The Reality:

Let's start with the obvious: A low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour in 1950. A fancy job in insurance or real estate? A buck-fifty an hour. You'd take home $50 a week after taxes. So please don't talk about the good old days of 50-cent steaks when people were getting paid what would now be Tooth Fairy money.

So how does this all average out, once you account for income? We don't have to guess. Punch anything into the cost of living calculator -- the one that uses the exact same formula that the government uses to decide things like tax rates -- and you'll see that the prices of most things have stayed pretty constant over the years. High-end manufactured goods have gotten cheaper. Much cheaper, as manufacturing costs drop.

Thanks, Shenzhen, China!

In 1954, the cost of a high-end Westinghouse color TV, with a massive 15-inch screen, was $1,295. No, not adjusted for inflation. That was the actual price at the time -- half of the yearly income for some families. Everybody writes this off as if it's a constant of the universe ("of course new technology gets exponentially better and cheaper with time!") instead counting it among the benefits of the modern system. Why? This economic system has resulted in handheld devices that can access all of the porn ever created, at a price affordable to the working man, and all we can do is complain about the cost of unlimited data plans?

"Yeah, it's as powerful as a PS3, but it barely fits in my pocket! THESE ARE THE NEW DARK AGES."

And the golden age of the $500 car... how many of you come from families with two cars? Statistically it's most of you, and far more than what it would have been in 1960, when there were half as many cars on a per-capita basis in the U.S. (it averaged about one car per household -- so if you had two, someone else had none).

And taxes? Again, the numbers don't lie -- in the U.S. taxes are the lowest they've been since 1950, and now that the Bush-era tax cuts have been temporarily extended, they will continue to be until 2012 at the soonest. The government even threw you an extra two percent reduction in payroll tax as a cherry on top. The U.S. has the second-lowest taxes among developed countries.

We're also the second whiniest, though.

Yes, we're going through a worldwide downturn and yes, a bunch of you are unemployed. Those of you who are reading this at a homeless shelter, we're not saying it's all in your head. But on the whole we could use a little perspective.

The Complaint:

"Two words: 'Jersey Shore.' People are getting stupider by the minute, and the stupid people are breeding faster than the smart people. They watch mindless reality shows, and all anybody cares about is celebrity gossip and bullshit. Teenagers are obsessed with Twitter and video games and have probably never read a book. Hell, Sarah Palin will probably be our next president."

Inevitably, someone in this discussion will mention Idiocracy

The Reality:

IQ scores have risen 24 points since 1914. And on top of that, you have to account for the Flynn effect, discovered by James R. Flynn, which is a way of compensating for increased education (but more on that in a moment). The intelligence quotient is set up in such a way that an average score is 100. So, what do you do if people keep getting higher and higher scores, to the point where 100 is no longer the average? You rejigger the way scores are calculated so that it goes back down to 100.

So, while IQ scores may appear to be similar from one generation to the next, the scores have to be constantly adjusted back down to 100 because children are doing better and better on the test. If you scored 100 on a test back in the day, you might actually be considered slightly mentally challenged now.

Yup.

Meanwhile, the quality of education has been going up for the past 40 years, with children scoring higher in reading and mathematics. That's not just in the U.S. -- it's worldwide. Graduation rates, too, are on an upward trend. So by the sheer numbers, we are actively creating useful members of society at an increasing rate, and if we continue onward, we might someday see as much as 200 percent of the population with high school diplomas. (Ed.: Can somebody double-check the math on that one?)

The world collectively is getting smarter. If you treat the combined mass of human knowledge as a resource for the future (and you should), then we're drowning in riches like Scrooge McDuck.

Ed.: Actually, Scrooge McDuck is an exceptional swimmer.

It seems like part of the negative perception is from trying to judge the intelligence of a people by their pop culture. But remember that most people spend their whole day at work or school thinking and making decisions and doing complex troubleshooting -- they treat entertainment as the break from all that.

And if you think that it's a sad sign of the times that Jackass 3D made a ton of money at the box office, hop in your time machine and go back 80 years. You'll find audiences howling with laughter at these guys ...

... bonking one another on the heads with shovels.

The Reality:

Think those ingredients in your TV dinner are scary? Prior to 1966, there was no ingredient labeling of prepared foods. You bought a tin of meat-and-potato stew, and what was in it was left to the goodwill of the manufacturer, who may have had to fatten profits by feeding people elk hooves and sawdust. You simply didn't know what you were eating.

Warning: Stuffing May Contain Drain Cleaner, Excrement.

The ingredient and nutrition labeling acts changed all that. Sure, food manufacturers can still try to lie and put bug shit and viruses in your food, but if caught, they get to pull all of their product off the shelf and dump it, at their own expense. And all those scary chemicals on the ingredients list? Many of those are preservatives. Meant to preserve the food. So it isn't rotten when you eat it.

Also, let's not forget that the refrigerator and freezer are both recent inventions -- go back to the Great Depression or earlier and you find that refrigerators cost more than a car. So keeping food cold or preserved was a crapshoot, with listeria, botulism and the shits acting as the dessert to granny's wholesome down-home country meal.

Remember all those cold Thanksgiving nights at the farm, lining up outside to shit with the family?

Oh, and feel free to browse through some recipes from the 1950s -- savor the Baked Corn Chex 'N' Cheese Custard and Spam fritters.

Again, we're not saying there isn't some gross stuff in your food -- there totally is and we have examined it in some detail -- just as we weren't saying that there are no stupid people in the world in our first entry up there.

All we're saying is that we're not at the disastrous nadir of some long downward trend.

Turducken notwithstanding.

The Complaint:

"A member of Congress gets gunned down in yet another mass shooting. You can't turn on the news for five seconds without hearing of a child being abducted and mutilated, or a massive gang war along the Mexican border. Every city in America has one section that you wouldn't dare drive through at night. Now compare that to the 1950s, when nobody even locked their doors at night. What changed?"

More brigands?

The Reality:

There absolutely was a huge crime wave in the 1980s, thanks to the crack epidemic (this graph shows the spike in murders in L.A., for instance). But the numbers do not lie: Crime, property crime, theft and burglary have actually been dropping since about 1993. Dropping and dropping, below even where we were before drug violence skewed the stats upward.

If you look at the homicide rate per 100,000 people, which is one of the only crime stats reliably tracked through the 1900s and into today, you can see that not only is it the lowest since the 1950s, but that it's quite a lot lower than it was in the 1970s and even the 1930s. (And it's a scaling formula, meaning it isn't skewed by population.) Now why would the crime rate be so high in the 1930s?

Because Batman hadn't been invented yet, obviously.

When the economy is bad, people get desperate, and desperate people will do whatever they can to survive, right? And here we sit, 80 years later, with the worst economy since the Great Depression. How's the crime rate faring now? It's lower than it was before the recession. A few days ago, the FBI published its statistics for the first half of 2010, which show that crime has dropped further still.

What has not dropped is the number of TV shows and news features about crime, and newspapers' need to report on violence whenever it occurs. Therefore, the only thing about crime that seems to be going up is the perception of how bad it really is.

So, by the sheer numbers, you would be just as safe keeping your doors unlocked at night as your grandparents were back in "the good old days."

In other words, it's time to box up your mantraps.

The Complaint:

"Two words: 'Justin Bieber.' Turn on a classic rock station and you can listen for hours without hearing one bad song. Now turn on a Top 40 station and try not to gouge out your ears. Today's music is just a bland product mass-produced by corporations. Don't take my word for it -- ask any music critic. They'll tell you the stuff that sells today is generic garbage. Not the music back in the day, like Zeppelin, Elvis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd ... bands like that would never top the charts today."

The Reality:

There are two things that skew our cultural memory on things like music.

OK, three.

First of all, you have the fact that the crap from previous eras gets forgotten, leaving only the great stuff behind. Those songs on classic rock stations are obviously cherry-picked as the best and most indicative of an entire era; it's not a random sampling of all the music available at the time. Modern rock or pop stations, on the other hand, have to play whatever's come out in the past six months or so.

So there is a filter applied to the old stuff. Even most of the music in Mozart's day was bullshit. And because it was bullshit, nobody felt the need to keep copies. And what was preserved isn't played today. Because it's bullshit. So it's easy to look back at Mozart's era (or the 1960s, or whatever) and assume that because only the classics survive in our memory, everything made back then was a classic.

The other problem is we assume that what gets remembered over time is whatever was the most popular. Not true.

One day she will fade from history, and then man will finally know freedom.

For instance, what survives from the Vietnam era (thanks mostly to Vietnam movies) are songs like the badass protest song "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones. Both were released in 1969, after the war started going bad.

Now look at the Billboard year-end singles charts from 1946 to today. The top song in 1969? "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies. Let us quote the entire lyrics of that song:

Sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Honey, ah sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
I just can't believe the loveliness of loving you
(I just can't believe it's true)
I just can't believe the one to love this feeling to.
(I just can't believe it's true)
Ah sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Ah honey, ah sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
When I kissed you, girl, I knew how sweet a kiss could be
(I know how sweet a kiss can be)
Like the summer sunshine pour your sweetness over me
(Pour your sweetness over me)
Sugar, pour a little sugar on it honey,
Pour a little sugar on it baby
I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah
Pour a little sugar on it oh yeah
Pour a little sugar on it honey,
Pour a little sugar on it baby
I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah
Pour a little sugar on it honey,
Ah sugar, ah honey honey
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.
Oh honey, honey, sugar sugar ..
You are my candy girl .

At least Britney Spears is most of a real person.

"Fortunate Son" got no higher than No. 14 on the charts. "Gimme Shelter"? It was never released as a single at all.

Go ahead, look down the list. There is some great music on there, but it's mixed in with a lot of stuff you've probably never even heard of. And do you know what you don't see on there? Queen, Led Zeppelin and a lot of other great musicians. Groups that are well-remembered now, when classic rock radio stations wouldn't be caught dead playing some of the shit that outsold them. Even Elvis and The Beatles are only on there twice, tying for the most No. 1 year-end singles with none other than George Michael.

And that's not even considering that, thanks to the Internet, we have far more access to all kinds of niche music genres and independent artists that we'd have never heard in the past.

And as for the critics, you have to keep in mind that there will always, always be critics who hate whatever the latest trend is. Rock music as a whole was blasted pretty harshly when it first got popular. Melody Maker called it "one of the most terrifying things to have ever happened to popular music." The Daily Mail decided to up the ante by mixing in some good old-fashioned racism: "[Rock music] is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge."

Hell, even The Beatles weren't safe. The Daily Telegraph said that they were "something Hitler might find useful."

Holy shit, music critics of the 50s and 60s sound oddly like the Glenn Beck of today.

Why? Because it's easier to be negative. That part will never change.

When not writing comedy, Mark M dispenses bad philosophy and bad relationship advice. To read more of Ashe's work, check out weirdshitblog.com.

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