[wiseowise]

A “certain culture” is an euphemism for bad economy, I assume?

[sublinear]

It can also be argued that when a culture seeks escapism it's because things are bad.

In other words, there's no correlation.

[watwut]

No, because it existed when economy was good too. It has nothing to do with economy state.

It is more of moral judgement thing, completely divorced from both needs and outcomes.

[rightbyte]

When I was a kid the general setup seemed to be the poorer the kid the more toys and higher weekly allowance it had. To compensate I guess.

Obviously not very poor but relatively poor.

[mft_]

Totally the opposite, from my recollection.

Number and value of child’s toys/belongings correlated directly with parental income, with parental attitude as an independent variable.

For example, my parents were probably at the lower-end-of-comfortable but definitely not wealthy, but I had less money spent on me as a result of their beliefs around raising a child, and politics more broadly.