This was unimaginable wealth compared to what was available back home. You had all 3 meals and even meat! Meat! The luxury.
sauce: I'm from one of those European countries where 1 in 6 people emmigrated between 1880 and 1920. Literature from the time (that we read in school) contrasts the local situation with the riches of America as reported by people who sent letters.
It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.
Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option. Instead we've wasted about 10 trillion dollars pave the entire continent. Possibly the most expensive mistake ever made in history.
It's obvious when I visit a city / countryside with poor transit and pedestrian infrastructure how much more I suffer. It's so damned obvious, it's the first thing that screams out to me right when I land / pull in / ride up.
I can't understand what literate person would take issue with the core of your assertions.
Shitty slumlord apartments are what everyone wants to escape from, in my experience.
I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.
Watch a few news reports on poverty in America and you will see that a decent percentage of working adults live with their entire family in a small cramped apartment, can’t afford any vacation, and likely can’t afford emergency medical care if it comes up.
And even those people in the suburbs with all those TVs could have more financial security and work fewer hours if our economy was more fairly arranged.
However, I think you're misapprehending quite how much worse things were a century ago. Now the poor may struggle to afford a PET/CT/MRI/ultrasound scan, or a PCR test, or a dose of antibiotics, or a heart (lung, liver, kidney, bladder, pancreas, ovary, …) transplant, but 100 years ago they did not exist. Diabetes only stopped being lethal just over 100 years ago, the first successful human treatment in the beginning of 1922. Smallpox no longer exists. And so on.
I’m talking about unfair power imbalances today. This has nothing to do with the past.
The key thing to understand is the difference in how precarious those situations are: that affluent suburbanite has some shiny things but their cash flow is much higher than their wealth. A TV in every room is a rounding error on the $11k/year each of those new cars costs on average, and over the course of someone’s working life that kind of thing makes a huge difference in net worth.
The American healthcare system factors into this significantly: if your income depends on showing up to work daily, all of that can go away with a single health incident which leaves you unable to work. A truly rich person is considerably more likely to be able to ride something like that out.
Similarly, retirement is a source of stress for many Americans. Having given mortgage processors and car companies millions of dollars over your life won’t help you much then.
What they had was social status, and I think that's more what you're talking about. Social status is incredibly important for humans, so I understand focusing on it. But since it's pretty much a Zero Sum Game, nothing much changes there.
Health care is the biggest differential - wealth can buy you out of a lot of lifestyle factors but a hundred years ago was just before the dawn of the antibiotic revolution. That part is true, but it isn’t a factor of rising incomes and given how many Americans have stress, lower quality of life, and experience severe financial strain due to healthcare costs I don’t think it’s attributable to higher incomes.
No, while rich people in the past had no iPhones or internet, they had something far more valuable than that: income generating businesses and appreciable assets like land, housing, gold, fine art, jewelery, etc.
And no, the average American is vastly poorer now as housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education, are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago. Having iPhones and internet doesn't make up for these.
Yes, but there are long-term disability insurance policies available for purchase that largely remove that risk. It's a cost, of course.
And, at least in the US, there are public programs that provide disability coverage already figured into one's taxes: https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/
I’m not saying they’re not worth having but again that there’s a big gap between someone being rich and a middle-class worker with decent active income.
In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a century it was not possible, at any price, to make a weekend trip between New York and London; to be immune to the common forms of seasonal flu; to have a video call with someone; to get penicillin; 3D printers, and indeed all CNC machines more complicated than a loom controlled by punched cards, would've been fantasy; and so much more besides.
TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.
Someone making 3X the US national median income is paying roughly the US national median income in federal/state/local taxes. They're paying a median working citizens' earnings in taxes.
Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.
And, like I said, much of what we now consider basic healthcare had not yet been invented.
And even in the last decades, those cheap Chinese gadgets you're so dismissive of, they give access for free to not just k-12 but also university and post-graduate level educational courses and materials on topics which had not been invented then either.
And the tech also lets more work remotely, changing the dynamics on housing.
Instead, they are regressing. If we are comparing to 100 years ago, we sure should have been doing better! If we compare to 50 years ago, there are some key ways where we have regressed within the United States.
The key here is that when we are speaking of standards of living, we are speaking within some narrow contexts. In the developing world, standards have blossomed. Within the United States, the GDP has continued to grow but the value hasn't spread equally.
I can say that in the lower 50% of people in the US, the standard of living has markedly decreased. For 50-80%, it's mildly increased. For the top 20%, it's doing just fine, but it's never been a better time to be wealthy as the pathway for compounding growth on wealth has never had so many tools.
