When following political discourse these days, it’s only a matter of time before you’re confronted with confident assertions that everything was so much better x years ago. That “they” are depriving you of a better life that you could’ve had if you happened to be born a generation or two ago. Such attitudes are no doubt fueled in part by the economic malaise of the current moment, with stubbornly high inflation in the post-COVID years a truly harmful phenomenon.
But don’t get things twisted: these are still the best times to be alive and it’s not even close. It all reminds me of a 2011 appearance by comedian Louis CK on Conan O’Brien’s show making fun of everyone complaining at a time when the world is as rich as it is.
“When I read things like, ‘The foundations of capitalism are shattering,’ I’m like ‘maybe we need that.’ Maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides,” Louis CK said.
“You think that would just bring us back to reality,” prompts Conan.
“Yeah because everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy,” responds Louis CK, who was born in 1967. “Like in my lifetime the changes in the world have been incredible.” CK goes on to note the material gains he’s seen in his lifetime, from relying on rotary phones to communicate with others to now being privileged enough to complain about the speed of the internet on airplanes.
Alas, the appeals to a better yesterday never end, and they come from across the political spectrum, in defiance of everything we take for granted today.
Everything was better in the 1950s and 1960s until you think about it
Most commonly fetishized by peddlers of nostalgia politics are the decades immediately following World War II.
Often, this comes in the form of memes, like one which generated considerable attention a few years ago which reads, “Once upon a time, a family could own a home, a car and send their kids to college all on one income,” with accompanying imagery evocative of the 1950s or 1960s
Never mind, of course, that homeownership rates are actually higher today than they were in the 1950s and 1960s, the average house is now twice the size, and many times more people get a bachelor’s degree than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Memes are a lot more effective when one doesn’t consider all of the facts.
To top it all off, for all the nostalgia about what “used to be” the American dream of home ownership, homes were not only generally smaller but often lacked basics we take for granted today. As Reason Magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward noted in a commentary blasting the meme, “the cheapest new houses available for sale in 1960 lacked more than just air conditioning. In 1960, about 16% of Americans still lived in houses without indoor plumbing.”
But outside the home people could hit the road in the 1960s, that’s true, and in 1960 most American households did have a car. But they only had a car, one car. Most now have two or more, with a plurality having at least two, while the percentage of households without one has also plummeted since the 1960s. Not only that, but cars are a lot safer than they were back then. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “The average vehicle on the road in 2012 would have an estimated 56% lower fatality risk for its occupants than the average vehicle on the road in the late 1950s.
And while there were indeed airplanes in the 1960s, consider that just 20% of Americans had taken a plane by 1965. By now, most Americans have not only been on a plane, but take them quite often. In December 2025, nearly a quarter of Americans reported having taken three or more round-trip flights in the last year, with another 21% reporting taking one or two. This is no trivial matter. People are more able than ever to visit other parts of the country and other parts of the world — many of us take full advantage of that.
You don’t see many people pining for smaller, air conditioning-less homes with outhouses, now do you? Or boasting that households could once only afford one car with far fewer safety measures and couldn’t afford a plane ticket?
We’ve gained plenty of ground since then
Once you get out of the 1950s and 1960s nostalgia, one will be hard pressed to say the 1970s were much better than where we are today. If you think today’s economic situation is untenable, one only needs to look up the era of stagflation. And as the late economist Steve Horwitz observed, “U.S. households below the poverty line in 2005 were more likely to have a dryer, a dishwasher, a refrigerator, a stove, a microwave, a color TV, a VCR, a personal computer, a cellphone and air conditioning than was the average U.S. household in 1971.”
But things are just things, right? Sure people have more things — more cars, bigger homes, more ability to travel — but people must somehow be poorer than in decades past right?
Not to be outdone, democratic socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has consistently leveraged similar “things were so much better before” rhetoric over years with the argument that people made more money in decades past.
“Mom is working, Dad is working, and the kids are working, and yet together they’re bringing in less disposable income today than a family did with one breadwinner 40 years ago,” he said in 2016, a line of argument he and many others have made. The problem with this line of argument is that it’s false.
When he said it in 2016, real disposable personal incomes per capita were twice what they were 40 years prior in 1976. Indeed, as of May 2026, they are twice what they were in 1990 and four times what they were in 1960.
Looking at the data, there’s no mistaking the perpetually increasing slope of the graph over the last 60 years. This is no small matter. Ever-increasing prosperity means people have more money to pay for more of their needs and wants. It enables people to build wealth for themselves and their families. It enables investment in property and businesses. It enables more freedom.
The global picture is improving, too
The remarkable abundance of contemporary America extends beyond our borders, as well. Not only have Americans experienced incredible increases in their quality of life relative to decades past, but the world has become a richer place as well.
“According to the World Bank, 42% of the globe’s population was still living in absolute poverty in 1981,” noted Human Progress, a project of the Cato Institute, in 2023. “In 1990, about 1.9 billion of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty; by 2018, that number had dropped to 650 million, even despite ongoing population increases that put the world population at 7.5 billion.”
According to the latest World Bank figures from March 2026, while about 11.3% of the world lived on less than $3 per day, that figure dropped to 10.4% by 2024 and is projected to drop to 10% this year. No matter how one puts it, the dramatic fall in global poverty is one of the greatest accomplishments in human history. It not only means that fewer people are suffering and struggling, but more people are able to think beyond mere survival and live lives on their own terms.
As the large and growing percentage of Americans who have been able to travel abroad over recent decades can attest, once impoverished areas of the world have seen incredible economic booms and the development of robust middle classes which look a lot like the ones we see here in the United States.
All of this has been associated with longer lifespans, higher literacy and greater freedom of choice for people around the world to do with their lives what they wish.
Sorry, but today is way better
For all of the noise and discord surrounding contemporary American politics — and when has that not been the case? — one can almost forget how fortunate we are to experience the prosperity of the modern world. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do better. For instance, we need to eradicate poverty both globally and domestically, but we roughly know what we need to do to achieve better outcomes.
The answer is not to try to chase the fake prosperity of the past with regressive trade policies to “bring back the factories” or impose wage mandates so people can make more or whatever fallacious economic plan the populists of the left and right want to impose. The answer lies with ensuring we let markets work, uphold the rule of law to keep everyone in check, and maintain a less intrusive government than so many seem eager to impose.
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of “Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way,” published by the Pacific Research Institute.
Read Part 1: America 250: Beyond the Politics of Nostalgia
Read Part 2: On the right—Are Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes really the future?
Read Part 3: America 250: Will the left’s apocalyptic vision usher in a future of big government?