What a difference half a century makes. If, that is, you’re not living in the U.S.
Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%). Overall, 43% of people in those countries said they were better off.
All told, a majority of respondents in these 20 countries said they were better off.
However, the U.S. wasn’t one of them.
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The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%). Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago (only after Mexico, Jordan and Argentina).
Why the disparity between these countries? In Europe, populists tend to be more enamored of the past than people who disapprove of some of the continent’s right-wing parties. Germans who support the Alternative for Germany party are 28 percentage points more likely to say that life is worse for people like them than those who have an unfavorable view of the anti-immigrant party, researchers found. Another trend: More educated people are likelier to say life is better today, and in some countries young people are more positive on life in 2017 than their elders.
“Some of the most positive assessments of progress over the past 50 years are found in Vietnam, India and South Korea,” the report found. “All societies that have seen dramatic economic transformations since the late 1960s, not to mention the end of armed conflict in the case of Vietnam. A majority in Turkey also share a sense of progress over the past five decades.” That said, Pew’s analysis indicates that views of the current economy are also a strong indicator of whether people say life for people like them is better today than it was 50 years ago.
In the U.S., the rich appear to be leaving the middle class behind. The American middle class made up just 26% of incomes in 2014, down from 46% in 1979, adjusted for inflation, according to a separate report released last June by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy group. The upper middle class controlled 63% of all income in 2014, up from just 30% in 1979. And it isn’t because more middle-class Americans are richer: Middle-income households make up 120.8 million of the population, almost as much as upper middle-class and lower-income Americans combined.
So basically, in all of the countries where people say they’re worse off, they wish they were still run by the white man.
Over thirty years ago I was in the Bahamas and saw an old, drunk Bahamian blocking traffic in an intersection yelling “things were better when the white man was in charge”. Out of the mouths of babes – and drunks…
I’m surprised the US isn’t lower on that list.
It will be.
It would be if only native born citizens were asked. Over 25% of current US residents weren’t even here 50 years ago and even among those born here how many were alive 50 years ago?
No habla.
In whatever of the 100 languages or so, what would you answer if you just came from mudpie land?
If you live in America, you are in the 1%, especially if you are female or homosexual. Tolerance doesn’t exist outside the safe borders and safe spaces afforded in “the homeland.”
Apparently France would be happier if the Germans were running the place. Makes sense.
Q: Why are there trees on the Champs Elysee?
A: So the Germans can march in the shade.
lol
If asking (adult) people about their conditions today and 50 years ago I suppose the average age of respondents would be around 70?
As for me, I was still serving in Vietnam 50 years ago so I would have to say I’m better off now than then. A lot better off.
The internet coupled with technology has changed everyone’s perspective. 50 years ago, you didn’t know the bias of media, the folly of our government, and the quantity of depression in society. With all the negatives being touted, how can anyone say that we’re better off. BTW, we had $5Trillion in debt in 2000. In a short 17 years, we now have $20Trillion. Can this go on indefinitely? I don’t think so.
Fifty years is a long time in a humans life span.
The parameters should have been – before computer and post computer eras.
The difference is as night to day.
Sometimes too much information is a bad thing, especially when its negative.
As can be seen in the amount of depression and anti-depressive medications.
People were happier when kept in the dark and fed horse shit. Just like mushrooms.
Let in bright light and the mushrooms die. Society does not like to look too closely at itself.
Fact the real owners of America : the circle jerk from Wall Street to K-Street to Capitol Street threw average middle class working Americans over board 50 years ago along with many of their pensions and benefits so no wonder the negative numbers ! Even a dog knows the difference between being stilumbled over and being kicked !
American working people and their families have been passed over consistently and Trump and all his Make America Great Again is just anothe bag of empty rhetoric .
Yes President Trump is our best shot but so far I have not seen enough butt kicking out of him . I wish I could take the Donald for a ride in my car for a couple hours and show him what’s left around here in the Baltimore Area . It’s all gone and it ain’t coming back !
I have told youse fucks for years – the system where 5% of the world’s population (the US) consumes 25% of the world’s resources is not sustainable. The folks that consume next to nothing want their fair share. That means the Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Thai, Eastern Europeans, etc., are going to chip, chip,chip away at the US middle class’s portion, and erode it.
That the US middle class is poorly educated, modestly endowed with intelligence, low-skilled, debt-ridden, etc., simply helps all the others chip away.
In a global economy, poorly educated, low-skilled types are cannon fodder. The Chinese and the Indians and the Thais are going to consume the US midle class, as that paradigm was never going to be sustainable. People have to EARN a high standard of living, either by being more talented, better educated, or more industrious than the competition.
Does that sound like the US middle class to you? Really? China has hundreds of millions of folks that are smarter, and more hard-working than the average middle class worker of the US. And they are getting better educated all the time. And they work cheaper.
The US middle class is terminally ill. The medicine to cure the illness is too bitter, and will not be swallowed.
In a global economy with tariffs to protect the middle class against predatory capital, things were just fine. That would be almost all of US history, up until the late 1960s….