THE GOOD OLD DAYS WEREN'T

I for one am sick of hearing forgetful old people talk about how great the gold old days were. Sure I agree maybe the quality and values of people have gone down - but our life in late 20th century western society is HEAVEN compared with how most of humanity has lived.  To prove this in numbers, I offer the following comparison of buying power 200 years ago vs today:
 

The following gives the prices in typical minutes of work to earn a good or service.  This assumes an average salary for a typical person in America now vs at the founding of our country.
 

GOODS OR SERVICE NOW in minutes  THEN
1 gallon of potable water   0.15    10
a time piece  15   200
a container able to hold a gallon   1    30
sending a 1 ounce package across the country   2.5   120
hearing 1 hour of music   4    400
1 sheet of paper   0.25    20
a hand pulled wagon capable of carrying 200lbs 300   400
1 pound of ground oatmeal (in volume)   8    120
enough dye to cover 3 sq yds cloth (in volume)  10    90
 

As an exercise, consider all the kids you have and people you know and love- now imagine any of them with a first name beginning with a letter between A and F.  - those would be all the people you'd expect to have die prematurely since the time they were born.  Add  to that living with the stale stench of human excrement from no central sewage disposal, a body racked with skin and intestinal parasites, no real
vision correction or dental care, world news traveling in months rather than seconds, etc.  You may think pollution is bad today, but then, everyone burned wood stoves which created more crap in the air - it also lead to massive deforrestation.  Work was backbreaking, human rights were way down low (don't forget that most people considered slavery just fine).  Travel was jarring, dangerous and unreliable.  Life was short and education was very low.  In those days, prostitution was even more common and alcoholism was near as bad.  In those days, doctors had few sucessful treatments and ended up doing more bad than good.

  A few facts from an artical originally by Art Pine from the Los Angeles Times:
    He quotes W. Michael Cox who compiled some of the following facts:  The following table is more accurately arrived at than my own:  It looks at the number of minutes worked in 1919 compared with the number of minutes worked in 1997 to earn a number of things (it even leaves out the massive number of free things you now have as a result of Socialism taxing your wages at a much higher rate). One statistic he had was in 1950 the average worker worked 6.5 hours to earn the cost of a square foot of house, now that cost is 5.6 hours.  Then a gallon of gas took 97 minutes then and 5.7 minutes now. Of course the cost of someone elses labor will run the same.  In the 50's, the average American spent 54% of income for food, shelter and clothing, now it is only 38%.
 
 

number of minutes of work needed to buy things in 1920 vs 1997
3 lbs tomatoes 101 18
1 dozen eggs 80 5
1 dozen oranges 68 9
1 lb bread 13 4
a king size mattress and boxspring 321 61
a chicken 147 14
a refridgerator 189720 4080
The difference is productivity due to better technology.
   In the trenchant words of Dilbert, "If it weren't for engineers, we'd site around in caves wondering if rocks are edible.

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