Some Thoughts on Nostalgia for the Economy of the 1950s, or 1980s, or 2000s (or Whenever)

I doubt I'll do something longform here on Leaflet every time a Bluesky post gets 1,000 or more likes, but it happened again and I'm going to do one again.

The post in question was about misplaced nostalgia for the U.S. economy of some prior era:

This is a point I made many times on the old Twitter, and it was always a hit. But you never know when a particular post will take off, so I wasn't anticipating this one would go anywhere. Then it did.

The vast majority of the reactions were positive, but I was surprised at the pushback from a few people. Some people seemed to misread my post as saying I thought the economic situation is not so bad today, but my point was about the misconceptions of what things were like in the past. I wasn't trying to do comparisons to today so much as force people to think more clearly about how things used to be.

With regard to those comparisons, though, there were a few replies arguing that "no, actually things were better back then," with differing suggestions for when "then" was.

A couple people went for the 1950s-early 1970s nostalgia . That's an easy one to rebut.

I can certainly imagine that for a small number of white men, this period had relatively high economic security. If you grew up in a region with industries such as autos or steel, a high school diploma may have been enough to get you a steady, well-paying job (I'm guessing family connections played a role here too though).

But outside of this small group, things were not like that. When talking about this period, it's important to factor in how economically insecure things were for: women; people who were not white; and many poor white men around the country.

For anyone who did relatively well during the period, it's worth keeping in mind that excluding people from the economy is part of the reason why things were good for you (or your parents or grandparents). These exclusions were fundamental flaws in the society of this period that people spent decades trying to fix.

It should also be noted that this period was an anomaly in economic terms, as the economies of U.S. industrial competitors had been destroyed by WWII. The absence of foreign economic competition was a temporary blip that seems to have distorted some people's idea of what a normal economy is like. After the European and Japanese economies recovered, there was no going back to the previous U.S. economy.

A lot of the people criticizing the post were focused on housing. Was housing cheaper back then? Yes, but in part that's because people generally had much smaller houses than today. Along these lines, this is worth noting too:

Turning now to the 1970s/1980s, which some people imagine is the economically prosperous period they want to go back to, here I have some personal experience so I'll offer a bit of anecdata on spending and earning money.

First, with regard to spending, let's talk about meals. My family was pretty solidly in the middle in terms of income, and we ate at a restaurant or got something from out about once or twice per month. My mom cooked a lot and made enough so that there were leftovers to last a couple days. To put this point more bluntly, we didn't spend much money on food, and while we may have been at the extreme, from what I saw many people were similar.

And on the earning money side of the equation, I know this will be hard to imagine for anyone today, but some kids woke up super early and worked! My best friend had a paper route starting in 7th grade, for which he got up at around 5 am. I went with him once: It was brutal!

Turning to one last period, to my surprise some people pointed to the 2000s as the period they wanted to go back to. During this period, my kids were little and I was busy getting a business up and running, so I missed a lot of what was going on in the broader economy at that time. But just to state the obvious, it turned out we were living in a housing bubble, which eventually crashed and made many people very insecure economically.

Summing all this up, it was nice to see that most people on Bluesky are critical of misplaced economic nostalgia. There are a few holdouts who don't like hearing any of this, and want to believe that everyone in the 1950s lived in the economy we saw in Back to the Future, but generally speaking people get it. On the other hand, the nostalgia problem is a bigger issue outside of Bluesky, and I hope someone who knows how to reach that broader audience can pass along the message.