifestyles could be interesting
Al Bundy supported a house full of degeneracy in a shoe salesman's salary.
Imagine living Al Bundys life slinging shoes at Foot Locker
The episode of The Simpsons with Frank Grimes comes to mind.
My folks got married in the 60s. They bought their first house in the early 70s for 32k. 3 bed / 1 bath house with a big backyard in a decent neighborhood (albeit on a busy street). My mom and dad both worked, but my mom stopped when I was born (early 70s). House was tiny, about 800sq ft. They upgraded in the mid eighties for 120k. Bigger place on a quieter street. Mom was back to working again but we were able to take multiple vacations a year. Camping, Disney, etc. Today, I'm not sure they could do it. Sure they would be making more but the first house? 640k. Thats a 1900% increase. Thats about 6% increase year on year compounded. How has the salary growth been for the same period? 1% - 1.5% compounded yoy (inflation adjusted). Fucking gross.
It wasn't even that long ago either. It was still relatively common to have single income households in the 80's when I was born.
My mum wasn't working at all when my older siblings were born, and she only started working when I started preschool.
Also, her minimum wage income boosted my parents savings so much they were able to buy an investment property and drop money into other things.
When I was a whipper snapper you could go to the two screen movie theater that got the movies once they left the new theater and watch a double feature matinee for a dollar. But not if you had an onion in your belt.
Why not? It was the fashion at the time.
At that point, it became to them as a child yelling "6 7" has come to us.
Not sure about you but when i hear "6, 7" i make the hand gesture and smile.
...there's a hand gesture?
There is, indeed. It's an important part of the meme. One could even be attribute the gesture to catalyzing the memeification in the first place.
All of this was only true of white families.
I grew up in the 80s. I can’t think of a single minority family that had an income of one and did what was described in the posr. I also grew up in a large city, so this may also be referring to suburbs and more rural areas.
Redlining kept minority families out of the suburbs anyway.
As far as I've read, the wealth gap between black and white people in America (I don't know much about other minorities) has been slowly shrinking since the late 1800's, where it stagnated following a century of rapid shift after the civil war.
In fact, the gap has grown(a little) in the last 20 years.
The slow progress shows that new deal policies aided black and white people, with the civil rights movement further closing the divide. So yes, this ideal single-income lifestyle applies more to white folks, but both demographics have suffered from the stripping away of those policies, which was already happening before Reagan's evicerating reforms in the 80's.
Yes but it wasn't white supremacy that upheld this standard of living, white supremacy was not the direct(*) reason that lower middle class families were able to live like this, it was the disciplining of capital by elements of a social democratic policies, high taxes and stronger unions.
So, you're describing correlation, not causation. The nostalgia here is for the disciplining of capital not for toothier white supremacy.
In other words, if you bring back the high tax regime, strong unions, and strong regulations today, there is nothing that will require you to also bring back the strong white supremacist policies.
(*) Indirectly, historically, sure. But for these classes of people during that period, the historic effect compared to disciplining of capital is marginal. We are not talking about rich white landowners, we are talking about people whose parents/grandparents were in deep poverty themselves.
The issue with the post is that it is nostalgic of a time that didn't exist for non-white families. You talk as if white families didn't directly benefit from the fact non-white families had less, as if it was only rich capitalists sacrificing so lower class families had more in that era. It is a direct causation.
Nostalgia is a tool of modern white-supremacism, and people should be more aware of that fact.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920512448941
Heck, the OOP* is even misogynist here whether they realise it or not. Capitalists realised they could get away with paying workers half as much if women were going to enter the workforce, and families would need two working parents. Recognising and acknowledging that it links back to homemaking labour being treated as without value to society more generally as well.
No, I do not, you are misunderstanding or misconstruing what I'm saying. I am saying that the bigger factor was the partial disciplining of capital in the post WW2 era. I am talking about relative importance of multiple factors in achieving an outcome. To put it differently: white supremacy in the post-WW2 era was not more aggressive than in the past, so we cannot reasonably claim that the increase in standards of living for the lower middle class is attributable to white supremacy. White supremacy was in fact even more aggressive in gilded age. If white supremacy explains lower middle class prosperity, the gilded age would have been a better time to be lower middle class than the post-WW2 era. It wasn't, and it doesn't.
Same applies to the misogyny allegation. Women were even more repressed in the previous eras. Did that mean that a typical lower middle class white dude was better off before? No!
Again, I am being very careful here: I'm not arguing against dismantling off networks of power that intersect with capitalist domination here. I am saying that if you want to talk about economic standards of living, you have to talk about economic policy. Antiracism and antisexism are necessary but they are not sufficient. Without a socialist backbone, we know now empirically that they just get coopted by corporate shills and all you get the kind of "corporate diversity" of the Democrats.
I understand the distrust of nostalgia. But I don't share it in the general sense. Nostalgia is a form of memory and it helps keep movements alive when they have been defeated hoping they can fight another day. The past is of course a space of struggle. Which is precisely why we should refuse to cede it to the far right. The answer to someone being nostalgic for a better quality of life cannot be to attack them for not mentioning that it was not good for everyone. Without nostalgia for their homes, the Palestinians would have long ago given up the dream of freedom. When they lovingly hold on to their house keys, they don't miss the imperialist, authoritarian, genocidal Ottoman fucking Empire, they miss not being dispossessed, displaced and oppressed by Zionism. Would it not be counter-productive to get in their faces every time they become nostalgic about the past with "yea but while you were cozy in your houses before the foundation of Israel, the Ottoman system you were part of was genociding Armenians and Greeks"?
Here you have members of the contemporary precariat pining for a time when they didn't have to work shitty gig jobs. Punching them in the face with the shitty things from the past is entirely counter productive. It in fact strengthens the fascist narrative because it reinforces the lie that in order for a white person to have a good quality of life, white supremacy has to also be in place. It cedes the past to the far right.
===================== EDIT, to synthesize a bit:
Postwar one-income stability was real, but it also wasn’t universal. The engine was political economy: high worker bargaining power (unions), regulation, and a state willing to tax and spend. When those institutions eroded, typical pay stopped tracking productivity. The distribution was racialized and gendered: a huge chunk of "normal" middle-class security was homeownership and cheap credit, and Black veterans and families were systematically blocked from GI Bill and housing pathways in many places.
So the honest slogan is: bring back the disciplining of capital, this time without segregation and patriarchal dependency.
I'm not reading this long of a comment when you're just trying to justify away racism.
*taps the sign*
Edit: I also NEVER SAID that white supremacy was the reason, as your first comment seemed to posit, so this just all feels like mansplaining. Have a nice day. 🫡
"I didn't read all that but it's definitely racist and mansplaining" is a hell of a take. Imagine a world where book reviews were all based on number of pages and a subjective opinion of the author.
I thought the comment was good reading. I'm pretty informed and I learned a few things.
Particularly enjoyed this part:
As a feminist, please, for the love of fuck, stop using the term "mansplaining" whenever someone disagrees politely in a debate.
Oh I'm sorry, I guess I'm not a feminist? I'll defer to your authority :)
Maybe just no longer in the mood to be charitable because of all the people in this thread jumping down mine and other's throats for saying this was only true for white families. Maybe not in the mood for someone splaining to me that nostalgia is good actually and not a well-studied tool of the far right. It's almost like the fascist in the White House uses "Make America Great Again" as his campaign slogan.
Maybe I'm just sick of this awful platform and it's "progressive" but actually very neoliberal conservative userbase.
How would you know what the platform is like if you don't read the comments?
Nobody's forcing you to be here if it's so awful. You can always try going outside instead or finding an echo chamber somewhere where you can safely ignore the reality of not everyone always agreeing with you.
Oh OK, the comment is long so just accuse me of trying to justify away racism instead. And of mansplaining. Super reasonable.
By the way, the TLDR version of my too-long comment is in the EDIT above. Tweet sized: «The engine was political economy, the distribution was racialized and gendered. Let's do the former without the latter.»
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Part of mansplaining is inventing a position to argue against so you can 'splain to someone like you know better than them. All I said was that it was only true for white families. Which you've admitted was the case. So what else are you doing here trying to explain away what was still a fact due to racism?? Sure, it wasn't necessarily the driving force, but it was a fact, and it's weird to be nostalgic for a time that actually sucked for a broad segment of the population. White families had it better than black families, and capitalists wouldn't have given up all that they did if those benefits had to actually be for everyone.
Not sure how to respond without a long comment, but here goes. Basic idea: we agree on the facts. We disagree on their interpretation and on the usefulness of nostalgia.
That is 100% race reductionist nonsense.
Now its your fault you can't make ends meet if you don't even have a "side hustle."
Living in cars is now such an accepted lifestyle, that I recently read about a college that was building a multi-level parking lot for students who live in their cars. They could build an affordable living facility, but it's better to normalize living in your car when they are young. And in college. That way, when that college degree that you went $60K in debt for doesn't turn into a real job, and you are working a minimum wage retail job, and door dashing, living in your car will feel perfectly normal.
I saw another post by guy discussing his strategy of living in his car for a few years, so he can save up the money for a house. We used to do stuff like that, too, except we wouldn't live in our car, we'd just get a roommate.
I have no doubt that soon we'll be seeing YouTube videos about couples living in cars, and even raising families in cars. Look how resourceful they are!
And kids today think that's normal.
I was making 15 an hour when Clinton was President, no degree. I had to have roommates, it really wasn't that much money where I lived.
There are something like 40 MILLION workers making less than 17 an hour now.
And for the "but most are teens" crowd, number one they are not mostly teens, and number two teens need to be able to afford housing, transportation, food, and the doctor, like everybody else, and their family needs the money too because minimum wage is freaking seven bucks an hour.
Sorry kids, we need a new ballroom and you would not believe how much gold paint.
Growing up, it was very possible for ONE minimum wage worker to be able to afford a mortgage on a modest home in my city.
Huh. We were stuffing 5 minimum wage workers into one house to make rent, which was a little lower than a mortgage was at that time. Early 1990s.
College, though? I did cover that with the Pell Grant. 3k a year. Just the classes - I did have to work to live. Nobody now is able to cover their classes with the Pell Grant now because it's still about 3k.
You could work part-time in a retail shop while paying for an apartment and college.
At no time was that ever possible
I had a big break in my college years. My first year of college in 2002 at a state school, tuition, dorm, and a meal plan combined came out to about 10k a year. I remember that the dorm and meal plan combined was $1419 a semester, and ALL unmarried students with fewer than 60 hours under the age of 25 were required to live in them unless they had immediate gamily within 30 miles.
By the time I went back to college and graduated in 2016, just the tuition at the same school was over 1,000 an hour, and the dorms were like like 4k a semester with no meal plan and there was a lottery to get to live in them because they tore most of them down to cut costs and increase rent.
Yeah I mean where do you think all these billionaires got their money from?
The idea that it was common because that's what was depicted on TV ain't really so. Think about how many shows right now, and over the last 30 years, have had people living in NYC, in huge, modern apartments, while working as a cab driver. Or a waitress.
The truth is that our standard of living has increased; real purchasing power has gone up. But we also expect to do more, and have more. And the cost of essentials has increased faster than the cost of non-essentials, which makes the gains feel like they're being chewed up and spat out.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-costs-of-generations.html
How I Met Your Mother actually addressed that plot hole by showing the group misremembering the size of the apartment they were in.
*for some demographics
The answer to why resides in the way wealth is allocated in society. If you look at the graph of the wealth of the 0.1%, the median income and the economical growth, those three numbers were growing at a steady pace up until the 70~80s. Now our economies are growing at a similar rate but median income plateaued/is decreasing while the wealth of people at the top has skyrocketed.
It's not hard to figure out where all that growth went.
We could still afford such a lifestyle. Or we could learn to share more and end poverty and respect the Earth. But instead we're allowing a small village of cunts to each have more money and power than entire countries.
The graphs on this page are always interesting to look at.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
The Rand Corp issued a report in 2019 on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think. The median salary of $43K in 1975 had increased to only $50K in 2019, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn't been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
Thats a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. The Trickle Down Economics that everyone thought was Ronald Reagan's great idea, was baked into the tax code in 1974.
In addition, the Federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 in 2009. Previous to that, it was raised to $5.15 in 1997. The Federal minimum wage was only increased twice in the last 28 years, for a total of a measly $2.10. And yet corporations and their owners SCREAM like their nuts are being carved out by a red hot, dull, rusty spoon at even the mention of a raise in the minimum wage.
When there are threats to raise it every 15 years or so, there are always two responses, as if they are the ONLY possible options - prices will have to go up, or jobs will have to be cut. There is never a mention of the third possible option - that corporations and their owners might have to make a slightly smaller profit. That option is absolutely unthinkable. Unmentionable.
"But less profit means the stock market would be impacted!" is the standard cry. Yes it would, but so what? The stock market hit its recent low in March of 2008, soon after Obama took over the presidency in the midst of a free fall caused by the Bush Economic Crash - about 7500. Today it is over 40,000. Corporations are clearly benefiting in today's economy, even during a global pandemic when millions of American families were facing homelessness and food shortages through no fault of their own. They were the helpless victims of government edicts which forcibly and ruthlessly shut down their only ways to make a living, while doing NOTHING to help them survive because a few rich Republicans are upset that poor people might get more money than they deserve. So they fought to a stalemate over $400 or $600 per week, while their Sociopathic Oligarch slavemasters chuckled smugly while metaphorically lighting their cigars with $100 bills and demanding more corporate welfare.
So what if smaller profits (because workers got paid their value) meant the stock market was only at 20,000, or even 15,000? Those corporations and their stockholders would still be wealthy, but there would be enough money in the treasury to pay for health care for all, college or trade school for every qualified student, to forgive all student loan shark debts, to cover those whose jobs have been essentially declared illegal because of the pandemic, and more. Sure, corporations would have to live with less profit, but instead of that money being tied up in enormous stock portfolios or in offshore bank accounts, it would be in the hands of people who would buy houses, cars, furniture, vacations, retire to make room for the next generation, etc.
The Trickle Down Economic Theory never worked. As anyone could have predicted (and many did), instead of spending those tax profits on new factories or new opportunities or higher pay scales like we were promised, the Sociopathic Oligarchs only accumulated it at the top. When they did spend it, they spent it on political leverage to get more corporate welfare so they could accumulate even more wealth, at the expense of the working class, creating financial hoards which they sleep on like a Tolkienesque dragon.
Its time to give Trickle Up Economics a try. Make more money available to those at the bottom and middle, and see what happens. Raise wages, forgive student loans, offer free college and trade schools, give every citizen health care, etc. and it will create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. Sure, the Oligarchs appreciate the efficiency of transferring the money directly from the government to their savings accounts, but the money from the Trickle Up stimulus will eventually reach them anyway, they just have to be a little patient and wait for it to help American families and the American economy first.
If they don't cooperate in this, then our society will spontaneously pivot to a Robin Hood Economy, and the Sociopathic Oligarchs won't like that one bit. We're already seeing the beginnings of it.
Read more about it :
New York Mag: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/09/rand-study-how-high-is-inequality-us.html
Fast Money: https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-study-uncovers-massive-income-shift-to-the-top-1
Anyone who pretends this was a racial thing and not a class thing deserves a long prison sentence.
Intersectionality my dude, it can be both
Intersectionality is right wing bullshit, sis.
I am pretty old & my mom and dad both worked at jobs. My grandmas did not BUT their moms did, so I think the one income nuclear family thing was a blip in history. Mostly people lived in larger family groups, more than one person was working even if someone was at home.
I would suck at being a housewife, don't mind working but yeah it should mean we are raking in cash, not just surviving.
And the people who didn’t have kids got Ferraris! Where the fuck is my Ferrari?
For white people in the imperial core
Keep downvoting, sorry the truth hurts that your parents only had those privileges from raping the rest of the world
You're right but you've also framed this in the most inflammatory way possible.
The life being described by OP was very much a privilege of a vast global minority. Sure it's something everyone should have but it's not something that's ever existed for most people.
Is it something that can be had again? Absolutely. But we can dream bigger than bringing it back for just Americans/Westerners (even if the West only got there via exploitation of others).
It is inflammatory because this conservative bullshit is fucking offensive as fuck to everyone on earth who were exploited by the US and its allies to make that life possible.
No, it can't, not in the way it happened. It happened by extreme exploitative capitalism and it ended in the exact way you are living now. Those same people are the ones who had their wealth transferred up. Those same people are the people who got foreclosed in 2008. There is no alternate ending to what happened then than the world you live in. To think you can go back to the past and live a way of life that doesn't exist from an idealized past is conservative thought.
No one on earth will ever have that again, you need to dream much bigger where you aren't profiting off the backs of my family with a better world for everyone that looks nothing like the regressive 1950s fantasy your boomer parents and grandparents lived in or you get the shit you have now.
If you're saying you want a better world for everyone then we're in agreement.
I won't speak for people whose parents lived in the West in the 50s, that's not my experience. But I hope that they also want shared global prosperity and safety, which is not how I'd describe the past 75 years or more.
What are you calling the imperial core? No one uses that term in the US. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Some people are more concerned with feeling right than being understood. Also a touch of in-group-joy by using phrasing of in-group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_countries
the imperial core is the primary beneficiary population in an imperium. the three main imperial cores are New York City, Moscow, and Beijing. in these places wealth stolen from the fringes are used to placate the masses. there are still people who suffer in the imperial core, but the material conditions of the populace convince the masses that some of that suffering will be resolved soon and then the comfort will be extended to all.
it's like… you know how people in the nordic countries are happier than most of the rest of the world, but then within those countries there is hardcore ignored racial bias and sami people don't have access to ALL the benefits of their society? and then when you look into how wealth moves in the nordics you find that much of their comfort comes thanks to an extractive petrochemical industry that is not sustainable? that's this concept in micro. in macro, the nordic countries are part of a three empire system that isn't immediately obvious thanks to neocolonialism hiding who's exploiting who behind multinational trillion dollar companies.
Yep, sounds like an average USAian.
Ah yes, the art of "Enshittification" i.e., profit over product. And obviously you are the product for the billionaires and vertainly not other way around. https://www.themurrowproject.org/p/the-enshitification-of-everything
Which people lived this life? Is how we are organised today incompatible with the way they viewed the world?
This was "middle class" and not everybody. The goalposts moved and middle class is now in the mid 500ks take home. Wages never kept up, so the classes shrank by default. It was and is all planned by those at the top to syphon off more and more so they can elevate themselves from us common plebs. Almost like cycles in nature? We fight and gain concessions, they slowly roll them back until we start again...
This is the natural tendency of capitalism. Paying workers more is less profitable, therefore companies that do so are less attractive to capital.
At the same time, to remain competitive, capital requires greater and greater investment, eg 20 years ago a grocery store needed 10 cashiers and $10,000 worth of machinery, now it needs 2 cashiers and $100,000 worth of investment to remain competitive and obtain the same revenue.
So per dollar invested, the rate of return goes down over time if the market doesn't expand.
Ha. Ha ha ha.
No, this was everybody. I don’t think there was a single exception to this lifestyle whatsoever.
But you don't need an income that high for the lifestyle described, outside of major cities anyway. UK here for context, I would only really expect needing a high income in London. I live on the south coast, if it wasn't for house prices and mortgage rates 1 minimum wage part time income would cover this lifestyle. Unfortunately I need to pay £1100 a month for decades instead. Maybe after a while inflation will make that easier.
All other expenses a month? £170 council tax (sorta like property tax but far more regressive), £100 energy, £24 internet, water is so cheap I haven't really tracked it, under £20, food £100 or so for 2. All essentials for aboit £420 a month or 34 hours at minimum wage - for the month!
Unfortunately stuck paying the majority of my income on a mortgage.
100pounds a month for food? What are you, a bird? Those prices are unreasonable in western Canada. I spend over $400/mo on food as a single individual. Could I spend less, sure, but not a whole lot less. Cost is certainly derivative of lactation, but housing alone kills your theory, and we all need a roof over our heads. This is the major cost inflation, but that plus everything else is an avalanche.
Do you live on steak and salmon? I don't even know how I would spend that much money without eating way too much meat.
Tell me you don't have Thames Water without telling me you dont't have Thames fucking Water
Well yeah, I said my mortgage is £1100 not my rent is £6000 a month. Its cheap when your water company just dumps the sewage into the sea.
Comparing then to now is hard. I don't doubt workers were compensated better when unions were stronger but it's an apples to oranges thing. Off the top of my head: Multiple generations lived in a single house that was much smaller. Households shared a single car. Most had a single television set that picked up 6 channels. One phone per household. Calling a couple towns over was expensive. Family vacations were within driving distance. Photographs were expensive. Video nonexistent. Eating out was a rare treat
People were so poor in 2025. Most households didnt even have multiple VR headsets. And those most had only remote controled lighting in one room. So poor.
The multi-gen household fact is simply not true for many places, same as the size of the houses. The number of cars and phones and TVs are all a result of the same thing. They never needed a second one. You don't need two cars if only one person is working and is home early enough to finish erands after work. Photographs, travel distance, Videos, that's all technological change. They couldn't afford it because it don't exist in a consumer form.
That doesn't change the fact that the high standard of living of that time was affordable while the high standard of living of today isn't affordable.
Multi generations in a house was certainly a thing though it varies depending on what decade you're talking about. The houses definitely were smaller as were the yards. Look at the new construction now, there are no modest sized homes being built then drive through an older neighborhood. There is simply no comparison. My aunts and uncles all shared bedrooms.. Rarely did houses have more than one bathroom. Nobody had central air conditioning not homes, not schools. Plenty of teenagers have cars these days though they're still in school. Nobody walks or rides bikes unless they're electric. Most people are overweight and plenty of young folks are diabetic. Those factory jobs that everyone thinks were so great? They were often dangerous before OSHA and unhealthy before the EPA. My older neighbors in Cleveland told me about the soot from the nearby steel mills. BTW those jobs were plentiful until recently where I live. They're miserable places to work still. They'll make you work 6-7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. My sister just got fired from one making $25 an hour, she lost a similar job year ago. Everyone is doing Adderall to cope, management looks the other way.
is there any source on this? Especially it being smaller. Because a lot of single-family houses (especially rural) more than a century ago very really big, because they were essentially small farms.
Drive through older neighborhoods and look for yourself. Also you can look up real estate property info on most county websites in the US. They'll tell you square feet and also the year built. Builders these days don't build reasonably sized homes unfortunately. I wonder if cities don't want them because it'll attract lower income folks. As for multi generations in the same home, I recently had a subscription to Ancestry.com and could see all the people living in one house as was recorded in the census data. Families had more kids too.
The economies of scale of setting up a job site, lining up all the contractors' schedules, getting all the materials and equipment in place, plus the paperwork of permitting, inspections, etc., mean that each additional square foot/meter of space is much, much cheaper than the first. That just naturally pushes towards bigger single family homes.
Multifamily is different, though, which is why many multifamily buildings gravitate towards 1- or 2-bedroom units.
A lot of those rural homes had an addition with each generation. Most families lived in 1200sq ft or less. The average size of a home has risen pretty dramatically.
Of course back then home only needed to be a place to sleep and eat and bathe. The rest of your life happened outside the home
I’m not racist you piece of shit.
You want to explain to me what you're talking about?
You removed my comment and called me racist even though I’m not and my comment wasn’t even remotely racist.
Shows and sitcoms don't portray mundane life, they portray what people want to see, not perfect, but not reality either. Similarly to how "backdrop" style in mall buildings and such isn't normal life. It's glossier, even if not palace-like.
USA. The country that is known elsewhere as having been filthy rich relatively to the rest of the world those years.
The "normal" good life was, yes, more common. But that life was also more labor, it required you to know how to fix your shoes and clocks and wiring and plumbing, even if you'd be able to call plumbers and electricians, - because calling someone to do a job wasn't what it is now, you didn't have the Internet and aggregators and contact centers.
There were no Google. You'd do more work on decisions and relationships, and every action would be more unique. Cost you more and give you more. You still can find such life for yourself. You will be happier, but it will be harder. Of course, you won't change the economy in general.
Stolen ... Well, what are you going to do about it? Your life is approaching what's normal elsewhere (still bigger living spaces, bigger food portions and more pretentious communication are normal in the USA as compared to Europe). I agree that things becoming worse are, ahem, not good. So what will you do?
I'm reading Saint-Exupery's "Citadel" now, and he's right about one thing, just sharing everything equally is not the way to improve your life or anyone else's. Happiness will follow work leading to something. You feel happier when participating in building a railway bridge, not so much when making a restaurant's website. Level of life, I think, follows happiness. It's not about what the society as a whole has, it's about bravery and ability to dream of all people in it.
I grew up in basically the situation the OP describes and my dad, a high-school teacher, bringing in the only income for the family, never touched any of the things mentioned in #3.
He was a post-polio survivor with a permanent limp from the disease. He needed lifts in his shoes. He had a shoe guy that made his custom stompers. Some would call that shoe guy a cobbler. In any case, as a classifiably disabled person, he didn't do handyman stuff at all. If the plumbing or electrics went out, he called a plumber or an electrician to handle it.
He always had some money tucked away for that sort of problem.
I'm the youngest of three siblings and through my highschool years, my dad was the only earner in the family.
I lived through exactly what OP describes.
Yes, see the part about USA (and anglosphere in general) being quite richer than the rest of the world. Yes, it was so, but whether it was "normal" can be discussed.
#3 is subjective enough to be innacurate, handy skills throughout the 1900's depended on what you did and where you lived. High population density and earning power will always end in more specialization.
It's interesting to see a shift back to fixing/making skills in North America now that people just can't afford hiring it. My mom and her parents can't cook, sew, grow, mend or repair for shit, and here's my ass with preserves from my garden in the pressure cooker, replacing the copper pipes under her sink with PEX.
Hell, there's even a movement for home biolabs to synthesize drugs.
OK, I might just have skewed perspective, being born in 1996 in ex-USSR, and remembering that in my childhood you were expected to have some idea how to fix everything you use or at least how the person with necessary equipment and skills will do that.
You guys are basically looking at ads produced by Madison Avenue in the 50s and think it's a realistic depiction of the past.
The poverty rate during the time you're talking about was 35% compared to 12% today.
The rate of malnutrition was similar.
Half the population were essentially domestic slaves. Would you want to be a housewife in the 1950s? Imagine being totally dependent on a much stronger other person who has societies okay to rape and beat you as long as it stayed quiet.
That's the supply side story. Nobody tells the demand side story. If every family could do it, they wouldn't be able to. Prices were low because not everyone could do it. You live in a capitalist society. Learn economics, don't be a sucker.
This is some white shit right here
Edit: fuck this golden age remembrance propaganda.
What the actual fuck does that have to do with the post
Fine ill break it down into smaller pieces for you kid.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.
You mean today?
This isn't just the '50s and '60s. This lifestyle existed in the '80s and '90s, although presumably that was the beginning of the end.
I'm curious, are you suggesting it was crimes against women being taken seriously that brought about this economic downturn? Just trying to find a nexus between the post and your comment.
Ill feed your curiosity.
The idea that American families used to thrive on one adult income is propaganda aimed at the uninformed and easily swayed. It makes the 1950s look like a simpler, fairer time, but that’s misleading. That ideal mostly applied to white, middle-class families. Black and Hispanic families faced systemic racism like redlining and being denied GI Bill benefits, and women were expected to stay home, often earning far less if they worked at all. Poverty, social constraints, and inequality for most were ignored. Nostalgia for that era is a story sold to flatter the smaller minded.