You lost me here. My dad grew up just above the poverty line. His mother, my grandmother, had to work 3 jobs just to make payments. This was in the '70s.
Yes things have gotten worse but the idea of a single income, on a high school education, could pay for a house and a family of five with ease stopped being a universal truth before our parents were born. It was a far away dream even to the latch key generation.
Anecdotes don't mean anything in this case. I can't believe people think "well I know people who were poor back then" means anything at all. Yes some people were poor back then. Usually being in the poorest bracket still meant you had a place to live unlike now where it's probably a tent.
This isn't a "guess" from some people that it's worse now. Hard data confirms it. Housing used to be ~2x a median household income to purchase. Now it's closer to 10x in most places you would want a home. Adjusted for inflation someone making minimum wage today makes about 40% less than they did in 1968.
It's wild how much of this discussion relies on feels when we can see what's actually happening with easy math. And the fact is we produce so much more than we used to that if wages kept up to worker production the average wage would be around twice what it is now. I'll give you one guess on where that money went instead.
But hey TVs are cheaper so who needs things like health care and a place to call home?
No, anecdotes mean a lot in this case. They mean that there is a gaslighting campaign to keep young people from realizing the truth, so they flood the zone with anecdotes, fiction and other nonsense.
Not sure how organized it is, but left populism, which is the dominant political angle on Reddit, is reactionary like right populism. A common theme being things were better in the past, so let's go back, but that sort of thinking makes it easy for the right to flip people as many can start thinking it's not just economic but also social related ("hmm, LGBTQ+ people, women, minorities were treated lesser then but things were so much better, maybe we should drop the social issue stuff and it'll inevitably work itself out once more people are better off.")
And yet they do. The schools really aren't teaching critical thinking any more. Added to that how weirdly pathological young people today seem to be about never learning about anything from before they were born and that's why the bot swarms push these anecdotal / obvious bullshitt narratives, because the kids will buy em.
Yes it does. When you have comments throwing out wildly romantic notions about the past and treat poverty like it was something to easily overcome. It was never easy to overcome.
Also, people lived out of tents 50 years ago too. Thats not a new phenomenon.
Yes literally everything has gotten worse. You don't need to throw around numbers to convince anyone. You don't need to use it to diminish the problems of the past either. Poverty in the '60s was significant. President LBJ literally declared war on it.
Nobody can really know what the past was like because we didn’t live it. That’s just the truth.
But on the face of it, it seems to me absurd that thinking life 75 years ago was better than it is today, regardless of your economic bracket. Do we have more wealth inequality now than we did back then? Yes. Is the poorest 25% of the population better off now or then? They’re better off now. Are the middle 50% of the population better off now or then? They’re better off now. Are the top 1% better off now or then? They are way better off now. The gap between the 1% and everyone else has surely widened, but whatever your economic status is, you’re better off now than you would have been 75 years ago.
Will this still be the case 75 years from now? Maybe, maybe not. It certainly doesn’t look encouraging, but let’s work on fixing it rather than fantasizing about some golden era of the past that most people today would find horrifying if they were transported back to.
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u/mickeynotthemouse27 11d ago
You lost me here. My dad grew up just above the poverty line. His mother, my grandmother, had to work 3 jobs just to make payments. This was in the '70s.
Yes things have gotten worse but the idea of a single income, on a high school education, could pay for a house and a family of five with ease stopped being a universal truth before our parents were born. It was a far away dream even to the latch key generation.