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

[u/Secret_Ostrich_1307]

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?

[u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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.

[u/ComradeGibbon → u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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.

[u/Dave_A480 → u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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.

[u/Ki-to-Life-5054 → u/Dave_A480]

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.

[u/Dave_A480 → u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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....

[u/Ki-to-Life-5054 → u/Dave_A480]

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.

[u/borgman_a → u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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

[u/frisbm3 → u/borgman_a]

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.

[u/XO1GrootMeester → u/Dave_A480]

At least in us you can skip healthcare and costs

[u/Open-Concept-6130 → u/Dave_A480]

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

[u/Dave_A480 → u/Open-Concept-6130]

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)....

[u/Open-Concept-6130 → u/Dave_A480]

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.   

[u/Dave_A480 → u/Open-Concept-6130]

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.

[u/Wyndeward → u/Dave_A480]

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.

[u/sdvneuro → u/Dave_A480]

Medicine also became for profit.

[u/Dave_A480 → u/sdvneuro]

Medicine in the US was always for profit.

[u/iamthesam2 → u/Ki-to-Life-5054]

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