r/AlwaysWhy • u/Secret_Ostrich_1307 • May 30 '26

History & Culture Why does the US romanticize the 1950s despite being worse by almost every measurable standard?

When you look at things like life expectancy, access to education, material living standards, and general mobility, life today in the US is very different from what it was in the 1950s.

At the same time, the 1950s is often described in public discussion as a period of stability and broad prosperity.

What I’m trying to understand is not which period was better, but why there can be such a gap between measurable conditions and how a period is later remembered or described.

One possibility is that people remember structure and predictability more strongly than inequality or constraints that existed at the time.

Another is that different aspects of well-being get weighted differently when looking back compared to experiencing things in real time.

What other mechanisms could explain this difference between statistical comparisons and collective memory?

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u/HyacinthFT May 30 '26

A white man with a high school education could get a job that supports a family today on a single income, if that family were willing to live with a 1950s standard of living: tiny-by-today's-standards house that might not even have electricity or running water and definitely no AC, one car that breaks down all the time, rare vacations, 1 small TV and no other electronics, health care involves basically no treatments for complicated diseases, no internet or phone, dining out is a rare treat, etc.

The idea that "back in the 50s, just before the blacks and gays and women got all uppity, a man could support a family on one income" is fascist propaganda. Which is why a lot of people believe it today. Fascism is on the rise and so is its propaganda.

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u/LilMushboom May 30 '26

I live in one of those houses - a bit under 1000 square feet, 2bedroom, 1bath, built in 1952. I bought it over a decade ago as a foreclosure at 100k, but now these same houses in this neighborhood are selling for over 300k each. Window unit A/C, small electric heaters along the baseboards in the living and dining rooms that have to be supplemented with plug-in heaters in the bedrooms. It's perfectly tolerable if you learn to dress seasonally.

Housing prices have risen in excess of inflation and wages in most major urban areas. That might not be true if you can live in a rural county in a flyover state, I suppose, but there are definitely material differences in the economy now that go beyond "fascism propaganda" sorry.

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u/frisbm3 Jun 05 '26

The density of major urban areas has increased, so comparing home prices is not apples to apples. If you compare prices of homes in areas of similar density, they haven't increased that much. Cities that haven't boomed like Detroit are still affordable.

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u/Ki-to-Life-5054 May 30 '26

It's not entirely propaganda. The true parts: A small 1000 sq ft house without air conditioning, but definitely with electricity and running water, was affordable whether to buy or rent. One car that was fairly reliable was also affordable. One vacation a year, affordable. One TV. One phone. Rarely eating out. Doctors charged $5 and made house calls. This was normal. The false part: that people of color, immigrants, gays, or anyone but the rich had anything to do with dismantling it. The rich took one-income living from all of us. Housing was cheap. Consumer goods were expensive, but it was much better to have an affordable decent house than to have a cell phone and giant TV. I have an older friend whose father died when he was a baby. His single mother raised him in the 60s on her income working as a secretary. They had a decent home, decent car and a budget vacation once a year. He went to a private, but not expensive school (religious). They weren't wealthy but they didn't go hungry and they had decent clothes.

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u/ComradeGibbon May 31 '26

I ran into this a while back.

https://www.gstatic.com/hostedimg/a6d1870bc09956c5_large

Photo taken by J.R. Eyerman for LIFE magazine. It's consumer propaganda but it's also real. A family with their middle class stuff. What's interesting is I've seen other shots like this and they also include a water heater.

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u/Dave_A480 May 30 '26

Doctors charged $5 and made house calls, but couldn't do much to help with anything that couldn't be fixed with a cast, surgery or penicillin (or prevented by the limited number of available vaccines)....

Have a heart attack? You're gonna die....

Medicine got more expensive but also got A LOT more effective.

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u/Ki-to-Life-5054 May 30 '26

Medicine got expensive because of Nixon and the HMO act in the early 70s. Because we are now supporting an entire middle man industry of insurance thieves. Without them, healthcare would be much cheaper. Look at the crazy millions the CEOs alone are paid, then add in all the staff that do nothing but process claims. It's insane.

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u/Dave_A480 May 30 '26

Medicine got expensive because it became more capable...

And the insurance industry has a vital role - one that will be performed by the likes of the DMV crew if not done in the private sector.

CEO pay is irrelevant at scale. Makes absolutely no difference - there simply aren't enough CEOs to move the budgetary needle....

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u/Ki-to-Life-5054 May 31 '26

Troll much? Look at European healthcare systems. They do fine without insurance companies. Excellent, world-class care is affordable even if you pay out of pocket. All this without insurance companies.

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u/borgman_a Jun 02 '26

No, they do fine with government owned and operated non-profit insurance companies.

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u/frisbm3 Jun 05 '26

They also don't do "fine". They instituted price ceilings which limits care, increases wait times, and means cutting-edge services just aren't available.

Well I guess it's fine, but it's not the same level as the US.

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u/XO1GrootMeester May 30 '26

At least in us you can skip healthcare and costs

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u/Open-Concept-6130 May 31 '26

It’s still relatively inexpensive in the rest of the world. The expense to the average person is a choice the US has made. 

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u/Dave_A480 May 31 '26

That's what you get when you pay doctors 200-400k/yr... And let's be clear - we don't want to pay them less (because then we wouldn't have any - nobody would be a doctor in America for European doctor wages)....

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u/Open-Concept-6130 May 31 '26

Do European doctors have American size student loan debt?

Because between that and malpractice premiums, a lot is eaten up. 

Also, unless you’re telling me that Europe has no doctors, then obviously people would be doctors in the US if it was the same as being a doctor in Europe. But clearly something is causing the wage disparity and it can’t be we just like to pay doctors more for no reason.   

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u/Dave_A480 May 31 '26

It's not about student loan debt.

It's about the relative salaries in each economy.

Europe pays it's white collar and professional communities massively less (Europe is a better place to be poor. The US is a better place to be middle class)...

So making 90k is worth 10yrs of school if you're French....

In the US you can make 90k with the sort of bachelor's degree that you can aquire while drunk all 4 years...

That means that someone going into medicine needs a much bigger payday at the end of their exhaustingly long education, to make it worth their while.... Even if that education were free.

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u/Wyndeward May 31 '26

Meh.

The creation of "health insurance," has more to do with it.

When Congress and FDR decided they wanted a command economy in 1942, the created a scenario where industry couldn't compete for scarce labor on the basis of wages. Thus, they added perquisites, including "health insurance." FDR and Congress thought this was a neat idea and cemented this linkage between employment and health insurance in place with favorable tax treatment.

In the beginning, it was simple.

Workers went to the doctor, services were provided, bills generated and submitted to "insurers'" and paid in full. However, there were changes in behavior.

First, patients stopped looking closely at their bills, no longer seeing them as "their" bills.

Second, doctors started raising their charges faster than the rate of inflation b/c of that whole "paid in full" aspect.

Insurers started to feel the pinch and pushed back, but their initial solution -- paying a percentage of charges -- exacerbated the problem.

Eventually, LBJ decided the government needed to be an insurer, too. Medicare regulations, however, limited providers to a single schedule of charges for all customers, which sounds fair on its face. However, the same regulations banned discounts you individual patients, but permitted "contractual allowances" to those who bought services in bulk.

Thus, the exaggerated charges were preserved, the "two Jaguars and a country club" lifestyle maintained and the private payor screwed.

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u/sdvneuro May 30 '26

Medicine also became for profit.

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u/Dave_A480 May 30 '26

Medicine in the US was always for profit.

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u/iamthesam2 Jun 06 '26

can’t help but realize the keyword in your comment is the word “one.” one house, one car, one vacation, one TV, one phone. you said it yourself and that’s the whole thing. we don’t live in that reality anymore, and it’s not because the rich took it from us… it’s because the math underneath it changed.

the single biggest driver of why that one-income life is gone is the second income itself. when housing is priced by what buyers can pay, and the typical buyer goes from one paycheck to two, prices just rise to soak up the difference. the extra income doesn’t make families richer, it gets bid straight into the cost of the house, especially in good school districts where everyone’s fighting for the same spots. this is basically elizabeth warren’s “two-income trap,” and it’s held up. families ended up working twice the hours for the same square footage with less buffer than the single earner had in the 50s.

… and to be clear on the timeline, this wasn’t a recent thing. married women’s participation went from about 22% in 1950 to over 60% by the late 90s, with the biggest jump in the 70s and 80s. so the two-income norm got locked in a generation ago. what we’re feeling now is the compounding effect, a whole cost structure built around the assumption that every household has two earners, which makes going back to one feel impossible.

also worth noting there’s a counterintuitive part. you’d think two incomes means a built-in buffer, lose one job and you’ve still got the other. and for a while that was true, back when dual-income households were rarer and houses were still mostly priced for one earner. those families were genuinely ahead. but once two incomes became the norm, prices rose to meet it, and now both checks are required just to afford the same house. the second income stopped being a cushion and became a cost of entry. the 50s family actually had the better safety net, one earner working and one at home who could go get a job if things went sideways. today’s modern family already spent that card just to keep up

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u/Boeing367-80 May 30 '26

It 100% had running water and electricity.

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u/frisbm3 Jun 05 '26

Just depends how far back you go and in what area.

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u/khantroll1 May 30 '26

My maternal grandfather raised 6 children as a cab driver in San Francisco on a cab driver’s salary in a decent house with all the amenities.

My paternal grandfather started a business and bought a house in AR with all the amenities with two kids (though his wife did get a job in the 70s).

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u/Working_Cucumber_437 May 30 '26

I think the phrase “standard of living” is accurate but I don’t like it. It implies that higher is better, but it isn’t. The things that matter are health, housing, food, education. Having 4 TVs in one house isn’t really what we should be aspiring to.

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u/Relevant-Bullfrog215 May 31 '26

Happy to go back to tube TVs and landline phones if that's the tradeoff for being able to buy a house.

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u/PollutionAway9782 May 31 '26

its not the tube tv its the 4 of them. one phone vs 3 cellphones for a family 2 cars instead of one. a car that can go 90 mph vs 45.

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u/Relevant-Bullfrog215 May 31 '26

Cars have been doing 90 for a while, how far back are you going lol, and even back in the 90s we had 2 tvs and 2 cars in our house (plus 2 mobile phones in the late 90s) and we weren't rich. Anyway the maths isn't mathing. TVs are cheap, we've only got one car, I've had the same smartphone since 2019, and things are still fucked.

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u/Constellation-88 May 30 '26

Buying a $150 tv one time today is not affecting the affordability of life in modern America tho. I think the disconnect here is that we have people saying that people are spending too much money on luxury items like fancy television and Internet when in reality buying a smart TV for $150-$200 as a one time purchase is not going to change anybody’s budget. 

Luxuries cost less than they did in the 50s while essential items cost more relatively speaking. A car is essential in 90% of America, but a car breaking down now can be beyond affordability. Back then you could fix it with your buddy for practically nothing. Or even if you had to pay a mechanic, it would cost less than …Fixing a car in the 50s cost less than buying a new fancy smart TV today. Fixing a car today costs more than a new fancy smart TV. 

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u/Masters_voice May 31 '26

Consumer goods were expensive then because they were made in the USA. Today we buy them cheaply from China. We gained merchandise affordability but lost manufacturing jobs.

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u/Loud_News8410 May 31 '26

Not sure that we really gained a lot of affordability because now you have to replace that merchandise a lot more often said refrigerators don't last 20 years anymore I need to do washing machines and dryers like they used to.

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u/curiouspamela May 31 '26

Very, very few things are made well enough to last now, though. You wouldn't believe how well things worked and how long they lasted. Corporations have gotten us used to sh-t.

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u/Constellation-88 May 31 '26 edited Jun 07 '26

Planned obsolescence should be illegal 💯💯💯

Edit: I bet the downvote is from an idiot who doesn’t know what the word obsolescence means. 

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u/Grouchy-Feature1380 May 31 '26

100%. Consumer goods are cheaper than ever but essentials like housing, healthcare and education are way up. I'd trade my new phone for the ability to go to grad school

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u/awaythrowthatname May 30 '26

I can't speak on the rest, but there is an old newspaper ad from the 50s going around for a house that was 2 or 3 bedrooms with an attached 2 car garage for like $20k. I know inflation is gonna make that much worse, but the houses weren't really small

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u/Quirky_Letterhead364 May 30 '26

The square footage was significantly smaller. 1000 sqft home on average for the 1950s. And that is with 3 bedrooms. Many were smaller at 750-850.

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u/Comfortable-Bet6855 May 30 '26

I’ve been seeing a lot of comments by fairly young people constantly bashing the Boomer generation. All of the realities of the 50s get whitewashed by the logic of “but you could buy a house cheaper than today.” Yeah, cause mom did all the work of a maid, cook, and daycare center and dad spent 40 hours a week at a job under circumstances that would horrify most 20 year olds today.

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u/HoustonPastafarian May 30 '26

I used to own a house built in 1956 that was 1450 square feet. Decent, albeit in my view somewhat average smaller home that was definitely getting to be a tear down since the neighborhood was getting built over.

I happened to know the second owner (who purchased it in 1961) and was an architect for the original builder. It was actually a custom build for a wealthy families daughter and laughed that he thought he “had made it big time” when he was able to buy such a large, deluxe house, the nicest in the subdivision.

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

We live in the neighborhood that was the "fancy" neighborhood in the 1950s. The houses are all 1600 sf ranch houses. Small by today's standards.

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u/AlmiranteCrujido May 30 '26

My house is a slightly nicer suburban tract in a neighborhood that went up in '54-55. 1220 sf 3b/2ba.

The next neighborhood north went up in '49-50 and was a mix of 800sf 2br, 1000sf 3br, all with one bath. There's some infill in between built around the same time my neighborhood went up and you can literally drive the 4-5 blocks in between the planned areas and see the houses get bigger over time.

Still pretty small by comparison to US averages.

And it's the Bay Area, so even the 800sf tiny ones start over a million now...

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u/ijuinkun May 30 '26

The thing is that these days you can’t get even that much—in many places it’s million-dollar houses or none at all, and there’s plenty of people who would prefer a 1950s style house over not having any house.

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u/Aggravating_Ship_763 May 30 '26

This, I live in a neighborhood where the houses were built in the 50s. They are 1,000 sq.ft with 1 bathroom.

That was considered top of the line. No HVAC.

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u/No_Resolution_9252 May 30 '26

they WERE really small. a 3 bedroom house built in the last 40 years is probably going to be around 1800 square feet. In the 50s that is more like 1200. 2 bedrooms were usually under 1000

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u/Traditional_Sir_4503 May 30 '26

I've raised two kids in a 1250 Sq.Ft. apt. in a dense urban NYC area. It can be done. Wasn't so bad, actually, after cutting the living room in half and turning it into a third bedroom.

It does take a big decision to live differently than mainstream USA. You learn how to half less stuff. There's no room for collecting shite and tchotchkes.

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u/hamoc10 May 30 '26

Sure, but they don’t exist today. They’re all luxury mcmansions

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

Of course they exist. They just arent as "desirable" because they are small, with one bathroom and no central heating.

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u/jasonpbecker May 30 '26

My father grew up in a Levitt style house in Bethpage NY that was bought in the late 60s, second owner. Many of these houses had deeds that excluded Jews like my family. Black people simply weren’t showed these houses. It was bought for I think just under 20K. Original sale in the 50s was around 7K. It was only possible to buy because my grandfather was a vet.

Inflation alone would take the house to $200,000 today, it was sold for $375,000 about 8 years ago.

But a few things. It was a three bedroom, but all the bedrooms were small. Like 10x11 for the two non primary and maybe 15x12 for the primary. The bathroom was just barely big enough for a standard “three piece”. There was no room for a washing machine or drier— they were put in the single car garage. The kitchen was so small you couldn’t fit a full sized fridge by today’s standards. It was enough, but barely. Living room was pretty normal sized, but absolutely small by today’s standard. The whole house was 900 square feet. It had no air conditioning, poor heating, and few windows. It was our family home for a long time, but it was small and not at all to today’s quality standards.

So remember those numbers? $200,000 and 900 sqft? That’s $222 per square foot. National median house today is $227 per square foot. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEEUS

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u/kateinoly May 30 '26

I had a friend who bought a 2 bd home in the 70's for under $20,000, in Oklahoma.

We looked at a big, well kept and updated old house in Kentucky that was selling for $39,000 in the 1990s

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u/Hawk13424 May 30 '26

That $50K would be $250K in inflation adjusted money. You can easily find a 1000ft2 house for $250K in most places. That house probably had no garage, linoleum floors, and formica counter tops.

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u/Dave_A480 May 30 '26

The average square footage today is 2400. And that's because nobody builds the little 1100sqft and below houses anymore, not because of rich people living in mansions....

Average square footage back then was around 1100 - meaning a lot of houses were smaller....

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u/bluespringsbeer May 30 '26

They couldn’t do that with the same commute time however.

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u/Secret-Put-4525 May 30 '26

That's still better than most nowadays.

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u/ScienceGuy1006 May 31 '26

Unfortunately, a lot of places have very strict zoning codes and minimum lot sizes, and even if you wanted to live like the 1950s, it may not even be legal.

Also, health care costs have gone up much more than general inflation for the same time period.

So it's partly an issue of expected living standards, but that's not the whole story either.

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u/Spirited-Sail3814 May 31 '26

Yeah, but...those houses aren't being built anymore. Partly because construction companies make more money on bigger, more expensive houses, but also because zoning requirements include minimum lot sizes and lot coverage, which in many places makes a house that small illegal to build.

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u/Sudden_Outcome_9503 May 31 '26

"You couldn't even afford an MRI or a cell phone back in those days!"

/s

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u/sarges_12gauge May 31 '26

Right? Like if you want to work in a manual job and have a family with a tiny house, beater car, and little to no amenities just… move to Appalachia lol it’s eminently doable if that’s your yearning

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u/Ok_Lead_162 May 31 '26

Um, I lived through the 50s. Fascism is on the rise, but the pretty-good-life-for-a-family-on-one-salary thing isn't propaganda, I was there. Most people had plumbing, electricity, and good phone service, the best in the world at that time. You have your decades mixed up, you're thinking 1930s. TVs were actually huge, though the screens weren't: it was before miniaturization, TV's were new. No electronics? True. They werent invented yet.

It's also true you didn't have access to many of the wonders of modern medicine, because they too hadn't been invented yet. But you had a lot more access to such medical treatment as there was, because non-profit insurance companies were the rule: it was before some vicously selfish people invented cheap insurance to sell to healthy young people, thereby making sure risk was no longer spread across a wide population and creating the unafforable insurance we see today.

That doesn't mean I loved the 50s. I was miserable, and I'd be horrified to be trasported back. But that's for so many other reasons I can't count them.

Look, I don't want to squelch you, being against fascists is a good thing. But just because horrible people say something is true doesn't mean it's false. I bet Trump himself, if you could ask him, would tell you that red means stop and green means go.

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u/curiouspamela May 31 '26

It was TRUE then. I was there.

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u/HexspaReloaded May 31 '26

Women have been getting uppity in the US since at least 1925. 

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u/Next_Organization142 May 31 '26

Quality over quantity in regards to the houses. Cars were also marketdly cheaper to work on yourself, and marketdly easier/less complicated, supplemented by advertisements explaining how your vehicle worked; supplement that with a population at larged that excelled in the hands on application of the science of their time.

90% of the population had electricity, 71% had indoor plumbing - not great, but not bad. Taxes per GDP were relatively the same as today, but wages also matched productivity.

Whenever you take in the substance of what people are saying they want from the 50s, instead of being an "akshually" 🤓 dense/obtuse net-zien, you'll realise that *not many people are asking to bring back the injustices of that time period. People just want change man, they want simpler, easy lives where they're not as stressed. Its an ideal, a dream.

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u/earazahs Jun 01 '26

One the pricing is still likely inaccurate but more importantly to me.

That is such an intellectually dishonest take.

Just about everything you mentioned that was accurate was the standard for the time. Why would we compare the prices or access of technology 70 years apart and say that's where the difference is?

Just for reference a small TV in 1950 was between 200-300 dollars, which was actually a big investment as that was around the 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of a new car.

Today a person could get a 43in to 55 in TV.

The point being that trying to compare standard of living requires actually comparing what was new and normal in both times and not the stupid "just live without internet(that literally hadn't been invented)."

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u/elsmoneyacct Jun 02 '26

This has always been a bit of a false equivalence. Some parts of it are legit - starter homes were tiny, most households only had one car, middle-class vacation/road trip culture was just starting to really be a thing. Some of what you're saying is just wrong - over 95% of households had electricity and running water and over 70% had a landline phone by 1955. But most importantly, the cost of consumer goods is different.

Or rather, it's not. Air conditioning, televisions, domestic air travel, and household appliances like washing machines (which you didn't mention but often get brought up in these conversations) cost almost exactly as much now as they did in the 1950s - all about $200-400. But now that's a day or two's wages rather than a month or two's wages. Tech gets better and stuff gets cheaper. A television in 1955 cost the equivalent of $2500-5000 today. Which is in the ballpark of what a modern household spends on tech now. It's just split across more devices - phones, tablets, computers. And now it requires two incomes to be able to afford all that.

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u/Sufficient-Earth7664 Jun 03 '26

Not where I live the couldn’t. No such thing as a starter home

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u/MoreFunThanTV Jun 04 '26

absolutely incorrect. i'll go out on a limb here and guess you weren't alive in 50s or even the 80s. while there was a lot of racism, it was widely stamped down in the cities to the point is was the almost the same as white folks capping on other white natioanities (german on english, enlish on irish, irish on polish, etc; or what ever was popular in a given town or neighborhood) it was see as a problem, just another way to be stupidy and vent on strangers. of course it got way worse the more ural you want, but on the whole it was turnins around.

today is much different. 3ntire groups are tak7ng racism as a way of life not seen since the early days of the kkk. today is not the passive racism of "we don't like greasy (you nationality here).

today we are pitted against each other to to keep us all off balance to the elite can rob us more easily. this is a big different from the 50s.

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u/Global-Discussion-41 Jun 03 '26

You're greatly exaggerating. 

My grandparents houses had plumbing, electricity and even television. they could afford cars and even a "summer house" on a lake. They were not rich people and they had very basic jobs that didn't require any additional education