[badpun]

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on.

In the US. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world was mired in communism, which created incredible poverty and misery. After the 80-ties when it was finally overthrown for the most part, those billions of people start competing on equal ground with the US, which equalizes the global situation a bit.

[wozer]

The wealth is still in the US, though. It did not go to other countries.

[badpun]

This is about income, and not wealth. Most of these middle-class US families in the 50-ties through 80-ties that you mentioned had very little wealth, and only managed to build it up (via paying off mortgage, saving for retirement) over decades of work and solid income. Now, there's less opportunities for solid income in the US, as they've become more equally spread across the globe.

[Godel_unicode]

It's not the zero-sum game you're making it out to be.

Also, those countries are all far better off now.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/25-years-r...

[coldtea]

>In the US. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world was mired in communism, which created incredible poverty and misery.

Depends on where of the world.

Most of the rest of the world in the 50s (aside from eastern Europe, USSR and China) was anything but communist.

And even the communist (socialist) parts, where not really about some "incredible poverty" (e.g. in places like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and so on, just substandard middle/working class existence. Everybody there could get a job, healthcare, college education, and a house, for one.

[badpun]

India was also communist. Just India and China alone is already something like 40% of world population. USSR + Eastern/Central Europe is another 400+ million people. There were also many communist countries in Africa and Asia.

As for the standard of living, I know the realities of communist Poland:

- The "everybody could get a house" is complete falsehood, at least for Poland. In fact, almost no one lived in a house - people lived in small, overcrowded flats (2 rooms for a family of 6, 1 room for a family of 4 were not uncommon), and even getting those shitty flats in drab housing projects required serious sacrifices and often years of waiting in the queue.

- As for higher education, only around 15% of population attended university, and not for the lack of wanting - it was clear that far from anyone could go.

- Healthcare was bad, but probably on par with the general underdevelopment of the country.

- Throught the fifties, people worked 28 days a month - yep, they only had a couple of Sundays off and that was it. The salary they got for such exertion was barely enough to cover rudimentary living expenses. My grandmother had to take a loan to buy a winter coat (to not freeze, not because it was pretty), and she paid that loan off over months. Over time, the living conditions gradually improved, but even in the eighties it was mandatory to work every second Saturday IIRC.

- What's probably most important and probably unimaginable for some who did not live under communism, were that obtaining just basic consumer goods was a challenge at times. Tens of millions of people at times stood for hours every day after work just to buy toilet paper or meat. It was an unimaginable waste of human time and energy.

[_0nac]

India as a whole has never been communist, although the Gandhi-inspired self-reliance/import substitution/License Raj era definitely did cripple the economy in similar ways.

Many "communist" countries in Africa and the Middle East were so mostly on paper and they flipped allegiances regularly based on whether the US or the Soviets were offering better carrots.