WAS LIFE BETTER FIFTY YEARS AGO?
By Dr Duncan Richard Shaw
Madrid, 23 July 2022
This is a tale from the pastel fields, where we ran when we were young
This is a tale from the water meadows, trying to spread some hope into your heart
It’s mixed with happiness, it’s mixed with tears, both life and death are carried in this stream
That open space, you could run for miles, now you don’t get so many to the pound
Now life is so critical, life is too cynical, we lose our innocence, we lose our very soul
True, it’s a dream mixed with nostalgia,
But it’s a dream that I’ll always hang on to that I’ll always run to
Won’t you join me by the riverbank?
Mmm…sweet nostalgia from the imperious Paul Weller, about growing up in rural England in the 1970s.
Weller’s fond memories combine with fading family photos to give me the sense of an idyllic childhood, spent in the green hills of north Derbyshire and the breezy beaches of England: sledges in the snow, bike rides out to the Peak District, picnics on Ashover Rock, boating in the Lake District, cricket on the beaches…
OMD (clever childhood friends Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys) captured this nostalgia in this delicious video for Secret, while Paul Simon reminded us of the eternal magic of old family photos:
Kodachrome – They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera – I love to take a photograph
So Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.
All of this rose-coloured nostalgia inevitably leads me to the question: was life better fifty years ago?
Were things really better before Covid, global warming, resource depletion, consumerism, overpopulation, obesity, privatization, digitalization, globalization, monetarism, Amazon, social media, deunionization, the ‘gig economy’, outsourcing, billionaire yachts and Hundred Cricket (not to mention Putin, Murdoch, Trump, Bolsonaro, Musk, Bezos and Johnson)?
The facts: life expectancy is higher nowadays (at least in the ‘developed countries’), and several killer diseases have been practically eliminated – at least in the western world.
But do we really live more peaceful and fulfilling lives nowadays? Practically all of my friends (mostly born in the Fifties and early Sixties) and family members are adamant that we do not.
They unanimously decry modern ‘music’ and wax lyrically about Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, Creedence, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Bob Marley, Barry White, Carpenters, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, Kinks, Stones – not to mention the Beatles…
They claim that the literature of the 1970s was far superior to that of today, pointing to the likes of García Márquez, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Nadime Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Raymond Carver, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, Richard Bach, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Alex Hailey, Graham Green, John Fowles, Kurt Vonnegut…
They are sure that food was better back in the 1970s (without pumped up, overweight chickens, processed food and ‘TV dinners’), and hark back to an age when families had the time (before mobile phones and social media) to sit around the table and eat home-cooked meals, discussing political and social issues respectfully – without the bitter divisions and ‘culture wars’ of today…
They agree that children were safer back then than today, out on their bikes all day or climbing trees, camping and roaming free – without the overbearing ‘helicopter parents’ of today…
They insist that politics was less divisive, sport less corrupt and commercialized (before the advent of doping and corporate control) and that genuine heroes like Muhammad Ali, Mark Spitz, Pelé and Ian Botham hardly earned more than the average ‘man in the street’, who usually could be sure of a ‘job for life’ – protected by strong trade unions.
Above all, my friends and family bemoan the fact that today’s bloated, pampered, unaccountable CEOs often earn around a thousand times more than most of their employees – and that mortgages now last for 30 or even 40 years rather than the 10 or 15-year mortgages of the 1970s.
Of course, there are more questions than answers – as Johnny Nash told us exactly fifty years ago.
Do women have more opportunities and a better life than in the 1970s?
Is there more respect for minority (sexual, racial) minorities than fifty years ago?
Are social media, digitalization and globalization positive or negative developments?
Are Latin America, Africa and Asia in a better condition today?
Above all: is life really better for most people today than in the 1970s?
Please post your comments…
Very good questions! I was much happier in the 1970s but when I was young my parents used to tell me that they were happier in the 1950s.
Will our children be nostalgic about the 2020s?
Nostalgic and thought provoking. The answer to the initial question would have to be, it depends. In some ways, for some people, things have gotten better. Though, the philosophical question is not so easy to answer. I like the way the pieces was laid out with links and clips.
Where I grew up life was more predictable and most people were working to live, not living to work.
A difficult question, my childhood memories are of very happy times, but, growing up in developing countries, I also remember children my age weaving carpets, open sewers and cholera epidemics. I do think that life in many developing countries has improved dramatically since the 1960s and 1970s.
Surely better now for the global many…
Perhaps it’s harder for the middle classes in Europe to maintain an equivalent lifestyle today as so much more kit is required and ‘keeping up with the Jones’ oftentimes requires double income families and all the attendant stresses and strained that engenders. We all need more time.
I was born in 1979 so it is hard for me to comment the 1970s but overall, life before the global coronavirus manipulation was better in the West. Life in developing countries, this is another story.
Glory days of Aston Villa in Division 3 on course to be First Division Champions and then Champions of Europe by the early years of the next decade...
Of course it was better 50 years ago!
Once again Duncan Shaw has given us some great food for thought with his latest stimulating column. If we are talking about the white middle and lower middle classes of Anglo-American societies, as Shaw seems to be, then I think the answer to the title’s question, “Was life better 50 years ago,” I think the answer is yes. Life has not improved economically for these people, and in many cases it has deteriorated. Particularly in the United States, their real wages and incomes have been no better than stagnant on average over this period, if not in outright decline. Most have lost all job and income security. Most have seen the demands on their time continue to rise and to experience increasing stress and anxiety. With each passing day, they most face more physical danger in public space. The neo-liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan which began at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was applied first at home within the Anglo-American world and then abroad at the end of the Cold War, catalyzing globalization and international economic integration within a liberal international order. This had the effect of hollowing out the education, social and physical infrastructural investment and support sustaining the broad middle classes since the end of World War II, setting the stage for their growing impoverization and resentment, which was only reinforced by the job threatening blow of rising trade competition from poorer by rapidly emerging economies. And now they face potential oblivion over the coming decades as automatization, mechanization, artificial intelligence and other ‘gifts’ of the digital transformation eliminate most of the jobs they might possibly access.
However, if we are asking the question of others – like most of Asia, much of Africa or even, closer to home, Ireland or Spain – then the answer is likely to be very different. It might also be different if the question were posed to an African American member of the middle class or an Hispanic.
With respect to a possible deterioration of different genres of art, including popular art, over the last 50 years, I think the general idea is correct, but the explanation is very complex and requires more serious attention, research and analysis. Nevertheless, I do think that it could be maintained that technology, particularly when its rate of innovation and change is increasing rapid, essentially exercises an on balance net negative effect on current and future creative art. But that would be another debate, and a long and arduous one no doubt.
Once again Duncan Shaw has given us some great food for thought with his latest stimulating column. If we are talking about the white middle and lower middle classes of Anglo-American societies, as Shaw seems to be, then I think the answer to the title’s question, “Was life better 50 years ago,” I think the answer is yes. Life has not improved economically for these people, and in many cases it has deteriorated. Particularly in the United States, their real wages and incomes have been no better than stagnant on average over this period, if not in outright decline. Most have lost all job and income security. Most have seen the demands on their time continue to rise and to experience increasing stress and anxiety. With each passing day, they most face more physical danger in public space. The neo-liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan which began at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was applied first at home within the Anglo-American world and then abroad at the end of the Cold War, catalyzing globalization and international economic integration within a liberal international order. This had the effect of hollowing out the education, social and physical infrastructural investment and support sustaining the broad middle classes since the end of World War II, setting the stage for their growing impoverization and resentment, which was only reinforced by the job threatening blow of rising trade competition from poorer by rapidly emerging economies. And now they face potential oblivion over the coming decades as automatization, mechanization, artificial intelligence and other ‘gifts’ of the digital transformation eliminate most of the jobs they might possibly access.
However, if we are asking the question of others – like most of Asia, much of Africa or even, closer to home, Ireland or Spain – then the answer is likely to be very different. It might also be different if the question were posed to an African American member of the middle class or an Hispanic.
With respect to a possible deterioration of different genres of art, including popular art, over the last 50 years, I think the general idea is correct, but the explanation is very complex and requires more serious attention, research and analysis. Nevertheless, I do think that it could be maintained that technology, particularly when its rate of innovation and change is increasing rapid, essentially exercises an on balance net negative effect on current and future creative art. But that would be another debate, and a long and arduous one no doubt. But it is one worth having....
Wondering if life would be considered "objectively" better or "relatively" better, then or now, and for whom.
An intriguing discussion is definitely worth comment. Theres no doubt that that you should write more on this subject, it might not be a taboo subject but usually people dont talk about these topics. To the next! Best wishes!!
As those who have already commented, to analyse and answer this question fully you would have to carve up the world across a vast range of socio economic and global segments. But as far as middle class English children are concerned, I think we were better off with our Scalextric, Raleigh Choppers and pineapple chunks than today’s teenagers fretting about when their next iPhone upgrade is due and how many likes their last post received.
PS Why has the writer downgraded himself from the lofty heights of professor to doctor for this post?
A thought-provoking overview of a perennial debate. In Britain, we are all guilty of Golden Age-ism; the music we like is still the music we grew up with.....see the Joe Strummer article and comments above. The truth is that life was simpler then and people had lower expectations but people died unnecessarily young of heart disease, lung cancer, or car crashes without seat belts. Education was free and people had jobs for life before the early 80s at any rate. We were blissfully ignorant of climate change but that wasn't going to stop it coming. By comparison, life is frenetic today and competition at all levels is fierce, not least the peer pressure put on our children on social media. However, overall, our kids are well informed, if they choose to be, and are better equipped to negotiate this modern world. Thankfully also, although those battles are far from over, they don't have to have to negotiate the same levels of sexism and racism that were endemic 50 years ago. If you want an irreverent reminder of those grim times treat yourself to Simon Goddard's Bowie Odyssey series...now up to 1972, where Ziggy Stardust fought for column inches with Enoch Powell and Page 3! If you are still not convinced then ask yourself if you would rather go to the dentist today or in 1972!
Another thought-provoking piece by Duncan Shaw. We all remember our childhood years in the 60s and 70s as better times. Of course we do, as we lived free of the concerns and pressures that are inevitably part of adult life. I often wonder if my parents felt the same stresses I feel or if life for them really was easier back then. And for those of us who grew up in solid middle-class families in First World countries it would be easy to point to the stable employment, affordable housing costs and freedom from the threat of Isis as proof that life was better. However, if we really take an honest look at the life outside our bubble, we see that from 1960 until now, the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty has dramatically decreased, the number of armed conflicts around the world is much lower than it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and minority groups finally enjoy the rights they were denied during our childhood years. By those very important measures, life is definitely better. And while the internet and technology in general may be allowing fake news and hate speech to spread unchecked, as well as ruining some of our human connections (please put down your phones and stop sending text messages and actually talk, in person, to your friends!) it has also made long-distance communication almost as good as a visit. The same communication technology allows for remote work, which has allowed many people freedom to explore other parts of their countries or even the world without giving up their jobs. These developments increase our happiness beyond measure, I am sure. So, to answer Duncan’s question, I honestly believe that while increasing wealth inequality and the growth of authoritarian regimes are darkening my usually optimistic view of life, the world in 2022 is actually better if we examine many quantifiable measures like poverty and conflict. That being said, NO TIME will ever equal the glorious years of the 60s and 70s in terms of music. Duncan named all of the reasons why.