Researchers Ask: Are People Better Off Than 50 Years Ago? (marketwatch.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader gollum123 quotes MarketWatch: Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%)...

The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.

"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."

Comments

Those who were there vs those who were not

[thinkwaitfast]

73% among those 50 and older say life is better now compared with 59% who say this among 18- to 29-year-olds

Re:Those who were there vs those who were not

[AmiMoJo]

In the UK housing is really unaffordable. We don't build enough houses, and older people see them as an asset which means they want to keep prices high.

In top of that, rents are very high too.

Many young people's only chance of owning a home is to wait for a relative to die and leave them some money. This creates a feedback loop where older people want their homes to remain expensive so they have more to pass on to their kids now that house prices are so high.

In top of that, university went from being free about 20 years ago to about 40-50k today. Student loans today are creating a huge black hole of bad debt for the next generation. Many, maybe the majority of students are never going to pay it all back.

So yeah, I wouldn't cite the UK as an example of a good system.

Re:Those who were there vs those who were not

[Anonymous Coward]

You're using an old trick - averaging across multiple populations to hide the divergence.

Home ownership is up. Except below the age of 40 it's down. So really those over 50 have it better, those under 50 much much worse.

Median home prices are about the same. But there are lots of homes in areas that are useless if you want to get a job. Home prices in areas with jobs are up over 500% on their 1967 number.

Mortgage rates are lower. But credit scores for the under 40s are worse, their income is lower.

Income is up. But only for the older generation. Median income for those below 40 is down across the stats.

Take your disingenuous nonsense elsewhere.

How can they compare?

[ugen]

Majority of world population (and pretty much everyone of the adult working age) either wasn't around 50 years ago or, if they were, were too young to really understand. Combine that with various confirmation biases, tendency to forget the negative and overstate how good things were back in the old days - and this question is, essentially, meaningless as a true gauge of change in life quality.

At most all it does is measure how whiny a given group of people is. And US residents are some of the whiniest in the world (but, unsurprisingly, France beats us on this one, if only just a bit)

Re:Short Answer: Yes and No

[kqs]

Note that TFA simply asked if people thought they were better off than two generations ago, rather than doing some type of measurement. It's like asking random people if the US deficit is larger now compared to 5 years ago; it's a good way to see what people believe but it doesn't measure or determine the truth.

Fifty Years Ago, America was Fighting in Vietnam.

[dgatwood]

Fifty years ago, Americans were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam war — a war so bloody and so largely useless that people were marching in the streets against it and fleeing the country to avoid it. In that same year, nationwide race riots led to over 100 deaths, and just three years later, the Kent State massacre happened, completely devastating Americans' trust in its government, followed shortly thereafter by Nixon's criminal conspiracy and resignation. And you can't even pretend that things were better a few years before that. After all, only fifty-five years ago, our country nearly ended the world during the Cuban missile crisis.

I hope and pray that most of the respondents didn't think very hard about that question before answering. Because if they did, then either our high school history books have become so whitewashed that nobody gets the full picture of just how bad things really were in America fifty years ago, the respondents slept through their American history classes, or the respondents did a little too much PCP in the 70s and don't remember the 60s anymore. Just saying.

Hmm, my own case...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Old guy opinion follows:

Assuming I were my current age 50 years ago, I'd be long dead. The fix for my problems weren't even conceived of then. As is, in spite of my previous problems, and in spite of missing several internal organs, I expect I'll survive another 20 years or so (and in so doing, live longer than any of my grandparents managed).

Now, one could argue that being able to make the previous statement to a worldwide audience in almost realtime is a bad thing, but I also happen to think that that's one of the major improvements in life in the last 50 years (Yes, I was born rather before the internet existed).

And other things too numerous to mention. Hell, I was around before cable TV, much less the internet...

Re:opportunity and wealth versus happiness

[ShanghaiBill]

is that important?

Given that people, except for the Amish, universally abandoned that way of life as soon as they had an alternative, no, it is not important.

Re:The trend here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberal and conservative are not opposites.
"Liberal" means in favor of liberty. For example, if you want the freedom to own guns, or to retain untaxed property, you are liberal.
The opposite is "authoritarian."
"Conservative" means resisting change, as in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
The opposite is "progressive" which views change as good because it's "progress," fixing things that actually are broke.

Of course, the matter of whether the status quo is broke or not is opinion, and hinges on who is benefitting from it. Those who are doing well say it ain't broke, and tend to be conservative, and those who are hurt by it say it is broke, and tend to be progressive.

But for liberal and conservative to be opposed, can only happen when the status quo is unfree, and change increases freedom. Unfortunately, this is frequently the case, and results in conservativism aligning with authoritarianism.

In any case, the point is, if you are a conservative for valid reasons, don't call your opponents liberals. Call them progressives. Otherwise you are revealing yourself to be authoritarian, and on no one like authoritarians, because they are jerks.