sdr –
I’d like to address a couple of points that you’ve made (fairly aggressively).
Yes – most households have more tv’s today than they did 40 years ago. They probably have FEWER radios. Technology did not stand still. Most households also have computers, which didn’t really become household available till the early 1980’s… you can’t claim it’s because of entitlement attitudes – it’s because technology developed, and over time became affordable. Your parents weren’t posting on message boards when you were growing up because the world wide web didn’t exist. Does that mean you have a sense of entitlement because you may (or may not) have more tv’s (that are less expensive in real dollars) and have computers and have the internet?
Even cable didn’t really exist in it’s current form till the 70’s. And addressable settops – which allow PPV etc, didn’t come along till the 90’s. Life did not stay frozen in the 60’s 70’s world you describe. Some of the things you’re singling out (flat screens, cable) have come about since you were a kid.
Like you, I grew up in an upper middle class, professional neighborhood. (University City when it was new). Lots of UCSD professors, engineers, lawyers, dentists, etc. Like you, I grew up with one tube color tv (because flat tvs didn’t even exist back then.) We also had the black and white tv that the color tv was an upgrade from. No cable because we had line of sight to the towers. The people down in the canyon near us had cable because they couldn’t pick up signal with rabbit ears or roof antennas.
That said we definitely had families in our neighborhood that lived beyond their means. This is not something that happened exclusively in recent times. Like you, I wore hand me downs as the youngest of 3 kids. But most of my friends, in my upper middle class professional neighborhood, got new clothes with designer labels. I was envious. I was also judged (negatively) by those with the new stuff. Wearing hand me downs was definitely a stigma.
You can’t look at tv’s and say people are living less frugrally than you deem they should. And I’m not going to make judgements about whether you’re frugal enough, by some arbitrary standard of morality, because you drink pricey wine and drive a BMW.
