Yeah - I guess I was not sufficiently clear. I was not asking whether the average standard of living is better now than at any specific prior time. Of course it is. Just about everyone has electricity and indoor plumbing. Most people can read and write. Most people have access to minimal health care including wonders like antibiotics, and infant mortality is decreasing and lifespan increasing (in general terms). Such improvement is true in both wealthy and poorer nations.
But Cornelius Vanderbilt lacked air conditioning, a cellphone, or access to antibiotics. That doesn’t mean that his standard of living was poor COMPARED TO HIS CONTEMPORARIES. (Of course, CV started off quite poor - so in his later life, his std of living was considerably greater compared to his contemporaries, than his parents’ had been WRT their contemporaries.)
Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors in the 1920s, came up with the idea of introducing new, updated versions of their cars every year. This was for the express purpose of enticing people to replace their old cars by making them feel out of date compared to the new ones. The fact that it worked would suggest that people in the US in the 1920s were just as status conscious as they are today.
It’s times like this I remind myself that when my mother was born, her parents’ farm did not have running water, electricity, or a septic system. When she was a teenager, an outbreak of mumps cost her her hearing, and made her older brother sterile.
My father’s parents were immigrants who came here with very little, worked themselves up, lost everything in the Depression, and had to start over again.
I grew up in the '50s, and people then sure as hell compared themselves to others. And I knew the phrase.
The only way to compare is by relative social position. My neighborhood is much like the one I grew up in, and my house is only slightly bigger, though worth twice as much as my old house on Zillow. But so is everyone’s house, so it doesn’t affect my standard of living.
I did better than my father, but my father never got to go to college and I worked in tech with a PhD. He grew up relatively well to do until he was 10 or so, but then his father died, his mother lost all their money, and he was much worse off than he came to be.
I’m surprised no one has brought up the “the poorest person lives better than an old king” nonsense. Not having internet, a DVD player, a flat screen TV and a smartphone in the '60s in no way decreased what I felt was my standard of living since no one had those things. We don’t have flying cars, really smart AI-based digital assistants and self-cleaning houses, but I doubt we feel deprived.
I’m sort of mixed on this idea. I do agree with everything you said, but I keep coming back to the idea that it is not practically do-able. First, you would need a spouse that is onboard with this–and good luck with that. But even if you were both committed, you would immediately have a problem with all of the neighbors thinking you were weird. If you get past that, you are going to struggle in life because unlike in the 60s, places want to communicate by email or text, especially at the job site, even a working class job. And in the 1960s on hot summer days you could arrive somewhere stinking and sweating like a hog (because it was hot and everyone was stinking and sweating) if you did that today you would again be outcast.
There would be tremendous social pressure for you to conform and the ostracization would not make you very happy. The phrase “You can’t go home again” comes to mind and I think that while on paper you are right, the practicalities would catch up to you to make this sort of “living cheap” not a truly viable alternative.
Inflation calculators usually come with warnings about how hard it is to calculate differences in incomes over the years. Silly example: no one in 1927 was laying out money for a cell phone, but today it is often considered essential. So we can’t even compare a “basket of goods” easily very far back.
We often hear people say, “stop complaining about poverty! The poorest person in America has access to things the kings of yore could only dream of!” That probably doesn’t make people feel rich. The standard of living comparison is always kinda objective, kinda subjective, and kinda relational.
It boggles my mind that smallest standard LCD television that most stores sell is 32 inches because THAT would have huge and expensive to buy as a CRT TV when I was a kid in 80s.
On the other hand Today’s TVs are a lot more fragile. I accidentally dropped a 25 inch CRT TV down a flight of stairs and it still worked fine. That probably would have destroyed a modern TV.
I also feel the only way to get anywhere in this is to put every generation into context, because, as has been amply stated, standards vary. And things are complicated.
My mother grew up, post-WWII in a wealthyish country estate. My father grew up post-WWII in abject poverty.
I grew up in the ‘80’s in a poorish household, due to my father having a very low income. I definitely felt poor (and plenty of assholes pointed it out to me), in the ultra-consumerist 80’s environment. We didn’t have a car, we didn’t have VCR, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have vacations abroad, things that most of my friends’ families had.
My partner came from an upper-middle class family, with a sizeable inheritance already at age 18. I myself am poorer than my poorish parents ever were in adulthood, as are both of my sisters. The ship has sailed, whether one reverts back to camels or bicycles.
An argument is made about the changes over time around the world in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling et al. The book claims to show that on average around the world standards of living are slowly improving. People tend to think otherwise because they used to compare just the parts of the world they know about with the parts of the world they now know. The same is true in each country for each social class. If you look at all parts of the world or look at all social classes in most countries, there has been a slow improvement. It’s a great book and I recommend everyone read it.
But isn’t it completely irrelevant what the big picture is? You compare your situation to your peers and your immediate surroundings. The fact that things for the poor, or the rich, are better now than 100 years ago doesn’t mean anything when you feel the effects of poverty etc. within your own context.
So you’re saying that if your personal situation is better than it was twenty years ago, there’s nothing to talk about except the fact that it’s better for you. Similarly, if your personal situation is the same as it was twenty years ago, there’s nothing to talk about except for the fact that it’s the same for you. And if your personal situation is the worse than it was twenty years ago, there’s nothing to talk about except for the fact that it’s worse for you. In that case, what’s the point of discussing anything with anyone else? Nothing they say is relevant to you. Any discussion with other people would be irrelevant, since you’re the only one that really knows your own situation.
Kurt Vonnegut suggested we are put on this earth to fart around, so one way to think about the question is, do you have more or less time to fart around? We might think about some version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, too; more food but loss of community is a mixed blessing. The real value of these sorts of questions is to help us think about the future we would like to work for.
well it also depends on context too … i mean if your gay/lesbian yoursocial standard of living is better than it was 10 years ago and hopefully(sooner I hope) in another 10 or 15 years all the social issues facing trans people will mostly be just “back in the day”
just like now where a lot of kids growing up now won’t even realize that same-sex marriage wasn’t a thing