Individual wages have been flat. Household wages have crept up largely because there are more 2-income homes. That’s not apples to apples.
I think you might be thinking of the Greatest Generation and the Silents – the Baby Boomers’ parents, the ones who were raising kids in the 50s and 60s.
It must be. Boomers couples were, for the most part, expected to work for someone else unless there was more than one small child at home.
I was really deacribing my own childhood from the 60’s and 70’s. My grandmother got her first wringer-washer in the early 60’s, and was still hanging clothes on the line in the 70’s. We lived in low income housing in the 70’s, and no one had a microwave, or a clothes dryer. We all had rotary clotheslines in front of our apartments. We didn’t get a color TV until I was in my teens. We never had a car at all. I remember when my mom got her first vacuum cleaner - an Electrolux. She was thrilled. Before that, cleaning rugs meant hauling them outside and beating them.
Of my wealthier relatives that lived higher middle class lifestyles, I don’t remember one that had two cars. My richest relative was an insurance salesman for Excelsior Life with his own office and a secretary, and he had a 1500 sq ft split-level home and drove a newish Buick - their only car. To us he looked rich. This would have been the 1970’s.
So you are a “Generation Jones” Boomer or a Gen Xer. I’m a Gen Jones Boomer. In my early childhood, it was assumed I’d be a stay-at-home mom eventually, too. By the time I was in high school, that had flipped and I was looking at which career might suit me. Staying at home was no longer an option for me or my female classmates. The only one who did, married and had kids right out of high school and when the older one went off to kindergarten, she was already studying to be an R.N.
Wait wait wait - are you saying that hanging clothes on the line is unusual?The rest of the time washing goes on the line, or I hang it up next to the radiators indoors in winter. It does rain quite a lot in the UK, but it’s not that bad. I’ve got a tumble drier, but I don’t suppose I use it more than once a month, or to dry a few items for ten minutes if they are a bit damp after hanging on the line all day.
Using a tumble drier is expensive, carbon intensive, and it tends to shrink certain clothes. And I do most of the washing for our small family, which can be quite a load, sometimes.
Tumble dryers are rarer in Europe than in the U.S.
Which is curious, since the US is a much drier country on average than the UK. As I said, I do have a tumble drier, but I try to refrain from using it.
The range of climates in the U.S. is greater than in the U.K., since the U.S. has about 40 times as much area as the U.K. The average number of rain days is less than in the U.S. However, for half the year the amount of rain on a rain day is larger in the U.S.:
I haven’t seen clothes hanging on a line in a long, long time. I haven’t even seen a clothesline in a long, long time. Everyone around here now has a dryer. One big difference is that until recently our energy was incredibnly cheap: 8 cents/kWh for a long, long time.
One more point about how baby boomers didn’t wreck the planet: They used a lot fewer resources than we do now, both in total terms and per-capita. Plastics weren’t a thing in the 50’s. We recycled a hell of a lot of stuff that is throwaway now. Homes are built with more materials, cars are heavier due to our increased demand for safety and convenience, and we have more air conditioning, dryers, and the like.
Here is an example of how much more stuff we consume now:
Some facts from the cite:
- U.S. raw material (non-fossil fuel or food) use rose 3.14 times more than the population from 1910 to 2014.1,2,3
- After rising 62% from 1970 to 2005, total material consumption in the U.S. (including fuels and other materials) reached 6.0 billion metric tons in 2017, which is still 12% higher than 1970 levels of material consumption.4
- In 2017, U.S. per capita total material consumption (including fuels) was 18.6 metric tons, 42% higher than Europe.5
- The use of renewable materials decreased dramatically over the last century—from 41% to 5% of total materials by weight—as the U.S. economy shifted from agriculture to industrial production.
The rise of packaged meals and fast food increased the amount of stuff we don’t recycle. Boomer kids had metal lunchboxes they used for years, and maybe had a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Soft drinks were in bottles that were recycled. So was milk. Fresh food wasn’t wrapped in plastic. There were far fewer ‘throwaway’ items and single use items. Clothing got mended instead of thrown out until it was completely threadbare. When things like your TV broke, you had them repaired rather than buy another one.
This was not because they were virtuous, it was because that’s the way the economics of the time broke out. It was no one’s fault, just as it isn’t anyone’s fault that we now live in more of a throwaway culture. It emerged from the goals and desires of the people when married with new technologies. Casting blame on previous generations is a waste of time, as is giving them credit for being ‘better’. Everyone is a creature of the society they live in, which in turn emerges from the confluence of a million changing factors.
One thing we never mentioned, for instance, is the effect of the birth control pill on female employment. It was pretty hard to have a career when you could get pregnant at any time, and discrimination against women in the workforce may have had something to do with the fact that people don’t like hiring workers who could leave at any time. After the pill came along, women had control over where and when they could have children, and this allowed fertile women to go to college, get married, start a career, then take time to have children when it worked best for them.
The other side effect of this is the collapsing birth rate, which will bring its own challenges to the next generations - which they’ll probably blame us for.
I see clothes hanging on the line a lot. Often they’re my own clothes. When I moved here, the dryer was broken. I got it fixed, but not before I’d gotten an electric bill without it. It broke again shortly after I saw the electric bill with it. I didn’t get it fixed a second time.
I think the clothes-on-the-line thing depends a lot on where you are. It’s overall less common than it was in the 1950’s, sure; but it hasn’t disappeared.
(In the winter I hang them in a spare bedroom. Not everyone’s got one, of course.)
We were babies in the 50’s; it was our parents who were using those fewer resources. We’re not the only ones who’ve been buying all that throwaway stuff, those bigger houses, those air conditioners and dryers: but it most certainly has been boomers who bought them. – pretty sure the cars are now lighter, however, instead of heavier; they’re made out of different materials and with more attention to gas mileage. And they last longer.
Yeah, but that was up to our parents, much more than up to us. That jump in material consumption you’ve got starting in 1970? That’s us, growing/grown up.
Nope, not at all. A Ford Mustang in 1966 weighed about 2500 lbs. A 2023 model comes in at about 3800 lbs. And that example is not an electric vehicle. A Tesla model S comes in at around 4700 lbs.
Ehh, that remains to be seen. Their initial parts last longer, but the older one was easier and cheaper to rebuild.
Name one single example of a Malthusian prediction being correct in the last 200 years. I dare you.
Objection! Survivorship bias! If a Malthusian prediction had been correct, we wouldn’t be here having an intelligent discussion about it, would we now?
Another neat little rhetorical trick!
- Where did I specify “Malthusian” alarmism? You specified this to stuff a bit of straw into a strawman.
- If we’re responding correctly to existential alarms, they don’t come to pass (the ozone hole is a prime example). If we don’t, well, we’re not here to talk about it, are we.
So pardon me while I dismiss the argument “ain’t nothing bad happened yet” from people who are determined to know nothing and do nothing about the actual situation.
This interesting column on widespread consumer goods but a failure to solve poverty, despite increased awareness and spending, makes an interesting read in light of the column.
Excerpt from above link
”Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”
No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”
Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong…
Except poverty has been reduced, from about 20% in the early 80s to less than 9%. Could be better, but it’s far from 50 years of nothing.