Was life better in the 70s?
Ari Kaufman of The Lid says no, and that those who think so are just being nostalgic:
Americans have always longed for the “good old days.” The problem is that most can’t define when or what constitutes those good old days. Most often, it seems to be about five decades earlier than the current day…
With nostalgia being such a powerful human emotion, politicians happily utilize it. Yet I would wager that many people confuse their own hazy personal memories with a narcissistic indictment of today.
When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean stagflation? Gas lines? Vietnam? Watergate?
We hear a lot about soaring crime these days. It’s surely an important issue, but are we nostalgic for the 1970s because we’ve memory-holed that violent crime exploded then and has been chiefly trending downward since 1993.
The essayist adds that we are richer today, live longer, have more free time, and travel more, with bigger homes and safer cars as well as better air quality.
I don’t argue with any of that. But I was around back then, and I say that nevertheless things were better. It just depends what things we’re talking about, and perhaps the biggest ones have to do with human relationships as well as basic agreement on societal values.
I am not just being nostalgic when I remember the 70s – or the 50s and 60s, or even the 80s or 90s. Yes, there were big problems. Crime was sometimes up, we had to wait in 70s gas lines, and Americans were dying in Vietnam (more during the late 60s than the 70s, when “Vietnamization” was being implemented; you can see an informative year-by-year chart here). Racial discrimination and discrimination against women were still real in the 70s, but both were waning. There were race riots then, but the general feeling was that things were getting better in that regard and that these were growing pains.
Just to take one small quality of life example, my parents – who were solidly middle class or even upper middle class – didn’t have a clothes dryer until I was in college. Sounds like that would mean a lower quality of life, right? But I never perceived it quite that way. It meant that we used to hang clothes on a clothesline, which was sort of fun (I held the clothespin bag as a little child, and handed the clothespins off to the adult). The clean clothes smelled of air and wind. And you had to plan ahead if you wanted to wear something that was dirty, because it took a full day to dry.
Big deal, though. In other words, it didn’t feel like a big deal even when I was a teenager. It was just something you planned for. And I knew what had preceded it, because my next-door-neighbors had an old-fashioned washboard and a clothes wringer in their basement, both of them no longer used. We used to play with them. Clotheslines were just normal, and we didn’t even think about the alternatives until clothes dryers became common. When we got one it made life easier, but not necessarily better. It just wasn’t that important in the larger scheme of things.
But what I think was most important in people’s perceptions and pleasant memories was that there was a lot of in-person socializing. Life was more fun, and not just because I was younger. I had plenty of personal problems, but there were more get-togethers, more phone calls, and even going to the movies was a treat (and the movies were actually good, for the most part). The human element in life was warmer and more interactive. The internet didn’t exist. People rarely screened their calls and it was okay to talk on the phone with a friend. When you called customer service you got a real human being whose speech you could understand, and you got actual real live service. There were fewer choices in things like tennis shoes (or as we New Yorkers used to call them, sneakers), but that meant we didn’t spend 100 hours researching something before we bought it. We just made the purchase and went on with our lives.
Theater was better. Ballet was a lot better. Art hadn’t been utterly taken over by woke politics – nor had anything, really. Humor was still funny. Fewer children killed themselves. There were no pandemic lockdowns. There were no Twitter meltdowns over using the wrong term for something. There was no widespread cancel culture. And Watergate was a refreshing walk in the park compared to today’s corruption and use of the government to make clandestine war on the opposition.
We had more liberty and we had more in-person social contact – neither of which is easily measured, but both of which are very important.
And although we thought Carter would ruin the country, we didn’t think he was actually trying to.
Got into the Arm in early 69, so the civilian side of things in the early Seventies passed me by.
Married and had lots of friends–in the American sense of cheerful acquaintances with whom you’d have dinner or help move or chat with.
Most of the bad stuff also passed me by, not counting that having to do with the military–Survivor Assistance Officer lasted fifty years after I got off active duty.
Still, with civic activities and active, outgoing busy kids and their friends and now the same with grandkids….not much in that line has changed for us.
‘Was life better in the 70s?’
Maybe but I was born in ’69 so my memories of most of the 70s are not great but the 1990s were absolutely better than now in virtually every way.
I would but the 1990s up against just about any decade in just about any field save maybe for medicine. Our supposed advances in technology have made for worse times not better in so many ways.
I’m a 1948 model, and I think American civilization reached its summit in the 1950s to the late 1960s. It’s been a slow decline since, with a rapid decline starting in 2020, or maybe following the 2016 election. (“Gradually, then suddenly.”)
Post-WWII America was like a colossus with respect to the rest of the world, although that was heavily the result of WWII’s destruction everywhere except in our Western Hemisphere. Also, blacks in America hadn’t attained full rights and we were pretty hard on the natural environment.
Talnik suggested what I think is the biggest difference/decay: We could at least take for granted that Carter was patriotic. Now we — and Western civilization more generally — are under the thumbs of those whom Mark Steyn has referred to as “our depraved political class.”
We forget the desperation, frustration, and anxiety that existed before we knew how it all turned out. When I think back on my teens or 20s, I don’t think first about all the time spent being completely stressed out and unsure. I can remember that, of course, but the first and featured recollections are all the fun times and successes. Maybe this is why women forget the severity of childbirth pains? Is this nostalgia or just common sense dumping of irrelevant/unhelpful recollections.
>>Neo, I agree with just about everything you wrote. In 1970, my entire grad student income was $2,800 for the year — AND I was allowed to take out a loan to pay almost the same — $2,400 — for a new small hatchback car. Flying “stand by” was common, and I found a really good deal flying NYC to Istanbul round-trip for about $300 — so I wandered around western Turkey/ eastern Greece for 3 weeks — feeling perfectly safe during that wandering alone. I guess that the wonder is that I felt that I could afford all that on such a low income.
>>Folks were “down to earth”. I thought nothing about asking the long-distance telephone operator for Philadelphia what the weather would be like there when my flight landed there the next day.
>>In late 1974, my income jumped to $11,000 per year — but I was embarrassed to learn that my father earned the same — while my parents owned their own home (without a mortgage) and were putting two remaining kids through college.
>>In 1975, I bought my first house — in what was considered a good Midwestern neighborhood — for $45,000.
>>Yes, personal friends and professional friends were everywhere — including in distant cities. We wrote letters! There were a lot more community meetings and events. Yes, President Carter’s 13% inflation was startling — but I don’t recall feeling financially burdened any time during the 1970s.
>>In 1978 I took time off from work and wandered solo overland through Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran for 6 weeks — which seemed both financially possible and safe. Who would consider that both financially possible and safe now? Life seemed good in the 1970s.
***As best I can tell from the internet, Ari Kaufman was not running around in real life during the 1970s.
Life in the 70s was a nightmare. The 60s were over and then … disco! 🙂
A pointlessly contrarian article.
Seventies music was far out! The seventies, which was closing under a layer of malaise, didn’t really end until Reagan took office in January, 1981, and the Iran hostages came home. I graduated college that year. It’s never fun to be in your twenties, but you can’t blame any decade for that. Something tells me, looking at our comments here, that we prefer a decade that includes our own flourishing, and there’s somebody flourishing somewhere every decade.
That said, we certainly do need to cherish our liberty, and foster more in-person contact. Your post is right on, sister! (Too sixties? …sorry!)
music was better, but I remember it was hazy grey blob, not to mention the inflation,
why focus on the 70s though, instead of the 80s or even the 90s,
It’s hard looking back objectively on the past, especially if you were young then. I hadn’t started kindergarten yet in 1980.
Whether you want to say some past decade was overall better than today, depends really on what things you value more. One thing we’ve lost sight of is how inexpensive things are, and a lot of those things are more reliable too. Color TVs, dishwashers, cars, washers and dryers, not only did they take a much larger fraction of your paycheck to afford, but they had to be maintained too.
It’s a little easier to find stuff on 1960 than 1970, and if you ask me, 1960 had a better culture than 1970, so here’s some comparisons.
A color television incredibly primitive by today’s standards was about $300, three weeks’ pay at the median household income of 1960 ($5000). Today’s median household income is $89,000 and for $300, 7 hours’ wages, you can get a modern 32″ TV, far better than anything that even existed in 1960, and it would be cheaper to get a new one than ask someone to fix it–if it ever went wrong, which it probably wouldn’t for the time you wanted to use it.
Today’s cars require little maintenance but oil changes for their first 100,000 miles, not true in 1960, and the cars are much safer too, though basic models are harder to afford than in those days. A Volkswagen Beetle in 1960 would have cost you about $2000, 21 weeks’ wages for the median household. A base model Subaru Forester is $26,000, 15 weeks’ wages for the median household today, and while I drove a ’73 Beetle for years and loved it, it just doesn’t compare even when new.
Easy to sneer at material things, but being poorer than we are today was tougher than it was today, and just because everyone else was also poorer didn’t make it less tough.
I was ten in 1970, waited with my dad in gas lines and had a great childhood! While I do remember people being friendly (for New York values of friendly) fashion was so bad I noticed it! Bell bottoms and platform shoes for the love of God.
Still don’t own a clothes dryer.
Miss it maybe 2 weeks a year.
Clothesline outside and a couple airers inside… timing is everything 🙂
Just like a walk-behind lawn mower, hanging out and bringing in laundry is some of the best brain clearing heart pacing time in my week. Perfect opportunity to pray for whatever is on the boil in life… and somehow the heat goes down on those things.
Cars were much worse in the 70s, but much cheaper.
The 1970s were a challenge. I was new in the airline industry. The OPEC embargoes raised oil prices and created a recession, which hit the airlines hard. The company laid off over 900pilots and yours truly ended up on the bottom of the seniority list. Every time I went to work, I expected a furlough notice. That lasted almost seven years.
I had an ace in the hole though. I was still flying in the Naval Reserve and the Reserve units were allowing up to four weekends of flying a month and they could be performed on your schedule. I could earn enough to keep us going if I lost my airline job.
We lived near Central City off the Peak-to-Peak highway in Gilpin County, Colorado. Elevation9000 feet. No TV. A well and septic. A ben Franklin stove and propane fired heater for heat. Skiing, trout fishing, and rocks to climb were close by. We didn’t lack for things to do.
I was on reserve with the airline. I would get called out about twice a month. Things were that slow in the business. So, I had a lot of time to cut firewood, and fix up our little cabin in the mountains.
Our two children learned to entertain themselves. Reading, hiking, fishing, skiing, and rock climbing were some of their activities. I got to spend a lot of time with them. They both became very self-sufficient. My wife was a hardy pioneer who loved living in the mountains with all it offered – even being snowed in occasionally.
The airline job picked up in the late 70s and the company recalled a lot of pilots and began hiring again. I retired from the Naval Reserve, and we moved to Boulder. Financially things looked good, and we were more optimistic about the future. Then our son was killed in a climbing accident in 1979. The 80s were a low period in our personal lives. Financially and professionally, I was thriving, but it was not nearly as pleasant as the70s.
It may be a semantic argument, but I’d say that whether or not things were better in the 70s, life certainly was.
JJ:
My condolences on the loss of your son.
windbag:
Good point.
In terms of goods and services you can buy and sell, life is better today. In terms of the culture, life was better then. The thing is, for the most part we had a tremendous sense of entropy which was absent in 2010. It has returned in the last half-dozen years. No one knows where the bottom is.
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The calibre of our federal officials has, with some reversals, been declining throughout the post war period. At the state level, this is less pronounced but visible in select areas.
I’d agree very broadly with Art Deco’s view. But I can’t commit to either a broad “It was better” or “it was worse.” What I will say, emphatically, is that a great many good things have been lost. Among those is a general respect for and belief in the constitutional system. Far too many people don’t know anything about it, don’t care about it, don’t have any sense at all of its connection to our general welfare, or are actively hostile to it. Some are both, e.g. AOC, as illustrated by her remarks today about the affirmative action decision.
I really can’t see a way for us to recover from that
Life was more fun, and not just because I was younger.
–neo
I don’t think this is a trivial point. If people are having fun these days, they are keeping it pretty damn quiet.
It is a difference which makes a difference.
I was a young grown man throughout the 70’s. Except for Vietnam, it was way better. Slower pace. Better music. No Wokism.
huxley,
‘if people are having fun these days, they are keeping it pretty damn quiet’
Especially the youngest generations (millenials, Gen Z) who are truly unlike any other generation in American history in my opinion. They don’t like independence (live at home longer, don’t get drivers license), they don’t like to interact with people in person and they are more cautious and scared in general. That makes ‘fun’ a really hard thing to have I would say.
These are all generalizations of course but it seems to me when the younger generations are like this it changes the entire mood of a society.
I live just outside Chicago. 40 years ago we’d go to the forest preserves on weekends. On a nice day it would be packed and you would have to wait it out to park. Every forest preserve would be like this. Picnics, softball, drinking, music playing, etc.
Now you drive by those same places on a nice day and theyre pretty much empty. No softball, no volleyball, no drinking, no cars, no people. A few cars here and there. Just enough to make ya think……..nah, probably weirdos.
I like the old way
The big plus for me about the present is the internet and Amazon. Why? Books and work. It was a thrill when Borders opened a bookstore here. They are gone now, but Amazon fills in nicely, plus I can buy things online without having to travel to find them. Another plus is that I can work with other folks all over the world on an open source project, it keeps me in touch. Small towns are much less isolated than they were.
What I do see as a big minus is politics, it has infested everything and won’t go away. It isn’t like every two/years anymore, it is every god damned day. Every morning I delete twenty or more emails asking for money, whining, insulting the opposition, etc. It sucks. Donate money to a campaign and you have made a friend for life. And that isn’t to mention the spam calls.
I do miss the eighties, maybe even more the seventies, but a lot of that is simply that I was younger and life was fresher.
The 70s were great, from the point of view of nostalgia. By definition, everybody reading this will recall a simpler life, but most of that is our own personal maturing process. The air was dirtier, life was shorter, mortality was closer, and we didn’t have anything like the opportunities we have today.
I was a teenager through most of the 70s, and early college years. The Vietnam war was still killing Americans, early on. But sure, life was great – for the teenager that I was.
If anyone thinks that life in general was better in the 70’s, then they should take some advice from the good Doctor and satisfy that longing: Turn on, tune in, drop out. Pre-pay your bills and try closing the laptop for a while, it’s a good start. Get out and do something completely unplanned and different with no preconceptions or inhibitions, and see if you feel the same after a week or two of not hearing any noise. Be a ’20’s hippie.
Wow, tough question. I was 13 to 23 yo during the 70s and life (personally) wasn’t always great. Some parts were wonderful, but it was an awkward time for me, plus my mom had just married a guy who had custody of his 4 kids. For my brother and me (2 years older) it was like a hellish version of the Brady Bunch.
I was born and grew up in southern California, which was a nice place then, and I remember leaving home as soon as I turned 18, and, earning only minimum wage in Orange County CA ($2.00 – $2.10 per hour), I was able to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment by myself in Anaheim (one week’s pay was my apartment rent, $80). Does anyone think this would be possible now? I just checked in Anaheim and the rates for one-bedroom are around 2K!!
I liked a lot of the music, but I never felt like I fit in with any group. I was conservative without knowing the concept, smart, but didn’t hang out with other smart kids, and liked to hang out with the “druggies,” but didn’t use drugs myself!
My dad was a narcotics cop with the Orange County Sheriff’s dept., and I loved him dearly. He died at the age of 44 in early 1979 when I was just 22.
There is no doubt that I am “personally” happier now than I was in the 70s, but that may be more because of my age at the time (and that fact that I am married to my husband, whom I met and fell in love with in 1977, but didn’t marry until 2008) and family circumstances during that decade.
Politically and culturally this decade we’re in now is horrible, but I do recall the sexual revolution in full swing back then, which wasn’t exactly a stellar time culturally (and then Roe v. Wade). So, I think overall as a culture it’s worse now, but my life personally is better.
Should say that, in the Seventies, it was a few loud hippies who were trying to destroy the country. Today it’s a fair number of your relations.
The first half of the 70s, I was too young to care. The second half was a disaster of self-inflicted miseries and yet, if I had not gone this way, I doubt that what followed would have happened to me.
I went to a lot of different schools (six grade schools, one Jr HS and three HS in seven states). Some had tracks, some had AP and some had nothing. I pretty much hated them all. I didn’t really have friends, just brief acquaintances.
I did have 10th and 11th at the same school in Virginia. I had actual friends. I had a girlfriend. I had a good job at a chain drug store that I worked Fridays after school and all-day Saturday and Sunday. And I had friends there too.
Part way through 11th, the school created a special self-directed class for me with its own course number and everything. Five hours a week of ‘Independent Study in Electronic Data Processing’. For my senior year, the class was going to be extended to ten hours a week. I was literally in a class of my own.
For the first time in my school life, I was sad that school was ending and I was already looking forward to the next year. I was looking forward to a great summer. The event of the summer for me and my girlfriend was to see ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at the Kennedy Center. I was happy in school. I was happy at work. I was happy in romance. I was happy at home. I was happy.
That all changed on Friday, two days after the end of the school year. As I was getting ready for work, my mother told me that Sunday would be my last day working there. We were moving to Seattle and we were leaving in five days. I was stunned. Goodbye summer, goodbye senior year, goodbye job, goodbye friends, goodbye girlfriend.
That fall I started a very lonely senior year at Mercer Island High School. A snooty place. I discovered the ‘Seattle Freeze,’ not inclusive. It took about a month for me to come to despise the place. I decided that I wanted out. I applied for early release to attend community college but I had to have the principal’s approval. I was denied. I guess “I despise your school” wasn’t a good reason. I finally just went on strike. I went to every class and turned in every assignment, all homework, every test, all blank.
Of course, I had to deal with a bunch of concerned adults including the school shrink. By Thanksgiving they had become extremely worried about my self-destructive behavior and they gave up and gave me early release. The following January, I started my freshman year at Seattle Central Community College on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Unbeknownst to me, the area around SCCC (AKA commie central) was a major center of Seattle’s counter culture. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
By the time I graduated from high school in June, I was 2/3 of the way through my first year and by the end of summer I was whole year ahead of my peers. I had stolen a march. I had also acquired a girlfriend, an opera singer-in-training from the nearby performing arts school. She was a 6-2 beauty with long flaxen hair and gorgeous head-turning legs. I also am 6-2 and we made a stunning couple.
At the end of my sophomore year, we eloped (stupid, stupid, stupid) and I transferred to the University of Washington. I had zero interest in campus/student life since I was working, married, commuting to school and only 19 years old.
Then in the spring of 1979 my world caved in. My marriage ended in divorce. It was soul crushing.
After my divorce, I became … indifferent. I dropped out of school and quit my job. I had several motorcycle crashes and a bunch of other dark experiences. Like Skylab, I was spiraling into the abyss. It was pure luck or perhaps by the grace of God that I didn’t completely ruin my life or kill or maim myself or by accident, someone else.
That same spring of ’79, in the east, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a young computer scientist made the hardest decision of her life when she told an equally young Australian geophysicist, the only man she had ever romantically loved and the only man who ever romantically loved her, that she would not join him in Australia as previously planned now that his NASA assignment was complete and he had returned to his university job.
That summer Skylab fell to Earth … on Australia.
By the fall, that very sad young woman was on her way back to the Pacific Northwest to a new job on a new spacecraft. She was a Portland girl who had unexpectedly found herself going to college in the east, getting a degree in an unexpected major and working first in Texas and then very unexpectedly at Goddard. She had been gone for a long time and she just wanted to go home to the city she loved, The Rose City, the city where most of her family lived. Seattle wasn’t home but it was close enough.
By the end of the year, the U. S. Embassy in Iran had been overrun and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. I had bottomed out and was climbing out of the abyss. I wanted to return to school but I needed money. I had been working construction but after the weather turned, I was looking for something better.
After the new year, 1980, everything changed for me. I got a job interview for a menial technical support position on the space program. One Friday in February the USA defeated the CCCP in the “Miracle on Ice” hockey game. The following Monday, I started my new job in the IUS Systems Integration Lab (SIL).
The opening of Matt Ridley’s Ted Talk for “When Ideas Have Sex” should be thrown into the mix. First 30 seconds.
https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex
Drove from Knoxville to Nashville and back for the funeral of a high school classmate. Class of ’74. Lots of nostalgia for all of us there. I think we’d mostly vote for it being a pretty good time. But that’s more about our ages at that time and not about the thousands of terror bombings, Vietnam war, oil shocks, inflation, recession, Watergate, or the disasters of the Carter years.
In the 70s I don’t remember the zombie hordes of the homeless, mentally ill, drug addicted or whatever we see routinely in America today.
That gets me down and I don’t see any hope for that getting better anytime soon.
Surely that knocks a few points off scoring the 2020s over the 1970s.
The cultured was better (less politics), but as stan notes – “the thousands of terror bombings, Vietnam war, oil shocks, inflation, recession, Watergate, or the disasters of the Carter years.” There was a lot of bad stuff going on. Yet, most of us remained optimistic that things would get better. And they did.
I attribute a lot of that to Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War. It paved the way for a huge increase in world commerce and the tech explosion.
People keep muddling through. As they say, “Life is what happens when you had other plans.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, with a few simple hand tools, you could repair your own vehicle very economically. You can’t do that today! Some folks like to say that modern cars get way better gas mileage than 60s/70s cars, but that is not true. Modern cars get marginally better gas mileage, but when a $400 sensor fails, there goes any gas savings you may have seen!
Also, my ex-wife went to a major university in the early 1970s. She paid $12 a credit hour, for all four years. She shared an apartment with 3 other gals. They all worked minimum wage jobs and could afford to have an apartment and go to school. And, they all graduated without any major debt. You can’t do that today! Not to mention that they didn’t get indoctrinated in wokeness back then.
I didn’t much care for the Seventies. They were depressing. A lot seemed to come alive in the Eighties. You could make a case that life in the Eighties and Nineties and Oughties was better than it is today, but the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, were when the Baby Boomers were growing up, so Boomers have a soft spot for them. Childhood and youth will always have an aura that adult years rarely match. I do wonder, though, if for young people, these are the Good Old Days now.
Apart from nostalgia, were those days better? The country was in a funk in the Seventies, but it didn’t seem permanent. Our current malaise feels terminal. I do think there was a greater sense of freedom in midcentury America. If you thought suburbia was confining, you could escape or rebel and feel like you were moving towards something new and exciting. One thing there wasn’t was the feeling that everything had been done before, the feeling that the country and the culture were exhausted and ready for the scrap heap. Left and right seem to share that pessimism today, though they draw different conclusions from it.
Neo mentioned “a lot of in-person socializing”
Folks used to sit out on the ‘front porch’ and socialize with neighbors up and down the street evenings. The porch gave way to ‘backyard patios’ … somehow, sadly.
A lot of replies are focussing on improvments and availability of material goods. Yes, material goods were more expensive then. But they LASTED!
Repairing my – not made in America – dryer again this week. I have put the purchase price of the dryer back into it in repairs over the last 7 years.
The dryer in my first house lasted over 15 years.
I’d gladly pay more for a cashmere sweater (seems that was the only thing not made in America back then) if everything else was made here.
And agree about the price of college – no way could anyone pay for it now by working in summer. Something very wrong there – almost like it’s deliberate, or something. Pay more, get less.
“there wasn’t … the feeling that the country and the culture were exhausted and ready for the scrap heap”
Abraxas hits it here. There is a sense that Western civilization has reached a dead end. Much bigger than how much stuff costs or how it works, or even the political issues though it may be related. How did this happen, especially after we won the Cold War?
I’m not religious but it seems tied to the decline of religion. Is that a cause, or a symptom? Or is there something else? I’ve got a lot more questions than answers.
Yes, material goods were more expensive then. But they LASTED!
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I think your memory is oddly selective here.
I remember that giant sets with the single dial, with some seven channels including the bilingual channel, that went anime after 8 on saturdays,
We think we miss the way things used to be.
We actually miss the way WE used to be.
@Rusty:In the 1960s and 1970s, with a few simple hand tools, you could repair your own vehicle very economically. You can’t do that today!
In the 60s and 70s people had much more need to repair their vehicle, and hardly ever need to today. Not only that, in the 60s and 70s most households who HAD cars had only one. Today more than 30% of US households own three or more. In 1960 22% of households had more than one car. In 2020, 58% of households have more than one.
Also, my ex-wife went to a major university in the early 1970s. She paid $12 a credit hour, for all four years.
Higher education certainly did not get cheaper or better since then, I grant you. It’s not the case that everything got better or cheaper or both, and since people put different values on different things, you’ll get a different answer overall for how much better or worse the past was.
That said, higher education is far available than it used to be. In 1960 less than 8% of Americans had a 4-year degree and in 2021 it’s 38%. Granted the standards got lower.
But if far more people are getting it today, and the price has also gone way up, then what that tells you is people are not paying the sticker price themselves. And this is true, besides Federal student aid and student loans the state systems are subsidized by their legislatures.
Federal student loan debt is about the least burdensome there is despite that it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. The horror stories we read about people with outrageous loan balances and terrible consequences for non-repayment are cherry-picked: it is so simple to get forbearance and deferments just for filling out a form, and you won’t go into default unless you ignore all their efforts to contact you for a prolonged period of time. Every single case I’ve read about in the media has had all the critical information deliberately left out or crammed into a little disclaimer at the end of the sad story, because they are trying to create a narrative to support a policy change (i. e. college for everyone, Federalizing all student loans…)
We think we miss the way things used to be. We actually miss the way WE used to be.
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Good point.
We think we miss the way things used to be.
We actually miss the way WE used to be.
Speak for yourself.
I miss some things about the way I used to be — particularly that amazing youthful vitality — though not how crazy and foolish I was then.
Nonetheless, I remain able to speak of the past and the things I miss from that time.
Not only that, in the 60s and 70s most households who HAD cars had only one.
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About 1.45 passenger cars per household in 1972. About 15% of all households at the time had no car. Those with cars averaged about 1.68 per household.
Seventies music was far out!
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Yes, Traffic, David Bowie, Al Green, Barry White, Chuck Mangione, to be sure. Bay City Rollers, not so much.
Art Deco –
Chuck Mangione! Now I’m going to have Land Of Make Believe rattling around in my head all day. Thanks for that (actually, I quite like that tune).
But I might have to listen to some Tull or King Crimson to clear my head.
I hadn’t though of chuck mangione till dr strange brought it up, that was the least strange thing about it,
Neo makes no mention of our non-border or of the 100,000 deaths yearly from fentanyl courtesy of China and the Mexican drug cartels. Nor does she note the don’t care attitudes of despicable Biden.
Yes. There wasn’t the division in America like there is today, and most people loved America then.
Cicero:
I never said I was offering a comprehensive and all-inclusive list. Plenty of things are not in this post.
Yes, life was much better in the 1970s as I was 40 years younger!
The things that are better today are the advances in medicine. However I think the 70s were better for other things because people interacted face to face more often and young people such as myself created great memories by doing things together with friends without texting each other all day. As for “Watergate” that was hardly the worst scandal in the history of the presidencies – not as bad as the weaponizing of the IRS for example or the polticizing we have now of the FBI and CIA, and half the country loved Watergate!
Amen to all that you said in this piece, sister. I long for the days when things were ‘normal’, this Twilight Zone we now reside in, is too much to bare; and even crazier to believe!
Slightly off topic, but back in the 70s, music from the 50s and early 60s was considered “oldies.” Nowdays the oldies stations play music from the 70s and 80s. That would be like a 70s oldies station playing music from the 1920s.
The 70’s for me started off with Vietnam, but by the end of the decade both my sons had been born. Life is about trade offs.
I was 5 in 1970, and have very fond memories of the 70s, but I had a great family and home, so I think anyone in my situation, in any decade, would look on it with fondness.
But I think a lot of the things said about the 70s are true. A lot of things were objectively better back then. The things that are better now tend to be material things, and while those are important and make a significant difference in your life, the things that are worse now tend to be people things. I’m still very happy, but I have a family of my own that are doing well, and my wife and I just celebrated 30 years of giddy happiness.
However, I still would rate the 20s as a pretty awful time, even though it hasn’t affected me personally as much as it has a lot of other people.
Steph,
You mentioned King Crimson. One of their better songs was 21st Century Schizoid Man.
And here we are.
But disco, leisure suits, and the grand finale, Jimmy Carter and his 18% interest rates!
The first ten years of my life – I was born in 1960 – I had no idea that we were living paycheck to paycheck. Dad put his suit and tie on every morning and took the bus into NYC, and mom stayed home with my sister and me and managed the household. I remember the clothes line, too. My parents enjoyed their friends and were good to us kids. The 1970’s were much the same. Dad started his own business and in the decades that followed prospered. Put one foot in front of the other. Nuclear family is one of the economic engines that made this a great and powerful country.