I spotted this on Instapundit:
Of course, there’s no cite. And my search-fu hasn’t turned up anything. So I turn to the Dope. Is it true? Economically, that is - let’s keep this in GQ and leave politics, definitions of freedom etc out of the equation.
It may be true for the investor class, but only about half the households in America own any stock at all(PDF). So a rise in the stock market does not necessarily mean a rise in the economics of the average household. It sort of depends on who “we” is.
There’s no absolute way to measure this. Too many factors are involved.
Is it the ability to buy consumer goods? The quality of health care? The availability of communications? In any of these and many other factors we as a world are far better off than ever before. There are more middle class Chinese than the total population of America. Fewer people live in abject poverty worldwide. Literacy is up globally. Industrialization and globalization is bringing well-paying jobs to hundreds of millions all over Asia. I saw a shirt in Penney’s yesterday from the Northern Marianas Islands.
Are some people living in poverty, or disease, or under corrupt dictators, or warlords or any of the other horrors of the world? Of course. Is it a smaller percentage of people? Probably. Just the number of people no longer living under Communist dictatorships is in the hundreds of millions.
Are there downsides to globalism and industrialization? Of course. Outsourcing costs jobs. European social democratic economies are stagnating. Pollution is rampant in the newly industrialized areas and they are also dying from taking in our waste products. We’re cutting down rain forests and paving over cropland.
The world isn’t always pretty and is never perfect.
But in terms of day to day living in western countries, anybody who wants to go back in time is simply insane or pig ignorant or has a deluded fantasy image of the past. The past was worse than the present in almost every conceivable way for the vast majority of people. Hardly anybody today would like to live like a king did even a few decades ago compared to what is available to an average middle class household in today’s world.
It’s worth noting, also, that the instapundit link you referenced was a bit misleading. “We’ve never had it so good” makes it sound like it’s been a bumpy road to our current position or that current economic success is the result of recent political decisions, that we should praise Bush or the Democrats or whoever for just how good we’ve got it. In reality, though, major economic growth is slow, steady, and long-term, as Exapno explained. It’s been the broad, slow strokes of history’s brush that make today better than yesterday economically, not some good decisions by this administration.
If you google Gini Coefficient, you’ll come up with all kinds of web pages that argue for and against the flattening of the distribution of wealth. The Gini coefficient basically measures how the wealth of poor people compare with the wealth of the rich. 0 is perfect equality (everyone has the same money), 1 indicates total concentration of wealth. Most cites say the Gini index has been dropping worldwide pretty consistently since WW2.
But forget the science. Just think about China, India, and the rapidly growing economies of East Asia. So many of these countries were basically universally dirt-poor three decades ago, now there’s a growing middle class buying cell phones, cars, and laptop computers. Given the number of people involved, it’s not hard to understand that there are impacts on growing global wealth, even if one considers that swaths of the Third World may be economically stagnant.
I know nothing about this so please educate me but my vision of the best time to live would be in the 1950’s. The reasons are not monetary necessarily though there might be a good argument that the average middle class family lived better considering it was a single income family.
My reasoning is something that cannot be contained in any equation. That being quality of life. Life in 2007 is frought with potential dangers at every turn. I have a deep unease of the potholes my children will fall into as they grow up.
Face it, given the choice of quality of life vs. monetary wealth, only the fool would go for the money.
Then again, I may have seen too many Happy Days episodes.
Probably you did. Yes, life was grand for middle-class white Americans in the 50’s, but the OP seems to be addressing the issue more globally. And there’s no denying that life in, say, India or the Phillippines is better now than it was 50 years ago, even if it’s not as good as a middle-class American lifestyle. Not to mention the question of quality of life for American racial minorities.
Also, you’re forgetting that in the 50’s, Americans lived with the daily threat of nuclear war. They seemed to worry a lot more about the USSR and the evil Communists than we worry about terrorism today, as far as I can tell.
Economics are just a representation of people’s standard of living so I am very confident that we, in fact, have never had it so good overall. Everyone can just drop the abstractions and complications and take a look at history books and then ask our older relatives.
I am pretty sure that it is our own Sam Stone who does a very powerful commentary on your points solkoe. The short version is that the average American family lived in a house just over 1000 square feet ranch whereas the average for new construction today is well over 2000 sq feet. They owned one car and had either very bad appliances or were missing some ones we take for granted altogether. That car was simple yet had few amenities including seat belts and was a real killer in a crash. Health care was affordable because doctors couldn’t do much to help you with anything complicated. They could give antibiotics, do stitches, do some very crude surgeries, set bones and that was about it. 1950’s house wives were a transient trend. Women before them had to do hard labor to meet the demands of a large, unautomated household.
Why can’t people just live like they did in the 50’s? Oh, you can. 1000 sq foot houses with no dishwashers and crappy washers and driers are cheaper than ever. Small black and white TV’s with no cable can be had for a song and skipping the computer and internet access saves even more money. One very simple car is easy for most families to afford and the increases in both reliability and safety are a free bonus from modern engineering. There won’t be any day care to worry about because the wife will always take care of the kids. 50’s style food is way cheaper now than it ever was then. College won’t cost much because your daughters won’t be going and probably not your sons either. You don’t have to worry about medical insurance because it is cost effective to just pay for the occasional bone break or stitches out of pocket. Your 50’s lifestyle won’t have doctors that can do a whole lot more.
I have no idea how anyone can say that the 50’s were less dangerous than they are today. The dangers of 50’s style car and equipment deaths plus deaths from a whole host of other health risk would let us have a 9/11 several times a year and we still wouldn’t catch up.
You are not kidding about that. I was born in 1973 and I think people forget how scared we were of the Soviets on a daily basis up until about 1990. Today’s terrorism threats are pitiful in comparison. Our fears were well founded. We were at the brink of civilization ending nuclear war at least twice but this one that was narrowly avoided in 1983 is the one that sends chills up my spine. One Soviet Colonel thwarted the WWIII launch orders when Soviet systems indicated that the U.S. had launched an ICBM nuclear attack against Russia proper. If he had not done so, we all would not likely be here today. You just don’t get that kind of thing anymore.
Cancer. Polio. Tuberculosis. Ordinary bacterial diseases. Joint degeneration. Poor dentition. Cataracts. High def TV. Internet. Jet travel. Personal hygeine products from tampons and winged pads to hair removal. Central heating. Air conditioning. Civil rights. Medicare. IRAs. Survival of premature infants. Vigorous elderly. NPR. Choices for women. Atomic clocks. Korean war. eBay…
I can’t think of almost anything that was better in the 50’s. What are the elements in your equation?
Mostly what it takes to live well now is being able to say ‘No’ to the plethora of opportunities and choices. But at least you have a choice.
These are the good old days. (Carly Simon, I think)
As a kid born in the 70’s who has no clue about what life was like in the 50’s, I think maybe part of it is that while we have almost everything materially better than they did (as the list shows above), they were so thrilled and cheery about it all. The ‘good life’ was within reach for millions of Americans who had grown up during the Depression and then fought through WWII–who probably never expected to suddenly land in a time of (relative) security and prosperity. So the prospect of a bright-red phone and a nice little house to live in and a car was just wonderful.
We are physically better off in virtually every way–except for our habit of eating junk and sitting too much–but we aren’t as gosh-darn thrilled about it. Maybe a lot of us haven’t had the adversity that makes the comfort so unexpected and amazing? Maybe we’re conditioned by our commercialist society to expect more than we can ever actually get? I dunno. Maybe I’m just wittering on nonsensically.
Yes, Carly Simon. And I tend to agree with you that today is better than before. But then, growing up in a small city in Bible-belt West Texas, I myself really had no way to go but up.
But just the medical advances alone would make today better for most people. Many who moon over the demise of the “good old days” wouldn’t be here to moon over them without those advances. And that’s just the 1950s; imagine the mortality rate 100 years ago. One of my great- or great-great-grandfathers (forget which) died in his early 50s in the 1850s (yes, 1850s, not 1950s) from some sort of unrecorded (by my family) disease; I’ve often wondered what he had exactly to die so young.
Well…unless you were black, gay, a woman who wanted to be anything other than a housewife, you didn’t like fighting Communists in Korea or had any kind of phobias about nuclear weapons.
As someone who grew up in the 50s, there was certainly an air of optimism back then. Despite the Cold War and other problems, there was a sense that everything was sure to get better over time. Science would eventually solve all our problems. The epitome of this was the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, which touted inexorable progress towards a bright shiny Future.
Then came the assassinations of the 60s, race riots that burned down parts of major cities, Vietnam, Watergate, and everything else. It suddenly seemed that progress wasn’t inevitable - science wasn’t a cure-all, and the world was going to hell despite all our material advances.
This sense of cynicism, I think, has persisted to a degree ever since then, despite the end of the Cold War and other positive developments, especially economic advances in much of the Third World. In its own way, it is perhaps as unrealistic as the naivete and unbridled optimism of the 50s. Because we are painfully aware of the many problems that still persist, we fail to recognize progress in places where it has occurred.
This appears to be cyclical. Science was similarly touted as a cure-all prior to the ravages of World War I. The scientific military advances used during that war, such as poison gas, turned science into a bugbear overnight, a sentiment that lasted for quite a while.
Guys, can we please keep this tuned to economics? Is the average person in the world better off now?
As snarky people often say, the average person has 1.92 arms. Some people are better off, others aren’t doing so well. There have been sizable worldwide increases in economic output and income has increased.
This overview from the World Bank on poverty includes these statistics:
If you have any more specific questions, please post them. It’s hard to answer such a big and yet vague question.
Here’s and interesting article from Scientific American on the effects of globalization.
It may be pointed out, however, that even though average income levels may be going up, because of population increase the absolute numbers of people living in poverty in some areas may have increased.
I’d suggest rather it’s the chaos and absence of rule of law.
But on the whole, it looks like the average person is better off. And that’s a good thing.
That’s the general point of the Scientific American article. Countries with good governance are best able to benefit from globalization. Those with weak or corrupt institutions usually cannot, or else the benefits flow only to the elite, and don’t help the poor.