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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

I think life in the 1920s, while having downsides, was a lot better than many people imagine.

I mean if you lucked out and were born wealthy in an urban area it was probably ok.

But half the population lived in urban areas and only half of those people had electricity. So 50:50 you end up on Schrute Farms with no electricity and an outhouse.

Not even mentioning race here.

That's possible, I'm not sure to be honest, I'd have to read more about rural life in turn of the century America to really form an opinion on this.

I imagine many women would disagree. Or the people who just got back from WW1, and are about to send their kids to WW2.

African Americans might also have something to say about how they were treatment during that time period. Still, you can't say that something hasn't been lost when previously, one person, working 9-5 M-F, including lunch, at a job that's not particularly spectacular, can provide a house, food, transportation, for two adults and multiple children, and if we look forwards a few decades, a college education for said children without lifelong crippling debt, and careers of their own.

Right, but staying on topic in terms of available material goods and income,

I don't think available goods and resources was as bad as this thread was making it out to be

Are antibiotics and vaccines and other healthcare “available material goods”?

I had two great grandmothers that lost the majority of their children as babies/toddlers.

I think a lot of people are not accounting for the costs of risks during that time. If everything went well, the rain was on time, no other nations attacked, no one fell ill, there were no birthing complications, then life was okay. But nature usually throws a few curveballs.

This is an empirical question that I feel you are trying to twist into a political one.

The sole question is can you on 100 dollars a month today live in a manner similar to what the average person in the 20s did

The empirical questions are what does 100 a month buy you today and what was the average lifestyle of a person in the 20s in terms of how much would it cost to buy that lifestyle today

Questions of how we got feminnism and better medicine since then is irrelevant and trying to distort a simple empirical analysis into a political one

Attempting to argue counterfactuals while negating the factors that occured to cause the world to exist in a particular state at a particular time isn't ever going to lead to a conversation you like.

The resource cost and availability that existed in 1920 were because of non-empirical decisions like politics and societies adaptations to new technologies. It's like you're taking a still frame of an avalanche and looking for a flat spot to build a foundation.

That is 9 years before great depression and right after WWI.

So, it is very shortly before economy goes boom and very shortly after everything literally went boom physically.

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