[Swizec]

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large.

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.

[klipt]

Being able to "walk everywhere" is itself a kind of luxury nowadays, because there are limited walkable cities in the US and they have all become very expensive.

It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.

[KevinGlass]

The fact that everything is designed around cars is one of the invisible nooses around the neck of America. When you look around and notice that everything is covered in cars, that's hard to unnotice. All those cars, roads, parking lots, highways, box stores, mile of sewer and water pipe, cost a staggering amount and are going to start costing a lot more to maintain over the next decade as systems age out and need replacement or maintenance. Not to mention the cost of demolishing the country we spend the previous 300 years constructing. The vampiric system of automobilism has made everything much more expensive for everyone.

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.

[rexpop]

It disturbs me that your comment is "greyed out," whatever that means: you're speaking an obvious truth. The car-scale of American infrastructure is an impediment to physical health; it's an impediment to social capital, and therefore to democracy and to mental health, as well. It funnels us down restricted, commercial avenues--pun intended. It's physically dangerous, it's chemically toxic, it's ecologically destructive, and it's damned expensive to maintain!

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.

[geraldwhen]

Nobody wants to live in apartments. Maybe 20-something’s with no prospect of family, but that’s it.

[PhasmaFelis]

Apartments are fine as long as they're good apartments. Properly-built concrete walls completely mitigate the sound problem you mentioned below. In four years at my current place, I've never heard a neighbor's voice from inside my apartment.

Shitty slumlord apartments are what everyone wants to escape from, in my experience.

[rexpop]

The post to which you're responding said nothing about apartments. Do you mind connecting a few dots for those of us less well-versed in the presumptions of your milieu?

[vladvasiliu]

The post didn't explicitly say "apartment", but it said:

> Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option.

What kind of dwelling, apart from apartments, are there in a "semi-crowded city"? They may not be high-rises, but even if it's a "multi-family house", it's still "apartments". There's only a (usually thin) wall separating your room from your neighbor's. This is one of the main aspects people typically hate about apartments.

[acchow]

Funny enough, having everything being designed around cars is actually more expensive for society on the whole. Walkable cities everywhere would actually be cheaper, and then it also wouldn’t be a luxury.

[themitigating]

The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have.

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.

[TaylorAlexander]

The fact that some people don’t know how well they have it is not evidence that everything is fine.

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.

[ben_w]

They didn't say "everything is fine". There's a lot wrong with everyone's economy from the perspective of "we work just as hard, why don't we get the same stuff?"

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.

[TaylorAlexander]

No I’m not misapprehending how much worse things were a century ago. I simply believe that argument has no bearing on the discussion of a fair distribution of wealth in todays society. No one today lives 100 years ago as a matter of simple fact. Yes, we have antibiotics now, and that’s great, but that has nothing to do with the fact that workers are producing vast amounts of wealth and receiving very little of that wealth as remuneration. We have cars today that make certain kinds of transportation easier, but that has nothing to do with a lack of maternity and paternity leave for new parents. We have cell phones so we can now talk to anyone in the world but that has nothing to do with the fact that business owners will selfishly decide to ship 1000 jobs overseas with no input from the workers who will be disenfranchised.

I’m talking about unfair power imbalances today. This has nothing to do with the past.

[acdha]

Not even close. That rich person had servants, could go on lengthy vacations, etc. and most likely they had substantial passive income.

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.

[BurningFrog]

The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.

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.

[acdha]

Commercial aviation was just getting started, yes, But a rich person in 1922 had luxury rail travel, boats, cars, horses, etc. Most importantly, they had time: air travel is important for most of us because having a paltry couple weeks per year means people try to do things like weekend trips which couldn’t otherwise work. If you’re truly rich, you have a lot more margin for having other people do the unpleasant trips for you or adjusting schedules to suit your comfort.

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.

[BurningFrog]

I was trying to make the point that wealth and living standards isn't about numbers on bank statements.

It's about the material conditions you live in. And in 2022, what we take for granted would blow away pretty much anything in 1922.

I don't think I quite succeeded. Will maybe try something else next time.

[acdha]

My point was that this isn’t so clear cut: healthcare is great, but a lot of things are mixed because humans care about relative status and the real signifiers continue to be things which involve other humans doing labor for you. Even though Netflix exists rich people still go to the opera because it’s an experience most people can’t afford.

[ChuckNorris89]

>The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.

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.

[ben_w]

Minor quibble: they would've had cars 100 years ago. Bad ones, but they would've had them.

[RhysU]

> 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.

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/

[acdha]

Which somewhat reduce that risk. People on SSI are usually struggling, not affluent, and actually getting those benefits can be a struggle for people with conditions less clear cut than, say, losing limbs.

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.

[RhysU]

Definitely, the SSI application process can be onerous. It is meant for people who can do no job not just their pre-incident job.

Definitely, SSI is not a full-time job income. That's why a worker with decent active income should look into private, long-term disability insurance.

[ben_w]

Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.

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.

[RhysU]

> Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.

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.

[ben_w]

And?

[RhysU]

How would you feel if someone taxed you an absolute amount that would leave 50% of your countrymen penniless? And they denied you tax breaks, like the child credit, that they grant themselves? And then that same 50% vilified you to boot?

[ben_w]

I would be absolutely fine, because I was on 3x the national average income.

I would not go onto national television and act like earning way more than anyone else made me a modern suffragette.

[ChuckNorris89]

>TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.

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.

[ben_w]

And a century ago? Because that's what this sub-thread is focusing on.

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.

[ebiester]

The whole point of civilization is that generation to generation, our standards of living should increase.

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.