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I'd give up current times to go back to the 50s-70s where you could comfortably live on one income in the suburbs.

I don't much care for safer cars, longer life expectancy, instant world wide communications compared to the freedom of living a much better life during one of the most prosperous times in US history. Quality of life experiences feels like it was much better before the 21st century race to the bottom. What's the point of living "better" if you're going to be chained to a desk or job for 50-60 years, or constantly have to retrain decade after decade?

On the other hand, the lives of people who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, or any combination thereof.

>where you could comfortably live on one income in the suburbs.

Does anyone have statistics on how many "traditional" single-income households there are in the U.S.? I live with my wife and four kids (home schooled) in a fairly large house, with a single income under that is apparently under the starting salaries for newly minted software-engineering graduates in the big urban areas.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-abou...

>I'd give up current times to go back to the 50s-70s where you could comfortably live on one income in the suburbs.

You can still do that if you're willing to make sacrifices. A colleague of mine gets by on one income - I don't know what he makes now, but he started at $35k about five years ago. And this is in the SF bay area.

When you do the math having both spouses working doesn't increase your standard of living very much because of taxes and child care.

You might enjoy watching: "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1592527/

It provide an interesting view on the late 60s to mid 70s in the US.

...the access to more and better medicines...

Not that I think white Americans deserve some extra-consideration but the recent decline in the life expectancy of white Americans [1], coupled with indeed further medical discoveries, seems like a demonstration that the effective decline in wages is able to outpace even these better medicines.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/health/life-expectancy-dec...

Most of the improvements are superficial, apart from medicine maybe.

- Housing

- Education

- Quality of jobs

- Career growth

- Job security

These are less accessible than 30-40 years ago, while surely you can enjoy the magic of Facebook on your shiny iPhone, which were admittedly unavailable then.

Medicine's not improved much either. Mostly access has improved for the underprivileged.

Robert Gordon makes the point in his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that life expectancy improved twice as much from 1900 - 1950 as from 1950 - 2000.

lol this is complete propaganda. Whether you realize it or not.

> And our standard of living is obviously far higher than at any time in the past

Human health declined beginning with the agricultural era. I mean, you don't even have any knowledge of every time in the past, yet you are so confident in claiming our lives have never been better.

> the access to more and better medicines, having at our fingertips

You do realise that the extreme majority of illnesses experienced today are caused by the modern world and lifestyles? These medicines are designed to fix problems that didn't exist previously. The most commonly sold medicine is probably heart medication or something like that. These were things people did not experience 50,000 years ago, or even 500 years ago.

> safer and longer-lasting cars

Do you realise that most people just use cars to sit in traffic for hours going to a job they hate? You consider that a sign of how great things are?

> longer life expectancy

Well it is now declining, but quality over quantity. Sitting around at 90 years old watching tv isn't something I would count as life.

> ubiquitous and free to nearly-free instantaneous communication

social media and communication over the internet is a terrible replacement for real-life communication. Social media is actually really depressing. There are even recent studies that link time on social media with depression.

These forms of communication are usually just a sign of isolation.

> refrigeration

great for ice-cream

> lower pollution

lol? Climate change?

> I can't fathom how anyone can claim that virtually any American is better off than his counterpart from any time in the past

I can't even fathom how someone who hasn't lived in any time but now can make that statement. Literally any time in human history? How was it like, I don't know, 200,000 years ago? Tell us. You will mention lower life expectancy. That is mostly due to infant mortality rates. Many people lived until they were 70. They had actual lives, not sitting at a computer typing shit all day.

Everything you say is complete propaganda of a corrupt capitalist society and you don't even realise it.

> I can't even fathom how someone who hasn't lived in any time but now can make that statement. Literally any time in human history? How was it like, I don't know, 200,000 years ago? Tell us. You will mention lower life expectancy. That is mostly due to infant mortality rates. Many people lived until they were 70. They had actual lives, not sitting at a computer typing shit all day.

For an account of living in agricultural (pre-industrial) society, I wholeheartedly recommend "The Peasants" by W. Reymont - the Nobel prize winning, extremely realistic account of how life was in a small village in central Poland around year 1900. In short: everyone was working pretty hard, but only the peasants who owned land were living a decent life. The others (a majority) worked on farms owned by the village's "elite" and always feared about their future (not to mention they sometimes didn't even own homes so they slept in for example their master's stable, next to the piles of horse shit). On the other hand, the work was more varied that most jobs today and there wasn't that much to do in the winters so everyone rested then.

I would absolutely go back 100 years and live John Rockefeller's life. I certainly value a lot of the advancements we've made since then, but for me luxury means not having to work!

I don't know if there's any reasonable way you can actually measure "standard of living", since it arguably includes "happiness" which is difficult to quantify.

Except he worked hard a good part of his life--whether or not a lot of people here agree with his goals. (And worked quite hard on philanthropy as well.)

John D. Rockefeller also did live to a rather old age. Not everyone in that era was as fortunate.

"I don't see any such refutation in the OP."

Maybe you missed the sub-title, which is "For the first time since the 1880s, more young Americans are living with their parents than with a romantic partner."

"I can't fathom how anyone can claim"

I can't fathom that you mean this literally so I assume you offer this in the rhetorical sense. You may wish to consider "Don't Get Offended":

"One oft-underestimated threat to epistemic rationality is getting offended. While getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like. In fact, getting offended usually makes it harder to figure out what the world looks like, since it means you won't be evaluating evidence very well."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gux/dont_get_offended/

I am guessing that, in reality, you do have the power to fathom such a thing. If you need help, there are thousands of well-reasoned essays on the web, which make the point that you claim to have difficulty fathoming. Google will steer you to them.

Or you can play Devil's Advocate to your own mind, and make the case yourself, to yourself.

My point is that most of these metrics just use sticker prices. If you say something like wages have decreased in relation to housing and automotive prices, you can't ignore that houses are bigger today and automobiles are more reliable. If the median car price has stayed the same but your car now lasts you almost 100% longer [1], that is a stable sticker price but a 50% percent reduction is the yearly cost. If the median price of a house has increased by 75% [2] but the house is 50% bigger, the effective price increase is barely above inflation.

[1] - http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

[2] - https://www.census.gov/const/uspricemon.pdf

You seem like the type who is unlikely to change an opinion, so I'm not going to expend any more effort on this. However, for your own edification, you might want to stop and ask yourself whether this:

"If the median price of a house has increased by 75% but the house is 50% bigger, the effective price increase is barely above inflation."

can be reconciled to this:

"For the first time since the 1880s, more young Americans are living with their parents than with a romantic partner."

People are angry about the decline in the standard of living, and for most us, the justification for that anger is obvious.

You really seem stuck on that one sentence from the article, but it doesn't say what you're trying to read into it. It does not say that standard of living has decreased. Heck, it doesn't even imply that. The only thing you can really get out of that text is that people's circumstances and priorities have changed. The change might be a decrease, but there's no need to read that into it.

>You seem like the type who is unlikely to change an opinion

There is no need to be rude. I posted twice in this conversation and linked to sources both times. I'm not sure how that gives the impression that I am being unreasonable.

>ask yourself whether this...can be reconciled to this...

It certainly can because they are measuring two separate things. Housing costs are up, but on a rate basis they are not as far up as most think. More Americans are living at home. The former is likely partially responsible for the latter, but it is unlikely that it is the only cause. As the article suggests, another cause is likely that younger people simply aren't living with romantic partners as much as the number of people living alone is also higher.

The problem with the argument that uneconomic factors have improved is not just that these are hard to measure but that a lot of folks have an interest in fudging the measurements.

Inflation adjusted wages have been quite stagnant while measures of inflation are rather dubious to say the least. My old car is indeed a bit more reliable than my previous old car but both were reliable - I can't see that compensating for more or less everything costing more relative my relatively fixed income.