And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.

In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.

(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)

There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.

Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.

It's one of the problems with saying healthcare prices have "gone up". An x-ray in 1976 cost like $100 in 1976 dollars and one today costs like $100 in 2026 dollars, so it's significantly cheaper. But you couldn't get an MRI for any price in 1976 and you can get one in 2026 for $800, so the cost of "imaging" has gone up notionally.

Not entirely, the problems are also that wages haven't kept up with inflation; $9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today, and the automakers realized they make more profit in financing than on the vehicle itself, optimizing the maximum they can squeeze someone who needs a vehicle, hence 96 months for an auto loan.

The wage gap between black and white Americans is nearly the same today as in 1970.

If you're going to reply to people can you actually reply to then instead of editing your comment? You probably shouldn't reply to people who tell you to kill yourself anyway but the fact that comment is (presumably) deleted illustrates the kind of confusion this causes.

The 80s-and-on story of America is not a story of women and minorities getting on more solid economic footing at the cost of some additional costs for white male Americans. Almost everybody is worse off - higher debt, less property ownership among the youth, etc.

I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)

[0] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627793834/theenigmaofclar...

So your thesis is that the segregationists were right and there’s a causal link between the decline in conditions for white American workers and the success of the civil rights movement?

Why must anyone be content to be poor and equal to only the poor?

> Yet we do not pay poll taxes today. We are not getting lynched in the streets. We are not being directly racially discriminated from employment.

No thanks to the present government, who post about deporting slightly less than 1/3 the US population.

Not to justify this, but is this possibly the reason why those opportunities existed?