Exactly. Food purity and safety has probably never been higher. 100 years ago there was widespread adulteration and contamination of food, in addition to pure snake oil sold as beneficial medication.
I could imagine more adulteration happening as globalization goes up, because traceability gets so much more difficult.
Food safety has probably gone up over the past 30 years. But I suspect adulteration has too.
The exact thing in question might be slightly different, but nothing is new.
In the case of rents, the evil landlord raising rents and kicking people out is a trope you see in 1910s fiction. (probably before that, but I haven't personally read much fiction older than about 1910)
The original claim that Michelangelo11 made is that society in the past was higher trust. That's the claim that needs evidence. The person who disagrees with the initial claim is not the one who needs to initially provide evidence.
I generally agree, but someone making another claim in response also needs evidence. If the response was, 'what is the evidence?', that would be different.
How do I reconcile my claim that Michelangelo11 is looking at the past with rose colored glasses against your observation that things were much worse 100 years ago? These views are the same. There is nothing for me to reconcile.
I did not express my idea clearly. The narrative is that the past was awful, and to a degree that it sounds cartoonish. I personally think it's smelling like propaganda: "You think it's bad now? Well you should be grateful. Before we came around life was unlivable, etc."
So I'm asking why you think nostalgia is more powerful than:
1. the dominant narrative
2. The possibility of that narrative being true and living it.
Old people are not easily scammed because they are inherently stupid. It's because they grew up in a time when fewer people were trying to scam them, and are not on guard. I don't think seniors from the Soviet Union have this problem.