The fault is with people with great power and no moral compass, the sorts who believe that all goes well when the economic elites get whatever they want.
Capitalism avoided falling to proletarian revolution because the owners and managers recognized the need for workers to have a stake in the system. The Soviet Union was a warning to either create a consumer economy that encompasses the proletariat or to establish fascist terror. There seems to be no middle ground.
Today the increase in consumption is that people now pay more for what they get -- higher rents, higher commute costs, and questionable financial services. Goods and services become raw deals and outright rip-offs.
Part of the reason for retirement at 65 was that at the least in mining and industry, elderly workers were dying in great numbers on the job due to heart attacks and industrial accidents. Someone senile working in a steel mill might easily wander into the path of or into a vat of molten metal. Maybe that is not so much a danger with someone doing a job as a checker-cashier... but still...
American capitalism has lost its humane virtues.
Very true here.
The Republican Party that built America's postwar suburbs understood this. THAT Republican Party disappeared when we needed it the most.
In the twenty years following WWII, Republicans sponsored living standards for suburban America that we might never be able to replicate again. In the 1950s, tract housing five miles farther out from the core city could be affordable housing. Sixty years later, that tract housing would have to be forty miles beyond the suburbs if the 1950s, which means thath where the economic activity expands, the suburban fringe of one city might grow into another urban area; thus Greater Philadelphia expands into Wilmington and of course San Francisco grows into San Jose. Salt Lake City into Ogden and Provo, or Austin into San Antonio? The only reasons for Detroit not growing into Flint or Toledo are that those three cities are clearly in economic decline, and should Ann Arbor and Detroit become abutting urban areas it will because of Ann Arbor attracting some high-tech industry that allows Ann Arbor to start pinching the vintage-1960s suburban fringe of Detroit.
Just because market realities mandate that people be shoehorned into skyscraper apartments does not mean that those apartment dwellers are the same sorts of people who could fatalistically accept the misery of the economic circumstances characteristic of dwellers in the dreary flats of the 1920s. But with the political leadership of the current GOP we revert to a Gilded Age in living conditions cue to the economic elites grabbing all the benefit of technological progress while putting the screws to the common man through monopolistic decisions.
If life was somehow better in the 1950s, at least in the sense of housing space per person, then such reflects population growth since then. In some respects things are greater than they were in the 1950s. Technological gadgets are the least of it. Most people could return to snail-mail for communications, dead-tree editions of books, three or four channels of television, landline phones, and monaural vinyl LPs if they had to -- and if I had to live with 1950s technologies of entertainment to get the living space per person of the 1950s, then that would be my choice. Of course there are some features of the 1950s that I would not want to see return -- like the Blood Alley highways, tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive that pollutes human bodies with lead, rigid steering columns that impale drivers in vehicle crashes, the Red Scare, the intolerance of feminism and homosexuality, polio, and the last gasp of Jim Crow practice. Antifeminism, homophobia, McCarthyism, and above all racism were not the faults of the primitive nature of the tools of entertainment.
If we could be as sophisticated in achieving social equity as we are in developing the sophisticated entertainments that we now have, maybe we could make America great as it has never been before, and not simply wonderful for rapacious elites and miserable for everyone else. I'll sacrifice white privilege for that, thank you.
