I think the debate is in danger of going completely off the rails…like I said, I wasn’t making judgments about comparative quality of life in the 2 eras. I was trying to make a point about pace and scope of change, especially geopolitical change.
I think what happened to the world post WWII was virtually unprecedented; you’d have to go back to post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna for something comparable. This was a period where a 2 year old map needed updating.
But I’ll amend my opening position to say that the past 17 years have seen changes in the realm of technology/society that are comparable to the post-war geopolitical changes; in the way an orange and an apple are the same size.
That’s quite absurd, really. It was very common in 1958 for people to bemoan the state of things; the idea that the 50s were a happy golden age is preposterous revisionism. People were terrified of the Soviet Union, of juvenile deliquency, of rock music, of TV, of suburban sprawl, and a lot of people were certainly not at all happy about how uppity the black folks were getting. The Soviet advantage in the space race was an enormous hit to the American psyche - it’s not widely remembered today in the mists of history, but it was seen as a terrible problem. Despite the common myth that all was economically wonderful, it really wasn’t; 1958 saw the beginning of a significant recession, one just as bad, if not worse, than the dot-com recession of 2000-2001 or the 1990-1991 recession.
Nitpicking: There was NO rock music in 1958. There was rock and roll, but in the beginning only white bands got radio airplay, leading to people buying their records and making money for them. Part of the scare over how uppity the “colored” folks were getting was young people getting into gospel, soul and especially jazz.
Rock music was the beginning of the end of that. Suddenly black singers were getting popular, even with white youth. One of my favorite Bandstand stories is how, when Dick Clark told his staff to book Chubby Checker to sing the Peppermint Twist, one person whispered “You know, he’s a colored boy.” Clark replied “I don’t care about the color of his skin, all I care about is the sound of his music.”
It might have been mentioned indirectly as rise of China and India, but particularly the size of the Chinese relative to world economy is a lot different now than 2018. That’s an every day important fact in stuff like what % of oil, copper, coal etc is consumed in China compared to previously.
There’s no doubt 1941-58 was more of an era of relative power realignment via active war and the near war/proxy wars of the Cold War. We are not ‘post history’ exactly since then, with some notable conflicts and tensions, but major international trends have been generally more toward peaceful evolution on the spectrum between that and all out major wars. That is different. But there have been plenty of such alternating episodes in modern history, like the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic War period and subsequent decades in the 19th century with not zero, but much less major war, and the tensions below the level of war more multilateral, kind of like now, rather than the predominantly binary US-Soviet confrontation.
It’s not inaccurate to say “by 2018 US economy is recovering”, but by most measures, it was recovering by 2010. One could reasonably argue that it is no longer recovering, because it has recovered.
