agip wrote:
When people try to lie to you and tell you that living standards have fallen in the US, take this out and read it to them.
From George Will.
In 1941, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 64.8 (today, 77.8), only 6.8 percent of the population was over 65 (today, 16 percent), penicillin was on the horizon but the Salk polio vaccine was a dozen years distant, and most hospitals spent more on clean linen than medical technologies. Sixty-three percent of households did not have telephones, less than half the U.S. population age 25 and older had a high school diploma (today, 90 percent) and homosexual sex was criminalized in all 48 states. The nation has undergone a moral advancement — consider the casual callousness toward minorities of all sorts eight decades ago — as stunning as its material improvement.
It is good to keep perspective and George Will does a good job there. But it is also important to refer to the perspective that people actually have. I would suggest that most people who think that things have not been getting better do not look at 1941 as a date to compare to. Indeed, most of us were not alive in 1941 and very, very few of us were adults at that time and able to make reasonable comparisons.
I think that many people think that we haven't been making a whole lot of progress as far as overall well being (admittedly difficult to define) since perhaps the 1980s.