The porn is MUCH better than in 1913. No contest really.
(and pretty much in every other quantifiable measure it’s better today than 100 years ago as well…but porn is my key metric)
So basically things that can’t be objectively measured? Kind of pointless things then.
Good riddance.
I was thinking that 2013 was a slam dunk. Then I started reading the comments on that infographic. So it’s 2013, as long as you can ignore the fetid black hole that is the comments section of just about any article that appears on the internet.
Unless you’re a huge fan of filthy outhouses… 2013.
Thank God we are no longer subject to the economic tyranny of Dutch Boy Paint and Campbell’s Soup!
There were lots of ignorant people back in 1913 as well, its just that you don’t hear much about them because their thoughts weren’t preserved for posterity.
Adjusted for inflation it looks like the average individual income was $18,899.15 in 2013 dollars. Still bad, but not quite as bad as it looks in the raw comparison (though better than China is today at $5,680 in 2013 US dollars). The life expectancy figure really tells the tale though.
There’s a larger percentage of “touched, but then left untouched” land now. National parks didn’t exist in their current form until 1916. The logging industry was at its height in 1913. I’m not 100% sure that’s true, at least not in the US.
Compared to 1913, when almost all cities on Earth were heated with coal, coke, and wood-burning stoves? Ridiculous.
The population growth might be responsible for more carbon output, but our use of burning fuels is orders of magnitude more efficient than in 1913.
I’d rather be nuked than be in a 1914 trench, I think.
For hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians, yes, things are much better. For AIDS-ravaged western Africa, maybe not so much. Your average American is better off than in 1913 but is on a downhill slide, economically, but perhaps it’s reversible. Perhaps not. There doesn’t seem to be much will to reverse it, even among average Americans.
I think “better off” is a pretty useless concept when comparing eras like that.
What does better off mean? Is there an objective measure? It’s very easy to just kind of arbitrarily pick things you wouldn’t want to change about today and say that they’re better than they used to be.
Yes, not only was Al Gore not born yet, but his father was only 6.
Seems easy enough to me. Do people live longer? Do they live better? Do they have access to more services, entertainment, higher standard of living? Do they have better access to essentials like clean water and wholesome food (hell, do they HAVE access to those things at all)?
All of these things seem objective enough to me, and quantifiable. What do you disagree with?
I thought prostitution was significantly more available back then. From the point of view of a moral degenerate that’s a sad turn of events.
What’s baffling is how people are so much more educated now yet baby names have become ever so much more stupid.
One hopes.
Then again, so did they…
Yeah, but at least the Europeans could see the writing on the wall, and for the most part they didn’t look on the confrontation with dread but were actually excited by the prospect (of course, they all thought THEY would win and fairly quickly). However, in the US we were still several years from war and I don’t think many at that time thought that we’d be embroiled in a world war.
I meant more in the way of art of literature (admittedly by 1913 the first strand of modernism had popped up, but even they are better than the stuff produced these days.
This.
I don’t think western Africa was much better off. The people there would have been dying of other, more contagious diseases. The only places in the world that might have been better off in 1913 is North Korea (even though it was a Japanese colony) and Zimbabwe.
And more dangerous to all concerned. At least nowadays, most STDs are treatable.