Sure, that’s true for a lot of people. Once you get used to privilege equality feels like oppression.
Well, yeah, that too; but I was thinking more of people who had careers or ways of life that are no longer possible (at least to the same extent), but that they loved and were well suited to.
Not everything in life is a zero-sum game, where gains for some people necessarily mean losses for others.
Several factors I can think of that constitute “The Good Old Days:”
“My Own Youth:” We all are getting older. Someday we will all realize that our own skills are diminishing. There are also younger people who will or are doing the young fun things that we used to do. They don’t care that much about our old memories and are younger and stronger than us. I think it certainly makes sense for an older person to pine for being younger. Wanting to reconnect with friends and family who have since died is another factor. Or remembering a time before a tragic life event that was difficult to recover from. All of this makes sense to me.
“Survivorship Bias:” You can’t die yesterday. Or honestly be starving or poor yesterday. Maybe you actually WERE starving or poor yesterday, but you don’t, today, feel the pain of starving yesterday. If you’re starving today, you’re starving today. Traumatic past events were either survived by those reporting today, or they are not in danger from the past threat.
“Rosy Glow:” Actual oral histories, where people are interviewed, tend to be “warts and all” where people genuinely remember bad events of the past. However, this requires actual work. Superficial renderings of the past, selective memories, do exist, and there is a marketplace for them. For people who don’t want to dig deeply, there’s a definite desire to think about the past postively.
“We Are Fallen:” The myth of a perfect past that we have decayed from. Associated with conservative religions, but it’s a fairly common trope overall. We’ve decayed from our true principles/roots.
“Genuine Loss From Change:” I grew up in a small town. More people live in that town today then when I lived there. It isn’t particularly close to any major city. But it used to have a daily newspaper and that’s gone now. Replaced by nothing, no other news source. So things are different today. The small towns used to be more self contained, now people live there but perhaps in some legitimate ways the community isn’t as tightly knit. Some people hate these developments, others hate small towns and cheer it all on. Maybe we’ll integrate into a monoculture that lasts forever. Maybe it’s Roman Empire II and we’re missing something and it all falls apart. Some things may be cyclical and we’re truly losing things from the past that matter. We’ll see what happens.
No economy has ever been consistently great. Economies cycle.
Nor did I claim the 50’s economy was consistently great.
In 1968 my history teacher read us a tract he had gotten in Jamaica, Queens, about the Mason George Washington (aka John James Audubon) and how the founding of America was all a conspiracy.
We all laughed then. Now I bet there are some Republicans who would treat it as gospel truth.
Well of course it was a conspiracy. All revolutions are conspiracies.
No it doesn’t. Things ain’t great or perfect, but they’re better. No doubt.
No, you just said it was great. No qualifiers (other than the incorrect assertion that there were lots of jobs - whether that was true depends on when, where, and for whom we’re talking about).
That’s like telling me that American flag is blue. Well, yes, but not entirely so.
My point was that, while it had its moments, the US economy of the 1950s also had its downturns. It’s a persistent myth that the 50’s economy was unequivocally great.
“Things” != “everything”.
Sure, taking the broadest view, the general state of human existence today may not unreasonably be assessed as a net improvement over all previous human history, based mostly on metrics like life expectancy and technological capacity and so on.
But that’s not an argument for the claim that literally everything is now better than it ever was.
Plus there’s the pesky little thing called aging and death. If you’re 70 today, you’re likely not going to be around in 35 years, so who cares if 35 years from now is better. And perhaps it would even be better for you 35 years AGO, even given the different society. When you were 35. That’s not unreasonable.
And then depression set in. . .
For me the “good olde days” was about 2005 ish. We had computers, modern medicine, affordable large TVs. But we didn’t have pervasive social media. I knew at a fundamental level there were idiots out there, somewhere, but now thanks to social media, I KNOW there are idiots out there. And there are more of them, and they are closer than I thought!
When I was young, Nazis marched in Skokie. Even living in WI, I barely knew where that was. Now there are Nazis on FB.
I get really annoyed at people of my generation who say things like "back when we were young, we’d ride in the back of pickups/play lawn darts/use “dangerous” playground equipment/play in traffic, and we were fine! Kids these days! (read that as “whiny ass liberals ruined our fun!”)
Well, you know the kids that died doing that? They aren’t around to contradict you.
As a childfree woman of color, I deeply regret that we have banned abortion. But beyond that there is no conceivable way I would go back in time to any point in history. People who talk about the good old days are almost always white, and maybe it was the good old days for them but it sure wasn’t for my parents or my husband’s parents (not the same ethnicity but not white).
And male - I have never heard a woman talking about the good old days.
John Csiszar
March 27, 2019
The Best and Worst Decades for America’s Money
## 1950-1960
Median Home Price: $7,354 in 1950 to $11,900 in 1960
Average Inflation Rate: 1.1 percent in 1950 to 1.5 percent in 1960
The postwar expansion carried over into the 1950s, with nearly full employment lasting until the end of the Korean War in 1953. Overall, the unemployment rate remained remarkably stable, starting the decade at 5.3 percent and ending at 5.5 percent.
## Analysis
The economic success of the decade was also reflected in the performance of the Dow Jones, which rose from 200.52 at the end of 1949 to 679.36 at the end of 1959. Remarkably, there wasn’t a single bear market throughout the decade. Moreover, the median income jumped from $3,319 to $5,620.
Unfortunately I have. There is a series of Phyllis Schafley white women who claim that the world was better when women couldn’t vote, when men ruled the world, etc., etc., etc. Ironically they won’t shut the fuck up about the good old days when women had to shut the fuck up.
After which there was a recession.
Unemployment peaked at 6.2% in 1958 (another recession). Moreover, we’re talking unemployment during the 50s. There was certainly less competition in the workforce when, by law or tradition, women and minorities were kept from even considering certain labor markets.
It wasn’t always on an upswing.
My point was that a person alive in the 1950s would be able to tell you of economic troubles, or worries about the economy. Overall, was it a good time for the growth of America? Yes, but not unequivocally so.
And, to add to the thread, the 50s were also a time when America was wondering if they were losing the space race. Sputnik beat the US.
Moreover, lots of people walking around figured nuclear war was coming. It was just a matter of when.
Again, every decade has economy ups and down, due to the cycles. The fact is, that the 1950s is accepted by experts as having one of the best overall economy in memory.
Which is what I said. Smoking, threat of nuclear war, lead in the gas. Not to mention racism.
Which means, even at the heyday of America, the best of the best in memory, there were bad things also.
There is a book about this. The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
This book explains why the “good old days” were only good for a priviledged few and why they were unrelentingly hard for most. Sobering, actually. Check it out
.
According to the description of that book, “the period to which this term is most often applied [is] the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900’s.” I did not realize that this specific era was what the phrase “the good old days” referred to.
Do you think of the phrase “the good old days” (whether or not you agree that they were any good) as denoting a particular era? And if so, which one?