Nothing annoys me more than the meme that everyone was somehow richer/better off in the 50s. It’s always such a stupid apples to oranges comparison (ignoring that houses are larger and higher quality, all of the gadgets we have now from phones to washing machines, the low quality of food in the 50s etc) - not even accounting for the fact that huge swathes of society were denied crucial civil and political rights.
The food is what always gets me. I guarantee you that (at least in the US) all of these people pining for “the good old days” appreciate having easy access to tasty Mexican food, which certainly wasn’t the case in the 50s. (For the UK, I suspect you can just swap in “Indian” for “Mexican”). Oh- and dentistry. When I was growing up, it seemed like every third TV ad was for a denture cleaning product- most old people had lost all their teeth!
No. The French and Italians have delicious food and much lower obesity rates than the US. A lot of the food that makes us fat doesn’t even taste that good, unless you want to argue that Pringles and Twizzlers are the pinnacle of culinary achievement.
"Pinnacle of culinary achievement" is subjective, but it's undeniable that a lot of junk food tastes delicious. That's the whole point, it's been scientifically designed to make you want to eat it. Admittedly it's a bit of a cheap, artificial deliciousness that doesn't quite satisfy the same way as a high-class meal, but it still makes you want to keep eating it.
Meanwhile the obesity rates in France and Italy, and every other country, just keep on rising. Most of them aren't eating fancy high-cuisine for every meal either, they're gorging on Mcdonald's and Potato Chips these days too.
Anyway my point was that it all adds up. Maybe you don't like junk food, great. But there's going to be *some* sort of food you find delicious. It's all available a short drive away or at the touch of a button, so it's a constant struggle of will to not overeat. I feel like it was easier in the old days because food just didn't taste this good, so we didn't *want* to overeat so much.
I'm generally on the same page, but I wonder how our food is going to get better since it seems like we've largely tapped out different ethnic cuisines and higher quality ingredients. Like friends, I'm not sure you can make new old cuisines. Someone should get cracking on this right away.
Every so often you’ll see on Twitter excerpts from old 50s cookbooks. You’ll see a lot of making fun of said recipes and how gross they sound. And yeah they do.
But a lot of those cookbooks were written at a time when food was way more expensive. Or at least more expensive part of a family budget. A lot of those recipes are about a) trying to make tasty recipes out of pretty limited ingredients and b) helping families (and let’s be real wives) maximize every ingredient in the house or how to creatively use cheap ingredients. Like sorry, cumin and paprika were probably not spices easily attainable even for middle class families.
Casserole culture likewise was considered an amazing innovation -- instead of slaving over a dish for days, you could toss a bunch of the newly-released canned goods into a pan and have them ready in an hour or so. It was so popular with Middle American housewives because it freed up SO much freaking time!!
What I find kind of hilarious about insta-pots is that the Russians have been making them for years. In my Peace Corps country in Eastern Europe everyone had them. Some were older and simpler, others were newer and could be programmed.
Those cookbooks were carried over from the Depression. I remember reading a recipe for squirrel in my mother’s edition of The Joy of Cooking (the one with the silhouette illustrations, probably published in the 1940s). In the meantime, a gringo version of tacos came on the scene in Southern California sometime in the 1960s.
I saw it first hand with my grandmother. So much of how and what she cooked was about not wasting anything food wise. She grew up in East London in the 30s.
My husband grew up on a farm and ate squirrel occasionally, but I doubt he or his mother got the recipe from the Joy of Cooking. He said it was decent enough but a lot of work for the meat. Snapping turtle on the other hand. . . Once was enough for him.
I grew up in California and lived with my grandparents, who themselves lived through the Depression. My grandpa moved there from Nebraska when he was a kid because his dad found a job in a printing press in San Francisco. Not exactly Okies, but they would serve you cold leftovers for breakfast if you did not clean your plate a dinner, no matter what it was. They hunted and fished for everything you could get a license for. (I fondly remember the sound of lead shot hitting plates at dinner.) And they would cook roadkill (pheasant and deer) because it was unthinkable to let anything go to waste.
It wasn't much better on the other side of the family, which were immigrant farmers who would take the scraps (and organs) that the butcher would otherwise throw away and make (admittedly pretty darn good) meals from it. Even when my grandparents were older and had plenty of money, my grandpa would wear clothes that were literally falling apart because, as far as we could tell, it just didn't occur to him that buying new cloths was a thing that people could do.
My mom’s dad was like this. I was a super picky eater and I hated him. Thing is I’m not that picky an eater I just didn’t like vegetables until college bc all my grandparents would do is boil vegetables to death and that’s still gross af
Didn’t meet any Okies; can’t speak for my dad. My grandfather, who’s family had come from Nebraska in the 19th century, was building beach front houses in Carlsbad in the 20s, lost all the property in the depression (why aren’t we rich Daddy?) But they still managed to climb back up into the middle class.
Maybe. But I'm not sure the putting of tiny marshmallows in your Jello was because quality food was so expensive. I think sense of taste was just a lot worse then.
Oh, it absolutely was! Gelatin was incredibly expensive until the middle of the 20th century, because it involved hours of labor boiling bones to extract the collagen, and then making it congeal, and only the wealthiest people who could afford to pay kitchen staff to work on it all day would ever have it. But then Jello was introduced, and suddenly a middle class family could serve something with gelatin.
It was like the truffle fries of its day - a food that connoted expensiveness, because of the cost it would have had for a previous generation, and therefore got served much more often than its actually tastiness justified.
I don't know the history of marshmallows. I assume that they were a cheap gelatin imitation of some food that would have been derived from a mallow plant that one harvested from marshes, and thus would have connoted some sort of luxury too.
Hmm. My mom was using those and many more spices in 1950’s and 60’s Detroit. I’ve never researched differences between the cost of various ingredients between then and now but do recall that fresh produce was harder to get and sometimes expensive then, at least in places like Detroit. Families may have spent proportionately more on food back then because no one could afford to eat out, take-out and prepared foods (other than delis) didn’t exist and both kids and adults with jobs outside the home brought their lunch from home.
Interesting data point. I do wonder if there is a difference between growing up in a major city vs. growing up in smaller cities or suburbs that was more pronounced back then in regards to availability of different ingredients. Also, probably worth considering that the period from 1945 to 1965 is the exact time when a lot of different ethnic foods not previously available to people (outside the ethnic neighborhood) started becoming more popular and widely available. Good article about this regards to pizza. https://www.seriouseats.com/a-slice-of-heaven-a-history-of-pizza-in-america
May in fact be worth differentiating between the world in 1947 and the world in 1967. Feel like a good comparison today is with Thai restaurants. When I was a kid I remember it being quite difficult to find real Thai places (as opposed to Chinese places masquerading as Thai places) outside of major metros. Nowadays Thai restaurants are pretty ubiquitous everywhere (despite what David Brooks tells you).
My dad still remembers eating his first piece of pizza. He was at the Seattle's World's Fair Italian booth and they had ordered spaghetti and they waiter brought pizza by mistake. They thought it was a free starter and ate and he said he was utterly blown away. My parents are in their late 70s and Progressive. If asked to make a short list what is better today than when they were kids they would definitely talk about civil rights for POC, women and LGBTQ first but if they were asked to make a long list at least half of it would be about being able to get great food from around the world and not having to eat ambroise salad. They both also grew up poor and are not poor anymore and they like that too. They still do weird cheap stuff like bargain hunting for groceries and buying stuff at garage sales for the thrill of the bargin that clearly comes from old habits but they don't have don't seem to have any nostalgia for the political economy of their youth -- just the music.
Fake news. Every immigrant culture knows how to cook good dishes out of extremely humble ingredients. 1950s bland jello-everything culture was aspirational and wannabe posh.
Gross recipes from the 50’s have nothing on what passes for cooking on TikTok (except for Jacques Pepin, whose short videos can make you fall in love with simple but classic French recipes for quick meals).
Seriously, food is one of the biggest advancements we've made over the past century. In this aspect it's undeniable that the best time is here and now.
I agree. I’m 61, and young people often say that my generation ruined it for them. And these guys go on bachelor parties to Las Vegas and Cancun. Those places were outer space to me and my set. We got two weeks of vacation - Period. They drink craft beer, eat all varieties of ethnic food, live in bigger and better homes, and whine about it.
I want to point out that most are not this way. It’s just a whiny minority.
Sadly, jobs with paid vacation are still much rarer than they should be. At least as of last year my state requires that every employee get an bare minimum of paid sick leave, but that also isn't true most places in the US. So that is why people go to work with COVID.
I just changed jobs for a promotion a few months ago but yeah this time my position came with a contractual four weeks of paid vacation. Really nice upgrade, in theory, even though actually taking that much time is, hmm, discouraging to career advancement.
You're not wrong, but I will note that this is a very different complaint than the one the article is talking about. It is possible (but debatable) that the choices the generations around your age made (see: the zoning laws Matt is always writing about) are a central reason things haven't been getting better faster.
Probably the most glaring examples I see of this is when you see people complaining about pickup truck prices. People will go out and drop $80k on an F-150 more luxurious than the back of a Benz limo from the 1990s and complain about how you can’t get a decent truck for less because of all the regulations. This despite not even looking at the $25,000 Ford Maverick that is still better in every way than the old trucks they are nostalgic for.
As a guy who is currently complaining about truck prices, a big part of the problem is those luxury features. Needless infotainment centers are the most obvious complaint. The ballooning size and 'fluffyness' of the body is another. Quad cabs and shorter beds being standard. The new Tacomas are as big as a Tundra from 8 years ago. I don't know anyone who complains about' the regulations'. Is the complaint about CAFE or crash standards? I would be interested to hear an example of what you mean.
The Maverick just came up in a meeting at work as an option for a utility truck, so we looked at the specs. 260 Max HP? It weighs 3600lbs! 2000 lb. towing? No 4WD?
It does nothing better than an old square body except MPG and safety features. It's not a decent truck, it's a huge sedan with a bed.
Overlap with your comment downthread about wanting to emulate the aesthetics of a working class lifestyle without the commensurate utility. People in Dallas (and the American South generally) don't actually need pickup trucks for utility, they just want to be driving a pickup. "A huge sedan with a bed" is arguably exactly perfectly targeted to a well-heeled portion of the market who want something that's nominally a truck on the outside but that they also actually use as a daily driver (hence quad cabs).
Musashi said "It is bad when one thing becomes two".
I'm going to channel a bit of FrigidWind and say that we need more gatekeeping assholes. I like a good truck. I'm looking at buying a good truck. But I drive a 15 year old Civic on the daily, and the truck is going to be something like a 1996 Toyota T100 or an early 2000s Tacoma because I need it to be small enough to get on class 4 roads, it's going to get scratched up, I'm going to put my dirty gloves on the dash to dry out, and I'm never going to tow anything bigger than a canoe. I have little patience for full size trucks for daily personal use. It's ret.....diculous.
Yeah. We can’t afford to switch out our cars bc we own them outright, but if I had my druthers we would have an electric car for my husband’s commute and a truck that I could use since all I go is to the store, but that we could use for dump runs and to pull a camper
1) The vast majority of truck users have no need for either 4-wheel drive or to tow anything. They might need something a little more beefy if they have 2000lb of plumbing supplies to haul around.
2) They could get a base F-150 for $35,000k.
3) The complaints about regulations are a constant anytime the subject comes up, which almost invariably involves people pointing to very stripped down small trucks overseas. And those trucks almost always have tiny-low powered engines, essentially no towing capability, etc.
The bottom line is that the $80,000 F-150 exists because people want to run their luxury vehicle purchases on the corporate books to game the tax code and don’t actually want cheap trucks, which are readily available.
I think we generally agree. Most truck owners don't actually need or use the features that make a truck different than a crossover SUV. And while the luxury features are in theory optional, I'm looking at new dealer stock right now and there isn't a bare bones option on two of the three dealer sites near me, with low end advertised prices starting around 50k.
I guess what bothered me about your comment was the idea that the Maverick is anything like a replacement for a 70s-90s pickup. Maybe for a circa 90 Toyota 22r, but it's nothing like a F150, let alone better in every way.
I've read theories that middle class people started dressing in athletic wear in the 70s and 80s because it was a symbol of the leisure class. I think part of the reaction you notice is more about taking care with your appearance than 'dressing up', but we kind of conflate the two, especially if you're going to have your picture taken you probably would have fixed yourself up.
I also notice a lot of Left counter culture trying to emulate working class style without really getting any of the details right. Like, they will wear Doc martens because that's what *used* to be a work boot, instead of wearing what a worker wears today (Redwing, Chippewa, Carolina etc.), probably because that kind of worker is left coded in their memory and today's work boot guy is right coded. It seems that the revolutionaries are locked into a romance with that time period as well. Strong unions, lots of protests and civil rights activism. I can't really fault them for that, but it does seem to ignore some of the gains that have been made as well.
Interestingly, Carhartt is becoming a brand I see in young urban style more and more, a la Timberland in the 90s.
The trouble with dressing up is that there's an actual-factual tradeoff in convenience and comfort (and in some instances utility. Zippers are pretty much strictly better than buttons on any non-aesthetic axis) that's so acute that IMO there's more mileage to be gotten out of making athletic wear look nice than on trying to but the toothpaste back in the tube on formal clothing. Also, of course, the ease and expense in money and time of washing vs. drycleaning.
Whenever I wear a suit in the summer my mind immediately goes to "This is a terrible idea on every conceivable level. Why has this been tolerated for so long? Did people in the past just not sweat and now this tradition hangs on as an atavistic exercise in masochism?"
The big advantage of buttons over zippers is that they are much easier to repair. If you lose a button, you can just sew a new one on. Even if you're not much at seqing, you can do that in a few minutes. If you lose a couple of teeth from a zipper, you have to unpick the whole zipper and sew a new one in, which is a lot of work (the unpicking will take hours). The only repairable fault with a zipper is if the pull tag comes off the slider - you can get replacement pull tags.
The modern era doesn't repair clothes, though, which would explain why people don't care.
As for a suit: you shouldn't wear a heavy wool suit in summer; you should be wearing either a linen suit or a cotton suit, both of which will have significant internal air circulation and can stay cool. If you're somewhere actually tropical, though, then there's a reason that Bermuda shorts were invented.
The problem is that a nineteenth century summer suit was a handcut, fitted item, made from a very light, breathable fabric, and shaped to have internal air circulation to keep you cool, and a modern suit is an off-the-peg design and probably has a ton of polyester in it. If it's tight anywhere, that blocks the internal air circulation there, while polyester isn't really breathable and it will retain heat and sweat.
Indeed - but when we're comparing styles of clothes designed to be tailored to styles designed to be worn off the peg, then it's hardly surprising that the off-the-peg version of the style designed to be tailored is going to suffer by comparison.
Just for an example, a traditional shirt is made from a woven fabric, and any part of the shirt that doesn't fit perfectly will be tight or loose or short or long. A T-shirt or a polo shirt is made from a knitted fabric, which has more natural give or stretch and a generic-shaped off-the-peg T-shirt will fit much better than a traditional shirt.
Also, my mother used to sew clothes herself - she bought fabric and cut to patterns and sewed it. As soon as she could afford to just buy clothes, she did, as it's an enormous amount of work.
At one time, seersucker suits were pretty common in the summer but not considered suitable in some more formal settings. In the last 30 years or so, a combination of air-conditioning in homes, vehicles and most workplaces probably reduced demand for cotton or linen suits. I always wore a very light weight wool suit, which wasn’t too bad, although I will sweat through anything if it’s hot and humid enough.
Linen is super wrinkly, which is surely part of why it's pretty rarely used for men's suits these days (air conditioning being another). More commonly, if you want a warm-weather appropriate suit, you would get one made with a "tropical weight" wool.
Man, there's a very famous drystone waller named Andrew Louden who still dresses in the old style, which is to say suit and vest with an apron for protection. It kinda makes sense because I'm the UK the weather calls for it, but watching him sweat in the sun in a New England summer is pretty funny. But if you look at photos, the old field stone wallers used to dress this way every day!
I think manufacturing improvements get the credit because we can now mass produce clothing in different shapes and textiles (with zippers!) so your casual wear doesn't have to be the same general shape as your business wear. And cultural standards have moved so that showing more skin is acceptable. My grandfather didn't like that my dad took his shirt off to split wood, for instance. He thought *that* was atavistic!
WRT to wearing heavy, old-fashioned clothing in the summer and showing skin, I always wondered why people in old western movies wore heavy clothing with long sleeves and long pants; surely shorts and a t-shirt would be more pleasant! It wasn't until I spent time in the desert that I realized that, without sunblock, you either cover your skin with high UPF clothing or you get burnt to a crisp (and can get skin cancer).
This is less of an issue in New England, but even there, if you're out in a field all day without skin-covering clothing or sunblock, you may well regret it (altho you can get away with it for longer periods of time in New England than you can in the desert).
In short, I think that the cultural standard of not showing skin had a practical basis. Chesterton strikes again!
I think I may have accidentally convinced myself in this thread that "Star Trek" uniforms are the best approach to combining professional standards for dress wear with something that actually accommodates a need for physical motion beyond "walking slowly in a cold climate."
Modern suiting of the type that the average person would own or come into contact with is vastly worse than old suiting, actually!
If you’re interested, I can get more into it (I helped in the process of creating a suit from the ground up a couple years ago) but this isn’t a situation that’s as cut-and-dried as other comparisons with older time periods.
I feel like the Doc Martens resurgence is just coupled with all things 90s style coming back and we wore them back then from the British punk scene. So that at least makes sense to me.
That makes sense, I remember the same things, I wore them too for mostly the same reasons. I remember when Docs started being shitty and expensive at the same time and I just wore combat boots. But it's a nesting doll of cultural memory and reference at this point.
Huh, yeah that is a pretty interesting point of comparison. When the average American today is going out in public wearing pajama pants and crocs, but with a $1000 computer in their pocket, I guess we have some pretty knee-jerk assumptions about wealth.
It's amazing and pretty insidious, the amount of lifestyle creep that has accumulated in the 21st century. Growing up, we never ate out, didn't pay for cable tv or internet (which wasn't a thing ofc), had one family computer and one tv, one 10+ year old car. But we were very solidly middle class.
Houses are not "better quality." Our first house was a 1949 cape and that house was small, but it had beautiful custom built inside and solid wood paneling. It was square and indestructible. Our current house was built in the late 90s and is far lower quality (we tried to find another 50s house in our new town but couldn't). Houses today are cheaply built and have little character. Often the floors aren't even real wood but that vinyl wood appearance stuff.
Have all our gadgets really improved our lives, or gave some possibly deteriorated our cognitive, physical, and social skills?
And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?
And the massive deterioration in family life, community bonds, mental health, the quality of everything from appliances to clothing to educational institutions and media and arts and entertainment has become intolerable to the point where it's just easier to watch old shows and opt out of modern institutions to the degree that it is possible.
Housing quality is survivor bias I think. A lot of crap housing was built in the past but it didn’t last. The only stuff that still exists was the high quality stuff. But even the “poorly built” stuff of today has way better electrical and plumbing just because the codes are so much tighter.
I think that you are correct, having grown up in a place chock full of 100+ year old houses. The bones are usually very well built, with larger beams, and thicker boards, but the foundations could be poorly laid stone with rotting mortar, and trying to electrify and insulate these houses is tremendously expensive.
I will say that finish carpentry has clearly suffered from Baumels Cost Disease, and it's much less likely that a median modern home will have anything like craftsmanship applied to the interior. People buy factory built cabinets, there's little to no work put into trim in living spaces, furniture is often plastic. Most rooms are painted drywall, which is uninspired to say the least.
But they function fine! Modern window and door systems are amazing! Stick framed houses are easy to insulate, wire and plumb! Lots of heating and HVAC options! Whatever shape table and chair you want!
So I get that people itch for beauty and quality, and it's somewhat hard to get on a middle income, but you can have a really fine place to live by any historical standard.
Very true. I recently moved from Atlanta to NYC. Atlanta’s housing stock is significantly newer than New York’s - and where this most clearly manifests itself is HVAC. Window AC units are RARE in Atlanta because almost everyone has central - even the very low end apartment complexes. So yeah, beautiful finish carpentry is nice and all, but what you are going to really appreciate in your daily life is quality HVAC and plenty of electrical outlets everywhere.
It’s why we need to stop using Baumol’s as an excuse and import cheap ass temporary labor from dirt poor countries, house them in barracks, and pay them minimum wage
"I will say that finish carpentry has clearly suffered from Baumels Cost Disease, and it's much less likely that a median modern home will have anything like craftsmanship applied to the interior."
I still think there's some selection bias here. I have a 100+ year old house, but the builders were clearly looking to cut costs. I'm pretty sure that the right angle was invented prior to the construction of this house, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the trim! (And all of the strike plates for interior doors were installed at the wrong height --- sometimes comically so.) Small (cheaper) old houses in the neighborhood sometimes suffer from the same non-euclidean geometry, so it's not a one-off. The bigger houses are more likely to have right angles.
Your house was probably built before a lot of improvements in lumber treatment and processing was common, and settlement of the foundation, inevitable over 100 years, is often the cause for angles to come out of true. Striker plates were probably handfitted to non standard doors, and were correct until the door was replaced. Larger houses have more structural tie-in, and probably cost more and commanded the services of better builders, so it's not surprising that they have aged better. Probably better maintenance over the years for the same reasons. But yeah, survivorship bias absolutely contributes to people thinking "they don't make em like that any more".
But that section of my comment was directed at things like crown moulding, base boards, chair rails, cabinets, custom doors, railings and stair treads. That's what I mean by finish carpentry.
Trim is finish carpentry, and while settling is often the cause of things to be a bit out of alignment, settling is not the cause of the trim on the left side of a door being 3/4" taller than the trim on the right side of the door (while the floor is level and the plaster uncracked!). Likewise, settling didn't cause a strike plate to be 3" from where it should be (in the most extreme case) when paired with an original door. Nor does settling cause a house to be built without a sill plate (on top of an uncracked poured concrete foundation) or a number of other obvious hallmarks of shoddy craftsmanship.
AIUI certain classes of high quality wood used in housing construction in the past are also difficult to impossible to obtain these days because they require old-growth forest growing conditions and thus can only be economically logged once, so older homes really may just have better bones than newer ones because they're using better materials no longer available. No expert on it though (nor am I trying to take a potshot at sustainable logging practices.).
Yep, the houses in my city built in the 40s-60s almost all have this sort of narrow board solid oak hardwood floors that are almost impossible to even find today, and are murderously expensive if you can.
Probably true, and also probably true that those woods wouldn't be that much better in a conventionally built house in 2024. If you want to timber frame or something, you can still find large hardwood timber for that, but it's either reclaimed stuff from old farms and barns, or you have to get it from small artisanal mills because there's no commercial scale demand. This isn't on the face a bad thing, but the demand for fast growing conifer plantations is probably a bad thing in the long run.
I think this is all part of the trend of rising wages making things that require craftsmanship or even just touch labor a lot more expensive than they used to be.
Yes as someone who has been house hunting - old homes are either really nice in historical neighborhoods and probably not meant for the middle class OR tons of homes pumped out for the postwar boom that now have tons of issues
Thanks to building restrictions, you can still get a workman’s special in the Bay Area for anywhere between $500k and $2M. They sucked then, they suck now, and in both times people buy them because of a housing shortage. At least in the ‘40s and ‘50s it was a shortage caused by transitioning off the wartime economy.
I once owned a rowhouse in Delaware that was like a living museum of wiring standards: Romex, BX armored, knob and tube. The oldest stratum was pre-electric: literal gas-lighting, where the conduits had not been removed, just dummied off and disconnected from the natural gas.
Horrible. I am not nostalgic for old wiring. Or old plumbing.
The law firm that I worked at early in my career did a lot of fire subrogation claims. I remember one of the other attorneys seeing the knob and tube wiring in our common laundry room and telling me it was a fire waiting to happen. Those guys tended to be paranoid so I just rolled my eyes. Our laundry room caught fire a few months later. No one was hurt. When I bought my house, the knob and tube was the first thing to go.
My friends family owns a huge 120+ year old house that was an inn, and then a girls summer camp. It's been in the family for generations and they still summer there. But it's still, *STILL* got knob and tube staples in under the floorboards, one central wood stove for heat, and I didn't want to know about the plumbing. We don't drink the water.
The most recent electrical upgrades circa 80s ran new wires along the same staples on the beams and replaced the 50s era outlets in the same spots because the walls are plaster and lath.
1. Housing is absolutely higher quality today than in the 50s. Most housing from then didn’t have plumbing and was poorly electrified. Now building codes require a much higher standard of housing with things like insulation, quality plumbing and electrical and a robustness to fire and natural disasters. That is not to say all housing today is better than all housing from the 50s, but the average house today is absolutely and u questionably better. It is likely only the best housing from the 50s survived 70 years so your probably falling victim to survivorship bias. Similarly it sounds like you might’ve bought a particularly bad modern house.
2. Maybe you could argue the internet/smart phones have some downsides but are you seriously claiming you’d prefer to live without a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, fridge or any other modern convenience? That would mean spending 5x as long doing basic household chores, not to mention much more manual effort. I am also certain you wouldn’t enjoy having only a singular and spectacularly crappy 50s care instead of a modern SUV. With regards to the internet and smartphones I’d not you can make a choice not to use these things or to moderate. For those of us who use these tools sensibly - having access to the combined knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips is of immense value.
3. There are a number of reasons such issues have increased:
-people in the 50s often didn’t live long enough to get cancer. Cancer is what kills you when other things (crime, war, disease) don’t. It’s a sign of our success.
-Access to food is much wider now. Obesity is a problem for societies so rich overconsumption is an option. Less obesity in the 50s was a reflection of good scarcity and poverty.
-you could go to say whole foods and buy a much wider variety and higher quality set of produce than anything available in the 50s and cheaper. People forget how much people are canned and processed food back then. Some people still do that - but it’s easy not to!
4. Again a lot of these things are just a function of more choice. Fast fashion provides clothes at unbelievably low price points allowing people who otherwise would go without access to clothes. We still make high quality stuff though. You can buy high quality clothes once and wear it for life if you prefer (I do!). There’s plenty of “shit” art now (at least in my opinion), but there’s also plenty of great stuff I love - plus easier access to all the old art that’s been made.
Community, family life etc are what you make of it. You can opt into communities that do things the way you want.
I wonder how much of mental health is a combo of more openness about problems that always existed + social media driven perceptions it’s fashionable to have some kinds of mental illness.
>And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?
This one, at least, is easy. Food is both tastier and cheaper, which is why people are eating more of it. Overeating is very bad for you. Obesity is not a consequence of "unhealthy" food, it is not a consequence of low food standards, it is not a consequence of some kind of chemical or whatever. Obesity is and always is a direct consequence of eating too much, which is something you do in an era where both the quality and quantity of food available is rising.
"Obesity is not a consequence of "unhealthy" food, it is not a consequence of low food standards"
I'm at least sympathetic to the argument that the macro nutrient composition of some fast food items could be considered "low quality" (e.g., high calorie, low fat, low GI) in a way that didn't exist back in the 1950s. Also ... sodas. While not a modern invention - just look at the growth rate of PepsiCo...
We’re blind to the food industry’s development of processed foods, which are literally designed to be addicting. I think sweetness is itself something that we crave to increase, so it’s been easy to make sodas addicting. We don’t notice the ways the food industry is exploiting us partly because we’ve been frogs in the pot over time, and partly because it affects the less-privileged more severely than most of us. We (at least those of us who prepare food for ourselves and others) can afford to pour over labels until we find tasty, less-addicting, more healthy and more varied food that is still convenient to prepare. Some here eat what others put on the table and in the pantry.
I think it’s also a matter of reading more and possessing a degree of self-reflection that might come from education: whenever I find myself gaining weight I survey all the information out there and try things out until something works. (And yes, this often includes spending more money for food.) I refuse to blame people whose lifestyles I can never understand for lacking self-discipline and eating too much. Most of us have never had to sustain long days of physical labor on cheap food from food carts, for example, perhaps followed by enough beers to deaden the aches, pains and fatigue until the next day.
Nevertheless, my insights are based on personal experience. First, many years ago I found myself adding more and more sugar to my coffee until I finally noticed this and just went back to drinking it black. Second, once upon a time I came across a version of Cheez-it called “Snap’d” that I couldn’t quit eating until the box was gone. I never bought a second box and went back to regular Cheez-it, which is only mildly addicting when I want comfort food. Underlying all of it is my early rebellion against Lay’s advertising slogan “bet you can’t eat just one.” This inspired me to train myself to be able to yes, only eat just one. If my pants still fit (kind of) it may be due only to coming into the world with a contrarian nature.
Very good point, I'm really on the Michael Pollen train here. I like his food rule, that if your Grandma can't recognize what the food is (due to it's incredibly processed nature, not cuisine unfamiliarity) then it's best not to eat it.
For me it was the 'extra toasty' ones. Who knew baking them for a few extra minutes would take them from, perfectly ok, to, I almost literally can't stop eating these things?
I'm not saying soda is the main driver of current obesity - but it's a major difference in diet vs. the 50s and while soda consumption has dropped just look at PepsiCo's growth rate. They just expanded into other sugar based drinks.
My point was that we've clearly started consuming fewer of the completely empty calories we did not too long ago without much difference in weight. It's just general overconsumption
Even *I* wasn't around in the 1950s, but in the 70s/80s my not-especially-health-conscious parents didn't buy soda to keep around the house. Fast food and junk like french bread pizzas were definitely a thing - my mom owned a small business and hated cooking - but portions were much smaller.
Yes they are, unless the old houses you think are superior have had thousands in maintenance and updates plowed into them over the years. If you buy a house today with 1952's heating or AC (usually nonexistent) or insulation or electrical wiring (inadequate)...well, you know where I'm going with this: if you buy a house built 70 years ago but upgraded and fit for today's market, you're not *really* buying a 1954 house.
Houses were much smaller then, too, and, while it may not matter to you personally, some people find "adequate space" a very important attribute of quality.
I live in a 1200 square foot craftsman bungalow with my two other family members. I also run a five person business out of it. It is lovely with built in woodwork and charm. All our clients remark on its charm. It also has zero closets. That is partly our fault because we converted a small closet into a powder room to have a second bathroom. We have wardrobe cabinets and dressers for clothing and that is it. I love my house but I haven't seen a full size closet at a friends place that hasn't made me drool.
On the community front, remember that the 50s were the era of "The Feminine Mystique." A lot of that community was built off of women being shut up in the house to a greater extent than their mothers and grandmothers had been, whom had often worked outside the house.
"If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?"
Some of this is likely better measurements of public health issues. Some of this is farm subsidies for corn making it too cheap to put extra sugar where it doesn't belong. Some of it might be that we are exposed to chemicals (flame retardants) on a much higher basis before that do save lives, but also have seem to cause people to have trouble shedding fat.
These things can all be true, while it also being true that the exposure of the average American to cuisines from India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, etc. is much better than in the past.
Lol. This absolutely isn’t true. For example, older houses were often built with cheap aluminum wiring-a fire hazard that isn’t even possible now.
Or even somethings people perceive as better/more durable are objectively worse. An example is cast iron pipes, which start failing in 40-60 years. Which is essentially now for the period it was commonly used.
There were lots of cheap, poorly constructed homes in the 1950s-1980s. They are falling apart.
I live in a 1961, straight middle-class of the era, home. Sure, custom wood trim was cheaper then. In general "back in the day" (any day) labor was cheap and stuff was expensive, now it's reversed. However, the mid-century overall crap materials and code-standards have cost me $100k's to bring up to modern standards. It still lacks good exterior wall insulation. It is in a good location and has a nice large lot (which is why we live there). The original oak floor is nice, but squeaky (poor quality sub floor!)
Examples: poorly insulated walls, small/leaky windows, ungrounded electrical, funky plumbing, lower ceilings, useless attic, lack of climate controlled storage space, heat via wood-burning fireplace? Ugh. (It is NC, but still, it was colder 60 years ago!)
"And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?"
I don't have data but my sense is the massive death rate of the wars creates some population skewing for the cancer rates over time. I'm with you on heart disease and obesity. Both are embarrassing stats for us right now.
My house was built in 1930. The original stuff was in good shape. Repairs and improvements likely done in the 1950s are good. The stuff done in the 1970s is complete crap. Luckily, we seem to be going back to better quality now. But things like hardwood just aren't available anymore.
I think the main thing people miss is the conformity and sense of collective progress. That's gone. The boomer liberal adoration of John F Kennedy is a great example of a way people can miss the aesthetic of the 50s without explicitly calling it that. Yes, there's the culture. The vast majority of people had larger extended family networks and fathers in their households, often for better and sometimes for worse. Deaths to fentanyl were much lower, and health expectancy was mostly going up because better food nutrients, antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitation technologies were transforming people's life expectancy.
But it was also liberating. Automobiles were regularly used by a massive middle class that could regularly dodge social authority of the small town whenever they felt like it. The car would put the sexual revolution on steroids even as people buttoned up and settled down compared to the 40s. The enormous household toil of cleaning and washing was now both motorized and available to most people, like smartphones. People (ex-military white men) were entering college en masse by the tens of millions for the first time to become more educated. Segregation, which had become de jure since the end of Reconstruction, was starting to fall apart as a richer South received more attention and legal pressure by a black middle class, including those returning from serving in France and living in Northern cities.
Most importantly to people, there was a clear mass culture. You tuned into a handful of TV shows and you'd get the news about the latest threats by the Soviets with everyone else. You might have opposed entering WW2 until Japan or been skeptical of NATO like Bob Taft (R-OH), but that handsome Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. really knows how to hand it to the commies in the UN delegation. The country made sense, and enormous new technologies were being deployed at scales never seen before. Congress ordered new housing, it was built. It ordered new highways, they were built. It all happened and it was clearly getting better even if things weren't always good.
The 50s are basically a mix of what people adore about the actor Reagan and the wartime leader FDR. They will come back again, as all things do, but for now we are in the 1910s-20s. A time of uncertain war abroad and global political economy shifts. Strange new ideas and fragmented men. Eccentric new fortunes manipulating press outlets and allying with politicians for a cut. Race riots, ethnic machines and favors in politics. Lots of anti-social behaviors emerging in our cities, foreign languages everywhere. We have been here before. We are here again.
Matt's done a great job repeatedly observing that this is wrong from a factual standpoint of wealth. But every time I see versions of this meme I just viscerally want to see the blatant sexism in it called out.
Yes, in major metro areas LOTS of young people would gladly buy a small house without a garage - like we did in 2004 near DC. It definitely would have been more affordable in the 70s-90s, so maybe that’s where the nostalgia belongs.
Can you imagine: mobilizing children and collecting dimes in order to mass vaccinate the entire country?! This is the past that conservatives want to go back to?
I live in a house that looks pretty much like the one in the picture. 1,000 square feet. no garage. Given the increase in housing costs in my area, it would now sell for more than $1 million. Definitely beyond the purchasing power of any single wage worker in the manufacturing sector. But much to Matt's point, that is in part because of housing regulations. Our area just got rezoned from single family homes to being able to have at least three units (four on a lot my size.) Lots of less well maintained homes are being sold and torn down and having three multi-story units with collective square footage of at least 6,000 and one of them is usually an ADU with about $1,200 square feet. They aren't sold separately but they rent for a hell of a lot less than a $1 million house would. So part of why no one with one middle class income can buy a house "like" mine now is that we have used zoning to make them unaffordable. But at the same time, a family of three living in 1,000 square foot used to be typical and would not seem pretty small to most people in most areas. Expectations about housing size have changed a lot. When we make repairs in can be hard to find appliances or plumbing fixtures that actually fit our spaces anymore and ofter have to pay more to get European or Japanese versions that come smaller. Lot of my parents friends grew up in similar sized homes but can't imagine how we live in one. It's a weird collective mind shift.
Most of the out-of-control cost of housing is land. It’s true that square footage and amenities have also improved! But appliances cost, like, a few thousand dollars. They didn’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars better since 2019.
My boomer parents had much less off-season produce available when they were growing up. Normal people were not going to get fresh strawberries in January because you would have had to grow them in a greenhouse or fly them in from Florida and either was expensive. Off season lettuce was... iceberg lettuce. They ate a lot of canned fruit and vegetables. I'm very glad that I can get fresh sugar snap peas at my local grocery store for $4.
Try shifting the comparison from the 1950s to 1964-69. With a political "consensus," integration was the law of the land and "Skin color doesn't matter" was the watchword. People were experimenting with sexuality and psychedelics; "gender identity" was becoming blurred (rather than promoted). We moved from a cramped 3-room apartment to a modest ranch house on a quarter-acre (yes, with a washer and dryer), 10 minutes' drive from the Walt Whitman Mall.
As I lament to my cat these days -- "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
Nostalgia politics is not a dead end: it's a way to get things done.
1) appeal to nostalgia
2) win elections
3) drain the US Treasury into the pockets of rich people
4) profit!!!
Republicans are the opposite of the underpants gnomes. They always know what step 3 is, and it is always "drain the US Treasury into the pockets of rich people." Every election is a heist movie where a plucky band of billionaires sets out to rob Fort Knox. And nostalgia helps them do it.
Political dead end? That's a better description for high-minded wonkery. If it gets votes, it's not a political dead end. If it doesn't get votes, it is.
I get a sense that resentment about feminism is the main driver this stuff, am I wrong about that? Like in the tweet above, you can spin a story about the housing market and racial politics that could be relevant there, but the tweet is pretty clearly about the wife working at home as much as economics.
The explicit references in the tweet to "mass immigration [and] widespread racial . . . activism" suggest there's also a fairly heavy racist component to me, and I'm someone who finds most accusations of racism these days to be overblown or based on mischaracterizations of what was actually said.
You are right, though, to mention feminism. My impression, actually, is that rage over changes wrought by feminism are responsible for a much larger share of male resentment and conservative policy positions over the last half century than is usually acknowledged.
I think this is true, but a little bit of just being the opposite side of the same coin. There are a lot of people that believe the reason women work is that they are forced into it by the declining real incomes of their husbands. And they also kind of believe that the declining real incomes of their husbands comes in part from more women working, resulting in an oversupply of laborers.
There’s a lot wrong with these beliefs. But for some they might be economically focused, just misinformed in a lot of ways.
>Political dead end? That's a better description for high-minded wonkery. If it gets votes, it's not a political dead end. If it doesn't get votes, it is.
And what we have seen across the world is that the public often does not course correct away from reactionary nostalgia politics when those politics fail to deliver. Instead there is a vicious cycle of various liberal and pro-growth forces banding together to resist reaction, which leads the reactionary to say 'the reason things suck worse now is because of those guys, that's why you need to give me more power' and then that cycle keeps flying until things finally get so bad that you can coherently run a grand coalition of every element of the political spectrum on "anti-that-guy-ism" (or alternately, until that person is able to chip away enough at institutions and democratic character to cement dictatorship). See: Poland, Hungary, Argentina, etc.
Fortunately, Donald Trump will be dead by 2030 and has no heir apparent, so at least there's that.
Maybe in the primary, but I'm not convinced it's the best way to win voters in the general. But I guess we'll all found out on this season of American politics!
So in some sense, they'll be appealing to the 1980s, when a big slice of Baby Boomers/Gen X was in early adulthood. There are simply not many votes to be had in appealing to Biden or my grandfather's teenage years.
In quite literal terms, they'll be appealing to 2019, when wages had steadily grown for many years in a row and the world had less foreign policy chaos going on. They'll say yes the news was full of crazy domestic stuff, but that's basically always true now.
Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, defunded UNRWA, and assassinated General Soleimani! His term didn't have *less* foreign policy chaos; Americans just cared less about it (and can go back to caring less any time they please).
What was Iran going to do, nuke America in retaliation? They called Trump and asked him to move soldiers so they didn't hit anyone with the missile volley they sent to save face. He completely called their bluff.
Biden by contrast, deliberately soured relations with Saudi Arabia because his staffers are obsessed with creating a multipolar Middle East between them and Iran no matter the facts or changing situation. It's like Merkel convinced Ukraine will be fine and soon in EU markets in 2015, Putin literally invaded and it didn't change her mind. She was already set in her ways no matter what.
The 1980s is also the time that Donald Trump was a fixture in the newspapers, first for being a billionaire and then for being a negative billionaire and then whatever else he did!
One reason Biden is in trouble on the economy issue is his political coalition really does believe it's worth increasing inflation a little if it's to satisfy interest groups through cash transfers or other costly demand-side stimulus. It's hard to be something that you're not, but then politics is all about the art of the possible.
And YOU are the problem, Kade. If you don’t understand that then you are in an echo chamber. This is our problem in America. We have these two echo chambers in which most of the left and right are stuck. They are living in two false realities. And if I believed as they do I’d probably be a nut too. Fortunately those are not the realities. You are obviously a leftist. Fine. But do you read right wing opinion editorials? If not you should. I’m right wing, but I read Yglesias and subscribe to The Atlantic. These people are not fools even though I think they are ultimately wrong. And by testing myself against them I sharpen my arguments and abandon some of my more hastily donned opinions. I wish you would too.
I am legitimately not a leftist, which refers to socialists and progressives who are frankly a lot more likely to share your apparent skepticism of US national security policy.
I'm an old school liberal internationalist which is somewhat unfashionable these days but is still approximately as correct as it was in the 90s.
I genuinely do not know what the allegation you are putting forward is. Do you believe that American support for Ukraine is based on a desire to enrich American defense contractors? I think that's just completely false and conspiratorial. America is supporting Ukraine because we legitimately believe that the norms and structures of the liberal order are good for America and worth upholding. I understand rightists like Tucker or apparently yourself are very skeptical of this idea on the merits, which is fair enough, but this is the first time I am hearing someone accuse Democrats of holding this opinion insincerely to enrich the wealthy.
I do not think the Ukraine policy (which I support) is simply to enrich defense contractors. I do believe that it is happening, though. You see, you have read into my opinions that which is not there and was never expressed. You are stereo-typing. Perhaps I am too. In fact, your description of yourself in your second paragraph could be my description of myself.
It would be helpful if you would take a moment to explain Ukraine funding, China graft, Silicon Valley grifting, etc. What exactly do you mean by those words?
Are you aware that huge amounts of the Ukraine funding is unaccounted for? When money is unaccounted for it has been stolen most of the time. Surely you are aware of the huge payments the Biden family has gotten from Chinese businesses and Ukranian ones. The art sales of Hunter originals? Bankman-Frieds connections?
I'm not necessarily aware of all of this. What precisely is the argument? That there is endemic corruption on aid to Ukraine, and that the Biden extended family is receiving corrupt money from Chinese and Ukrainian businesses? That Democratic donors/office holders were invested/involved with Bankman-Fried? I'd first want to quantify/describe the alleged connections, then ask what the implications of that are. Suppose I grant that all of what you say is true and involves significant sums. What do you think should follow from that?
Please keep in mind that I was answering someone who was alleging that Republicans are all about enriching themselves. I'm just pointing out that human nature doesn't slink on one side and preen on the other side of the political divide.
From a logical perspective, you haven't countered the claim that Republicans are all about enriching themselves. Saying Democratic politicians may be involved in corruption says nothing about the state of corruption for Republicans. Is your point that many actors are corrupt, so that one must choose who to support on other factors? I'm still not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Ugh disqus is/was the worst. I was happy when Wonkette finally moved to substack and I could comment without logging in through a social media or Google account.
You can create a Disqus account, that's what I did.
There are some things that I don't like, but advantages that it has over Substack is that it allows you to hyperlink and do basic text transformations, and that it gives a nice "# new comments above/below" banner on the top and bottom of the screens that you can click to jump to new comments. Here on Substack I have to kludge my way to a workaround by doing a Ctrl+F for "new_repl", except that the underscore is replaced with a space, so that this comment doesn't picked up in that search.
I remember tutoring a bunch of 16-year-olds for the SAT around 2015, when I was in my 30s, and them talking about how old-school hip-hop was so much better than what was out now, and I was like, *I’m* supposed to be telling *you* that!
I'm no music snob, but I think there genuinely are times in which contemporary music just isn't as compelling as past periods, even among the demographics at whom contemporary music is targeted. https://xkcd.com/339/
The latter half of the aughts in particular (what might be called the heyday of the Black-Eyed Peas) was both a time when I was reasonably aware of hit music (and not an old fogey) and yet also of the opinion that it overwhelmingly sucked compared to, like, the previous fifteen years.
I don't know who said it - maybe Rick Ruben - but a lot of music is made to the drugs of the era and that to enjoy the music you really need to be on the drugs too. Obviously the 60s/70s psychedelics fits this. Cocaine in the 80s. Alcohol maps to grunge. Their point was all the mumble rap is really made for people on downers (e.g., oxy, ketamine, etc.) -- and if you're not on downers you won't *get* it. It was interesting.
EDIT: Also fully agree there was period where commercial pop dominated and well ... that just sucked.
Sure, I agree with that. It's actually funny you linked an XKCD because Randall Munroe is someone who normally scoffs at the idea that the past could *ever* be better in any respect than the present. Examples off the top of my head (why do I know so many off the top of my head??):
I just gave a college-age son of a good friend my old LPs. He was particularly ecstatic to find I had Steely Dan's Gaucho (1980). And he and his friends especially enjoy listening to these albums on vinyl.
This is why I'm not worried long-term about seemingly overwhelming phenomena like TikTok. Young people will always rebel and move on and they will do so in ways that may surprise, like loving ~50 year old albums and using old technology for that enjoyment.
One of the young staff guys at my gym plays all the alternative-metal hits I used to listen to on the radio at my pizza joint dishwashing job in high school, and it just amazes me that someone his age can have SUCH a command of early-2000's music. Also keeps me rockin' on bench day.
That’s not especially surprising, I doubt even someone who was more into music from that time than you would have listened to much of their stuff. Outside of Green Day, none of those bands were actually very big.
If it's any consolation, I'm just a few years older than Matt and I don't know who many of the bands he mentioned are! (E.g., pretty sure I'd never even heard of Operation Ivy before this.)
Ok. I can't remember the lag. I felt like Juicy hit right around the time it came out but maybe it was later. It only reached 27 on the Billboard in 1994 but Hypnotize hit #1 in 1997. I was in high school in 95-99 and Biggie and Tupac were such huge parts of it.
'Hypnotize' was 100% helped by the fact that he died a week after the release of the song. Like Jadakiss once said (presumably about his time with Puff), "...dead rappers get better promotion..."
I am in my late 30s and just starting to appreciate the music of prior generations - specifically a lot of 1970s folk music like John Denver, Cass Elliot, Peter, Paul & Mary, and so on. These are songs I was vaguely aware of growing up, so there's slight nostalgia/familiarity, and also I think I find them a soothing and peaceful refuge from today's turbulent media landscape.
I just looked at their discography and you are 100% correct -- their last single to ever chart was in 1969. (I thought they might have had some 1970s era hits too, but they actually released nothing in the '70s until their album, Reunion, in 1978 and it appears to have performed so poorly that it has never even received a re-release on CD!)
You are right to look forward to that, Milan. Truly there is not a better way to spend a lazy evening with a fellow traveller or two than to clamber headfirst down a rabbit hole of great bands and songs that you had on repeat during your glory years.
I'm waxing nostalgic about the stuff I listened to in my early 30's. If there were one era I could make my honorary "generational music", it would be the goddamn YouTube emo-EDM of the Suicide Sheep era, 2011-2017.
That shit--man, it was the shit. We should bring that era back. My nostalgic self has declared it.
(Of course, by rightful age, my nostalgic music era should be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Incubus, and System of a Down--they were the "bees knees" when I was a teenaged/20-something lad. I guess their vibes never quite clicked with me. Also, I grew up rather slowly.)
“But at its best, politics isn’t an aesthetic experience, it’s a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better.”
Matt assumes that the “problems” people face are mostly material. This is dubious. My house is plenty big, my car plenty reliable, but diet varied and plentiful. My unmet needs are emotional and largely positional. I want my career to glitter, my ideas to command as much attention as Matt’s and my drop shots to be the envy of Fayette County pickleball. I want to be the most interesting man in the room. We can get richer but, we can never all be the most interesting.
I crave a politics that better connects us as human beings. People romanticize horrible, brutal things like war because it forges intense connections. The impulse towards violence is repugnant, but the desire for belonging and connection are real and human. A politics that makes us feel like we are all in it together and will help one another when it isn’t your day, your week your month or even your year could deliver more than one which merely increases GDP.
"Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."
Relatedly, I wish there were more express acknoweldgment of the relative-vs-objective axis of human well being. Many things - among them indoor plumbing - hit so low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that there’s no way you can’t pitch them as straight up welfare improvements. For these goods, the standard libertarian “increases in GDP result in increases in welfare” story is basically correct, fairly profoundly so. Every time I have a hot shower I try to remind myself what a luxury it is by historical standards and prevent hedonic treadmill creep, with reasonable success.
But as you note, this linear relationship between material improvement and subjective wellbeing gets really easy to skew, as marginal improvements in goods availability provide less and less radical change from the status quo ante (plus hedonic treadmill), and sometimes for the worse in large part (TikTok bad. Leaded gasoline bad.)
But even as we hit a point of diminishing terms in terms of utility-to-expenditure, we nevertheless find ourselves in a perpetual Red Queen’s Race of *relative* status and wellbeing that’s modulated in part by how much we consume relative to others. Matt’s proposal that you can decided to just be happy living with less stuff in a 1950s style home is a reasonable recommendation for people who are not, as a class, a bunch of status-obsessed hairless social apes. Unfortunately, of course, being “a bunch of status-obsessed hairless social apes” is quite literally the human condition.
Matt’s 1950s house example is god here - if everyone has a small house and one car, you’re doing fone relative to your social milieu, and while a bigger house might be nice on its own terms, you may rationally care about the status points a lot more than that[1]. This is the Amish approach: create an entire society where forgoing modernity and strict relgiosity are the default because social conformance is such a powerful force. For everyone else, there’s the proverbial observation that if you have the only 2,000 sqft house in a neighborhood where everyone else’s is 1,500 sqft, you’re doing pretty well. If you have the only 2,000 sqft house where everyone else’s is 3,000 sqft, you’re doing pretty poorly.
[1] As I pointed out once on Noah Smith’s blog, it’s not clear that Henry VIII would be wrong to prefer to be a king in his time to being a schmoe in ours, notwithstanding his inability to buy a refrigerator or AC unit or car.
"But even as we hit a point of diminishing terms in terms of utility-to-expenditure, we nevertheless find ourselves in a perpetual Red Queen’s Race of *relative* status and wellbeing that’s modulated in part by how much we consume relative to others."
Since you mentioned Noah Smith, this ties in neatly with the Elite Overproduction concept.
For a generation or so we produced a lot of highly educated people in fields of study with very limited prospects w.r.t. both remuneration and status.
Deprived of the status that they think they deserve, they basically rocked the boat (made a bunch of noise and caused a bunch of problems) in an attempt to draw attention to themselves and gain more status. With clearly negative effects on society overall.
But because status is inherently relative/zero-sum, and money is generally a better status signal overall, it had limited success. So they keep at it and are a perpetual thorn in society's side.
I mostly agree with that hypothesis, but I'm always skeptical of it as the "end of the story". I think you can't complete this equation without its other side -- Boomer longevity.
The Boomers coincided with huge increases in late-life survivability, not JUST total-life-expectancy (where most gains were simply made in infant mortality).
I think that elite overproduction would have been a somewhat manageable problem if the Boomers had mostly all died over the last 30 years, leaving housing and inheritances and job openings for the new elites. To boot, the new elites wouldn't have had as much political competition with the Boomers -- Obama's presidency would have been a LOT more transformative if Mitch McConnell isn't trying to figure out how to mobilize Boomer obstructionism, but rather, facing a decimation of his base, sees courting Millennials as his only way out of his party's popularity crisis.
TLDR, most of the 2010s would have involved Millennials competing with each other for the spoils of the Boomers' demise, which is STILL a zero-sum game, but is LESS zero-sum than IRL turned out to be.
And I am going to be somewhat...uncharitable...here, but I don't think even a mass die-off/retirement of boomers was ever going to open up enough positions to satisfy a lot of the would-be elites with 'useless' (or at least non-remunerative) degrees.
A bunch of additional positions in academia would also have to be created. And then you'd have the opposite problem when the millennial demographic tide receded (as it is doing now) and university enrollment plummets, and those positions become extraneous.
Btw I absolutely had you in mind when writing my first comment in this thread since I kept going back to the interplay of mimetic desire with the tenets of Buddhism.
Relative social status is an extremely powerful engine of human psychology, but I think the idea that consumption = status is only one mode of that engine. There have been a number of eras throughout history in which being materially better off was a prime indicator of status, but it is not always true. Other substitutes have been social capital, physical prowess, intellectual achievement, and even self-discipline and self-deprivation on the part of wealthy people.
There's a reason, for example, that being a bitcoin millionaire who has a tacky home filled with tacky art might blow the minds of your blue collar friends from high school but fills other wealthy people with revulsion. Refinement and taste are a key component of status, not just consumption.
In an era where there is always more and better things to buy, consumerism is the obvious choice for apes to rank themselves with. But I think it is possible through the grinding slow fight of culture war to change how people evaluate relative status. One issue is that liberals are averse to really acknowledging that some people being better and others being worse is an inevitable element of reality, and thus they refuse to select their preferred mode of determining "better" and "worse".
If neither you nor anyone you know has indoor plumbing, it might not rank high on Maslow's hierarchy. Have it and have it taken away and I think one's attitude will be different.
While awareness of what you're missing out on or not can certainly change your social-status-mediated wellbeing, Robert Caro's discussion of the backbreaking labor involved in carrying water in the Texas Hill Country has me pretty firmly convinced that indoor plumbing is a huge welfare improvement regardless of any social context.
Exactly, a society where increases to incomes are mostly gobbled up by spending on zero-sum positional status games will be one where economic metrics can keep hitting new all-time highs without people's subjective lives getting any better.
This is an extremely key point that all technocrats completely miss. Life, at least for some of us, is about being RELEVANT. Technology, if anything, reduces human relevancy, and "progress" seems to be towards needing other humans less. The side effect - being needed less by other humans - is not discussed and is awful.
In a smaller society, I might have been the Matt for my community. But because of technology, no one will choose me over him. I tried writing a blog - even my mom wouldn't subscribe. Brutal. He's simply better at it, and will always be better at it, and it leaves me feeling helpless. I imagine that's how a lot of people feel.
Meanwhile, the people reading Matt have no connection to him at all. In almost all cases, he can't hear anything you say or communicate with you at all. It's a one-way street, which leaves one feeling disconnected. I keep reading Matt and wanting to have a discussion with him, but of course...I'm not relevant to him, and he'd never have the time, and it wouldn't be fair, and it's because this relationship between us is false. Parasocial. My ape brain can't keep up - I feel lonely and desperate for an intelligent friend. All of them have turned themselves into commodities, it seems.
Agreed, but also this is why it's so important for politicians to not sell the heroin fix for this - out-group animosity. This is one of the harder-to-describe dangers of Trump and the intersectional left - they both trade in hatred and fear of other Americans.
Why do you want to be the most interesting man in the room? Seriously. If you’re the most interesting, doesn’t that imply that everyone around you is more boring than you?
Why is it your goal to surround yourself with more boring people?
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think I'm in the same sort of income bracket as you, and can in some sense say "my house is plenty big, my car plenty reliable, my diet varied and plentiful. My unmet needs are emotional and largely positional." And yet, there are plenty of material things that I would appreciate - I want more and better restaurants I can walk to! I want jumping on a plane to visit friends in New York and London to be as cheap and convenient as it is to hop onto a train to Los Angeles for the weekend!
It actually annoys me more on a personal level when supposedly left wing people engage in this sort of nostalgia politics. People who also want to go back to the 50s because how much more unionization there is. Or the types of lefty NIMBYs (that seems to be especially prevalent in California) that romanticize some perfect pastoral past. Like I want to yell “you can support more unions without over romanticizing the past. That’s supposed to be a right wing thing”.
My continued go to example of what can happen when nostalgia politics goes to far is everything that’s happened in the UK since 2008. So much of their anemic economic performance and especially terrible housing policy can be traced to an even deeper sense of false nostalgia (I’m guessing there are tons of essays or books about how decline of British empire fits in) and the fact the population is on average older than America. Hence a whole lot of pensioners who bought houses decades ago continually voting for the ultimate example of a party built around rose tinted nostalgia for the past, the Tory party.
A striking way I see how this dynamic works is with soccer. By any objective measure, English soccer is at a high point right now. The Premier league is not just the envy of the soccer world in terms of revenue and worldwide viewership, it’s the envy of sports leagues the world over (the NBA in season tournament is clearly inspired by the FA cup. Which is not premier league specific obviously but gets at my point). It increasingly is able to outbid other teams for stars (the actual animating impulse behind the super league was Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona feeling as though they can’t keep up financially. See Barcelona and “levers”).
And yet if you listen to a lot English ex pros and pundits, it’s astonishing how much not only they bash the game today but clearly pine for the game of the 70s and 80s. Little refresher, English grounds were mud baths and featured “hood and hope” tactics, the stadiums were crumbling disasters which led to very real tragedy (see Bradford city fire. See Hillsborough which is partly a story of a stadium not suitable for big crowds). If you read Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch one of the more striking sentences is when he describes the first time he saw a dead body after a game. Like what do you mean the first time?!
Just such a striking example of how people can over romanticize almost anything in their past purely as Matt notes, this is when you were young.
Same thing happens in baseball all the time. And always has. There is a great book called the Glory of Their Times, which is basically interviews of old baseball legends like Ty Cobb. The vast majority of these geezers are complaining about the way the players play “today” (I forget the year the book came out, but it is old) and how they could not have hacked it back when they played. Sports/houses/cars get better over time. Nostalgia is really looking back through the rose-colored glasses of time.
The funny thing is, the recent pace of play changes is actually moving baseball back to where it was 50-60-70 years ago. During the pandemic when we were stuck inside with nothing better to do, I definitely went on a youtube deep dive a number of times (admittedly I've found myself doing that even lately). And one thing that came up is the full game 7 of the 1952 World Series. I definitely didn't watch the whole thing, but watched snippets. Man was it striking how quickly things moved. Pitches to the plate were rapid one after the other.
I continue to believe that Tony LaRussa and the Rays brain trust were a huge reason baseball lost fans. LaRussa is one of the first managers to really have a closer and essentially use situational bullpen. Rays, with the budget they had, went all in on advanced metrics which included early adopters of shifts, "three true outcomes" and even more strategic used of pitchers (including shortening starting pitcher starts). Both were right to do what they did (LaRussa won multiple championships, Rays are way more successful than they should be given their budget), but man did it really make the game so much worse entertainment wise. There were stats on this regarding how much longer games were compared to the past (and how they managed to get game time down last year) and just how little the ball was in play compared the past.
Like hey old-timers, the game is literally different today.
It amused me to no end when baseball powers that be, in an attempt to reach more fans and especially younger fans created a committee/commission that included George Will. Like as soon as I heard Will was involved, I was like "can't think of a better symbol of why baseball is losing younger fans". And by the way I say this as a baseball fan (have gone and will continue to go to lots of Mets games. Hey Cohen, where were you on Ohtani by the way?).
I also read a good Times piece about a disproportionate number of the best baseball books in any one year are baseball books. Or just that a disproportionate number of sports books in general are baseball books. Just a clear sign of a sport hampered by its attachment to its past.
On I think a very related note. I saw on twitter (refused to call it X) Jeet Heer had a revealing but amusing post (not usually a fan of his, but this was interesting) of a screenshot of a book about the Black Plague. The book itself apparently (somehow) found some primary source documents. And of course due to the plague there was an actual small uptick in wages for Peasant workers. And apparently this primary source had some landlord complaining about how workers today are whiney and don't work as hard as they use to. Like holy crap!, this "lazy kids today aren't built like we were in the past" is an extremely old sentiment.
"Kids these days have it so easy with their newly evolved homo sapien brain sizes. I remember back when we were homo erectus, we were all incredibly confused all the time!"
Football fans moan about how the game is obsessed with money while at the same time excoriating their team owners for not blowing money on players.
The Bradford City fire is one of the most jaw dropping things I have seen on YouTube (it’s regularly removed because of how harrowing it is). It’s what happens when greasy food packaging is dropped in amongst dry wood.
If I'm not mistaken the other proximate cause was years and years of people just dropping their almost completed cigarettes' butts behind the wooden stands. I've seen the video, it's astonishing how quickly the stadium goes up in flames (there was also footage of an old man running onto the field completely engulfed in flames which is probably why it was subsequently taken down).
It was also The Sun that wrote complete lies after Hillsborough and blame the tragedy on drunken Liverpool fans who supposedly pickpocketed and peed on fans (narrator voice, no evidence this ever happened). The proximate source for this falsehood is (drum roll) police who were very clearly trying to deflect from their very real role in creating this disaster. And to this day there are "truthers' who think Liverpool fans were responsible.
This is true in American football as well. I'm expecting it to get very nasty in the college game in particular, with the rise of NIL and, soon in my opinion, schools directly paying players.
I think it’s a step in the right direction to admit the truth: Big football schools are minor league NFL franchises that partially support an educational mission and give the student body something to do on weekends to get their drinking started.
Which was considered one of the most unlikely championships in English first division history. It was brought up all the time when Leicester City won in 2015.
But reality is the financial gulf between 2nd division and 1st division at that time was way way less than it is now due to television money, sponsorship deals and higher ticket prices. The top teams couldn't just hoover up all the best prospects and players; they could definitely pay more than most teams lower down the pyramid (let's be real, a big part of Liverpool's success), but again gulf wasn't nearly as large financially. Meaning plenty of good players were out of Liverpool's grasp financially and but maybe more importantly good players could get similar or maybe that much less pay even at 2nd division sides. Dave Mackay was possibly the most important Brian Clough signing that helped make Derby County a rising force and he was able to sign Mackay while still in the 2nd division (famously to the ire of the board since he still cost more than typical 2nd division players). Kevin Keegan famously came back to 2nd division Southampton after leaving Hamburg. If Harry Kane decided he'd had enough of Bayern after one season, considering he clearly has plenty left in the tank, he'd be extremely sought after; there's just no way a Watford or QPR or Sunderland is able to come close to affording his wages.
College teams would likely get crushed, even the ones loaded with McDonalds All-Americans or other blue chip prospects.
But international teams? Especially European teams? That could be a lot of fun. And also add the element that makes the FA cup so exciting (and the NCAA BBall tourney); the possibility of a major upset.
Yeah I mean the Pistons would lose to the best European team, right? Some of those teams have amazing chemistry and develop great team players. It's one of the reasons why an American hasn't won league MVP since 2018.
On a one off basis, yes I think a European team could not just win but win quite handily. I mean we see this in the NCAA tournament. There's been numerous 14 over 3, 15 over 2 and yes one 16 over 1 upsets. Teams loaded with future NBA talent losing to a team with players more likely to win Academy Awards then be drafted*. But over a 7 game series? Very likely Pistons would still win based on talent. You can see this to an extent with European soccer. The promoted teams can often overachieve and even get few big scalps, but there is a clear talent gap between them and other established Premier league/La Liga/Serie A teams which means those teams are usually fighting relegation. If they can survive a season or two then they can usually start attracting a few more top level (although usually not truly elite) pros.
Regarding MVP thing, I'd be a bit careful. First, Embid, Giannis and Jokic were all drafted as young players. Embiid was born in Cameroon but actually went to high school in Florida and then went to Kansas before being drafted. You can credit the European teams youth systems to a degree for Giannis and Jokic. But even that's complicated. Giannis kind of famously didn't pick up a basketball until 13 and didn't get Greek citizenship until a few months before the draft (Giannis was a stateless refugee) and was drafted at 18. He was a real unknown with dare I say "freakish" physical tools which is why he was mid round draft pick. Jokic famously was drafted during a Taco Bell commercial, is probably the closest to what you are saying but even he was drafted at 19.
On an individual basis with MVP's, obviously that's all true. But I was thinking more of a podcast I was listening to with Doc Rivers where he was talking about the decline of team basketball on AAU teams. And how this was impacting the NBA readiness of some American players.
An especially ironic form of this is nostalgia for things that they themselves destroyed. For example, there was a recent viral article about a NH Trump supporter, who is quite well off and drives a big truck. Last year, the same guy was quoted asking Haley about going back to a time when he was riding his bike in the street. Beyond the obvious wishing for childhood, the biggest reason kids don't ride their bike is because they are worried about being run over by giant trucks!
It's also amazing how the party of supposedly personal responsibility here expects the president to micromanage their neighborhood to make him ride his bike without giving up his truck. There's nobody stopping him from riding his bike if he wants.
New England is one of the few places left where people haven’t fully sorted along right/left party lines. In this hyper-polarized time, I love seeing pride flags in the same yard as pickup trucks. So I hope New Hampshire holds onto its weird contradictions.
To steel man the statement below, what he’s pining for is not a time when there weren’t big trucks on the street (60s cars were terrible for pedestrians too) but a time when you could let your kid roam around free. Why you can’t is complicated but seems basically bipartisan to me: conservatives like to play up urban crime because it helps them in elections but the worst abuses of CPS who arrest parents for letting their 10-year-olds roam free seem to primarily happen in blue nanny states (while red states like Utah are passing free range kids bills).
THAT’s why you think kids don’t ride bikes? Because evil Trump supporters drive big trucks, lol? They don’t go outside because parents are irrationally concerned about crime. And to the extent that crime is real, I blame you leftist whose constituencies are committing most of the crimes.
I don't think this is right, at least in suburbs and small towns. I'm a parent, and my concerns about my (6 YO) kid biking (or walking at night) far from home is 100% that he'll get hit by a car. I have 0% concern that he'll get, what, mugged for his $4 candy fund?
To be clear, the canonical boogeyman is a pedophile offering candy. But because you have provided an independent candy fund, your child is safe from such schemes.
Reckless drivers, generally, but large trucks that sit high off the ground make it a lot easier to miss a child in your immediate vicinity.
A personal anecdote - I have a friend (adult) who was hit by a Hummer on her bike and dragged underneath. Driver only stopped because he heard her screaming. This was over ten years ago - the largest trucks now sit similarly high up to Hummers then.
You believe that parents have internalized the size of vehicles, and adjusted their attitudes about children playing outside because of this?
The argument above is that the man is a hypocrite because he drives a big truck, but big trucks are the reason people don't let their kids ride bikes outside any more. I find this tenous. You could argue that there's simply more traffic and that might be a point. You could argue that it has a lot to do with helicopter parenting and screens, and I would agree. But saying 'trucks got so big that I can't let my kid play outside' is grasping at ways to strike at people you consider the outgroup (guys in NH who like Trump and drive trucks).
I mean I don't know, but the data is very clear that vehicles are getting much larger and this is directly attributable to more pedestrian deaths. I imagine some parents have noticed this!
Every argument is always tenuous because every phenomenon has multiple factors.
I’m inching THIS much closer to just declaring a general campaign to get all of SB to adopt “interdependent coevolution” as the community’s accepted model of all causality. It would probably shorten about 90% of our arguments’ opening salvos.
This of course is another powerful seduction of nostalgia: the assumption that we must go back, because if we do we'll magically become younger along with it. Unfortunately, that's not how time and senescence works.
I think it’s a reference to what your parents did to you, rather than let you ride your bike all over town from 8am to 8pm, like the cooler generations were allowed to do.
I am younger than you but my parents had me very late in life (my mom was mid-40s) so they had the mindset of your parents. On more than one occasion, I was driven home by Concerned Neighbors who were shocked my parents would let me roam around extremely safe neighborhoods in suburban Florida & Texas without supervision.
I grew up in the 80s and I didn’t have video games but I was a hardcore bookworm. My family usually encouraged this but I’d stay with my grandparents most of the summer and they would absolutely force me outside. Frankly, if they hadn’t then I probably wouldn’t have had any friends. Left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed inside with a book.
But I had a great time, played a lot of sports. Me and another kid bought $5 tennis rackets at Walmart and taught ourselves to play by watching tennis on TV (Mats Wilander forever!), and I somehow made the tennis team in high school. Also raised a lot of hell, rock fights etc, rarely got caught.
In general this is right, but isn't resistance to congestion tolling just that... people don't want to pay the tolls?
E.g., my father hated toll roads and thought the California freeway system was wonderful despite all the traffic. I don't think he was being nostalgic- he was being cheap.
The same type of cheap lots of people are. Ever met someone who will go to all the different supermarkets because oranges are 40 cents cheaper at one and ground beef is 80 cents cheaper at the other and he has coupons at the third?
Or how about left wing free transit advocates who prefer that price tag at zero even if the system isn't as good because of the lack of fare collection?
People love free and cheap stuff even when the love is irrational.
It’s also like exhibit A in decreasing marginal utility of money. When you make more cash, the idea of explicitly “buying time” eg by knowingly forgoing couponing becomes a lot more palatable because you’re spending out of a comfortable cash surplus rather than stretching an already thin budget.
It's easier to train yourself to always scrimp and save, than to train yourself to scrimp and save only in the situations where it makes a big difference.
But that's precisely it... free roads aren't free. They cost money. We all pay hundreds of dollars a year for our "free" roads, we just don't see it like a toll because it comes out of all our other taxes.
Right but it's precisely when a cost is visible that people react to it. Look at calls for free transit, free college tuition, etc. Obviously those things will actually all be paid for one way or the other. But the notion that something is "free" nonetheless has emotive power.
My father in law is very excited about the upcoming Masters of the Air, a Band of Brothers style series about WWII bomber crews. This is because his own father was in the 8th Air Force and was a bomber pilot. When he talked about this, he talks about how much better men used to be than they are today.
And yet, my father in law has also spoken about how his own dad, war hero, regularly beat the shit out of him, his siblings, and his mom. He’d suffered broken ribs and one time the doctors call the police because of the abuse. His dad eventually drank himself to an early death in his 50s.
I can’t square that nostalgia. Maybe some need to understand the trauma? But he doesn’t talk about it like this.
Anyway, nostalgia seems, to me, to fill some kind of psychological need that we have to understand how we could, despite things obviously being worse, have been happy sometimes.
The late philosopher Svetlana Boym made a distinction between an almost whimsical 'reflective' nostalgia that was usually about good things like your family and friends and ska music, and a more serious 'restorative' nostalgia that was usually about bad things like greivances and grudges.
One interesting thing about this framework is that you can have this bizarre sense of a "nostalgia for a sense of progress" - fond memories of expectations that things will be better in the future - that can be interpreted in either way. Channelled into the former, that historic optimism can be a source of inspiration for self-improvement and further change. Into the latter, it can become quite a grim force to try to stop further change in a doomed attempt to wind back the clock into a period of optimism.
It seems like it would be a worthy goal to try to encourage modern America's nostalgia more towards that reflective interpretation than its restoratative one.
Good post, and I would be very interested in further exploration of the implications of the final paragraph. One of my probably not totally rational concerns for my kids about an aging society is that they will be caught up in a backward looking environment, dominated by old people with increasing life spans, pushing public policy towards their interests instead of the future. There's already an interesting evolution in that direction with Trump consolidating nostalgia and outright reactionary politics with at least a promise not to mess with the expensive entitlements that go to the elderly (whether that can be squared by the cut the taxes party is still an open question). I think a lot of the tendencies on the left that are most controversial in these comments around identity politics also fall into a similar backwards looking paradigm, more interested in trying to impose past conflicts on a population that has profoundly changed demographically over the last 60 years.
Anyway I agree that it isn't healthy and it isn't the recipe for a better future.
Don't think that's an irrational concern; I have seen plenty of times that when people lose the connection to others that work brings, they can easily drift into an inward, negative, pessimistic world of resentments. Not to say all older people are like that but it's not uncommon.
I keep seeing articles about “this revolutionary 700 year old natural air conditioning system” and a bunch of people commenting that we don’t NEeD modern air conditioning. That’s pretty silly, no ancient technology can hold a candle to a basic modern air conditioning unit. Social media creates weird nostalgia movements.
Yeah growing up in the rural southern US there was no ancient airflow chimney that would have made life worth living with 98 degree temps and 95 percent humidity.
Yeah, the humidity thing is what a lot of these folks miss. If these posts are what I think they are, the technology they're referring to is from medieval Persia and (1) depends on underground irrigation canals that exist(ed) basically in Iran and nowhere else and (2) uses evaporative cooling, which means it only works when ambient humidity is low (like in...well...Iran). The tech is legit impressive, under the right circumstances it can make ice. But it's not like this tech has been forgotten; modern evaporative cooling systems are still used in lots of places that have low humidity and high heat. It's just that it's useless if you don't have low humidity.
Thank you! Incidentally, going to the topic discussed elsewhere in these comments, old Persian evaporative cooling tech is a big part of why you find so many good and interesting ice cream and sorbet options for dessert at Persian restaurants today—Iranians have been able to make them for hundreds of years and with the Iranian climate they have every reason to do so.
And yet somehow, I often find myself in Europe during a "rare" (so they try to claim) hot stretch (90+ F in Sweden once even). And they don't put screens on their windows so I either get stagnant air or bugs.
I was at a talk recently where former Sec. of Energy Steven Chu bragged about not needing AC in his SF home because he knew how to get a good breeze going (or something like that, it was a really boring talk).
Nothing has depressed me more lately than reading Applebaum's NY Times column about not wanting to live in a museum, then popping open the comment section and *every* *single* *comment* was full of useless nostalgia or people just openly saying they actually did want to live in a museum.
I think this is one of the areas where the left-ish hue of the Times's readership appears most strongly: Real estate developers are evil. Real estate profits are ipso facto questionable. It's bad to build new stuff. Yada yada. The NYC-centric nature of that paper's commentariat doesn't help (it should, but it doesn't) in that a lot of commenters themselves no doubt have experienced or currently experience stress and anxiety over securing decent shelter for themselves and their families. And yes, feelings of envy abound when it comes to New York City real estate. Which can turn negative.
So OF COURSE new buildings are vulgar, ostentatious, ugly, etc. Where's Howard Roark when you need him?
True that it's leftish in rhetoric but it's also profoundly conservative to prioritize holding on to what you have rather than risk anything in the world might change.
Yes. And to be clear I haven't read the column yet, but shall. But without a doubt soi-disant liberals can certainly engage in a lot of behaviors that code as "conservative" (I mean, many folks on the left—especially ones sitting on gigantic home equity—are stone NIMBYs!)
Way, way back on the Weeds you, Ezra and Sara had an episode on manufacturing nostalgia and made the point that no one has nostalgia for 1890s manufacturing jobs they were terrible and the nostalgia is for the apex of a legal and economic regime of tripartite bargaining and law making and smart people could do this for jobs that exist today bringing money and status to things like preschool teacher, home health aids and gig economy work over time.
It remains to me a frustrating road not taken. It seems the only way we can imagine increasing prosperity is to go back to the past in either a more active welfare state or some prior economy that had rather different composition than what’s on the table now.
And Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Often led by moneyed interests in industries that stand to gain. Chambers of commerce, home builders associations, and the like. A 283% increase in child labor employment since 2015 as well as a spike in child labor law violations. Just shy of 1000 cases last year. Though I'll grant that the scale is nothing close to the industrial era. We're talking about thousands across the entire country instead of millions back in the day.
If this is mostly part time employment among teenagers, then I don't see it as a problem.
If this is mostly employment of minor illegal immigrants due to fake/falsified identification...then it is somewhat of a problem, but one that needs to be addressed by cracking down on the employment of illegal immigrants.
If there are actual American citizens that are so impoverished that they are resorting to working under the table at full time jobs as minors, then I agree it is definitely a problem.
This is what's so frustrating about The Groups. They're incentivized to hype up everything as if it's a general crisis, instead of some specific problem.
Negative. I am including New Hampshire as one of several states that has loosened their child labor laws in order to illustrate the trend mentioned above, that child labor is making a comeback.
Matt convincingly explains the root cause of nostalgia as a universal human phenomenon: being young is fun and so people have positive associations with the trappings of the world of their youth.
Exactly because this is a universal phenomenon, it fails as an explanation for the unusual popularity and political strength of nostalgia today. This unusual wave of nostalgia suggests that some of the changes of recent decades have actually made people's lives subjectively worse. A politics that tries to address things like the National Hangout Crisis could therefore be "a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better."
Matt seems to agree with me that the current wave is unusual, "A key sign of the extent to which nostalgia has taken over politics..." but he doesn't seem to cite any hard data.
The most recent result shows 58% of Americans now saying that life was better for people like them 50 years ago than it is today vs. 23% saying that life today is better. That's worse than I'd expect, and worse than I've been able to find in earlier studies asking similar questions.
> worse than I've been able to find in earlier studies asking similar questions.
Can you link those other studies? The pew one you did link doesn't actually compare to earlier surveys so it doesn't back up your argument that this has actually changed.
Some people are confused about inflation adjustments etc. and genuinely believe that people were on average objectively materially better off in the past. These people are simply mistaken. (But, I am curious, is there any reason these kinds of errors would be more common now than they used to be?)
Leave those people aside for the moment. As Matt notes, the house is small and they only have one car, which is still achievable today with a single income. Perhaps the nostalgia you note is rather for a time when a small house and one car was enough to not feel materially deprived.
I personally suspect that the main reason surveys are showing more and more preference for the past over the present is not fundamentally material at all. I think Matt is correct that ever increasing availability and quality of passive entertainment (smartphones, Netflix, etc.) make many aspects of our lives worse, the same as ever increasing availability and quality of fentanyl and Doritos.
Regarding why these errors would be more common now, I think social media plays a role. Out-of-context photos can go viral, and the people who are in the best position to say "actually things weren't that great" a) are not on social media as much, b) probably are "suffering" from nostalgic memory distortion themselves.
Here's Matt's prior post rounding up the evidence that social media exposure doesn't increase political misinformation, and that modern Americans are better informed about politics than they were in the past:
I'd guess the same is true with regards to economic misinformation.
It seems Americans are getting better informed over time, and they are increasingly preferring the past to the present. That suggests that aspects of the modern world really are increasingly hostile to human well-being, in a way that isn't captured by our measures of wages and expenditures, square feet of housing per person, etc.
Slow Boring has highlighted many of these problem areas in other posts:
I'm confused. I was referring to this paragraph in your earlier comment:
"Some people are confused about inflation adjustments etc. and genuinely believe that people were on average objectively materially better off in the past. These people are simply mistaken. (But, I am curious, is there any reason these kinds of errors would be more common now than they used to be?)"
That seems to suggest that you think more people are mistaken about this topic than were previously. But now in this comment you say that actually, since people are *better* informed than they were previously, "[t]hat suggests that aspects of the modern world really are increasingly hostile to human well-being, in a way that isn't captured by our measures of wages and expenditures, square feet of housing per person, etc." But we were talking about people who think that square feet and wages and whatnot were better in the past than the present!
Beyond my confusion there, I think there's a major unsupported premise that your thesis rests on. You take it as a given that "these kinds of errors [are] more common now than they used to be" and that Americans are "increasingly preferring the past to the present." But what is the evidence that in fact these trends are increasing relative to the past? Matt doesn't present any survey data suggesting that this kind of nostalgia is more common now than in the past; are you familiar with any? If not, what are we relying on to say it's more common—viral social media posts? But past generations didn't have any social media to go viral on! There are all kinds of reasons that nostalgia could be *more visible* today than in the past that don't rely on greater levels of unhappiness, or even greater levels of nostalgia. I mentioned social media; dovetailing with that is that more old images are available (if your grandparents grew up in the 50's there are many more photographs of their time than there were if your grandparents grew up in the 20's, and many more video and sound recordings). There's also an increasing awareness on the part of marketers of how valuable nostalgia can be. None of that is to deny that there are plenty of signs that some changes have been ambivalent or negative, but I don't think we can attribrute the whole viral nostalgia phenomenon to those changes.
Sorry about the confusion. The parenthetical question was a genuine question, not rhetorical, I was interested in hearing arguments for why that kind of error might be more common today than in the past. You suggested social media as a possibility, and thank you for that, but I don't think that explanation actually holds up. I hope that clears up what I meant.
I found a couple earlier one-time surveys asking similar questions, but not a really good time series.
Assume for the moment that we are able to find good evidence that nostalgia is unusually prevalent at present, and that we agree that the cause is not a worsening of material living standards. Even then, I agree that it’s hard to see a way for me to definitively show which causes in particular are contributing, and how much. But I do think we should start by looking at things in everyday life that have changed dramatically in recent years.
Nothing annoys me more than the meme that everyone was somehow richer/better off in the 50s. It’s always such a stupid apples to oranges comparison (ignoring that houses are larger and higher quality, all of the gadgets we have now from phones to washing machines, the low quality of food in the 50s etc) - not even accounting for the fact that huge swathes of society were denied crucial civil and political rights.
The food is what always gets me. I guarantee you that (at least in the US) all of these people pining for “the good old days” appreciate having easy access to tasty Mexican food, which certainly wasn’t the case in the 50s. (For the UK, I suspect you can just swap in “Indian” for “Mexican”). Oh- and dentistry. When I was growing up, it seemed like every third TV ad was for a denture cleaning product- most old people had lost all their teeth!
It's the most delicious time to be alive in the US if you enjoy eating a variety of food.
And even if you don't, the traditional staples are still there for you to get if you want.
Perhaps, not coincidentally, the obesity rate is now the highest it's ever been...
No. The French and Italians have delicious food and much lower obesity rates than the US. A lot of the food that makes us fat doesn’t even taste that good, unless you want to argue that Pringles and Twizzlers are the pinnacle of culinary achievement.
"Pinnacle of culinary achievement" is subjective, but it's undeniable that a lot of junk food tastes delicious. That's the whole point, it's been scientifically designed to make you want to eat it. Admittedly it's a bit of a cheap, artificial deliciousness that doesn't quite satisfy the same way as a high-class meal, but it still makes you want to keep eating it.
Meanwhile the obesity rates in France and Italy, and every other country, just keep on rising. Most of them aren't eating fancy high-cuisine for every meal either, they're gorging on Mcdonald's and Potato Chips these days too.
Anyway my point was that it all adds up. Maybe you don't like junk food, great. But there's going to be *some* sort of food you find delicious. It's all available a short drive away or at the touch of a button, so it's a constant struggle of will to not overeat. I feel like it was easier in the old days because food just didn't taste this good, so we didn't *want* to overeat so much.
The most delicious time *yet* - I dream of the food riches we will some day get to experience.
I'm generally on the same page, but I wonder how our food is going to get better since it seems like we've largely tapped out different ethnic cuisines and higher quality ingredients. Like friends, I'm not sure you can make new old cuisines. Someone should get cracking on this right away.
Every so often you’ll see on Twitter excerpts from old 50s cookbooks. You’ll see a lot of making fun of said recipes and how gross they sound. And yeah they do.
But a lot of those cookbooks were written at a time when food was way more expensive. Or at least more expensive part of a family budget. A lot of those recipes are about a) trying to make tasty recipes out of pretty limited ingredients and b) helping families (and let’s be real wives) maximize every ingredient in the house or how to creatively use cheap ingredients. Like sorry, cumin and paprika were probably not spices easily attainable even for middle class families.
Casserole culture likewise was considered an amazing innovation -- instead of slaving over a dish for days, you could toss a bunch of the newly-released canned goods into a pan and have them ready in an hour or so. It was so popular with Middle American housewives because it freed up SO much freaking time!!
Casserole culture needs to make a comeback, IMO.
I don’t like my current options of microwave dinners or three hours of pretending to be a chef.
Isn't that what instant pot recipes are, now?
What I find kind of hilarious about insta-pots is that the Russians have been making them for years. In my Peace Corps country in Eastern Europe everyone had them. Some were older and simpler, others were newer and could be programmed.
I've tried to get back into casseroles, but they are SO bad for you. You can maybe make a reasonably healthy squash/zucchini casserole.
Not so! There are tons of healthy, plant -based casseroles. I recommend googling “whole food plant based.”
Everything, into the pot.
Try “sheet pan dinner” as a compromise option
Anything that uses cream of mushroom soup in it is sus af
Afuckingmen.
Those cookbooks were carried over from the Depression. I remember reading a recipe for squirrel in my mother’s edition of The Joy of Cooking (the one with the silhouette illustrations, probably published in the 1940s). In the meantime, a gringo version of tacos came on the scene in Southern California sometime in the 1960s.
I saw it first hand with my grandmother. So much of how and what she cooked was about not wasting anything food wise. She grew up in East London in the 30s.
My husband grew up on a farm and ate squirrel occasionally, but I doubt he or his mother got the recipe from the Joy of Cooking. He said it was decent enough but a lot of work for the meat. Snapping turtle on the other hand. . . Once was enough for him.
Grew up in north central Florida. Alligator and rattlesnake were a thing. Tried them once. Did not try them again.
Alligator gumbo is good.
I grew up in California and lived with my grandparents, who themselves lived through the Depression. My grandpa moved there from Nebraska when he was a kid because his dad found a job in a printing press in San Francisco. Not exactly Okies, but they would serve you cold leftovers for breakfast if you did not clean your plate a dinner, no matter what it was. They hunted and fished for everything you could get a license for. (I fondly remember the sound of lead shot hitting plates at dinner.) And they would cook roadkill (pheasant and deer) because it was unthinkable to let anything go to waste.
It wasn't much better on the other side of the family, which were immigrant farmers who would take the scraps (and organs) that the butcher would otherwise throw away and make (admittedly pretty darn good) meals from it. Even when my grandparents were older and had plenty of money, my grandpa would wear clothes that were literally falling apart because, as far as we could tell, it just didn't occur to him that buying new cloths was a thing that people could do.
My mom’s dad was like this. I was a super picky eater and I hated him. Thing is I’m not that picky an eater I just didn’t like vegetables until college bc all my grandparents would do is boil vegetables to death and that’s still gross af
Didn’t meet any Okies; can’t speak for my dad. My grandfather, who’s family had come from Nebraska in the 19th century, was building beach front houses in Carlsbad in the 20s, lost all the property in the depression (why aren’t we rich Daddy?) But they still managed to climb back up into the middle class.
Maybe. But I'm not sure the putting of tiny marshmallows in your Jello was because quality food was so expensive. I think sense of taste was just a lot worse then.
Oh, it absolutely was! Gelatin was incredibly expensive until the middle of the 20th century, because it involved hours of labor boiling bones to extract the collagen, and then making it congeal, and only the wealthiest people who could afford to pay kitchen staff to work on it all day would ever have it. But then Jello was introduced, and suddenly a middle class family could serve something with gelatin.
It was like the truffle fries of its day - a food that connoted expensiveness, because of the cost it would have had for a previous generation, and therefore got served much more often than its actually tastiness justified.
But the damn tiny marshmallows, man. The marshmallows!
I don't know the history of marshmallows. I assume that they were a cheap gelatin imitation of some food that would have been derived from a mallow plant that one harvested from marshes, and thus would have connoted some sort of luxury too.
Hmm. My mom was using those and many more spices in 1950’s and 60’s Detroit. I’ve never researched differences between the cost of various ingredients between then and now but do recall that fresh produce was harder to get and sometimes expensive then, at least in places like Detroit. Families may have spent proportionately more on food back then because no one could afford to eat out, take-out and prepared foods (other than delis) didn’t exist and both kids and adults with jobs outside the home brought their lunch from home.
Interesting data point. I do wonder if there is a difference between growing up in a major city vs. growing up in smaller cities or suburbs that was more pronounced back then in regards to availability of different ingredients. Also, probably worth considering that the period from 1945 to 1965 is the exact time when a lot of different ethnic foods not previously available to people (outside the ethnic neighborhood) started becoming more popular and widely available. Good article about this regards to pizza. https://www.seriouseats.com/a-slice-of-heaven-a-history-of-pizza-in-america
May in fact be worth differentiating between the world in 1947 and the world in 1967. Feel like a good comparison today is with Thai restaurants. When I was a kid I remember it being quite difficult to find real Thai places (as opposed to Chinese places masquerading as Thai places) outside of major metros. Nowadays Thai restaurants are pretty ubiquitous everywhere (despite what David Brooks tells you).
My dad still remembers eating his first piece of pizza. He was at the Seattle's World's Fair Italian booth and they had ordered spaghetti and they waiter brought pizza by mistake. They thought it was a free starter and ate and he said he was utterly blown away. My parents are in their late 70s and Progressive. If asked to make a short list what is better today than when they were kids they would definitely talk about civil rights for POC, women and LGBTQ first but if they were asked to make a long list at least half of it would be about being able to get great food from around the world and not having to eat ambroise salad. They both also grew up poor and are not poor anymore and they like that too. They still do weird cheap stuff like bargain hunting for groceries and buying stuff at garage sales for the thrill of the bargin that clearly comes from old habits but they don't have don't seem to have any nostalgia for the political economy of their youth -- just the music.
And yet cumin and paprika are rather cheap compared to fresh, organic ingredients whose taste needs no augmentation
Fake news. Every immigrant culture knows how to cook good dishes out of extremely humble ingredients. 1950s bland jello-everything culture was aspirational and wannabe posh.
Gross recipes from the 50’s have nothing on what passes for cooking on TikTok (except for Jacques Pepin, whose short videos can make you fall in love with simple but classic French recipes for quick meals).
Seriously, food is one of the biggest advancements we've made over the past century. In this aspect it's undeniable that the best time is here and now.
Nobody gets nostalgic for jello molds with Vienna sausages in them, I note.
And yet everyone complains about food getting worse as they gobble more and more of it….
Food in America today tastes better and is cheaper and more convenient than ever. Has this made Americans' lives better?
Yes. Has it made Americans happier? YMMV.
I get pretty damn happy when I consume a banh mi sandwich, a poke bowl, and so much more that I didn't eat when I was younger.
I feel the same way *I say with a mouth full of Sushi Burrito*
“Let’s ask this Yale grad living in Manhattan who spends all their money on GrubHub about student loan debt.”
There wasn't even Italian food in the 1950s. Pasta was so unknown that the BBC was able to do their famous "Swiss spaghetti tree" hoax in 1957.
Can I interest you in some Minnesotan Hotdish?
https://youtu.be/oiSzwoJr4-0?t=830
Or fresh fruit and vegetables year round. Or high quality meat on a near daily basis.
I agree. I’m 61, and young people often say that my generation ruined it for them. And these guys go on bachelor parties to Las Vegas and Cancun. Those places were outer space to me and my set. We got two weeks of vacation - Period. They drink craft beer, eat all varieties of ethnic food, live in bigger and better homes, and whine about it.
I want to point out that most are not this way. It’s just a whiny minority.
I am just glad car exhaust is cleaner.
Still not clean enough, as I usually witness at some point in the winter here when an inversion strikes...
That lead really turned out to be a problem, heh?
Not really. Bute the gases did.
I mean as recently as 2003-4 I had two weeks vacation and 5 holidays.
These days it’s 11 holidays and two plus weeks of personal time on top of vacation which starts at 3-4 weeks in many cases. Life is definitely better.
I'm 34 and I'm not sure I've had more than two to three weeks' vacation per year at any job in my lifetime. Most of the time that's unpaid.
You really need to change jobs. Seriously.
Sadly, jobs with paid vacation are still much rarer than they should be. At least as of last year my state requires that every employee get an bare minimum of paid sick leave, but that also isn't true most places in the US. So that is why people go to work with COVID.
I just changed jobs for a promotion a few months ago but yeah this time my position came with a contractual four weeks of paid vacation. Really nice upgrade, in theory, even though actually taking that much time is, hmm, discouraging to career advancement.
You're not wrong, but I will note that this is a very different complaint than the one the article is talking about. It is possible (but debatable) that the choices the generations around your age made (see: the zoning laws Matt is always writing about) are a central reason things haven't been getting better faster.
No doubt that is possible. Those decisions are also part of the reason things are so damn good, because they are.
It is such a lie. So many comparisons about cost of living today vs the past completely ignore the expectations and lifestyle creep.
Probably the most glaring examples I see of this is when you see people complaining about pickup truck prices. People will go out and drop $80k on an F-150 more luxurious than the back of a Benz limo from the 1990s and complain about how you can’t get a decent truck for less because of all the regulations. This despite not even looking at the $25,000 Ford Maverick that is still better in every way than the old trucks they are nostalgic for.
As a guy who is currently complaining about truck prices, a big part of the problem is those luxury features. Needless infotainment centers are the most obvious complaint. The ballooning size and 'fluffyness' of the body is another. Quad cabs and shorter beds being standard. The new Tacomas are as big as a Tundra from 8 years ago. I don't know anyone who complains about' the regulations'. Is the complaint about CAFE or crash standards? I would be interested to hear an example of what you mean.
The Maverick just came up in a meeting at work as an option for a utility truck, so we looked at the specs. 260 Max HP? It weighs 3600lbs! 2000 lb. towing? No 4WD?
It does nothing better than an old square body except MPG and safety features. It's not a decent truck, it's a huge sedan with a bed.
Overlap with your comment downthread about wanting to emulate the aesthetics of a working class lifestyle without the commensurate utility. People in Dallas (and the American South generally) don't actually need pickup trucks for utility, they just want to be driving a pickup. "A huge sedan with a bed" is arguably exactly perfectly targeted to a well-heeled portion of the market who want something that's nominally a truck on the outside but that they also actually use as a daily driver (hence quad cabs).
Musashi said "It is bad when one thing becomes two".
I'm going to channel a bit of FrigidWind and say that we need more gatekeeping assholes. I like a good truck. I'm looking at buying a good truck. But I drive a 15 year old Civic on the daily, and the truck is going to be something like a 1996 Toyota T100 or an early 2000s Tacoma because I need it to be small enough to get on class 4 roads, it's going to get scratched up, I'm going to put my dirty gloves on the dash to dry out, and I'm never going to tow anything bigger than a canoe. I have little patience for full size trucks for daily personal use. It's ret.....diculous.
Yeah. We can’t afford to switch out our cars bc we own them outright, but if I had my druthers we would have an electric car for my husband’s commute and a truck that I could use since all I go is to the store, but that we could use for dump runs and to pull a camper
Minivans in disguise
1) The vast majority of truck users have no need for either 4-wheel drive or to tow anything. They might need something a little more beefy if they have 2000lb of plumbing supplies to haul around.
2) They could get a base F-150 for $35,000k.
3) The complaints about regulations are a constant anytime the subject comes up, which almost invariably involves people pointing to very stripped down small trucks overseas. And those trucks almost always have tiny-low powered engines, essentially no towing capability, etc.
The bottom line is that the $80,000 F-150 exists because people want to run their luxury vehicle purchases on the corporate books to game the tax code and don’t actually want cheap trucks, which are readily available.
I think we generally agree. Most truck owners don't actually need or use the features that make a truck different than a crossover SUV. And while the luxury features are in theory optional, I'm looking at new dealer stock right now and there isn't a bare bones option on two of the three dealer sites near me, with low end advertised prices starting around 50k.
I guess what bothered me about your comment was the idea that the Maverick is anything like a replacement for a 70s-90s pickup. Maybe for a circa 90 Toyota 22r, but it's nothing like a F150, let alone better in every way.
I think it’s often nothing more than the clothing is what we associate with being dressed up and therefore must signify wealth.
I've read theories that middle class people started dressing in athletic wear in the 70s and 80s because it was a symbol of the leisure class. I think part of the reaction you notice is more about taking care with your appearance than 'dressing up', but we kind of conflate the two, especially if you're going to have your picture taken you probably would have fixed yourself up.
I also notice a lot of Left counter culture trying to emulate working class style without really getting any of the details right. Like, they will wear Doc martens because that's what *used* to be a work boot, instead of wearing what a worker wears today (Redwing, Chippewa, Carolina etc.), probably because that kind of worker is left coded in their memory and today's work boot guy is right coded. It seems that the revolutionaries are locked into a romance with that time period as well. Strong unions, lots of protests and civil rights activism. I can't really fault them for that, but it does seem to ignore some of the gains that have been made as well.
Interestingly, Carhartt is becoming a brand I see in young urban style more and more, a la Timberland in the 90s.
Sorry, this comment really drifted!
The trouble with dressing up is that there's an actual-factual tradeoff in convenience and comfort (and in some instances utility. Zippers are pretty much strictly better than buttons on any non-aesthetic axis) that's so acute that IMO there's more mileage to be gotten out of making athletic wear look nice than on trying to but the toothpaste back in the tube on formal clothing. Also, of course, the ease and expense in money and time of washing vs. drycleaning.
Whenever I wear a suit in the summer my mind immediately goes to "This is a terrible idea on every conceivable level. Why has this been tolerated for so long? Did people in the past just not sweat and now this tradition hangs on as an atavistic exercise in masochism?"
The big advantage of buttons over zippers is that they are much easier to repair. If you lose a button, you can just sew a new one on. Even if you're not much at seqing, you can do that in a few minutes. If you lose a couple of teeth from a zipper, you have to unpick the whole zipper and sew a new one in, which is a lot of work (the unpicking will take hours). The only repairable fault with a zipper is if the pull tag comes off the slider - you can get replacement pull tags.
The modern era doesn't repair clothes, though, which would explain why people don't care.
As for a suit: you shouldn't wear a heavy wool suit in summer; you should be wearing either a linen suit or a cotton suit, both of which will have significant internal air circulation and can stay cool. If you're somewhere actually tropical, though, then there's a reason that Bermuda shorts were invented.
The problem is that a nineteenth century summer suit was a handcut, fitted item, made from a very light, breathable fabric, and shaped to have internal air circulation to keep you cool, and a modern suit is an off-the-peg design and probably has a ton of polyester in it. If it's tight anywhere, that blocks the internal air circulation there, while polyester isn't really breathable and it will retain heat and sweat.
Lack of affordable tailoring is another facet of cost disease.
Indeed - but when we're comparing styles of clothes designed to be tailored to styles designed to be worn off the peg, then it's hardly surprising that the off-the-peg version of the style designed to be tailored is going to suffer by comparison.
Just for an example, a traditional shirt is made from a woven fabric, and any part of the shirt that doesn't fit perfectly will be tight or loose or short or long. A T-shirt or a polo shirt is made from a knitted fabric, which has more natural give or stretch and a generic-shaped off-the-peg T-shirt will fit much better than a traditional shirt.
Also, my mother used to sew clothes herself - she bought fabric and cut to patterns and sewed it. As soon as she could afford to just buy clothes, she did, as it's an enormous amount of work.
Linen and cotton suits are kind of Not a Thing at least in much of the U.S. (also AIUI linen is super wrinkly albeit breathable, right?)
At one time, seersucker suits were pretty common in the summer but not considered suitable in some more formal settings. In the last 30 years or so, a combination of air-conditioning in homes, vehicles and most workplaces probably reduced demand for cotton or linen suits. I always wore a very light weight wool suit, which wasn’t too bad, although I will sweat through anything if it’s hot and humid enough.
Linen is notorious for wrinkling in a humid climate, it's fine in dry heat.
British civilians in India during the era of the empire adopted linen suits in the dry season, cotton in the monsoon, and wool in the cold season.
Linen is super wrinkly, which is surely part of why it's pretty rarely used for men's suits these days (air conditioning being another). More commonly, if you want a warm-weather appropriate suit, you would get one made with a "tropical weight" wool.
Linen is a thing in the South among well to do folk. Think straw hats and mint juleps.
Man, there's a very famous drystone waller named Andrew Louden who still dresses in the old style, which is to say suit and vest with an apron for protection. It kinda makes sense because I'm the UK the weather calls for it, but watching him sweat in the sun in a New England summer is pretty funny. But if you look at photos, the old field stone wallers used to dress this way every day!
I think manufacturing improvements get the credit because we can now mass produce clothing in different shapes and textiles (with zippers!) so your casual wear doesn't have to be the same general shape as your business wear. And cultural standards have moved so that showing more skin is acceptable. My grandfather didn't like that my dad took his shirt off to split wood, for instance. He thought *that* was atavistic!
WRT to wearing heavy, old-fashioned clothing in the summer and showing skin, I always wondered why people in old western movies wore heavy clothing with long sleeves and long pants; surely shorts and a t-shirt would be more pleasant! It wasn't until I spent time in the desert that I realized that, without sunblock, you either cover your skin with high UPF clothing or you get burnt to a crisp (and can get skin cancer).
This is less of an issue in New England, but even there, if you're out in a field all day without skin-covering clothing or sunblock, you may well regret it (altho you can get away with it for longer periods of time in New England than you can in the desert).
In short, I think that the cultural standard of not showing skin had a practical basis. Chesterton strikes again!
Having defended the suit, I will say it makes zero sense as workwear and modern workwear is vastly superior.
The only downside to modern workwear is you can't really repair it yourself, it's essentially disposable.
I think I may have accidentally convinced myself in this thread that "Star Trek" uniforms are the best approach to combining professional standards for dress wear with something that actually accommodates a need for physical motion beyond "walking slowly in a cold climate."
Modern suiting of the type that the average person would own or come into contact with is vastly worse than old suiting, actually!
If you’re interested, I can get more into it (I helped in the process of creating a suit from the ground up a couple years ago) but this isn’t a situation that’s as cut-and-dried as other comparisons with older time periods.
Yes, interested to hear why this should be.
I feel like the Doc Martens resurgence is just coupled with all things 90s style coming back and we wore them back then from the British punk scene. So that at least makes sense to me.
That makes sense, I remember the same things, I wore them too for mostly the same reasons. I remember when Docs started being shitty and expensive at the same time and I just wore combat boots. But it's a nesting doll of cultural memory and reference at this point.
Huh, yeah that is a pretty interesting point of comparison. When the average American today is going out in public wearing pajama pants and crocs, but with a $1000 computer in their pocket, I guess we have some pretty knee-jerk assumptions about wealth.
It's amazing and pretty insidious, the amount of lifestyle creep that has accumulated in the 21st century. Growing up, we never ate out, didn't pay for cable tv or internet (which wasn't a thing ofc), had one family computer and one tv, one 10+ year old car. But we were very solidly middle class.
That's an interesting point
Houses are not "better quality." Our first house was a 1949 cape and that house was small, but it had beautiful custom built inside and solid wood paneling. It was square and indestructible. Our current house was built in the late 90s and is far lower quality (we tried to find another 50s house in our new town but couldn't). Houses today are cheaply built and have little character. Often the floors aren't even real wood but that vinyl wood appearance stuff.
Have all our gadgets really improved our lives, or gave some possibly deteriorated our cognitive, physical, and social skills?
And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?
And the massive deterioration in family life, community bonds, mental health, the quality of everything from appliances to clothing to educational institutions and media and arts and entertainment has become intolerable to the point where it's just easier to watch old shows and opt out of modern institutions to the degree that it is possible.
Housing quality is survivor bias I think. A lot of crap housing was built in the past but it didn’t last. The only stuff that still exists was the high quality stuff. But even the “poorly built” stuff of today has way better electrical and plumbing just because the codes are so much tighter.
I think that you are correct, having grown up in a place chock full of 100+ year old houses. The bones are usually very well built, with larger beams, and thicker boards, but the foundations could be poorly laid stone with rotting mortar, and trying to electrify and insulate these houses is tremendously expensive.
I will say that finish carpentry has clearly suffered from Baumels Cost Disease, and it's much less likely that a median modern home will have anything like craftsmanship applied to the interior. People buy factory built cabinets, there's little to no work put into trim in living spaces, furniture is often plastic. Most rooms are painted drywall, which is uninspired to say the least.
But they function fine! Modern window and door systems are amazing! Stick framed houses are easy to insulate, wire and plumb! Lots of heating and HVAC options! Whatever shape table and chair you want!
So I get that people itch for beauty and quality, and it's somewhat hard to get on a middle income, but you can have a really fine place to live by any historical standard.
Very true. I recently moved from Atlanta to NYC. Atlanta’s housing stock is significantly newer than New York’s - and where this most clearly manifests itself is HVAC. Window AC units are RARE in Atlanta because almost everyone has central - even the very low end apartment complexes. So yeah, beautiful finish carpentry is nice and all, but what you are going to really appreciate in your daily life is quality HVAC and plenty of electrical outlets everywhere.
It’s why we need to stop using Baumol’s as an excuse and import cheap ass temporary labor from dirt poor countries, house them in barracks, and pay them minimum wage
"I will say that finish carpentry has clearly suffered from Baumels Cost Disease, and it's much less likely that a median modern home will have anything like craftsmanship applied to the interior."
I still think there's some selection bias here. I have a 100+ year old house, but the builders were clearly looking to cut costs. I'm pretty sure that the right angle was invented prior to the construction of this house, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the trim! (And all of the strike plates for interior doors were installed at the wrong height --- sometimes comically so.) Small (cheaper) old houses in the neighborhood sometimes suffer from the same non-euclidean geometry, so it's not a one-off. The bigger houses are more likely to have right angles.
Your house was probably built before a lot of improvements in lumber treatment and processing was common, and settlement of the foundation, inevitable over 100 years, is often the cause for angles to come out of true. Striker plates were probably handfitted to non standard doors, and were correct until the door was replaced. Larger houses have more structural tie-in, and probably cost more and commanded the services of better builders, so it's not surprising that they have aged better. Probably better maintenance over the years for the same reasons. But yeah, survivorship bias absolutely contributes to people thinking "they don't make em like that any more".
But that section of my comment was directed at things like crown moulding, base boards, chair rails, cabinets, custom doors, railings and stair treads. That's what I mean by finish carpentry.
Trim is finish carpentry, and while settling is often the cause of things to be a bit out of alignment, settling is not the cause of the trim on the left side of a door being 3/4" taller than the trim on the right side of the door (while the floor is level and the plaster uncracked!). Likewise, settling didn't cause a strike plate to be 3" from where it should be (in the most extreme case) when paired with an original door. Nor does settling cause a house to be built without a sill plate (on top of an uncracked poured concrete foundation) or a number of other obvious hallmarks of shoddy craftsmanship.
AIUI certain classes of high quality wood used in housing construction in the past are also difficult to impossible to obtain these days because they require old-growth forest growing conditions and thus can only be economically logged once, so older homes really may just have better bones than newer ones because they're using better materials no longer available. No expert on it though (nor am I trying to take a potshot at sustainable logging practices.).
Yep, the houses in my city built in the 40s-60s almost all have this sort of narrow board solid oak hardwood floors that are almost impossible to even find today, and are murderously expensive if you can.
Probably true, and also probably true that those woods wouldn't be that much better in a conventionally built house in 2024. If you want to timber frame or something, you can still find large hardwood timber for that, but it's either reclaimed stuff from old farms and barns, or you have to get it from small artisanal mills because there's no commercial scale demand. This isn't on the face a bad thing, but the demand for fast growing conifer plantations is probably a bad thing in the long run.
We should invade British Columbia and take all their wood
Why a bad thing in the long run to use fast growing conifers? Build longevity?
I think this is all part of the trend of rising wages making things that require craftsmanship or even just touch labor a lot more expensive than they used to be.
Yes, that's Baumels Cost Disease.
Yes as someone who has been house hunting - old homes are either really nice in historical neighborhoods and probably not meant for the middle class OR tons of homes pumped out for the postwar boom that now have tons of issues
Correct.
Thanks to building restrictions, you can still get a workman’s special in the Bay Area for anywhere between $500k and $2M. They sucked then, they suck now, and in both times people buy them because of a housing shortage. At least in the ‘40s and ‘50s it was a shortage caused by transitioning off the wartime economy.
Electricians always have horror stories about DYI vacuum tubes.
Let me tell you about Bakelite and ceramic insulators....
Knob and tube, baby. What a nightmare.
I once owned a rowhouse in Delaware that was like a living museum of wiring standards: Romex, BX armored, knob and tube. The oldest stratum was pre-electric: literal gas-lighting, where the conduits had not been removed, just dummied off and disconnected from the natural gas.
Horrible. I am not nostalgic for old wiring. Or old plumbing.
The law firm that I worked at early in my career did a lot of fire subrogation claims. I remember one of the other attorneys seeing the knob and tube wiring in our common laundry room and telling me it was a fire waiting to happen. Those guys tended to be paranoid so I just rolled my eyes. Our laundry room caught fire a few months later. No one was hurt. When I bought my house, the knob and tube was the first thing to go.
My friends family owns a huge 120+ year old house that was an inn, and then a girls summer camp. It's been in the family for generations and they still summer there. But it's still, *STILL* got knob and tube staples in under the floorboards, one central wood stove for heat, and I didn't want to know about the plumbing. We don't drink the water.
The most recent electrical upgrades circa 80s ran new wires along the same staples on the beams and replaced the 50s era outlets in the same spots because the walls are plaster and lath.
don't forget insulation and windows and heating and air conditioning and attached garages and....
That’s a really good point.
1. Housing is absolutely higher quality today than in the 50s. Most housing from then didn’t have plumbing and was poorly electrified. Now building codes require a much higher standard of housing with things like insulation, quality plumbing and electrical and a robustness to fire and natural disasters. That is not to say all housing today is better than all housing from the 50s, but the average house today is absolutely and u questionably better. It is likely only the best housing from the 50s survived 70 years so your probably falling victim to survivorship bias. Similarly it sounds like you might’ve bought a particularly bad modern house.
2. Maybe you could argue the internet/smart phones have some downsides but are you seriously claiming you’d prefer to live without a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, fridge or any other modern convenience? That would mean spending 5x as long doing basic household chores, not to mention much more manual effort. I am also certain you wouldn’t enjoy having only a singular and spectacularly crappy 50s care instead of a modern SUV. With regards to the internet and smartphones I’d not you can make a choice not to use these things or to moderate. For those of us who use these tools sensibly - having access to the combined knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips is of immense value.
3. There are a number of reasons such issues have increased:
-people in the 50s often didn’t live long enough to get cancer. Cancer is what kills you when other things (crime, war, disease) don’t. It’s a sign of our success.
-Access to food is much wider now. Obesity is a problem for societies so rich overconsumption is an option. Less obesity in the 50s was a reflection of good scarcity and poverty.
-you could go to say whole foods and buy a much wider variety and higher quality set of produce than anything available in the 50s and cheaper. People forget how much people are canned and processed food back then. Some people still do that - but it’s easy not to!
4. Again a lot of these things are just a function of more choice. Fast fashion provides clothes at unbelievably low price points allowing people who otherwise would go without access to clothes. We still make high quality stuff though. You can buy high quality clothes once and wear it for life if you prefer (I do!). There’s plenty of “shit” art now (at least in my opinion), but there’s also plenty of great stuff I love - plus easier access to all the old art that’s been made.
Community, family life etc are what you make of it. You can opt into communities that do things the way you want.
I wonder how much of mental health is a combo of more openness about problems that always existed + social media driven perceptions it’s fashionable to have some kinds of mental illness.
>And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?
This one, at least, is easy. Food is both tastier and cheaper, which is why people are eating more of it. Overeating is very bad for you. Obesity is not a consequence of "unhealthy" food, it is not a consequence of low food standards, it is not a consequence of some kind of chemical or whatever. Obesity is and always is a direct consequence of eating too much, which is something you do in an era where both the quality and quantity of food available is rising.
"Obesity is not a consequence of "unhealthy" food, it is not a consequence of low food standards"
I'm at least sympathetic to the argument that the macro nutrient composition of some fast food items could be considered "low quality" (e.g., high calorie, low fat, low GI) in a way that didn't exist back in the 1950s. Also ... sodas. While not a modern invention - just look at the growth rate of PepsiCo...
We’re blind to the food industry’s development of processed foods, which are literally designed to be addicting. I think sweetness is itself something that we crave to increase, so it’s been easy to make sodas addicting. We don’t notice the ways the food industry is exploiting us partly because we’ve been frogs in the pot over time, and partly because it affects the less-privileged more severely than most of us. We (at least those of us who prepare food for ourselves and others) can afford to pour over labels until we find tasty, less-addicting, more healthy and more varied food that is still convenient to prepare. Some here eat what others put on the table and in the pantry.
I think it’s also a matter of reading more and possessing a degree of self-reflection that might come from education: whenever I find myself gaining weight I survey all the information out there and try things out until something works. (And yes, this often includes spending more money for food.) I refuse to blame people whose lifestyles I can never understand for lacking self-discipline and eating too much. Most of us have never had to sustain long days of physical labor on cheap food from food carts, for example, perhaps followed by enough beers to deaden the aches, pains and fatigue until the next day.
Nevertheless, my insights are based on personal experience. First, many years ago I found myself adding more and more sugar to my coffee until I finally noticed this and just went back to drinking it black. Second, once upon a time I came across a version of Cheez-it called “Snap’d” that I couldn’t quit eating until the box was gone. I never bought a second box and went back to regular Cheez-it, which is only mildly addicting when I want comfort food. Underlying all of it is my early rebellion against Lay’s advertising slogan “bet you can’t eat just one.” This inspired me to train myself to be able to yes, only eat just one. If my pants still fit (kind of) it may be due only to coming into the world with a contrarian nature.
Very good point, I'm really on the Michael Pollen train here. I like his food rule, that if your Grandma can't recognize what the food is (due to it's incredibly processed nature, not cuisine unfamiliarity) then it's best not to eat it.
For me it was the 'extra toasty' ones. Who knew baking them for a few extra minutes would take them from, perfectly ok, to, I almost literally can't stop eating these things?
But soda consumption has tanked from its high from about 20 Yeats ago and obesity has kept rising.
20 centuries of stony sleep?
I'm not saying soda is the main driver of current obesity - but it's a major difference in diet vs. the 50s and while soda consumption has dropped just look at PepsiCo's growth rate. They just expanded into other sugar based drinks.
My point was that we've clearly started consuming fewer of the completely empty calories we did not too long ago without much difference in weight. It's just general overconsumption
This one's a classic:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/americans-have-been-gaining-weight
Even *I* wasn't around in the 1950s, but in the 70s/80s my not-especially-health-conscious parents didn't buy soda to keep around the house. Fast food and junk like french bread pizzas were definitely a thing - my mom owned a small business and hated cooking - but portions were much smaller.
In the mid-90s my brother and I used to have RC Cola-chugging contests to see who could finish a can the fastest.
There has undoubtedly been a lot of R&D into making the panoply of tasty but not very nutritious snack foods that are now ubiquitous.
>>Houses are not "better quality."<<
Yes they are, unless the old houses you think are superior have had thousands in maintenance and updates plowed into them over the years. If you buy a house today with 1952's heating or AC (usually nonexistent) or insulation or electrical wiring (inadequate)...well, you know where I'm going with this: if you buy a house built 70 years ago but upgraded and fit for today's market, you're not *really* buying a 1954 house.
Houses were much smaller then, too, and, while it may not matter to you personally, some people find "adequate space" a very important attribute of quality.
and such luxuries as multiple full bathrooms and closets!
I live in a 1200 square foot craftsman bungalow with my two other family members. I also run a five person business out of it. It is lovely with built in woodwork and charm. All our clients remark on its charm. It also has zero closets. That is partly our fault because we converted a small closet into a powder room to have a second bathroom. We have wardrobe cabinets and dressers for clothing and that is it. I love my house but I haven't seen a full size closet at a friends place that hasn't made me drool.
On the community front, remember that the 50s were the era of "The Feminine Mystique." A lot of that community was built off of women being shut up in the house to a greater extent than their mothers and grandmothers had been, whom had often worked outside the house.
"If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?"
Some of this is likely better measurements of public health issues. Some of this is farm subsidies for corn making it too cheap to put extra sugar where it doesn't belong. Some of it might be that we are exposed to chemicals (flame retardants) on a much higher basis before that do save lives, but also have seem to cause people to have trouble shedding fat.
https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2016/01/strong-link-found-between-flame-retardants-and-obesity
These things can all be true, while it also being true that the exposure of the average American to cuisines from India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, etc. is much better than in the past.
Lol. This absolutely isn’t true. For example, older houses were often built with cheap aluminum wiring-a fire hazard that isn’t even possible now.
Or even somethings people perceive as better/more durable are objectively worse. An example is cast iron pipes, which start failing in 40-60 years. Which is essentially now for the period it was commonly used.
There were lots of cheap, poorly constructed homes in the 1950s-1980s. They are falling apart.
I live in a 1961, straight middle-class of the era, home. Sure, custom wood trim was cheaper then. In general "back in the day" (any day) labor was cheap and stuff was expensive, now it's reversed. However, the mid-century overall crap materials and code-standards have cost me $100k's to bring up to modern standards. It still lacks good exterior wall insulation. It is in a good location and has a nice large lot (which is why we live there). The original oak floor is nice, but squeaky (poor quality sub floor!)
Examples: poorly insulated walls, small/leaky windows, ungrounded electrical, funky plumbing, lower ceilings, useless attic, lack of climate controlled storage space, heat via wood-burning fireplace? Ugh. (It is NC, but still, it was colder 60 years ago!)
Heart disease rates have plummeted, stop making stuff up
https://www.prb.org/resources/u-s-trends-in-heart-disease-cancer-and-stroke/
I would rather live in my sterile post-industrial all-stainless and chrome apartment than in some godforsaken 1940s shoebox of a wood house.
I would rather use my iPhone than pick up some handset and say "Central, are you on the line? Connect me to Klondike-54."
I would rather go to McDonald's than eat some of the slop they had back then.
Modernity is good. Let's drive a stake through the heart of the past. It's stupid and over.
Move to Tokyo or Rotterdam and keep your cramped, robotic paws off California!
"And food? If it was so low quality back then compared to now then why has everything from cancer, heart disease, and obesity skyrocketed?"
I don't have data but my sense is the massive death rate of the wars creates some population skewing for the cancer rates over time. I'm with you on heart disease and obesity. Both are embarrassing stats for us right now.
My house was built in 1930. The original stuff was in good shape. Repairs and improvements likely done in the 1950s are good. The stuff done in the 1970s is complete crap. Luckily, we seem to be going back to better quality now. But things like hardwood just aren't available anymore.
I think the main thing people miss is the conformity and sense of collective progress. That's gone. The boomer liberal adoration of John F Kennedy is a great example of a way people can miss the aesthetic of the 50s without explicitly calling it that. Yes, there's the culture. The vast majority of people had larger extended family networks and fathers in their households, often for better and sometimes for worse. Deaths to fentanyl were much lower, and health expectancy was mostly going up because better food nutrients, antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitation technologies were transforming people's life expectancy.
But it was also liberating. Automobiles were regularly used by a massive middle class that could regularly dodge social authority of the small town whenever they felt like it. The car would put the sexual revolution on steroids even as people buttoned up and settled down compared to the 40s. The enormous household toil of cleaning and washing was now both motorized and available to most people, like smartphones. People (ex-military white men) were entering college en masse by the tens of millions for the first time to become more educated. Segregation, which had become de jure since the end of Reconstruction, was starting to fall apart as a richer South received more attention and legal pressure by a black middle class, including those returning from serving in France and living in Northern cities.
Most importantly to people, there was a clear mass culture. You tuned into a handful of TV shows and you'd get the news about the latest threats by the Soviets with everyone else. You might have opposed entering WW2 until Japan or been skeptical of NATO like Bob Taft (R-OH), but that handsome Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. really knows how to hand it to the commies in the UN delegation. The country made sense, and enormous new technologies were being deployed at scales never seen before. Congress ordered new housing, it was built. It ordered new highways, they were built. It all happened and it was clearly getting better even if things weren't always good.
The 50s are basically a mix of what people adore about the actor Reagan and the wartime leader FDR. They will come back again, as all things do, but for now we are in the 1910s-20s. A time of uncertain war abroad and global political economy shifts. Strange new ideas and fragmented men. Eccentric new fortunes manipulating press outlets and allying with politicians for a cut. Race riots, ethnic machines and favors in politics. Lots of anti-social behaviors emerging in our cities, foreign languages everywhere. We have been here before. We are here again.
Matt's done a great job repeatedly observing that this is wrong from a factual standpoint of wealth. But every time I see versions of this meme I just viscerally want to see the blatant sexism in it called out.
I dunno. That little house is over $500k here
Yes, in major metro areas LOTS of young people would gladly buy a small house without a garage - like we did in 2004 near DC. It definitely would have been more affordable in the 70s-90s, so maybe that’s where the nostalgia belongs.
Yeah the 90s were objectively the best
Stop denigrating the 50s. Polio, man -- good times.
If it was good enough for FDR, it's good enough for us!
Whereas that Salk guy -- he was worse than Fauci!
Can you imagine: mobilizing children and collecting dimes in order to mass vaccinate the entire country?! This is the past that conservatives want to go back to?
"...mobilizing children and collecting dimes...."
Pure collectivism of the kind that Ayn Rand warned us against.
"March of Dimes," you say? More like march of sheep.
I live in a house that looks pretty much like the one in the picture. 1,000 square feet. no garage. Given the increase in housing costs in my area, it would now sell for more than $1 million. Definitely beyond the purchasing power of any single wage worker in the manufacturing sector. But much to Matt's point, that is in part because of housing regulations. Our area just got rezoned from single family homes to being able to have at least three units (four on a lot my size.) Lots of less well maintained homes are being sold and torn down and having three multi-story units with collective square footage of at least 6,000 and one of them is usually an ADU with about $1,200 square feet. They aren't sold separately but they rent for a hell of a lot less than a $1 million house would. So part of why no one with one middle class income can buy a house "like" mine now is that we have used zoning to make them unaffordable. But at the same time, a family of three living in 1,000 square foot used to be typical and would not seem pretty small to most people in most areas. Expectations about housing size have changed a lot. When we make repairs in can be hard to find appliances or plumbing fixtures that actually fit our spaces anymore and ofter have to pay more to get European or Japanese versions that come smaller. Lot of my parents friends grew up in similar sized homes but can't imagine how we live in one. It's a weird collective mind shift.
Most of the out-of-control cost of housing is land. It’s true that square footage and amenities have also improved! But appliances cost, like, a few thousand dollars. They didn’t get hundreds of thousands of dollars better since 2019.
My boomer parents had much less off-season produce available when they were growing up. Normal people were not going to get fresh strawberries in January because you would have had to grow them in a greenhouse or fly them in from Florida and either was expensive. Off season lettuce was... iceberg lettuce. They ate a lot of canned fruit and vegetables. I'm very glad that I can get fresh sugar snap peas at my local grocery store for $4.
Try shifting the comparison from the 1950s to 1964-69. With a political "consensus," integration was the law of the land and "Skin color doesn't matter" was the watchword. People were experimenting with sexuality and psychedelics; "gender identity" was becoming blurred (rather than promoted). We moved from a cramped 3-room apartment to a modest ranch house on a quarter-acre (yes, with a washer and dryer), 10 minutes' drive from the Walt Whitman Mall.
As I lament to my cat these days -- "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
A house like the one in the picture, in my metropolitan area, would be unaffordable for all but the wealthy.
Nostalgia politics is not a dead end: it's a way to get things done.
1) appeal to nostalgia
2) win elections
3) drain the US Treasury into the pockets of rich people
4) profit!!!
Republicans are the opposite of the underpants gnomes. They always know what step 3 is, and it is always "drain the US Treasury into the pockets of rich people." Every election is a heist movie where a plucky band of billionaires sets out to rob Fort Knox. And nostalgia helps them do it.
Political dead end? That's a better description for high-minded wonkery. If it gets votes, it's not a political dead end. If it doesn't get votes, it is.
I’d add ”appeal to racial prejudice and resentment” as 1b but otherwise this is spot on
"I don't feel any racial resentment, just nostalgia.
For the days when those people knew their place."
Pepperidge Farm remembers. (Couldn’t resist a meme)
I'm nostalgic for the days when the voice of nostalgia came from somewhere between a Vermont dairy farmer and a Down East Maine lobsterman.
The true voice of nostalgia is two hundred miles of wilderness.
Huh? At this point, "racial resentment" starts with a capital "B."
I get a sense that resentment about feminism is the main driver this stuff, am I wrong about that? Like in the tweet above, you can spin a story about the housing market and racial politics that could be relevant there, but the tweet is pretty clearly about the wife working at home as much as economics.
The explicit references in the tweet to "mass immigration [and] widespread racial . . . activism" suggest there's also a fairly heavy racist component to me, and I'm someone who finds most accusations of racism these days to be overblown or based on mischaracterizations of what was actually said.
lol should have checked
You are right, though, to mention feminism. My impression, actually, is that rage over changes wrought by feminism are responsible for a much larger share of male resentment and conservative policy positions over the last half century than is usually acknowledged.
I think this is true, but a little bit of just being the opposite side of the same coin. There are a lot of people that believe the reason women work is that they are forced into it by the declining real incomes of their husbands. And they also kind of believe that the declining real incomes of their husbands comes in part from more women working, resulting in an oversupply of laborers.
There’s a lot wrong with these beliefs. But for some they might be economically focused, just misinformed in a lot of ways.
>Political dead end? That's a better description for high-minded wonkery. If it gets votes, it's not a political dead end. If it doesn't get votes, it is.
And what we have seen across the world is that the public often does not course correct away from reactionary nostalgia politics when those politics fail to deliver. Instead there is a vicious cycle of various liberal and pro-growth forces banding together to resist reaction, which leads the reactionary to say 'the reason things suck worse now is because of those guys, that's why you need to give me more power' and then that cycle keeps flying until things finally get so bad that you can coherently run a grand coalition of every element of the political spectrum on "anti-that-guy-ism" (or alternately, until that person is able to chip away enough at institutions and democratic character to cement dictatorship). See: Poland, Hungary, Argentina, etc.
Fortunately, Donald Trump will be dead by 2030 and has no heir apparent, so at least there's that.
Came to post basically this. It might be a 'dead end' for societal progress, but it certainly isn't for Donald Trump's political career.
Maybe in the primary, but I'm not convinced it's the best way to win voters in the general. But I guess we'll all found out on this season of American politics!
I love the Republicans' message: "We're nostalgic for the glorious American past, and Joe Biden is too old."
So in some sense, they'll be appealing to the 1980s, when a big slice of Baby Boomers/Gen X was in early adulthood. There are simply not many votes to be had in appealing to Biden or my grandfather's teenage years.
In quite literal terms, they'll be appealing to 2019, when wages had steadily grown for many years in a row and the world had less foreign policy chaos going on. They'll say yes the news was full of crazy domestic stuff, but that's basically always true now.
>the world had less foreign policy chaos
Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, defunded UNRWA, and assassinated General Soleimani! His term didn't have *less* foreign policy chaos; Americans just cared less about it (and can go back to caring less any time they please).
What was Iran going to do, nuke America in retaliation? They called Trump and asked him to move soldiers so they didn't hit anyone with the missile volley they sent to save face. He completely called their bluff.
Biden by contrast, deliberately soured relations with Saudi Arabia because his staffers are obsessed with creating a multipolar Middle East between them and Iran no matter the facts or changing situation. It's like Merkel convinced Ukraine will be fine and soon in EU markets in 2015, Putin literally invaded and it didn't change her mind. She was already set in her ways no matter what.
The 1980s is also the time that Donald Trump was a fixture in the newspapers, first for being a billionaire and then for being a negative billionaire and then whatever else he did!
And prices at supermarkets and restaurants were much lower.
"...I'm not convinced it's the best way to win voters in the general."
From your mouth!
Dems should probably get in on the game rather than stay "above" appealing to any voter over 40
One reason Biden is in trouble on the economy issue is his political coalition really does believe it's worth increasing inflation a little if it's to satisfy interest groups through cash transfers or other costly demand-side stimulus. It's hard to be something that you're not, but then politics is all about the art of the possible.
Haha, yeah “Republicans”. Democrats aren’t doing that with their Ukraine funding, China graft, Silicon Valley grifting, etc. lol.
Ryan, welcome to the Slow Boring comment section and I hope you'll enjoy your brief stay.
I hope not. That would surely make it an echo chamber, lol.
Stick around! Everyone literally disagrees all the time.
"Everyone literally disagrees all the time."
Do not.
There are plenty of people here who disagree with Matt, the Democrats, the Left et. al.
i am sorry i don't peruse right wing media so i have no clue what in the world you're on about.
what do you mean by those three planks
And YOU are the problem, Kade. If you don’t understand that then you are in an echo chamber. This is our problem in America. We have these two echo chambers in which most of the left and right are stuck. They are living in two false realities. And if I believed as they do I’d probably be a nut too. Fortunately those are not the realities. You are obviously a leftist. Fine. But do you read right wing opinion editorials? If not you should. I’m right wing, but I read Yglesias and subscribe to The Atlantic. These people are not fools even though I think they are ultimately wrong. And by testing myself against them I sharpen my arguments and abandon some of my more hastily donned opinions. I wish you would too.
I am legitimately not a leftist, which refers to socialists and progressives who are frankly a lot more likely to share your apparent skepticism of US national security policy.
I'm an old school liberal internationalist which is somewhat unfashionable these days but is still approximately as correct as it was in the 90s.
I genuinely do not know what the allegation you are putting forward is. Do you believe that American support for Ukraine is based on a desire to enrich American defense contractors? I think that's just completely false and conspiratorial. America is supporting Ukraine because we legitimately believe that the norms and structures of the liberal order are good for America and worth upholding. I understand rightists like Tucker or apparently yourself are very skeptical of this idea on the merits, which is fair enough, but this is the first time I am hearing someone accuse Democrats of holding this opinion insincerely to enrich the wealthy.
I do not think the Ukraine policy (which I support) is simply to enrich defense contractors. I do believe that it is happening, though. You see, you have read into my opinions that which is not there and was never expressed. You are stereo-typing. Perhaps I am too. In fact, your description of yourself in your second paragraph could be my description of myself.
You: "You are obviously a leftist"
Also you: "You see, you have read into my opinions that which is not there and was never expressed".
Aren't you doing a lot of stereotyping and leaning heavily on assumption here?
Are you actually named Kade? If so everyone probably thinks you consume a lot of right wing TV media regardless.
I am a white guy from the South so it's really not a bad bet, sadly I was born a contrarian.
It would be helpful if you would take a moment to explain Ukraine funding, China graft, Silicon Valley grifting, etc. What exactly do you mean by those words?
Are you aware that huge amounts of the Ukraine funding is unaccounted for? When money is unaccounted for it has been stolen most of the time. Surely you are aware of the huge payments the Biden family has gotten from Chinese businesses and Ukranian ones. The art sales of Hunter originals? Bankman-Frieds connections?
I'm not necessarily aware of all of this. What precisely is the argument? That there is endemic corruption on aid to Ukraine, and that the Biden extended family is receiving corrupt money from Chinese and Ukrainian businesses? That Democratic donors/office holders were invested/involved with Bankman-Fried? I'd first want to quantify/describe the alleged connections, then ask what the implications of that are. Suppose I grant that all of what you say is true and involves significant sums. What do you think should follow from that?
Please keep in mind that I was answering someone who was alleging that Republicans are all about enriching themselves. I'm just pointing out that human nature doesn't slink on one side and preen on the other side of the political divide.
From a logical perspective, you haven't countered the claim that Republicans are all about enriching themselves. Saying Democratic politicians may be involved in corruption says nothing about the state of corruption for Republicans. Is your point that many actors are corrupt, so that one must choose who to support on other factors? I'm still not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Looking forward to waxing nostalgic about the stuff I listen to now in my middle age. I have no clue who any of these bands are.
Will I be arguing with people that Lorde's Melodrama (2017) is in fact the perfect encapsulation of 2010s pop music? It's disturbingly likely.
“Now what do you young bucks know about Tha Carter V?”
Mark my words Milan, you will miss this comments section and find that internet discourse has gone totally off the rails.
GenX remembers usenet and irc... You'll have your own version of online nostalgia.
phpBB and Disqus in between!
Ugh disqus is/was the worst. I was happy when Wonkette finally moved to substack and I could comment without logging in through a social media or Google account.
You can create a Disqus account, that's what I did.
There are some things that I don't like, but advantages that it has over Substack is that it allows you to hyperlink and do basic text transformations, and that it gives a nice "# new comments above/below" banner on the top and bottom of the screens that you can click to jump to new comments. Here on Substack I have to kludge my way to a workaround by doing a Ctrl+F for "new_repl", except that the underscore is replaced with a space, so that this comment doesn't picked up in that search.
I dunno; at least Disqus no longer shows up four times on the first page of half my Google search results like f*ing Quora still does.
BBSes! Exitilus and Legend of the Red Dragon played over dialup! And porn that took an hour to download a grainy image
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uNJPzoAYWU
I clicked on this thinking, now which Simpsons bit is this? Did not disappoint!
My son is 16 and he says this to his friends about TCIV, an album that came out when he was, *checks notes*, 4 years old.
I remember tutoring a bunch of 16-year-olds for the SAT around 2015, when I was in my 30s, and them talking about how old-school hip-hop was so much better than what was out now, and I was like, *I’m* supposed to be telling *you* that!
I'm no music snob, but I think there genuinely are times in which contemporary music just isn't as compelling as past periods, even among the demographics at whom contemporary music is targeted. https://xkcd.com/339/
The latter half of the aughts in particular (what might be called the heyday of the Black-Eyed Peas) was both a time when I was reasonably aware of hit music (and not an old fogey) and yet also of the opinion that it overwhelmingly sucked compared to, like, the previous fifteen years.
I don't know who said it - maybe Rick Ruben - but a lot of music is made to the drugs of the era and that to enjoy the music you really need to be on the drugs too. Obviously the 60s/70s psychedelics fits this. Cocaine in the 80s. Alcohol maps to grunge. Their point was all the mumble rap is really made for people on downers (e.g., oxy, ketamine, etc.) -- and if you're not on downers you won't *get* it. It was interesting.
EDIT: Also fully agree there was period where commercial pop dominated and well ... that just sucked.
Sure, I agree with that. It's actually funny you linked an XKCD because Randall Munroe is someone who normally scoffs at the idea that the past could *ever* be better in any respect than the present. Examples off the top of my head (why do I know so many off the top of my head??):
https://xkcd.com/1370/
https://xkcd.com/2650/
https://xkcd.com/1227/
https://xkcd.com/1314/
https://xkcd.com/1996/
Despite being young at the time, I feel no nostalgia for the Bubblegum-Pop-and-NuMetal Y2K era.
I just gave a college-age son of a good friend my old LPs. He was particularly ecstatic to find I had Steely Dan's Gaucho (1980). And he and his friends especially enjoy listening to these albums on vinyl.
This is why I'm not worried long-term about seemingly overwhelming phenomena like TikTok. Young people will always rebel and move on and they will do so in ways that may surprise, like loving ~50 year old albums and using old technology for that enjoyment.
Those are just facts.
It depends what you mean by old-school. The 90's, yeah, I'm on board with that. Earlier than that and I just think of this Donald Glover bit: https://youtu.be/I1bbBqnG_cg?si=IYG0-mHCBRS22Sny&t=98
(The link goes to the relevant part but the whole clip is relevant to today's post actually)
One of the young staff guys at my gym plays all the alternative-metal hits I used to listen to on the radio at my pizza joint dishwashing job in high school, and it just amazes me that someone his age can have SUCH a command of early-2000's music. Also keeps me rockin' on bench day.
That’s not especially surprising, I doubt even someone who was more into music from that time than you would have listened to much of their stuff. Outside of Green Day, none of those bands were actually very big.
This seems like a classic case of Gen X culture getting squished by both boomer and millennial music?
If it's any consolation, I'm just a few years older than Matt and I don't know who many of the bands he mentioned are! (E.g., pretty sure I'd never even heard of Operation Ivy before this.)
I bet you know Biggie and Tupac tho ... Ready to Die felt as big as Smells Like Teen Spirit when it came out.
It was! Just not with the white kids until later.
Ok. I can't remember the lag. I felt like Juicy hit right around the time it came out but maybe it was later. It only reached 27 on the Billboard in 1994 but Hypnotize hit #1 in 1997. I was in high school in 95-99 and Biggie and Tupac were such huge parts of it.
Me too haha. I was way more into East Coast/NYC, Wu-Tang, Biggie, Nas. Never really got into 2Pac but obviously he was huge.
I feel like Ready to Die stayed cool for longer while Nirvana became background nostalgia very quickly.
'Hypnotize' was 100% helped by the fact that he died a week after the release of the song. Like Jadakiss once said (presumably about his time with Puff), "...dead rappers get better promotion..."
I only know/remember Biggie and Tupac from an Obama joke at a White House Correspondence dinner.
Sadly not very well
I am in my late 30s and just starting to appreciate the music of prior generations - specifically a lot of 1970s folk music like John Denver, Cass Elliot, Peter, Paul & Mary, and so on. These are songs I was vaguely aware of growing up, so there's slight nostalgia/familiarity, and also I think I find them a soothing and peaceful refuge from today's turbulent media landscape.
The 1960s are calling and they are demanding ownership of Peter, Paul & Mary.
Their first LP was the first one I ever bought, in 1962. As far as I’m concerned, their music (like all art) belongs to every generation.
I just looked at their discography and you are 100% correct -- their last single to ever chart was in 1969. (I thought they might have had some 1970s era hits too, but they actually released nothing in the '70s until their album, Reunion, in 1978 and it appears to have performed so poorly that it has never even received a re-release on CD!)
You are right to look forward to that, Milan. Truly there is not a better way to spend a lazy evening with a fellow traveller or two than to clamber headfirst down a rabbit hole of great bands and songs that you had on repeat during your glory years.
I'm waxing nostalgic about the stuff I listened to in my early 30's. If there were one era I could make my honorary "generational music", it would be the goddamn YouTube emo-EDM of the Suicide Sheep era, 2011-2017.
That shit--man, it was the shit. We should bring that era back. My nostalgic self has declared it.
(Of course, by rightful age, my nostalgic music era should be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Incubus, and System of a Down--they were the "bees knees" when I was a teenaged/20-something lad. I guess their vibes never quite clicked with me. Also, I grew up rather slowly.)
Same, from the other generational side.
Except for Less Than Jake. Always there for a hometown Gainesville FL band.
First time I ever ditched school was to see Less Than Jake open for No Doubt at the Metro. Had to be 95 or 96. Gwen was something else. Woah.
Yessir.
The Bobby Shmurda song that shall not be named is a decade old now. You yourself probably weren’t allowed to listen to it when it came out...
ABOUT A WEEK AGO
I miss *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys. Those were the days.
How can you miss them when they’re still in nostalgia-milking commercials?
Milan what are your faves? I keep gravitating back to the same shit I was listening to in the 80s-90s..
Carter V, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, Born Sinner, 4 Your Eyez Only
lol I will have to look all of those up!
Drake will be pushing 60 when you're in your 40s.
Will the music have devolved from mediocre to straight up bad by then? Yes. Will I still be bumping it? Yes.
New album, "Thank Me Then", dropping circa 2044
So like that will be the midpoint of Drake's career?
“But at its best, politics isn’t an aesthetic experience, it’s a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better.”
Matt assumes that the “problems” people face are mostly material. This is dubious. My house is plenty big, my car plenty reliable, but diet varied and plentiful. My unmet needs are emotional and largely positional. I want my career to glitter, my ideas to command as much attention as Matt’s and my drop shots to be the envy of Fayette County pickleball. I want to be the most interesting man in the room. We can get richer but, we can never all be the most interesting.
I crave a politics that better connects us as human beings. People romanticize horrible, brutal things like war because it forges intense connections. The impulse towards violence is repugnant, but the desire for belonging and connection are real and human. A politics that makes us feel like we are all in it together and will help one another when it isn’t your day, your week your month or even your year could deliver more than one which merely increases GDP.
"Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."
- Orwell
Relatedly, I wish there were more express acknoweldgment of the relative-vs-objective axis of human well being. Many things - among them indoor plumbing - hit so low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that there’s no way you can’t pitch them as straight up welfare improvements. For these goods, the standard libertarian “increases in GDP result in increases in welfare” story is basically correct, fairly profoundly so. Every time I have a hot shower I try to remind myself what a luxury it is by historical standards and prevent hedonic treadmill creep, with reasonable success.
But as you note, this linear relationship between material improvement and subjective wellbeing gets really easy to skew, as marginal improvements in goods availability provide less and less radical change from the status quo ante (plus hedonic treadmill), and sometimes for the worse in large part (TikTok bad. Leaded gasoline bad.)
But even as we hit a point of diminishing terms in terms of utility-to-expenditure, we nevertheless find ourselves in a perpetual Red Queen’s Race of *relative* status and wellbeing that’s modulated in part by how much we consume relative to others. Matt’s proposal that you can decided to just be happy living with less stuff in a 1950s style home is a reasonable recommendation for people who are not, as a class, a bunch of status-obsessed hairless social apes. Unfortunately, of course, being “a bunch of status-obsessed hairless social apes” is quite literally the human condition.
Matt’s 1950s house example is god here - if everyone has a small house and one car, you’re doing fone relative to your social milieu, and while a bigger house might be nice on its own terms, you may rationally care about the status points a lot more than that[1]. This is the Amish approach: create an entire society where forgoing modernity and strict relgiosity are the default because social conformance is such a powerful force. For everyone else, there’s the proverbial observation that if you have the only 2,000 sqft house in a neighborhood where everyone else’s is 1,500 sqft, you’re doing pretty well. If you have the only 2,000 sqft house where everyone else’s is 3,000 sqft, you’re doing pretty poorly.
[1] As I pointed out once on Noah Smith’s blog, it’s not clear that Henry VIII would be wrong to prefer to be a king in his time to being a schmoe in ours, notwithstanding his inability to buy a refrigerator or AC unit or car.
"But even as we hit a point of diminishing terms in terms of utility-to-expenditure, we nevertheless find ourselves in a perpetual Red Queen’s Race of *relative* status and wellbeing that’s modulated in part by how much we consume relative to others."
Since you mentioned Noah Smith, this ties in neatly with the Elite Overproduction concept.
For a generation or so we produced a lot of highly educated people in fields of study with very limited prospects w.r.t. both remuneration and status.
Deprived of the status that they think they deserve, they basically rocked the boat (made a bunch of noise and caused a bunch of problems) in an attempt to draw attention to themselves and gain more status. With clearly negative effects on society overall.
But because status is inherently relative/zero-sum, and money is generally a better status signal overall, it had limited success. So they keep at it and are a perpetual thorn in society's side.
I mostly agree with that hypothesis, but I'm always skeptical of it as the "end of the story". I think you can't complete this equation without its other side -- Boomer longevity.
The Boomers coincided with huge increases in late-life survivability, not JUST total-life-expectancy (where most gains were simply made in infant mortality).
I think that elite overproduction would have been a somewhat manageable problem if the Boomers had mostly all died over the last 30 years, leaving housing and inheritances and job openings for the new elites. To boot, the new elites wouldn't have had as much political competition with the Boomers -- Obama's presidency would have been a LOT more transformative if Mitch McConnell isn't trying to figure out how to mobilize Boomer obstructionism, but rather, facing a decimation of his base, sees courting Millennials as his only way out of his party's popularity crisis.
TLDR, most of the 2010s would have involved Millennials competing with each other for the spoils of the Boomers' demise, which is STILL a zero-sum game, but is LESS zero-sum than IRL turned out to be.
"I think that elite overproduction would have been a somewhat manageable problem if the Boomers had mostly all died over the last 30 years"
This Boomer: hey, wait a minute.
I said all due respect!
Demographic trends definitely play a role here.
And I am going to be somewhat...uncharitable...here, but I don't think even a mass die-off/retirement of boomers was ever going to open up enough positions to satisfy a lot of the would-be elites with 'useless' (or at least non-remunerative) degrees.
A bunch of additional positions in academia would also have to be created. And then you'd have the opposite problem when the millennial demographic tide receded (as it is doing now) and university enrollment plummets, and those positions become extraneous.
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that there would be NO problem, but just that it wouldn’t be considered a “crisis” by the overproduced elites.
Btw I absolutely had you in mind when writing my first comment in this thread since I kept going back to the interplay of mimetic desire with the tenets of Buddhism.
Third 👏Noble 👏Truth 👏FTW! 🙌🙌🙌
I feel seen. 🤣
Relative social status is an extremely powerful engine of human psychology, but I think the idea that consumption = status is only one mode of that engine. There have been a number of eras throughout history in which being materially better off was a prime indicator of status, but it is not always true. Other substitutes have been social capital, physical prowess, intellectual achievement, and even self-discipline and self-deprivation on the part of wealthy people.
There's a reason, for example, that being a bitcoin millionaire who has a tacky home filled with tacky art might blow the minds of your blue collar friends from high school but fills other wealthy people with revulsion. Refinement and taste are a key component of status, not just consumption.
In an era where there is always more and better things to buy, consumerism is the obvious choice for apes to rank themselves with. But I think it is possible through the grinding slow fight of culture war to change how people evaluate relative status. One issue is that liberals are averse to really acknowledging that some people being better and others being worse is an inevitable element of reality, and thus they refuse to select their preferred mode of determining "better" and "worse".
I would suggest that Henry VIII would very much have preferred today's divorce laws...kind of famously so.
When you’re king, you get to make your own divorce laws!
(Plus his ex wives didn’t get half of his estate!, rather famously so in the case of Ann Boleyn.)
Exactly. That's how he got ahead. (Ducks.)
Haha true. I would guess he'd love modern divorce laws while also being king.
I'm also guessing he'd love some modern medicine to treat his gout.
lol
If neither you nor anyone you know has indoor plumbing, it might not rank high on Maslow's hierarchy. Have it and have it taken away and I think one's attitude will be different.
While awareness of what you're missing out on or not can certainly change your social-status-mediated wellbeing, Robert Caro's discussion of the backbreaking labor involved in carrying water in the Texas Hill Country has me pretty firmly convinced that indoor plumbing is a huge welfare improvement regardless of any social context.
I thought maybe “low” meant “high,” as in low on the pyramid=of high importance, since you need it before you can go higher up the pyramid?
I think Marc meant low on the pyramid (i.e. more fundamental need, survival rather than expression value) = high on the hierarchy of importance.
Exactly, a society where increases to incomes are mostly gobbled up by spending on zero-sum positional status games will be one where economic metrics can keep hitting new all-time highs without people's subjective lives getting any better.
Are you Emily or Joey, or just a fan?
This is an extremely key point that all technocrats completely miss. Life, at least for some of us, is about being RELEVANT. Technology, if anything, reduces human relevancy, and "progress" seems to be towards needing other humans less. The side effect - being needed less by other humans - is not discussed and is awful.
In a smaller society, I might have been the Matt for my community. But because of technology, no one will choose me over him. I tried writing a blog - even my mom wouldn't subscribe. Brutal. He's simply better at it, and will always be better at it, and it leaves me feeling helpless. I imagine that's how a lot of people feel.
Meanwhile, the people reading Matt have no connection to him at all. In almost all cases, he can't hear anything you say or communicate with you at all. It's a one-way street, which leaves one feeling disconnected. I keep reading Matt and wanting to have a discussion with him, but of course...I'm not relevant to him, and he'd never have the time, and it wouldn't be fair, and it's because this relationship between us is false. Parasocial. My ape brain can't keep up - I feel lonely and desperate for an intelligent friend. All of them have turned themselves into commodities, it seems.
Agreed, but also this is why it's so important for politicians to not sell the heroin fix for this - out-group animosity. This is one of the harder-to-describe dangers of Trump and the intersectional left - they both trade in hatred and fear of other Americans.
Biden doesn't do this. It's a key difference.
“The impulse towards violence is repugnant…”
In most contexts.
human beings overproduce violence. the instinct should be restrained and channeled, it will never disappear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
one of my wife’s wiser tropes is “testosterone poidoning.”
Why do you want to be the most interesting man in the room? Seriously. If you’re the most interesting, doesn’t that imply that everyone around you is more boring than you?
Why is it your goal to surround yourself with more boring people?
I wasn’t being that literal. The more interesting I am, the more access I will have to interesting people.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think I'm in the same sort of income bracket as you, and can in some sense say "my house is plenty big, my car plenty reliable, my diet varied and plentiful. My unmet needs are emotional and largely positional." And yet, there are plenty of material things that I would appreciate - I want more and better restaurants I can walk to! I want jumping on a plane to visit friends in New York and London to be as cheap and convenient as it is to hop onto a train to Los Angeles for the weekend!
It actually annoys me more on a personal level when supposedly left wing people engage in this sort of nostalgia politics. People who also want to go back to the 50s because how much more unionization there is. Or the types of lefty NIMBYs (that seems to be especially prevalent in California) that romanticize some perfect pastoral past. Like I want to yell “you can support more unions without over romanticizing the past. That’s supposed to be a right wing thing”.
My continued go to example of what can happen when nostalgia politics goes to far is everything that’s happened in the UK since 2008. So much of their anemic economic performance and especially terrible housing policy can be traced to an even deeper sense of false nostalgia (I’m guessing there are tons of essays or books about how decline of British empire fits in) and the fact the population is on average older than America. Hence a whole lot of pensioners who bought houses decades ago continually voting for the ultimate example of a party built around rose tinted nostalgia for the past, the Tory party.
A striking way I see how this dynamic works is with soccer. By any objective measure, English soccer is at a high point right now. The Premier league is not just the envy of the soccer world in terms of revenue and worldwide viewership, it’s the envy of sports leagues the world over (the NBA in season tournament is clearly inspired by the FA cup. Which is not premier league specific obviously but gets at my point). It increasingly is able to outbid other teams for stars (the actual animating impulse behind the super league was Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona feeling as though they can’t keep up financially. See Barcelona and “levers”).
And yet if you listen to a lot English ex pros and pundits, it’s astonishing how much not only they bash the game today but clearly pine for the game of the 70s and 80s. Little refresher, English grounds were mud baths and featured “hood and hope” tactics, the stadiums were crumbling disasters which led to very real tragedy (see Bradford city fire. See Hillsborough which is partly a story of a stadium not suitable for big crowds). If you read Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch one of the more striking sentences is when he describes the first time he saw a dead body after a game. Like what do you mean the first time?!
Just such a striking example of how people can over romanticize almost anything in their past purely as Matt notes, this is when you were young.
Old people being nostalgic and young people being annoyed at it is a permanent dynamic.
Same thing happens in baseball all the time. And always has. There is a great book called the Glory of Their Times, which is basically interviews of old baseball legends like Ty Cobb. The vast majority of these geezers are complaining about the way the players play “today” (I forget the year the book came out, but it is old) and how they could not have hacked it back when they played. Sports/houses/cars get better over time. Nostalgia is really looking back through the rose-colored glasses of time.
Chris Rock was really good in going after nostalgia in baseball a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFQkQ6Va3A
And I'm sure that there are plenty of nostalgia dead enders out there whining about the recent pace of play changes.
The funny thing is, the recent pace of play changes is actually moving baseball back to where it was 50-60-70 years ago. During the pandemic when we were stuck inside with nothing better to do, I definitely went on a youtube deep dive a number of times (admittedly I've found myself doing that even lately). And one thing that came up is the full game 7 of the 1952 World Series. I definitely didn't watch the whole thing, but watched snippets. Man was it striking how quickly things moved. Pitches to the plate were rapid one after the other.
I continue to believe that Tony LaRussa and the Rays brain trust were a huge reason baseball lost fans. LaRussa is one of the first managers to really have a closer and essentially use situational bullpen. Rays, with the budget they had, went all in on advanced metrics which included early adopters of shifts, "three true outcomes" and even more strategic used of pitchers (including shortening starting pitcher starts). Both were right to do what they did (LaRussa won multiple championships, Rays are way more successful than they should be given their budget), but man did it really make the game so much worse entertainment wise. There were stats on this regarding how much longer games were compared to the past (and how they managed to get game time down last year) and just how little the ball was in play compared the past.
Like hey old-timers, the game is literally different today.
It amused me to no end when baseball powers that be, in an attempt to reach more fans and especially younger fans created a committee/commission that included George Will. Like as soon as I heard Will was involved, I was like "can't think of a better symbol of why baseball is losing younger fans". And by the way I say this as a baseball fan (have gone and will continue to go to lots of Mets games. Hey Cohen, where were you on Ohtani by the way?).
I also read a good Times piece about a disproportionate number of the best baseball books in any one year are baseball books. Or just that a disproportionate number of sports books in general are baseball books. Just a clear sign of a sport hampered by its attachment to its past.
On I think a very related note. I saw on twitter (refused to call it X) Jeet Heer had a revealing but amusing post (not usually a fan of his, but this was interesting) of a screenshot of a book about the Black Plague. The book itself apparently (somehow) found some primary source documents. And of course due to the plague there was an actual small uptick in wages for Peasant workers. And apparently this primary source had some landlord complaining about how workers today are whiney and don't work as hard as they use to. Like holy crap!, this "lazy kids today aren't built like we were in the past" is an extremely old sentiment.
It's a sentiment as old as man.
"Kids these days have it so easy with their newly evolved homo sapien brain sizes. I remember back when we were homo erectus, we were all incredibly confused all the time!"
Most importantly, Let’s go Mets!
Football fans moan about how the game is obsessed with money while at the same time excoriating their team owners for not blowing money on players.
The Bradford City fire is one of the most jaw dropping things I have seen on YouTube (it’s regularly removed because of how harrowing it is). It’s what happens when greasy food packaging is dropped in amongst dry wood.
If I'm not mistaken the other proximate cause was years and years of people just dropping their almost completed cigarettes' butts behind the wooden stands. I've seen the video, it's astonishing how quickly the stadium goes up in flames (there was also footage of an old man running onto the field completely engulfed in flames which is probably why it was subsequently taken down).
It was also The Sun that wrote complete lies after Hillsborough and blame the tragedy on drunken Liverpool fans who supposedly pickpocketed and peed on fans (narrator voice, no evidence this ever happened). The proximate source for this falsehood is (drum roll) police who were very clearly trying to deflect from their very real role in creating this disaster. And to this day there are "truthers' who think Liverpool fans were responsible.
Like guys, this is what you are nostalgic for?!!
....1985!?
This is true in American football as well. I'm expecting it to get very nasty in the college game in particular, with the rise of NIL and, soon in my opinion, schools directly paying players.
“…schools directly paying players”
I think it’s a step in the right direction to admit the truth: Big football schools are minor league NFL franchises that partially support an educational mission and give the student body something to do on weekends to get their drinking started.
Oh I think it's a major step in the right direction.
The 70s are when freaking Nottingham Forest won the European Cup in back-to-back years.
Which was considered one of the most unlikely championships in English first division history. It was brought up all the time when Leicester City won in 2015.
But reality is the financial gulf between 2nd division and 1st division at that time was way way less than it is now due to television money, sponsorship deals and higher ticket prices. The top teams couldn't just hoover up all the best prospects and players; they could definitely pay more than most teams lower down the pyramid (let's be real, a big part of Liverpool's success), but again gulf wasn't nearly as large financially. Meaning plenty of good players were out of Liverpool's grasp financially and but maybe more importantly good players could get similar or maybe that much less pay even at 2nd division sides. Dave Mackay was possibly the most important Brian Clough signing that helped make Derby County a rising force and he was able to sign Mackay while still in the 2nd division (famously to the ire of the board since he still cost more than typical 2nd division players). Kevin Keegan famously came back to 2nd division Southampton after leaving Hamburg. If Harry Kane decided he'd had enough of Bayern after one season, considering he clearly has plenty left in the tank, he'd be extremely sought after; there's just no way a Watford or QPR or Sunderland is able to come close to affording his wages.
The in season tournament would be much more fun if it included top college and international teams.
College teams would likely get crushed, even the ones loaded with McDonalds All-Americans or other blue chip prospects.
But international teams? Especially European teams? That could be a lot of fun. And also add the element that makes the FA cup so exciting (and the NCAA BBall tourney); the possibility of a major upset.
Yeah I mean the Pistons would lose to the best European team, right? Some of those teams have amazing chemistry and develop great team players. It's one of the reasons why an American hasn't won league MVP since 2018.
On a one off basis, yes I think a European team could not just win but win quite handily. I mean we see this in the NCAA tournament. There's been numerous 14 over 3, 15 over 2 and yes one 16 over 1 upsets. Teams loaded with future NBA talent losing to a team with players more likely to win Academy Awards then be drafted*. But over a 7 game series? Very likely Pistons would still win based on talent. You can see this to an extent with European soccer. The promoted teams can often overachieve and even get few big scalps, but there is a clear talent gap between them and other established Premier league/La Liga/Serie A teams which means those teams are usually fighting relegation. If they can survive a season or two then they can usually start attracting a few more top level (although usually not truly elite) pros.
Regarding MVP thing, I'd be a bit careful. First, Embid, Giannis and Jokic were all drafted as young players. Embiid was born in Cameroon but actually went to high school in Florida and then went to Kansas before being drafted. You can credit the European teams youth systems to a degree for Giannis and Jokic. But even that's complicated. Giannis kind of famously didn't pick up a basketball until 13 and didn't get Greek citizenship until a few months before the draft (Giannis was a stateless refugee) and was drafted at 18. He was a real unknown with dare I say "freakish" physical tools which is why he was mid round draft pick. Jokic famously was drafted during a Taco Bell commercial, is probably the closest to what you are saying but even he was drafted at 19.
On an individual basis with MVP's, obviously that's all true. But I was thinking more of a podcast I was listening to with Doc Rivers where he was talking about the decline of team basketball on AAU teams. And how this was impacting the NBA readiness of some American players.
*meant to note at the end. Was referring to this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs2vV9rI-6w
An especially ironic form of this is nostalgia for things that they themselves destroyed. For example, there was a recent viral article about a NH Trump supporter, who is quite well off and drives a big truck. Last year, the same guy was quoted asking Haley about going back to a time when he was riding his bike in the street. Beyond the obvious wishing for childhood, the biggest reason kids don't ride their bike is because they are worried about being run over by giant trucks!
It's also amazing how the party of supposedly personal responsibility here expects the president to micromanage their neighborhood to make him ride his bike without giving up his truck. There's nobody stopping him from riding his bike if he wants.
New England is one of the few places left where people haven’t fully sorted along right/left party lines. In this hyper-polarized time, I love seeing pride flags in the same yard as pickup trucks. So I hope New Hampshire holds onto its weird contradictions.
To steel man the statement below, what he’s pining for is not a time when there weren’t big trucks on the street (60s cars were terrible for pedestrians too) but a time when you could let your kid roam around free. Why you can’t is complicated but seems basically bipartisan to me: conservatives like to play up urban crime because it helps them in elections but the worst abuses of CPS who arrest parents for letting their 10-year-olds roam free seem to primarily happen in blue nanny states (while red states like Utah are passing free range kids bills).
While Utah was the first, a variety of red and blue states have passed free range parenting laws: https://reason.com/2023/07/01/reasonable-childhood-independence-free-range-independence-day/
THAT’s why you think kids don’t ride bikes? Because evil Trump supporters drive big trucks, lol? They don’t go outside because parents are irrationally concerned about crime. And to the extent that crime is real, I blame you leftist whose constituencies are committing most of the crimes.
I don't think this is right, at least in suburbs and small towns. I'm a parent, and my concerns about my (6 YO) kid biking (or walking at night) far from home is 100% that he'll get hit by a car. I have 0% concern that he'll get, what, mugged for his $4 candy fund?
To be clear, the canonical boogeyman is a pedophile offering candy. But because you have provided an independent candy fund, your child is safe from such schemes.
Is this a constructive addition to the conversation that you thought would help inform people?
Considering that he’s right, probably.
As the father of a 9 year old, it's the trucks, not crime, at least in my neighborhood.
The trucks, or just traffic?
Reckless drivers, generally, but large trucks that sit high off the ground make it a lot easier to miss a child in your immediate vicinity.
A personal anecdote - I have a friend (adult) who was hit by a Hummer on her bike and dragged underneath. Driver only stopped because he heard her screaming. This was over ten years ago - the largest trucks now sit similarly high up to Hummers then.
About which part?
Yes. But if you want to remain hunched in your echo chamber it is problematic. Cheers
To the extent the concern is irrational who do you blame for that?
My constituency is committing the crimes? My constituency is literally the lowest-crime city in the country!
I think he means Black people.
> I blame you leftist
Stop calling out people directly. That's one big reason you're getting a frosty reception.
We had big trucks in NH in the 80s.
Average truck size has increased since then. Outliers have become the norm.
You believe that parents have internalized the size of vehicles, and adjusted their attitudes about children playing outside because of this?
The argument above is that the man is a hypocrite because he drives a big truck, but big trucks are the reason people don't let their kids ride bikes outside any more. I find this tenous. You could argue that there's simply more traffic and that might be a point. You could argue that it has a lot to do with helicopter parenting and screens, and I would agree. But saying 'trucks got so big that I can't let my kid play outside' is grasping at ways to strike at people you consider the outgroup (guys in NH who like Trump and drive trucks).
I mean I don't know, but the data is very clear that vehicles are getting much larger and this is directly attributable to more pedestrian deaths. I imagine some parents have noticed this!
You believe it's impossible for "parents" as a class of people to have noticed that every other car is a giant SUV or truck now? It's not subtle.
I live in a land of trucks, and most vehicles are small and midsize crossovers.
Doesn’t take that many to make the roads meaningfully more dangerous.
Every argument is always tenuous because every phenomenon has multiple factors.
I’m inching THIS much closer to just declaring a general campaign to get all of SB to adopt “interdependent coevolution” as the community’s accepted model of all causality. It would probably shorten about 90% of our arguments’ opening salvos.
I romanticize being 20 lbs lighter and those few weeks I actually had abs.
"...those few weeks I actually had abs."
I still have the abs, I'm just more selective now about who I allow to see them.
Mostly MRI techs, also CT scans.
Eventually, the coroner will get a peek, if he starts in with a flensing knife.
This of course is another powerful seduction of nostalgia: the assumption that we must go back, because if we do we'll magically become younger along with it. Unfortunately, that's not how time and senescence works.
I want an anti-aging pill or a longevity vaccine like in SMAC.
You should read "The Postmortal" by Drew Magary.
You can get them back—just have to lock in
Thank you for the contribution, 21-year-old
Mostly this is a joke about the phrase “lock in” which is popular in my generation
I think it’s a reference to what your parents did to you, rather than let you ride your bike all over town from 8am to 8pm, like the cooler generations were allowed to do.
“Stop playing video games and go outside.”
“But there’s nothing to DO out there!”
“I don’t care. Go.”
... is the reason for much fondly-remembered teenage roaming around the woods by my parents’ old house.
I am younger than you but my parents had me very late in life (my mom was mid-40s) so they had the mindset of your parents. On more than one occasion, I was driven home by Concerned Neighbors who were shocked my parents would let me roam around extremely safe neighborhoods in suburban Florida & Texas without supervision.
I grew up in the 80s and I didn’t have video games but I was a hardcore bookworm. My family usually encouraged this but I’d stay with my grandparents most of the summer and they would absolutely force me outside. Frankly, if they hadn’t then I probably wouldn’t have had any friends. Left to my own devices, I would’ve stayed inside with a book.
But I had a great time, played a lot of sports. Me and another kid bought $5 tennis rackets at Walmart and taught ourselves to play by watching tennis on TV (Mats Wilander forever!), and I somehow made the tennis team in high school. Also raised a lot of hell, rock fights etc, rarely got caught.
We stole a lot lumber to build a treehouse.
We are old here. I don’t have the time to run 40 miles a week.
I do! Got me in the best shape of my life.
Your feet must make ballerinas cringe.
Me either man
In general this is right, but isn't resistance to congestion tolling just that... people don't want to pay the tolls?
E.g., my father hated toll roads and thought the California freeway system was wonderful despite all the traffic. I don't think he was being nostalgic- he was being cheap.
"...despite all the traffic. I don't think he was being nostalgic- he was being cheap."
And setting the monetary value of his time at zero? What kind of cheap is that?
The same type of cheap lots of people are. Ever met someone who will go to all the different supermarkets because oranges are 40 cents cheaper at one and ground beef is 80 cents cheaper at the other and he has coupons at the third?
Or how about left wing free transit advocates who prefer that price tag at zero even if the system isn't as good because of the lack of fare collection?
People love free and cheap stuff even when the love is irrational.
It’s also like exhibit A in decreasing marginal utility of money. When you make more cash, the idea of explicitly “buying time” eg by knowingly forgoing couponing becomes a lot more palatable because you’re spending out of a comfortable cash surplus rather than stretching an already thin budget.
That's true although TBF I know some very cheap people who have plenty of money. There's a psychological allure to it.
It's easier to train yourself to always scrimp and save, than to train yourself to scrimp and save only in the situations where it makes a big difference.
But that's precisely it... free roads aren't free. They cost money. We all pay hundreds of dollars a year for our "free" roads, we just don't see it like a toll because it comes out of all our other taxes.
Right but it's precisely when a cost is visible that people react to it. Look at calls for free transit, free college tuition, etc. Obviously those things will actually all be paid for one way or the other. But the notion that something is "free" nonetheless has emotive power.
Not just emotive power, but it creates an entitlement. “What do you mean I can’t use the roads?!?”
My father in law is very excited about the upcoming Masters of the Air, a Band of Brothers style series about WWII bomber crews. This is because his own father was in the 8th Air Force and was a bomber pilot. When he talked about this, he talks about how much better men used to be than they are today.
And yet, my father in law has also spoken about how his own dad, war hero, regularly beat the shit out of him, his siblings, and his mom. He’d suffered broken ribs and one time the doctors call the police because of the abuse. His dad eventually drank himself to an early death in his 50s.
I can’t square that nostalgia. Maybe some need to understand the trauma? But he doesn’t talk about it like this.
Anyway, nostalgia seems, to me, to fill some kind of psychological need that we have to understand how we could, despite things obviously being worse, have been happy sometimes.
The late philosopher Svetlana Boym made a distinction between an almost whimsical 'reflective' nostalgia that was usually about good things like your family and friends and ska music, and a more serious 'restorative' nostalgia that was usually about bad things like greivances and grudges.
One interesting thing about this framework is that you can have this bizarre sense of a "nostalgia for a sense of progress" - fond memories of expectations that things will be better in the future - that can be interpreted in either way. Channelled into the former, that historic optimism can be a source of inspiration for self-improvement and further change. Into the latter, it can become quite a grim force to try to stop further change in a doomed attempt to wind back the clock into a period of optimism.
It seems like it would be a worthy goal to try to encourage modern America's nostalgia more towards that reflective interpretation than its restoratative one.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents
http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html
Good post, and I would be very interested in further exploration of the implications of the final paragraph. One of my probably not totally rational concerns for my kids about an aging society is that they will be caught up in a backward looking environment, dominated by old people with increasing life spans, pushing public policy towards their interests instead of the future. There's already an interesting evolution in that direction with Trump consolidating nostalgia and outright reactionary politics with at least a promise not to mess with the expensive entitlements that go to the elderly (whether that can be squared by the cut the taxes party is still an open question). I think a lot of the tendencies on the left that are most controversial in these comments around identity politics also fall into a similar backwards looking paradigm, more interested in trying to impose past conflicts on a population that has profoundly changed demographically over the last 60 years.
Anyway I agree that it isn't healthy and it isn't the recipe for a better future.
Don't think that's an irrational concern; I have seen plenty of times that when people lose the connection to others that work brings, they can easily drift into an inward, negative, pessimistic world of resentments. Not to say all older people are like that but it's not uncommon.
Shorter version of a post I had earlier; See everything that's happened in U.K. the last 15 years.
I keep seeing articles about “this revolutionary 700 year old natural air conditioning system” and a bunch of people commenting that we don’t NEeD modern air conditioning. That’s pretty silly, no ancient technology can hold a candle to a basic modern air conditioning unit. Social media creates weird nostalgia movements.
this could also just be people who live in places where it is never hot or humid. it’s a surprisingly common attitude in Europe.
Yeah growing up in the rural southern US there was no ancient airflow chimney that would have made life worth living with 98 degree temps and 95 percent humidity.
Yeah, the humidity thing is what a lot of these folks miss. If these posts are what I think they are, the technology they're referring to is from medieval Persia and (1) depends on underground irrigation canals that exist(ed) basically in Iran and nowhere else and (2) uses evaporative cooling, which means it only works when ambient humidity is low (like in...well...Iran). The tech is legit impressive, under the right circumstances it can make ice. But it's not like this tech has been forgotten; modern evaporative cooling systems are still used in lots of places that have low humidity and high heat. It's just that it's useless if you don't have low humidity.
That’s excellent additional context, thanks Kareem!
Thank you! Incidentally, going to the topic discussed elsewhere in these comments, old Persian evaporative cooling tech is a big part of why you find so many good and interesting ice cream and sorbet options for dessert at Persian restaurants today—Iranians have been able to make them for hundreds of years and with the Iranian climate they have every reason to do so.
Saffron ice cream is available for sale at a few places in New York.
Best SB comment in a while
And yet somehow, I often find myself in Europe during a "rare" (so they try to claim) hot stretch (90+ F in Sweden once even). And they don't put screens on their windows so I either get stagnant air or bugs.
I was at a talk recently where former Sec. of Energy Steven Chu bragged about not needing AC in his SF home because he knew how to get a good breeze going (or something like that, it was a really boring talk).
Nothing has depressed me more lately than reading Applebaum's NY Times column about not wanting to live in a museum, then popping open the comment section and *every* *single* *comment* was full of useless nostalgia or people just openly saying they actually did want to live in a museum.
I think this is one of the areas where the left-ish hue of the Times's readership appears most strongly: Real estate developers are evil. Real estate profits are ipso facto questionable. It's bad to build new stuff. Yada yada. The NYC-centric nature of that paper's commentariat doesn't help (it should, but it doesn't) in that a lot of commenters themselves no doubt have experienced or currently experience stress and anxiety over securing decent shelter for themselves and their families. And yes, feelings of envy abound when it comes to New York City real estate. Which can turn negative.
So OF COURSE new buildings are vulgar, ostentatious, ugly, etc. Where's Howard Roark when you need him?
True that it's leftish in rhetoric but it's also profoundly conservative to prioritize holding on to what you have rather than risk anything in the world might change.
Yes. And to be clear I haven't read the column yet, but shall. But without a doubt soi-disant liberals can certainly engage in a lot of behaviors that code as "conservative" (I mean, many folks on the left—especially ones sitting on gigantic home equity—are stone NIMBYs!)
I missed that column. Sounds interesting. Is it recent? Could you give a date or a link? I can’t seem to find it
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-costs.html
Thanks for the link. Wow, those comments!!
Way, way back on the Weeds you, Ezra and Sara had an episode on manufacturing nostalgia and made the point that no one has nostalgia for 1890s manufacturing jobs they were terrible and the nostalgia is for the apex of a legal and economic regime of tripartite bargaining and law making and smart people could do this for jobs that exist today bringing money and status to things like preschool teacher, home health aids and gig economy work over time.
It remains to me a frustrating road not taken. It seems the only way we can imagine increasing prosperity is to go back to the past in either a more active welfare state or some prior economy that had rather different composition than what’s on the table now.
I dunno. Child labor is coming back so there must be some nostalgia for the early twentieth century.
Evidence for child labor coming back?
Surely you are not referring to the Arkansas thing?
And Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Often led by moneyed interests in industries that stand to gain. Chambers of commerce, home builders associations, and the like. A 283% increase in child labor employment since 2015 as well as a spike in child labor law violations. Just shy of 1000 cases last year. Though I'll grant that the scale is nothing close to the industrial era. We're talking about thousands across the entire country instead of millions back in the day.
If this is mostly part time employment among teenagers, then I don't see it as a problem.
If this is mostly employment of minor illegal immigrants due to fake/falsified identification...then it is somewhat of a problem, but one that needs to be addressed by cracking down on the employment of illegal immigrants.
If there are actual American citizens that are so impoverished that they are resorting to working under the table at full time jobs as minors, then I agree it is definitely a problem.
This is what's so frustrating about The Groups. They're incentivized to hype up everything as if it's a general crisis, instead of some specific problem.
Yeah I want to see exactly what those labor violations are.
Kids having jobs is good, actually
Their little brown fingers are so good at cleaning the meat grinders!
Citation please.
You're upset because NH now allows a 15 year old to bus (not serve) tables where alcohol was served? Or they they can work until 9pm instead of 7pm?
Negative. I am including New Hampshire as one of several states that has loosened their child labor laws in order to illustrate the trend mentioned above, that child labor is making a comeback.
But those are reasonable changes, which suggests that maybe that labor isn't a bad thing, unless you have better examples.
Out of our friend group of four from high school, by far the most impressive of us is Andrew, who became a soldier.
Soldiers are generally people of low moral character.
[rockwell_painting.jpg]
Taco Bell is pretty good, actually.
Matt convincingly explains the root cause of nostalgia as a universal human phenomenon: being young is fun and so people have positive associations with the trappings of the world of their youth.
Exactly because this is a universal phenomenon, it fails as an explanation for the unusual popularity and political strength of nostalgia today. This unusual wave of nostalgia suggests that some of the changes of recent decades have actually made people's lives subjectively worse. A politics that tries to address things like the National Hangout Crisis could therefore be "a serious effort to look at problems in people’s lives and make things better."
> This unusual wave of nostalgia
What data are you relying on to call this "unusual"?
Matt seems to agree with me that the current wave is unusual, "A key sign of the extent to which nostalgia has taken over politics..." but he doesn't seem to cite any hard data.
Here's one study:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/americans-take-a-dim-view-of-the-nations-future-look-more-positively-at-the-past/
The most recent result shows 58% of Americans now saying that life was better for people like them 50 years ago than it is today vs. 23% saying that life today is better. That's worse than I'd expect, and worse than I've been able to find in earlier studies asking similar questions.
> worse than I've been able to find in earlier studies asking similar questions.
Can you link those other studies? The pew one you did link doesn't actually compare to earlier surveys so it doesn't back up your argument that this has actually changed.
Sure, but then why does the nostalgia in question focus on the material (look at the house you could get, etc)?
Some people are confused about inflation adjustments etc. and genuinely believe that people were on average objectively materially better off in the past. These people are simply mistaken. (But, I am curious, is there any reason these kinds of errors would be more common now than they used to be?)
Leave those people aside for the moment. As Matt notes, the house is small and they only have one car, which is still achievable today with a single income. Perhaps the nostalgia you note is rather for a time when a small house and one car was enough to not feel materially deprived.
I personally suspect that the main reason surveys are showing more and more preference for the past over the present is not fundamentally material at all. I think Matt is correct that ever increasing availability and quality of passive entertainment (smartphones, Netflix, etc.) make many aspects of our lives worse, the same as ever increasing availability and quality of fentanyl and Doritos.
Regarding why these errors would be more common now, I think social media plays a role. Out-of-context photos can go viral, and the people who are in the best position to say "actually things weren't that great" a) are not on social media as much, b) probably are "suffering" from nostalgic memory distortion themselves.
Here's Matt's prior post rounding up the evidence that social media exposure doesn't increase political misinformation, and that modern Americans are better informed about politics than they were in the past:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-myth
I'd guess the same is true with regards to economic misinformation.
It seems Americans are getting better informed over time, and they are increasingly preferring the past to the present. That suggests that aspects of the modern world really are increasingly hostile to human well-being, in a way that isn't captured by our measures of wages and expenditures, square feet of housing per person, etc.
Slow Boring has highlighted many of these problem areas in other posts:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-ever-better-video-content-breaking
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-against-meta
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-sports-gambling-industry-needs
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-biggest-problem-in-media-is-the
https://www.slowboring.com/p/americans-have-been-gaining-weight
I'm confused. I was referring to this paragraph in your earlier comment:
"Some people are confused about inflation adjustments etc. and genuinely believe that people were on average objectively materially better off in the past. These people are simply mistaken. (But, I am curious, is there any reason these kinds of errors would be more common now than they used to be?)"
That seems to suggest that you think more people are mistaken about this topic than were previously. But now in this comment you say that actually, since people are *better* informed than they were previously, "[t]hat suggests that aspects of the modern world really are increasingly hostile to human well-being, in a way that isn't captured by our measures of wages and expenditures, square feet of housing per person, etc." But we were talking about people who think that square feet and wages and whatnot were better in the past than the present!
Beyond my confusion there, I think there's a major unsupported premise that your thesis rests on. You take it as a given that "these kinds of errors [are] more common now than they used to be" and that Americans are "increasingly preferring the past to the present." But what is the evidence that in fact these trends are increasing relative to the past? Matt doesn't present any survey data suggesting that this kind of nostalgia is more common now than in the past; are you familiar with any? If not, what are we relying on to say it's more common—viral social media posts? But past generations didn't have any social media to go viral on! There are all kinds of reasons that nostalgia could be *more visible* today than in the past that don't rely on greater levels of unhappiness, or even greater levels of nostalgia. I mentioned social media; dovetailing with that is that more old images are available (if your grandparents grew up in the 50's there are many more photographs of their time than there were if your grandparents grew up in the 20's, and many more video and sound recordings). There's also an increasing awareness on the part of marketers of how valuable nostalgia can be. None of that is to deny that there are plenty of signs that some changes have been ambivalent or negative, but I don't think we can attribrute the whole viral nostalgia phenomenon to those changes.
Sorry about the confusion. The parenthetical question was a genuine question, not rhetorical, I was interested in hearing arguments for why that kind of error might be more common today than in the past. You suggested social media as a possibility, and thank you for that, but I don't think that explanation actually holds up. I hope that clears up what I meant.
You’re completely right that my premise could use better evidentiary support. Here’s one survey, but it only has data points for 2023 and 2021: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/americans-take-a-dim-view-of-the-nations-future-look-more-positively-at-the-past/
I found a couple earlier one-time surveys asking similar questions, but not a really good time series.
Assume for the moment that we are able to find good evidence that nostalgia is unusually prevalent at present, and that we agree that the cause is not a worsening of material living standards. Even then, I agree that it’s hard to see a way for me to definitively show which causes in particular are contributing, and how much. But I do think we should start by looking at things in everyday life that have changed dramatically in recent years.