[WalterBright]

In the 1800's, having children was a net asset because they were put to work as soon as they could walk. This is not so in today's society, where they are unemployable and do not contribute economically until 22 or 23.

Also, my grandparents came from families with 8 or more children, and many of them died as children. This was normal for those days.

[susan_hall]

"In the 1800's, having children was a net asset because they were put to work as soon as they could walk"

You are expanding upon my example without explaining it. My point remains: has the standard of living gone up? If people could do productive work at the age of 10, but now they have to wait till they are 25, then what metric do you use to prove that the standard of living has gone up? If you want to argue that leisure has expanded, can you prove that the expansion of leisure is entirely experienced as a positive thing? Are young men happier now that they can't find good paying work till they are in their late 20s, rather than finding such work in their late teens?

It remains true that it was easier to raise children 100 years ago than it is now. Is there a metric that shows this as a decline in the standard of living?

My point is that there is a lot that is left out of these metrics. A simplistic look at median wage and the Consumer Price Index suggests that the male median wage peaked in 1973 and family income peaked in 1999. But if you were to measure those factors that are specific to raising a family, the decline in the standard of living, for families, would show up earlier than 1999.

As to the "half the children died" argument, the steepest part of the decline in childhood death was 1850 to 1900. Of the 16 children my great grandmother gave birth to, 15 lived till at least their 18th birthday.

[WalterBright]

Polio wasn't conquered until the 1950's.

> what metric do you use to prove that the standard of living has gone up?

Average height, longevity, infant mortality are good proxies. Median wage doesn't mean much as it doesn't say what you can buy with it.

Have you ever been to Disneyland? Yellowstone? Traveled internationally? Only the rich could do that in 1900. People didn't even brush their teeth until after WW1. Few my age would have any teeth.

No birth control, no living together before marriage. Would you be happier with that?

No radio, no TV, no Hackernews, no movies, no stereo, no Beatles, no disco (!), are you sure you want all that?

[susan_hall]

You are avoiding the issue. I have to assume that you have no answer to the question. It is more difficult to raise children, and we lack metrics that show that decline. Listing a bunch of neat stuff doesn't show that the standard of living has improved. As a point of comparison, imagine if it now cost 50%, to raise 16 children, than it had 100 years ago. In that situation, we could compare like with like, and we could say that everything had gotten universally better. Since we don't face that situation, we run the risk of only counting the good stuff, without counting any of the bad stuff, and thus falsely concluding that things have gotten better. If we'd like to count DisneyWorld on the positive side, where do we count the increased difficulty of raising children?

Your point about polio is bizarre, as it was never the dominant factor in childhood mortality. The steepest decline in childhood mortality was during the period from 1850 to 1900.

[WalterBright]

Polio: http://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sokol.html Mortality wasn't the big concern with polio, it was the debilitating life-long after effects, and the adverse effects of pervasive fear of it.

You want to believe things are worse in America, I can't change your mind. In my own lifetime things have gotten visibly better. My father lived into his 90s, and he'd recount how things have gotten quite a bit better. Sure that's anecdotal, but you can look up statistics, too.

A "bunch of neat stuff" does improve standard of living. I'm almost never bored, for example.

[susan_hall]

I can put this differently: if I had a CFO who confused gross revenue with net profit, then I would fire the CFO and hire someone better.

We can easily list cool stuff that happened over the last 100 years: radio, television, cell phones, the Internet.

We can easily list bad stuff that happened over the last 100 years: environmental degradation, global warming, the increase in the percentage of income spent on transportation, difficulties in raising children.

What do we get when we subtract the bad stuff from the good stuff? Until we have good metrics for doing that, we are like the CFO who confuses gross revenue with net profit.