Megan McArdle has written a serious think piece for Cato Unbound. Her topic: enumerating the manifold ways we are better off than were our parents 50 years ago. This improvement continues to impress me, a person who has lived a long and successful life.
I grew up in a home with two bedrooms, one bath, and the first-in-the-neighborhood two car garage. The house had floor furnaces instead of HVAC, only the ceiling was insulated, and the driveway was gravel. It was almost new and nicer than those occupied by the parents of most of my cohort in school, or by my parents' friends from the posh church in our small town.
We became a two car family only because dad didn't trade in the old Chevy which still had some miles left on it. For most of their lives my parents made do with one car, including after I left home.
While I lived at home our vacations were, with one exception, exclusively by auto and often featured camping in a tent and cooking on a Coleman stove. Our TV was black and white, and got iffy reception of only two network channels in our rural area. Our phone was a party line. We had fun, and were securely middle class.
My life today is orders of magnitude better: more comfortable, more luxurious, and with much wider horizons. Today's working poor almost certainly live better than the middle class of 1950. McArdle is correct that we take for granted today things we only dreamt of then.
