We live longer, have more free time, and travel more affordably. Adjusted for purchasing power, Mississippians - who live in our poorest state - have higher incomes than the French. In 1976, an FBI spokesman described San Francisco as the “Belfast of North America.”Īmericans are richer today than decades ago. In an 18-month period from 1971-1972, according to the FBI, there was an average of five terrorist bombings per day. Violent crime exploded in those decades and has been trending mostly downward since 1993. It’s a legitimate issue, but perhaps we’re nostalgic for the 1970s and 1980s not just because crime gets so much coverage but also because we’ve memory-holed the fact that crime was so much worse (maybe the lead poisoning from those days caused amnesia?). We hear a lot about rising crime these days. When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean the runaway “stagflation” - high inflation plus low growth? The lines to buy gas? The Vietnam War? Watergate? I look fondly at my 1970s childhood, but it would be ludicrous for me to think such fondness was proof the country was doing better. My hunch is that many people confuse their own gauzy memories of their personal life with a narcissistic and ideological indictment of today. Politicians play on nostalgia because it is one of the most powerful human emotions. The 2021 reboot of “The Wonder Years” is also set in the 1960s, which is now nearly 60 years ago. I grew up on “Happy Days” and, later, “Back to the Future.” In the early 1990s, it was “The Wonder Years,” which was set in the 1960s. She found that in recent surveys, the 1980s and 1990s are starting to supplant the 1950s as the new “good old days.” You can see evidence for this all over the place in popular culture, from the remakes of old sitcoms to original offerings such as “Stranger Things” that cast those years as a lost time of innocence.īut take it from someone who was there, Americans were pining for the good old days back then too. Karlyn Bowman studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. It often seems to be about five decades earlier from right now. Indeed, Americans have always had a thing for the “good old days.” The problem is that what - or when - constitutes the “good old days” is a constantly moving target. In 1939, Gallup found that 62% of Americans thought people were better off in the horse-and-buggy era (though only 25% said they’d actually want to live then). This is bad - but not for the reasons you might think. For Republican and Republican-leaning respondents, nostalgia for the early 1970s reached 72%. An April Pew survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 (58%) Americans think the country was better off for people like them 50 years ago. Nostalgia, a term that originated as a medical diagnosis for Swiss mercenaries suffering from homesickness, is the sorrowful longing for a lost past. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” - Marcel Proust
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