[quote=Ash Housewares][quote=weberlin]
I was merely making an observation, not whining about entitlements. My question remains unanswered. How did people in the 1950s live an extravagant lifestyle (compared to 1900) on one income, and why didn’t the same argument work for the next 50 years (2000 vs 1950)? I contend the answer is globalization. I’d love to hear other theories. Please enlighten me.[/quote]

Maybe 50s was an aberration! Infrastructure/industries in most of western Europe & Japan was destroyed in WWII. USSR and eastern Europe was destroying themselves with communism. China was just getting out of messy civil war embarking onto another couple of failed social disasters. India just become independent with zero infrastructure about to enter into a few wars and famines.

It took good two decades (or longer) for rest of the world to rebuild their societies, educate their people and so on…

It is not like there was no globalization in the 50s-60s. But rather in the 50s – 60s, products produced in US by US producers/businesses/exporters had very little competition. The world needed US whatever the price. China couldn’t produce anything anyway, so it was not a threat. There was not many educated Indians, so there was question of doing any back office work there…

I am not saying that USA can not compete (although there seem to be many people who believe that on this board.). Afterall we were the world’s workshop before China. It is just that when you need to compete, it doesn’t feel so good! Easy money is always more popular that hard earned money