[standardUser]

Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.

[OutOfHere]

AI and automation are creating plenty of wealth, just not for the worker :)

[ctoth]

What factors? Why are they unlikely to come about again? How do we make them come about again?

You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"

I, for one, completely disagree.

[eudamoniac]

The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.

[UncleMeat]

A 60 year old was born in 1966 and started their career in the mid 80s. That's displaced pretty far from ww2.

[vkou]

> The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched,

Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.

[zeven7]

They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.

[danaris]

But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles.

We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.

No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.