One facet of the household economic changes from the 1950s to today which I haven't seen discussed much: what was the impact in labor markets of women entering the workforce? The period when female LFP rates from somewhere around 20% to above 80% is also the period when inflation-adjusted middle-class wages basically flatlined. From a micro 101 perspective, though, that's exactly what you'd expect. And it provides another explanation for the sense that households are poorer than in the 50s, even though the opposite is true: median wage-earner incomes flatlined, but the median household went from 1 earner to 2 earners, which roughly doubled household incomes (at the cost, admittedly, of single-parent households and rising prices for the kinds of previously unpaid work done by the stay-at-home parent, especially childcare).
One thing that nobody seems to grasp is that Urbanism in the past was objectively better: street grids scale up gracefully and can handle dramatic growth, but cul-de-sacs and suburban road patterns cannot.
Starting with FDR, street grids were made defacto illegal, and street planning went out of fashion (we only plan major arterials and often after the fact, whereas most cities before WW2 had something like a plan for where every minor streets and parks would go as the city expanded).
People often talk about land-use, building types, architectural styles and blah blah blah. The truth of the matter is that post-war suburban development does not scale. Everyone’s quality of life gets worse when more people show up. This is a simple technical property of suburban street network design.
We could easily fix this, but we won’t, because nobody notices it, or even cares.
My grandfather, who raised his family crapping in an outhouse and chopping wood for heat, used to tell me "The only thing good about about the good old days is they are gone."
Your articles skips the vast qualitative improvements of so many goods and services. You can't compare the safety of a 1960s car with today's. The washing machines wash better, are less noisy, use less water etc etc. And More's law!
When my father bought a 20 vol encyclopedia ca 1972, it cost him more than half a monthly salary. Worth it. But today's Wikipedia is free, and mostly better, more accurate etc.
(actually, when Jimmy Wales asks us to, we should help Wikipedia)
Does the substance technology not allow a song to be playing on a post? Matty references the Mr T Experience song here but I really think this blog needs to be leaning more consistently into its specifically pop-punk cultural origins
Meh. One big meh. I think this whole piece is so so misleading. Are some things , indeed many things, better now than in the 50s. Obviously. As a gay man I should know. However, most of the argument here are misleading. Sure dishwashers are nice to have (having grown up with one and then spent quite a few years as an adult without I should now), washing machines are certainly a massive improvement etc. at the end of the day however are these (and luxuries such as the abilities to eat out far more frequently and diversely, go abroad more frequently etc) actually a better indicator for quality of life compared to the ability to own a home at a reasonable age? To have job security? To know you’re set for retirement ? Not to have anxiety about your kids ability to make a living ? To live in a safe community that is an actual community where you know your neighbors etc? Sure, I suppose higher college participation is better in the abstract, but is todays job market, where a very significant portion of the population that still doesn’t go to college is basically consigned to life of poverty (in many cases), and the greater part of the rest start their adult life with daunting if not crippling debt, better than that of the 50s where few went to college but a greater portion could expect a stable dignified job allowing for middle class lifestyle and a sense of community ? I don’t want to go back, mostly due to the problems on the rights of women and minorities back then, but nyc that is very important has been lost in terms of: 1. Rights of workers and conditions of labors - esp for the less educated 2. Having stable communities 3. The ability to settle down and raise families.
Last but not least - in the 50s-70s the us had a sustainable natural demographic growth. Now we’re facing demographic collapse despite record levels of immigration. Despite serious tensions , there is little doubt, too, that is politics were far more functional back then, as was the us place on the world stage. Certainly some things improved but a whole lot went wrong in the intervening generations. I wish we got a more nuanced picture.
I was a child in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1980s, and my experience aligns with a lot of your observations. We - my parents, my great-grandma, and I - lived in a 900 sq ft apartment, we had one used car (a great luxury in those days, and one we used only for occasional trips out of the city, because gasoline was expensive - within the city we got around on foot and by public transit), and we had no microwave, dishwasher, or clothes dryer. This being the 80s, we obviously had no cell phones, tablets, Internet, or laptops. I was the envy of all my classmates when I received a VHS player in 1991.
That said, nobody was worried about housing costs - nobody had a single-family home unless they belonged to the wealthy elite, but everybody could afford an apartment, however tiny. Everyone had government-funded healthcare, including optical and dental. You had to have excellent grades in high school to go to university, but if you qualified, attendance was government-funded. Everyone had an old-age pension, childcare was affordable, and there was disability insurance for those unable to work.
I would certainly trade away some of our current material wealth for greater security for the elderly, for young children, for the disabled, etc. Perhaps a VAT would help?
My big question is, how feasible is this kind of world? Poland was subsidized heavily by the USSR, until the whole system collapsed. America in the 1950s famously benefited from being the only large economy left standing after WWII. Also, note that both 1950s America and 1980s Poland had a lot less automation than today, which means more jobs. Can we turn back the clock? Would we want to?
Demographic collapse is a whole other can of nematodes. I certainly understand that we can't have infinite population growth on a finite planet, but I don't want outright collapse either. I read an article in The Atlantic recently about South Korean women basically rejecting marriage and children, and it made me sad.
Note that welfare state in the us was always far less generous than far less wealthy europe. It’s all a choice. Unionizations levels have a lot to do with the legislative environment , de-industrialization was at least to a major extent a matter of policy choice in the 90s , not an inevitability. A choice - btw- that has not only wrecked social havoc (which may or may not have given us trump) but also strategic folly in diminishing the us industrial capacity, including crucially in manufacturing arms (cf important NYT article this week), medical supplies (cf 2020) and other essentials. In fact European countries that made different choices (eg germany) suffered much less from these ills. It’s not about turning back the clock but realizing we made some big mistakes along the way, and rejected the fallacy that just because something happened it must have happened and cannot be different now or in future.
“You can, actually, afford a 1950’s consumption bundle on one income” is an underrated point.
Two points adding to what is in this post:
A lot of of what we buy now is health care that wasn’t available at any price then. There are diseases we can manage or cure now where the cutting edge treatment in the 1950’s was “that sucks man, get your affairs in order.”
A majority of people were being legally and culturally oppressed much more back then. Women who would be doctors and executives now couldn’t get a better job than nurse or teacher (which are fine and important jobs but it was not better for the women to have this restriction). Redlining housing and provision of public services was widespread and very bad.
"Consumption of more years of schooling" is not the same thing as "more educated" because "years of schooling" are not a uniform good. In fact, there is reason to think that schooling quality has gotten worse during the second half the 20th century.
For example, some studies show a significant decline in public reading skills from 1970 on. A 2009 DOT study found that people who didn't go to college in the U.S. were highly likely to lack functional literacy skills. A 2019 DOE study found that 54% of U.S. adults have prose literacy below the 6th grade level. Detailed numbers for the 1950's are harder to find, but some census data indicates that no state reported more than a 10% illiteracy rate, and 2/3rds of the states reported rates below 3%. At minimum that puts paid to the idea that there's been some sort of grand quantum leap in the education level of the U.S. population.
Moreover, I would expect the median U.S. citizen to be slightly less-skilled and less-educated than their 1950's counterpart. Increased wealth, technological complexity, and service-sector availability means that the 2023-er is far less likely to know how to perform significant repair work on their possessions. Additionally, increased years spent in the education system means that the 2023er has significantly less job experience than the 50's counterpart, and thus not only knows less about actual productive skills, but has less financial awareness. Smaller average family size means that the 2023er has less experience with childcare. Etc., etc.
Overlooked in this article: a big reason why so many households in the 1950's lived just fine with two parents sharing just one car is that the communities back then were more walkable so people didn't feel compelled to drive for every single little trip. Not only was routine shopping within walking distance, but so were schools, and most kids - even younger kids - walked, rather than needing to be driven by their parents.
Today, we are living in legacy of city planners' collective decisions to declare walking a "deprecated" mode of transport and design streets accordingly. The result is that now every adult has to fork for an additional several hundred dollars each month for a separate car, and kids have to be driven to school and other activities they would have previously walked to. The lack of exercise from everyone being driven everywhere is also likely a contributor to the obesity epidemic.
Yes, I don't consider "we used to have only one car per household, but now most households have two!" to be an unalloyed good. All that extra driving = more CO2 emissions and worse health. We would have been so, so much better off if 1950s Americans hadn't decided that a car-centric suburb was the pinnacle of human existence. Walkable neighborhoods FTW!
There's no doubt living standards are much higher when measured by inflation adjusted income today than in the 1950's. Matt and other neoliberals across the spectrum are right about that.
But why have politics grown so toxic then?
I think Oren Cass is basically right that (many of) the things that the typical person or family wants today actually are more expensive and further out of reach than they were in the 50's. Things like college education, health care and especially housing in strong job markets in catchment areas that have good school districts. All of these despite the various subsidy schemes are more expensive than before.
Put differently, in 1970 it was not significantly more expensive to buy a home in California than anywhere else in US. The price of a home NYC in 1970 had not changed much in many decades. today to a first approximation, only the rich, the poor and the childless can afford these places. Nowadays people often have to accept lower salaries/productivity in exchange for affordable houses in places they can raise kids like TX and GA.
Maybe TV's were smaller and fewer, homes were smaller, cars were worse, but many important things often seemed more abundant in 1946-1970 because in part they were. What can we do about this?
I think the "abundance agenda" is a great start and before too long I expect center right thinkers to stop defending the existing settlement and apply themselves to this question too namely: what can public policy do to make BIG and IMPORTANT things more abundant???
I think Matt is on the right track. CHeap and abundant energy is a start.
I'm not so sure that that is true and I am pretty sure that the cost surge in those things has lead to.demand for more subsidies not the other way around.
"There was a time a few years back when we had an explosive diffusion of ramen shops, and you can now get a pretty good bowl of tonkatsu in all kinds of places."
I'm all for protecting endangered species but life is full of tradeoffs. Geothermal power replacing fossil fuels or a toad that happens to live in one hot springs? Sorry, toad, but thanks for taking one for the team.
The Endangered Species Act has the weird consequence that it matters greatly whether a population is classified as a species or a subspecies, independent of objective facts about how different it is from other related populations. It would be better to have some sort of measure of biodiversity that could be agreed on, but that is even harder.
It’s tonkotsu btw sir. Katsu is fried pork cutlet :)
The numbers I've seen for people going to college in the 60's were way lower than 45%. The data here is more in line with what I've seen before:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
* tonKOtsu, not tonKAtsu
https://ejjiramen.com/tonkotsu-vs-tonkatsu/
One facet of the household economic changes from the 1950s to today which I haven't seen discussed much: what was the impact in labor markets of women entering the workforce? The period when female LFP rates from somewhere around 20% to above 80% is also the period when inflation-adjusted middle-class wages basically flatlined. From a micro 101 perspective, though, that's exactly what you'd expect. And it provides another explanation for the sense that households are poorer than in the 50s, even though the opposite is true: median wage-earner incomes flatlined, but the median household went from 1 earner to 2 earners, which roughly doubled household incomes (at the cost, admittedly, of single-parent households and rising prices for the kinds of previously unpaid work done by the stay-at-home parent, especially childcare).
One thing that nobody seems to grasp is that Urbanism in the past was objectively better: street grids scale up gracefully and can handle dramatic growth, but cul-de-sacs and suburban road patterns cannot.
Starting with FDR, street grids were made defacto illegal, and street planning went out of fashion (we only plan major arterials and often after the fact, whereas most cities before WW2 had something like a plan for where every minor streets and parks would go as the city expanded).
People often talk about land-use, building types, architectural styles and blah blah blah. The truth of the matter is that post-war suburban development does not scale. Everyone’s quality of life gets worse when more people show up. This is a simple technical property of suburban street network design.
We could easily fix this, but we won’t, because nobody notices it, or even cares.
My grandfather, who raised his family crapping in an outhouse and chopping wood for heat, used to tell me "The only thing good about about the good old days is they are gone."
Your articles skips the vast qualitative improvements of so many goods and services. You can't compare the safety of a 1960s car with today's. The washing machines wash better, are less noisy, use less water etc etc. And More's law!
When my father bought a 20 vol encyclopedia ca 1972, it cost him more than half a monthly salary. Worth it. But today's Wikipedia is free, and mostly better, more accurate etc.
(actually, when Jimmy Wales asks us to, we should help Wikipedia)
Great point! But one pushback - you should *not* donate to Wikipedia, or at least do so knowing what it will be used for.
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/
interesting ...
They seem to have something smart as well: within 15 mn after my post, I received a begging mail from Jimmy W.
"And if a bunch of people build a bunch of stuff in a bunch of different places over an extended period of time, there are basically two options"
Well, three: some a priori very good ideas conceived by super heroes turn out to be busts as well. Call that one "bad luck".
Does the substance technology not allow a song to be playing on a post? Matty references the Mr T Experience song here but I really think this blog needs to be leaning more consistently into its specifically pop-punk cultural origins
Meh. One big meh. I think this whole piece is so so misleading. Are some things , indeed many things, better now than in the 50s. Obviously. As a gay man I should know. However, most of the argument here are misleading. Sure dishwashers are nice to have (having grown up with one and then spent quite a few years as an adult without I should now), washing machines are certainly a massive improvement etc. at the end of the day however are these (and luxuries such as the abilities to eat out far more frequently and diversely, go abroad more frequently etc) actually a better indicator for quality of life compared to the ability to own a home at a reasonable age? To have job security? To know you’re set for retirement ? Not to have anxiety about your kids ability to make a living ? To live in a safe community that is an actual community where you know your neighbors etc? Sure, I suppose higher college participation is better in the abstract, but is todays job market, where a very significant portion of the population that still doesn’t go to college is basically consigned to life of poverty (in many cases), and the greater part of the rest start their adult life with daunting if not crippling debt, better than that of the 50s where few went to college but a greater portion could expect a stable dignified job allowing for middle class lifestyle and a sense of community ? I don’t want to go back, mostly due to the problems on the rights of women and minorities back then, but nyc that is very important has been lost in terms of: 1. Rights of workers and conditions of labors - esp for the less educated 2. Having stable communities 3. The ability to settle down and raise families.
Last but not least - in the 50s-70s the us had a sustainable natural demographic growth. Now we’re facing demographic collapse despite record levels of immigration. Despite serious tensions , there is little doubt, too, that is politics were far more functional back then, as was the us place on the world stage. Certainly some things improved but a whole lot went wrong in the intervening generations. I wish we got a more nuanced picture.
You bring up a lot of good points, THPacis.
I was a child in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1980s, and my experience aligns with a lot of your observations. We - my parents, my great-grandma, and I - lived in a 900 sq ft apartment, we had one used car (a great luxury in those days, and one we used only for occasional trips out of the city, because gasoline was expensive - within the city we got around on foot and by public transit), and we had no microwave, dishwasher, or clothes dryer. This being the 80s, we obviously had no cell phones, tablets, Internet, or laptops. I was the envy of all my classmates when I received a VHS player in 1991.
That said, nobody was worried about housing costs - nobody had a single-family home unless they belonged to the wealthy elite, but everybody could afford an apartment, however tiny. Everyone had government-funded healthcare, including optical and dental. You had to have excellent grades in high school to go to university, but if you qualified, attendance was government-funded. Everyone had an old-age pension, childcare was affordable, and there was disability insurance for those unable to work.
I would certainly trade away some of our current material wealth for greater security for the elderly, for young children, for the disabled, etc. Perhaps a VAT would help?
My big question is, how feasible is this kind of world? Poland was subsidized heavily by the USSR, until the whole system collapsed. America in the 1950s famously benefited from being the only large economy left standing after WWII. Also, note that both 1950s America and 1980s Poland had a lot less automation than today, which means more jobs. Can we turn back the clock? Would we want to?
Demographic collapse is a whole other can of nematodes. I certainly understand that we can't have infinite population growth on a finite planet, but I don't want outright collapse either. I read an article in The Atlantic recently about South Korean women basically rejecting marriage and children, and it made me sad.
Note that welfare state in the us was always far less generous than far less wealthy europe. It’s all a choice. Unionizations levels have a lot to do with the legislative environment , de-industrialization was at least to a major extent a matter of policy choice in the 90s , not an inevitability. A choice - btw- that has not only wrecked social havoc (which may or may not have given us trump) but also strategic folly in diminishing the us industrial capacity, including crucially in manufacturing arms (cf important NYT article this week), medical supplies (cf 2020) and other essentials. In fact European countries that made different choices (eg germany) suffered much less from these ills. It’s not about turning back the clock but realizing we made some big mistakes along the way, and rejected the fallacy that just because something happened it must have happened and cannot be different now or in future.
“You can, actually, afford a 1950’s consumption bundle on one income” is an underrated point.
Two points adding to what is in this post:
A lot of of what we buy now is health care that wasn’t available at any price then. There are diseases we can manage or cure now where the cutting edge treatment in the 1950’s was “that sucks man, get your affairs in order.”
A majority of people were being legally and culturally oppressed much more back then. Women who would be doctors and executives now couldn’t get a better job than nurse or teacher (which are fine and important jobs but it was not better for the women to have this restriction). Redlining housing and provision of public services was widespread and very bad.
"Consumption of more years of schooling" is not the same thing as "more educated" because "years of schooling" are not a uniform good. In fact, there is reason to think that schooling quality has gotten worse during the second half the 20th century.
For example, some studies show a significant decline in public reading skills from 1970 on. A 2009 DOT study found that people who didn't go to college in the U.S. were highly likely to lack functional literacy skills. A 2019 DOE study found that 54% of U.S. adults have prose literacy below the 6th grade level. Detailed numbers for the 1950's are harder to find, but some census data indicates that no state reported more than a 10% illiteracy rate, and 2/3rds of the states reported rates below 3%. At minimum that puts paid to the idea that there's been some sort of grand quantum leap in the education level of the U.S. population.
Moreover, I would expect the median U.S. citizen to be slightly less-skilled and less-educated than their 1950's counterpart. Increased wealth, technological complexity, and service-sector availability means that the 2023-er is far less likely to know how to perform significant repair work on their possessions. Additionally, increased years spent in the education system means that the 2023er has significantly less job experience than the 50's counterpart, and thus not only knows less about actual productive skills, but has less financial awareness. Smaller average family size means that the 2023er has less experience with childcare. Etc., etc.
Overlooked in this article: a big reason why so many households in the 1950's lived just fine with two parents sharing just one car is that the communities back then were more walkable so people didn't feel compelled to drive for every single little trip. Not only was routine shopping within walking distance, but so were schools, and most kids - even younger kids - walked, rather than needing to be driven by their parents.
Today, we are living in legacy of city planners' collective decisions to declare walking a "deprecated" mode of transport and design streets accordingly. The result is that now every adult has to fork for an additional several hundred dollars each month for a separate car, and kids have to be driven to school and other activities they would have previously walked to. The lack of exercise from everyone being driven everywhere is also likely a contributor to the obesity epidemic.
Yes, I don't consider "we used to have only one car per household, but now most households have two!" to be an unalloyed good. All that extra driving = more CO2 emissions and worse health. We would have been so, so much better off if 1950s Americans hadn't decided that a car-centric suburb was the pinnacle of human existence. Walkable neighborhoods FTW!
There's no doubt living standards are much higher when measured by inflation adjusted income today than in the 1950's. Matt and other neoliberals across the spectrum are right about that.
But why have politics grown so toxic then?
I think Oren Cass is basically right that (many of) the things that the typical person or family wants today actually are more expensive and further out of reach than they were in the 50's. Things like college education, health care and especially housing in strong job markets in catchment areas that have good school districts. All of these despite the various subsidy schemes are more expensive than before.
Put differently, in 1970 it was not significantly more expensive to buy a home in California than anywhere else in US. The price of a home NYC in 1970 had not changed much in many decades. today to a first approximation, only the rich, the poor and the childless can afford these places. Nowadays people often have to accept lower salaries/productivity in exchange for affordable houses in places they can raise kids like TX and GA.
Maybe TV's were smaller and fewer, homes were smaller, cars were worse, but many important things often seemed more abundant in 1946-1970 because in part they were. What can we do about this?
I think the "abundance agenda" is a great start and before too long I expect center right thinkers to stop defending the existing settlement and apply themselves to this question too namely: what can public policy do to make BIG and IMPORTANT things more abundant???
I think Matt is on the right track. CHeap and abundant energy is a start.
I think you meant "as a result of the various subsidy schemes" not "despite the various subsidy schemes".
Housing, college and health care would be much less expensive - maybe not affordable but less expensive - without the government subsidies.
I'm not so sure that that is true and I am pretty sure that the cost surge in those things has lead to.demand for more subsidies not the other way around.
But i admit the issue is complicated..
"There was a time a few years back when we had an explosive diffusion of ramen shops, and you can now get a pretty good bowl of tonkatsu in all kinds of places."
Non-sequitor of the week ! (Tonkatsu ≠ tonkotsu)
Of course, it's not just NEPA that throws sand in the gears preventing good development. Good recent article in the LA Times how the Endangered Species Act is a prime impediment to renewable energy development, in this case to stop or at least slow the building of geothermal plants to protect the Dixie Valley toad (https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2023-03-23/renewable-energy-company-threatens-to-sue-biden-over-endangered-toad-boiling-point)
I'm all for protecting endangered species but life is full of tradeoffs. Geothermal power replacing fossil fuels or a toad that happens to live in one hot springs? Sorry, toad, but thanks for taking one for the team.
The Endangered Species Act has the weird consequence that it matters greatly whether a population is classified as a species or a subspecies, independent of objective facts about how different it is from other related populations. It would be better to have some sort of measure of biodiversity that could be agreed on, but that is even harder.