I was browsing this thread on personalfinance, and like all discussions about rent prices, it comes with people complaining about how bad everything is today, and how prices are going to spiral out of control over the next 5 / 10 / 30 years.

Then I found the gold nugget: http://i.imgur.com/lNE3ODA.jpg

Before I could lambaste the guy with census data, the comments got nuked by the mods — so in accordance with sunk cost fallacy rule, I'm posting it here instead as a quick RI.

Not sure it's so apples to apples. In the 60s men wore suits and women wore nice dresses. Food was more natural and less artificially created crap.

We might be paying slightly less, but we are getting polyester tshirts, plastic shoes, and 60/40 grain fed cancer beef instead of wool suits and 97/3 grass fed free range beef.

You seem to have an extremely warped perception of what life was like for the average person in the 60's and how "good" it was.

(Spoiler: not everyone could afford wool suits.)

• In 1960, America had an average poverty rate of 22.1%. If you open the "1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 Census" data file, you'll see that the entire southeastern United States was in a state of chronic poverty, with a per-county poverty rate of more than 40% — in other words, over 20 million people, or 11% of the entire U.S. population, was living in poverty. I don't have data for this, but one can reasonably conclude that a significant portion of those 20 million people were likely living in extreme poverty, i.e. unable to meet basic needs for survival.

• By 1970, average poverty in America had decreased to 13.7%, which is pretty good considering that the average poverty rate in 2010 was 14.9%. Still, 2% of the population, or just under 4 million people, was still living in chronic poverty.

• Using the slider in the top right, we can see that between 1970 and 2000, chronic poverty had all but disappeared for the vast majority of the U.S. — and by 2010, very few counties (13 out of 3143) reported having more than 40% of their population in poverty. While this isn't ideal, we can conclude that overall, life has improved for the average person since 1960.

I'd love to go deeper into this, but I can't find a lot of historical data on homelessness in the U.S., which is still a huge problem.

Sources:

1. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/#dec

2. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/methods/definitions.html

Admittedly this is a very one-dimensional view of the subject, but I think it conveys the overall point that life for the average American has improved significantly over the past 50 years; not just economically, but also in terms of available healthcare and education, and opportunities to succeed. There are obviously still problems like chronic homelessness, child poverty, and uncomfortable levels of income inequality, but these problems are not irreversible nor untreatable.