a friend sent me this today and i thought it would make a good topic for members to add to if Ian could start it on a new page as i don,t know how.
If you think life was better 20 years ago, think again
Were we truly better off 20 years ago? We’re forever being told that living standards in the West are declining, or at least stagnating. But if you’re old enough, cast your mind back to how you lived in 1997.
There was no Wi-Fi, no Wiki, no Google. Although the internet existed, it was limited and laboured, and few of us had emails. Starbucks hadn’t arrived in the UK; its forerunner, Seattle Coffee, was just starting to make decent coffee more widely available. EasyJet operated only one international route, from Luton to Amsterdam, and older airlines, facing scant competition, charged accordingly. To go abroad, you didn’t book your flight online, let alone your hotel; you had to go to a travel agent. Photography involved rolls
of film, which sometimes didn’t develop.
In what sense, then, are we supposed to be poorer? The surveys that suggest a decline in living standards are usually based on real wages. The entry into the global market of hundreds of millions of new workers since the Nineties has indeed reduced the relative value of labour, but it has also vastly improved the quality, as well as the affordability, of goods and services.
How can we measure the difference in value between tasty coffee and watery coffee? Or put a price on the increased availability of good wine, once the preserve of the upper middle classes? How can we quantify the fact that most of us are now in what used to be called “the jet set”? What about the explosion in home entertainment over the past 20 years? In 1997, we had a choice of four TV channels – Channel Five was launched in March that year – plus maybe a Blockbuster video. Now we can decide what to watch, when, and on what medium.
These things are almost impossible to evaluate, so we rarely try. Instead, we stick to tangible measures like wages, disposable income and asset values, which can tell a falsely glum story. Then again, people have nodded along to falsely glum stories since at least the time of Seneca.
We can’t time-travel to 1997, but if we had to live for a just week as we did 20 years ago, we’d be cured of our nostalgia. The one big exception is the price of housing, which has risen relative to income – though as a result of restrictive planning rules and high immigration, not of economic decline.
By almost every other metric, things are getting better faster. Last week, a survey by Goldsmith’s, University of London asked people for their daily anxieties. The top three responses were waiting around for deliveries, forgetting online passwords and leaving your phone at home. Asked
the same thing in 1997, respondents said finding a happy relationship, earning enough to pay the bills and saving for a holiday. Even our first-world problems are becoming more first-worldy.
No generation has been as wealthy as ours, though our children will surpass us. And you know what? When they do, they will complain, like every previous generation, that they live in a uniquely unhappy age.