this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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I get it. We can't buy houses, we can't afford groceries.
Admittedly my parents couldn't afford a house and we often had to skip on groceries too.
But as a kid of the 80s, the thing that gets me is how these memes seem to ignore inflation entirely.
Yes those numbers are lower but so were wages.
And of course we can can talk about real terms wage stagnation, but poverty is timeless and the 80s were an awful and unaffordable time for a lot of people.
But yeah. Sure.
Things are so much more COMPLEX than they used to be - on purpose ofc, b/c people made money from exploiting that increase in complexity.
e.g. American schools used to be tops in the world for things like STEM + others. Now... not so much.
Healthcare too. Now... not so much.
Life expectancy / standard of living, it's all relevant.
And we don't even know: is this a temporary downswing, which will eventually right itself? It doesn't look like it, when up against the forces of globalization, automation, and fascism - it looks rather like now is as good as it is ever going to get, and things like Social Security, Medicare/-aid will just not be available for the people who are currently paying into it. But, back then they did not know how quickly things would get better either, and yet they did so...
On the other hand, decades went by where the gap b/t a living wage vs. what people were paid got ever wider. DECADES of that practice put us into this situation, and it won't take mere days, weeks, months, or even years to get out of it. Robert Reich's Inequality for All (completely free to watch on YouTube etc.) explains the 3 reasons people did not notice it happening back then: as costs went up, (a) additional people went to work (it used to be just one person, then it became two), (b) people worked for longer hours (not just 30-40 hrs/week, but 60+ these days), and (c) people borrowed against the past successes, with e.g. mortgages to put their kids through college and prop up the standard of living that they were accustomed to.
So, yeah, poverty itself was probably far worse back then, whereas hopelessness seems worse today, and it seems not entirely due to media clickbait exploitation of people's fears. But also, things have shifted such that poverty WILL BE worse in the future: e.g. if young people today cannot afford college, and the minimum wage is not a livable one, then not only will they never own a home, but there is a real, actual potential that they will find themselves homeless. As is happening right now all across the country in fact... Maybe that will be turned around, but like... how?
Indeed, the age-old dance, but always, always with a new form (except there is nothing truly new under the sun).