Stealing? Your word. Not mine. The disparity between the uber wealthy and the poor is a gap wider than ever before seen. I grew up in the 60s and 70s where a single income could support a family. Can’t happen now, however you might choose to justify that to yourself.
How do you explain it?
The "good old days" never existed.
A typical family in the 1960 US had the standard of living of a typical Mexican family today. Life expectancy in the US in 1960 was about 70 years which is lower than in Mexico, Iran, China and even Colombia today, while US's per capita income in 1960 which was about 23,000 dollars in current dollar terms was similar to Russia or Armenia today while US per capita income today is 57,000 dollars.
A typical American family of today has a better standard of living than a top 1% family in 1960, since it has access to stuff like the Internet, high resolution TV and smarthphones that didn't exist in 1960.
You are talking about another thing: why does the fraction of the population that is in the working increased since 1960? It really increased from 36% to 48%, so today it is more common for both husband and wife to work. However people today work fewer hours per year than they did in 1960, as average number of hours worked decreased from 2,000 hours to 1,780 hours in the US.
Well, there are many causes for the increase in labor force participation which include cultural factors as in 1960 women were not supposed to work while now in our modern culture women it is more socially acceptable for women to work. That is progress.
Also, in 1960 things like microwave ovens, dishwashers and washing machines didn't exist or were not as common as today so people had to spend much more time working at home doing things like preparing food and doing laundry and hence had less time available to work outside of home.
So why people feel like American is in decline? Because in most other parts of the world progress was even faster. Japanese incomes increased 7 times since 1960, German incomes increased 3 times, Chinese incomes increased 15 times, Korean incomes increased 25 times while US incomes increased "only" 2.5 times.
So the idea of US decline comes from the fact that just after WW2 the US was the only major industrialized country that was not directly affected by the war and hence it's standards of living were far above the rest of the world in 1950s, today that is not true anymore since Europe recovered from its two world wars while Asia has been catching up to the West. But that's normal and means progress is global. Actually the only regions of the world that progressed less than the US since 1960 are UK, Argentina, Venezuela, Afghanistan, North Korea and most of Africa.
Closed Thread
