The Good Old Days!

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When (most) conservatives talk about the good old days, they give the impression that they were better: that's the essence of (cultural, at least,) conservatism.  Keep the old ways.  When liberals talk about the good old days, it's usually to point out how far we've come.  But, of course, what has happened is that the conservatives have had a field day for 30 years, so I guess that would be several field decades, so that things are not as good as a liberal would like.

I'm going to be ambiguous about it; some things are better, some things are worse.

One thing that has changed a lot is everyday life.  For instance, buying groceries.  Of course, prices used to be unbelievably lower, you got a lot of local food from farms close by.  You ate mostly food you cooked at home from scratch, and most folks knew to cook (even the guys, though they kept this kind of a secret).  These days, the prices are higher; the cost of college and the cost of food are the things that go up the fastest.  But there is a lot more variety of food, and it doesn't cost as much as you would expect, once you're used the prices.  How is this?  Some of the food is even half-cooked; you only need to go home and, you know, add water, or whatever.  What has changed?

Enormous trucks.  Enormous farms.  Corporations that get food from all over the world, and sell it to your supermarket.  The people who make the most money out of all this are the big food companies (e.g. Kraft, ConAgra, General Mills, Hormel, Perdue, and the usual suspects), with the trucking companies coming next, the Supermarket chains coming after that, and then the providers of plastic containers and packaging, etc etc.

What about the local farms?  Well, now they're competing with the big farms out west, which means that they have to sell their produce at much lower prices than they would if they got to sell directly to the grocers.  This is a tragedy that is well recognized.  The Economists would say that the small farms were mismanaged and simply ran at a loss.  The rest of use would say that the workers were paid a fair wage, the animals were kept under much more humane conditions, and the food was actually superior.

Another thing that has changed is the roads, and vehicular traffic.  The traffic is heavier, the vehicles are bigger, there are more of them, and they're going a lot faster, and it is more dangerous.  In addition, of course, people are actually conducting phone conversations while they drive.  On the other hand, more people have (more) cars; some of them several cars per person, one for work, one for off-road, one for cruising for chicks, one for towing the boat, one to go with your red jacket ...

Cars are, generally speaking, more sophisticated, and pollute a lot less, per car.  Of course, with a trillion cars out there, there are a hundred cars helping to pollute the air in the place of one car from around the sixties, so there has not been any net improvement.  (In the special case of Los Angeles County, however, apparently there has been improvement for some time.  However, a recent news story revealed that, since cars in California hardly rust out at the rate in colder climes, many older cars (of pre-1980 vintage) are still on the roads, so that the pollution control in some legal vehicles are well below the standards for new cars.  They are sliding standards, which are more lenient for older cars.  Maybe it's time to stop the sliding?)

When you buy most products whose use or consumption has an impact on your health, labels are now required, to let you know facts about the product.

Cars, for instance, must report miles per gallon.  Flushes must tell you water use per flush.  Food has to tell you saturated fats and lots of little details per serving.  Products potentially harmful to children have to be labeled.  Most amusingly, of course, cigarettes and alcohol are labeled as being harmful, something we have known for a century.

Recently, legislation was passed in Pennsylvania that large diesel vehicles (more than 5 tons in weight) are not permitted to idle while parked in public areas.  Hallelujah!  Not only are rest areas on Interstate highways going to be quieter at night, they are going to be a trillion times less noxious.  It became fashionable for diesel truck drivers to keep their enormous engines on all the time in the seventies, and it was so much fun for them, it became the norm, a sort of macho thing.

What about family life?  Were the good old days better for people?  For children?  For women?  Men had a lot more power in their homes, and women took greater responsibility for keeping the family together, and looking after the children.  This was arguably better for the children, in an ideal middle-class family.  But many women were unhappy staying at home, and in poorer homes already both partners had to work.  Women's occupations were uninspiring, repetitive jobs: answering phones, making coffee, slaving over stoves, looking after children, sewing clothing, weaving, and of course, farm work.  The more rewarding jobs, such as teaching, nursing, etc required long hours for pay considerably less than their male counterparts.

In the last analysis, many of these conditions have changed only in small ways.  The income gap is still present, though it has narrowed; a woman teacher would earn almost the same as a man.  A nurse earns considerably less than a doctor.  Women doctors: do they earn as much as their male colleagues?  It is difficult to know.

Alcoholism and smoking were difficult issues.  These vices disrupted homes across demographic lines; one could almost guarantee a typical woman that her husband would be a heavy drinker in the earlier parts of the last century.  The situation is somewhat better, mostly because drunken misbehavior on the part of men is not as widely tolerated anymore.  On the other hand, women have started drinking much more heavily.  Drinking among women starts in college, and it seems to me that it is getting very heavy indeed.  Smoking, I believe, is now a bigger risk for women than for men.  Certainly, a greater percentage of people smoking outside college buildings, in my observation, are women.

Education?  The dropout rate has gone down.  But what does it signify?  If a typical college graduate of 2010 was as well-educated as a typical college graduate of 1960, we could claim that things were looking up.

On the plus side, students have to be prepared for a more complex society today than the one their grandparents lived in.  Health insurance, the stock market, college, computers, even obtaining phone service, are all more complicated, and we can safely say that modern kids manage these things OK.  On the other hand, at the simple things of life, such as running a family, educating your children, maintaining your home, repairing your car, holding down a job, our grandparents would have been vastly better.

But we are comparing apples to oranges.  These days, everybody completes high-school; we're comfortable ignoring those who do not.  But fifty years ago, close to a quarter of the population (and it could be even higher) did not have a high-school degree, and a high-school degree was not required for many jobs.  Those who did not have a High-School Diploma were, some of them, quite able to do a lot of things that would probably defeat a typical modern adult, e.g. fix a leaking roof.  On the other hand, there were undoubtedly many others, around the 1950s and 1960s, who might have been capable, but never made it through high school, and led miserable lives.  So the formal education system has improved to accommodate a wider variety of ability and family background, but the education content has not kept pace with the needs of the workplace.

The awareness of health issues: being overweight, cholesterol, exercise, high blood pressure, environmental pollution, smoking, highway safety, drug safety; these things make it easier to live a healthier life.  There are more effective drugs today: Ibuprofen, diabetic drugs, drugs for asthma and allergies, childhood diseases.  There is greater awareness of how American business, commerce, economics impacts quality of life in other countries: Mexico, Colombia, Africa, Palestine, China, etc.  On the other hand, lifestyles are far more sedentary; people do not even need to leave their homes to watch a movie.  Is this progress?  Well, yes.  But the physical exertion of earlier times undoubtedly helped to offset some of the disadvantages of poor diet.  Our modern diets are, on the average, actually worse, though access to good food is far, far greater.  So we eat bad food out of choice, not out of necessity.
Finally, for many older people, the memory of older times are memories of growing up in homogeneous neighborhoods.  The racial homogeneity of the neighborhoods of the last century are undoubtedly a part of the yearning at least some of us feel.  For some, the richness of the demographics of many urban and suburban neighborhoods are pluses they do not recognize.  Children consider hanging out with black, Latino, Asian and Oriental kids the normal state of things, but for the adults: this is now, but that was then, when everyone on your street was almost exactly like you.  So, it's neither better nor worse; just different!