Quote (thesnipa @ Nov 3 2021 02:41pm)
50-100 years ago if u had stocks you were rich or upper middle class. today if you dont have stocks its only because you're ignorant or just plain stupid.
lifetime medical costs are higher because of both preventative care that wasnt even a thing and because people live longer. we're not seeing as many 60 year olds men just keel over, they're instead dreading colonoscopies and googling whether or not they should take a full vacation day for the day after.
overall there are drawbacks of modern life, but its still better on the whole. u wanna trade up for a 1960s factory worker who owns an out of the box asbestos filled home he bought on a high school education that will die when he's 65? i fuckin dont.
50 years ago you didn't need stocks because pensions were everywhere. Even a grocery store worker had a great retirement plan from their employer. The need for investing a signficant portion of your income to retire is a point against it being better now.
Preventative care is good now *if* you have insurance and the money to pay the copays on top of that. The average person, as in a person in a 60k a year household income, is putting off screenings as long as possible due to cost. Medical care is increasingly segregated to those who can afford it, which is one of the reasons why I said "if you make less than 60k".
As for life expectancy, we've only increased 10 years, and the majority of that increase can be attributed to our increased knowledge of heart disease.
The only legitimate argument I can really see is "We live 10 years longer". Cool, but on the whole everything else is worse.
I'd say that things started getting worse probably around the 80's, when Reagan's deregulation nation shit really made people give up on good governance.
This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Nov 3 2021 02:03pm