I was in college in the 70s, so yeah, it was a fun time for me when I think back on it. Who wouldn’t want to hear Aerosmith live in a club with maybe 80 people there before their first album.
But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no cell phones you were on your own if the car stopped running. A car accident could kill you in a 35 mph crash. I also carried a state highway map and a city map of around 100 pages in a spiral bound book because there was no GPS.
The best medicine available seems primitive by comparison to today. I had classmates that wore leg braces due to childhood polio. People were still dying from rabies, TB, and even Smallpox. There were cholera pandemics. No MRI, no CAT scans.
I was studying programming. I had to walk to campus at night to punch cards. No internet, no terminal, just a place to drop off cards so that you could pick up your output in the morning.
I was middle class in the 70s so I had it much better than many others. Most of us grew up with a single wired phone in the house, only one full bathroom, one black and white TV that received three channels, no DVD, no CDs.
A VCR player in 1975 was big and heavy and cost over $5000 in today’s dollars so none of us owned one.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
Even in the 1970s, life was still much much better for me than my parents that had grew up on small farms during the dustbowl days of the Great Depression.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
When I hear my parents talk about growing up in the segregated south in the 50s, there is nothing about it that makes me think - "wow life was so much better back then".
The South in the 50s was definitely segregated, although the degree of prejudice varied. Whether white or black, life was likely not better than it is now.
But the OP was talking about the 70s and there is a world of difference. Once you get to the 70s the statement "wow life was so much better back then." becomes debatable for whites, at least.
Sorry, your narrative timeline is simply incorrect. Perhaps b/c you did not live in the USA?
Gore-tex was invented in 1969 but was hardly necessary. Wool has always worked extremely well and still does: polyester was pretty good except in northern USA. I lived in the south and wore predominantly cotton: Levi jeans and cotton t-shirts were our uniform in the summer; winter we bought a jacket and lived with it.
In 1971 I bought a used American car with everything on it for $300. My East Indian college roommate loved to ride in it and very quickly got a license and car of his own. I later drove my $300 car from Texas to New York via the Midwest and DC to graduate school. I later drove that car to work and school around DC. I had tools but rarely needed them except for maintenance. The car was extremely reliable and needed only tuneups and tires. I gave it to a friend when I bought another car.
You didn't (and still don't) need a cell phone. It was (and is) easy to get help from strangers.
A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.
You complain about carrying a map and a zip code book - you should still (I do), since your phone or network could fail at any time. But you don't b/c in your heart you believe that you can rely on the kindness of strangers!
Medicine today is not much better than it was back then. Trauma care _is_ improved (the lessons of Vietnam were absorbed). But antibiotics worked better back then than today and other than antivirals and statins, the use of drugs hasn't improved much. As someone once said, doctors got no respect until antibiotics came along and, were they taken away, doctors would not get much respect now.
The remnants of the polio epidemics was still present in students of the 1950s (Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and I was vaccinated ~1957). I too had classmates with polio braces, but polio in the USA was stopped by the vaccination campaigns before the 1970s.
People didn't die of rabies in the 1970s unless it was untreated.
People didn't die of TB in the 1970s unless it was unattended and/or advanced before treatment.
Smallpox was wiped out and routine immunization halted in 1970. The only cholera pandemics were offshore USA (e.g., the El Tor pandemic in Indonesia->Pakistan in the '70's).
I too carried punch cards (I started in the 60's) and was glad to do so: programming turned into a career. 4 years later in the mid-70's I had a terminal and multiple computers available in a network.
3 TV channels was plenty: I got the news and entertainment too, although after awhile I began to notice TV was turning into something akin to the "Bullshit Web" of today:
VCRs were about $1000 in 1975 but they were available used for only hundreds of dollars. I have a used one that runs still today! In comparison my first CD player died after 3 years.
Neither discrimination nor bigotry nor prejudice were ubiquitous but they _were_ still present. Your description of prejudice fits the southern USA of the '50's, NOT the '70's.
Indeed my grandparents were small farmers (sharecroppers) and their and their children's (my parents') lives were hard. But the opportunities my parents had during their time were enormous and their lives were rich and memorable.
It probably remains true even today that antibiotics are man's most significant improvement of the last century.
But in summary I find your description of the 70s is off by fully 20 years.
> A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.
Cars were a lot less safe in 1971, that is a fact. No air bags, no anti-lock brakes, no traction control. Older cars didn't have seat belts, shoulder belts were rare, cars weren't built to crumple, steering columns would impale you, etc.
Fact, not anecdote:
In 1971 there were 4.46 fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled (MVMT).
In 2015 it was 1.18 fatalities per MVMT.
So yes, in fact cars were three times as dangerous as today.
1) What I stated was not anecdote: a car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and don't).
2) I simply don't agree with your use of relative statistics, which reeks of alarmism. My doctors use such arguments in attempts to convince me to take statin drugs, which would at best extend my life for only a few days if I took them for 30 years. He always tells me that I'm "X times as likely to die from a heart attack" unless I take statins. I always remind him of the nature of his statistics, the side-effects of statins, and the non-present longevity payoff of taking them.
Once the number of fatalities per MVMT is below a certain value it ceases to be likely in the overall scheme of things and becomes unimportant.
Relative statistics ignore the prior probabilities - the fact that I'm unlikely to die driving in the first place. Yes, 4.46 deaths per MVMT is about 3 X 1.18, but both are low deaths per MVMT.
I may die from falling off a ladder or get eaten by a shark but neither is likely, nor am I now nor was I likely in the 70s to die in a car accident. Some other damn thing will most likely get me (that isn't anecdotal either).
Perhaps the deficit of happiness can be better explained by one of Peter Thiel's most excellent reductionist observations:
The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we
landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three
weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when
progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2]
Perhaps, for too long, the left has engulfed and held hostage our cultural ideas of progress and advancement. And perhaps that has imbued us with a certain stripe of ideological stagnation not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also the debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself and its relevance to the overall happiness of our society.
Perhaps our dominant leftist culture's 'ideological stagnation index' is the unmeasured metric that could explain why we feel the way we feel despite
technological progress.
Thiel on the same topic:
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to
be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world
where actually believing that a better future is possible that
you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is
actually radically countercultural.[1]
[1]
Glenn Beck and Peter Thiel On How To Change What's Politically Cool
He's talking about the cultural left not the political one deployed to ensure voter turnout.
Perhaps this will add more context:
Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there
is a difference between the election of a black
president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in
their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights
parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these
ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s
Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually
might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless
fake cultural wars around identity politics are the
main reason we have been able to ignore the tech
slowdown for so long.[1]
You're not reading Thiel's full argument, it takes a while to appreciate it, you won't get it from a couple of sound bites. I've read a slew of his essays and watched his talks - it takes a while to absorb how different this interpretation of reality is.
I believe Thiel is correct in what he is saying and that is terrifying. It is going to take Westerners a long time to finally wake up and when it finally does it'll be jarring and immensely depressing.
Is there any way you could go into more detail on this or refer to some sources? In all honesty, your comment sounds vague and a bit esoteric, still interesting enough that I want to know if there some hidden truth to it. It can’t be that difficult
Peter Thiel is really a kind of philosopher - the venture capitalism is more of an outgrowth of something else than his primary focus. This is a person who reads widely, has big ideas and is consistently ahead of everybody else - his reputation is wholly deserved.
I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it.
I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves.
A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief.
Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of René Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this.
Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason why he's ahead of the curve over and over. Things like Seasteading, Urbit, if you ferret away at the peripheral you start to see interesting stuff, some of which gets ferried back to the mainstream sooner or later he's not the only talent scout for weird ideas like this but there's surprisingly few people out there in these strange circles - I've found that I keep running into the same people over and over, only a few hundred of them I'd guess. I'm tired now, it's near GMT midnight but good luck on your quest!
A lot of Tyler Cowen's ideas intersect with Thiel, that's another good line of enquiry.
I'm very far to the left, but the military made almost all the major inventions that silicon valley has packaged up for consumer use. The iPhone is nothing but a collection of technologies designed for war. GPS, small cameras, the internet, ect were all designed by the military not by Silicon Valley.
The point though is that some people in SV think that a monoculture of liberals were/are behind everything and that is just not true. Technology is a full spectrum ideological bloodsport.
But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no cell phones you were on your own if the car stopped running. A car accident could kill you in a 35 mph crash. I also carried a state highway map and a city map of around 100 pages in a spiral bound book because there was no GPS.
The best medicine available seems primitive by comparison to today. I had classmates that wore leg braces due to childhood polio. People were still dying from rabies, TB, and even Smallpox. There were cholera pandemics. No MRI, no CAT scans.
I was studying programming. I had to walk to campus at night to punch cards. No internet, no terminal, just a place to drop off cards so that you could pick up your output in the morning.
I was middle class in the 70s so I had it much better than many others. Most of us grew up with a single wired phone in the house, only one full bathroom, one black and white TV that received three channels, no DVD, no CDs.
A VCR player in 1975 was big and heavy and cost over $5000 in today’s dollars so none of us owned one.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
Even in the 1970s, life was still much much better for me than my parents that had grew up on small farms during the dustbowl days of the Great Depression.