If you were a white middle class male things were better for you. If you were a woman or a minority - no.
This is something of a peeve of mine; oldsters talking about how everything was so cheap back in the good 'ol days, citing low dollar prices for goods and services without considering the changing value of money through the years.
From The Inflation Calculator:
“I bought an Oldsmobile for $3500 in 1955! Cars were so cheap then, and I could pay some coloreds fifty cents to wash it! Get off my lawn!” Shut the fuck up, gramps. That’s $28,000 2010 dollars, and that car was less well equipped than a stripped-out Nissan Sentra today.
My parents were the first on the block to get cable television in 1973. It was $5 a month. A bargain, you say, when you look at your $80 or $100 cable bill now? Bullshit. $24.20 in today’s dollars a month for 12 channels; five local, three Canadian, a public access channel, two crawler channel, and one showing nothing but an analog clock and thermometer. One crawler channel went away a couple of years later, and became HBO; you could pay another five bucks a month to receive it, and it only aired about five hours ever night.
There were some things that were cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars in the good 'ol days. Concert tickets, houses, rent in Manhattan, some forms of skilled labor and trade work, medical care, tuition at private colleges, and maybe some raw materials that weren’t as scarce as they are now. Otherwise, no, you couldn’t buy a meal in a diner for the equivalent of a dollar in today’s money, or a gallon of gas for 15 cents.
Back on topic. Maybe some would consider it better, some wasteful, but many disposable items were much more heavy-duty. Band-Aids and potato chips came in metal tins, some products packaged in wooden crates rather than cardboard boxes, and so on.
[hijack]Speaking of NIMBY zoning, is one of those types of NIMBY zoning a restriction on the number of people that can live in a house? Because it seems to me that living in a decent sized house in a good part of Ithaca with a roommate would be about the same price as living in a slightly smaller house elsewhere (although not as cheap as the parts of say, Watkins Glen, where you would live next to Authentically Authentic neighbors as you say.)
It would make sense to NIMBY-ites if there were such restrictions in place because otherwise you might be able to make a lot more money renting to, say, 5 students, than to a family, and people might not like living next to 5 students, but I haven’t researched it.
Oh, and computer keyboards. Expensive, but nothing beats a Model M from the late 1980s. You can still buy them today, made by Unicomp in Kentucky. Still, most computers today come equipped with a cheapo mushboard, not something with hundreds of moving parts that you can use to fight off a home invasion.
[offtopic]A lot of it is that there’s only a limited amount of land zoned for residential development beyond the city, and what’s there allows mainly single-family houses on large lots or “back to the land”. There’s the occasional subsidized apartment complex when a developer working in concert with a public agency can get land rezoned. Otherwise, theres nothing in the middle.
Supply and demand, basically. There’s a huge demand for middle-end housing, but the zoning, and anti-development to some extent, makes building it a challenge.[/offtopic]
TV commercial breaks used to be every 15 minutes instead of every 3 minutes. We used them as snack or popcorn breaks. For broadcast TV, you could see some racier programming late at night with the occasional display of breasts (such as Monty Python or Benny Hill). Now that’s limited to paying customers. Even primetime TV had some gratuitous skin exposure such as Charlie’s Angels. About the only skin you’ll see on broadcast TV nowadays is on weight-loss or exercise infomercials.
Things weren’t so computerized and automated, so there was more demand by employers for people having basic english and math skills.
You could usually buy things on sale without having to provide your personal information to register as a regular customer of a store.
Politicians hadn’t passed as much legislation and run up as much debt, both which tend to accumulate over time. In the previous century, we didn’t have the Patriot Act.
Airline travel wasn’t such a hassle while nowadays even Swedish grandmothers are treated as suspected terrorists.
College education was free in my dad’s time, but has become ridiculously expensive.
Since the cashiers had to count your change back to you (the registers didn’t tell the change, only the total due), they put the coins in your hand first and didn’t freakin’ try to pile them on top of the bills and receipt!
I remember getting sand dabs near San Francisco in the late 90’s. Then, something happened (I don’t really remember what), and you stopped seeing them in the markets and on restaurant menus as often.
Nitpick: it was beef tallow, not lard, or at least it was in the 80’s. Probably not much better for you than lard.
Ok. But what’s the good part? A lot of things are a matter of opinion.
I would say that most statements of the sort that “art or music was better back when than it is now” are similarly a matter of opinion. There’s also a significant selection effect, where good stuff from the past is more likely to be preserved and remembered than bad stuff.
What has happened here is that what counts as “basic skills” has changed. It doesn’t include the mental arithmetic necessary to make change now, but it does include computer skills that very few people would have had years ago. Pretty much nobody had the skills to use an online search engine or a smartphone in 1990. Whether this is an improvement or not depends on your opinion of the relative value of those skills. Bear in mind that there is a very human tendency to think that any skills you have are of more value than they might actually have in the market, and to think any skills that you don’t have must be of less value.
The lard is cursed.
Well, nobody praises the DeLorean’s performance or reliability. I was talking in terms of performance driving. Of course, nothing then matches today’s supercars, but at least all the big makers had a performance sport model that didn’t require ABS, stability control or traction control, all of which can hinder performance driving and all of which are now more or less regulated.
The fashion was better.
Last year I worked on a library exhibit covering the 100th anniversary of the college yearbook. I could pinpoint the moment fashion trends went to hell and never recovered (answer: 1969).
Also, from looking at those yearbooks going back to 1911, college wasn’t about getting drunk as much and as often as possible, like it is today (at least this college).
Certainly, but I would argue that hack artists in the pre-20th century world produced stuff that is better than hack artists now, for one simple reason - the increasing ease of photo reproduction and printing over the course of the last century squeezes more hack artists into producing “concept” art.
A third-rate, derivative and unoriginal landscape is still passible wall decoration, but a third-rate, derivative and unoriginal “concept” piece is totally worthless - neither decorative nor thought-provoking.
Mind you, the improvement in technology is of course in itself a positive good.
But some of us do consider those a good thing. I used to have a car with ABS, my current car doesn’t have them, and I wish it did. I wish it had stability and traction control, too. I could have gotten a car with those features, but the circumstances under which I got my current car were such (my car was badly damaged), so I had to take what I could get that was immediately available. If that happened again, I would be able to get a car with those features, available immediately. I drive my cars until it is uneconomical or unfeasible to keep doing so (because I’m cheap and hate the learning curve of getting used to a new car), so circumstances like that are not unlikely to be why I buy my next car.
Plus, even those who don’t like having those features on their cars, might like other, less-skilled drivers having them. It’s good for below-average drivers to have features on their cars that make accidents less likely, since an accident isn’t necessarily going to only affect the bad driver. There might be another driver (or more than one) involved, and accidents can tie up traffic. There’s not much to like about being in an accident (even if it is someone else’s fault) or sitting in traffic caused by an accident.
FWIW when I was in college in 1970s I could fly home on student standby for $14.95. The eight hour ride on Greyhound was $12.95.
That particular plane route was never full so I always got on.
ETA: all of those flying granny flight attendants we have now? Hot young babes then. 
As others have pointed out, the idea of “cleaner nature” is so much bullshit. One of the best things to come out of the 1960’s was environmentalism. We damned near made the planet uninhabitable.
Perscription drugs are so much more common now. Go to the doctor and there will be a reason to write a script. Especially a psychiatrist.
But in one way, the aesthetics of nature were more widely available by default because there were fewer people on the planet. I know that everyone wants a mountain home, but actually building developments of dozens or hundreds of homes right in the Smokies does cut down on the aesthetic experience: even if there was just as much of it back in the old days and it was just as ugly, there is still going to be less of chance to see unspoiled views now simply because the population density is greater.
Depends on where you are, and what you are concerned about. Certainly, such things as overfishing and logging access (which are related) in northern Canada have gotten appreciably worse since the '70s, I can attest to that - and it has been an ongoing process: it was better in the '60s, better yet in the '50s, etc.
OTOH, you are much less likely these days to have rivers in the middle of cities catch fire. 
Agreed, but that’s just a change in percentages as a result of having more artists. Although I suspect you might believe as I do, that the qualifications for an ‘artist’ had to be stretched to make that change in percentages occur.