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points by bluGill 3 days ago | 0 comments

What is missed is free time is just one good you can get. People like different "things". Sometimes that "thing" is free time. Sometimes that thing is more expensive food. Sometimes that thing is a bigger house. Sometimes that thing is... There are a lot of options. If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.

[–] xg15 2 days ago

I think in this case, it was rather cynical. The "free time" the workers got was because they were unemployed. The workers who were still employed of course had no additional leisure time, the added productivity went to the employer.

[–] autoexec 2 days ago

> If you were willing to live like 1950 you could have the male working 20 hours a week and the female never leaving the home. What people forget is in 1950 having a black and white TV was unusual (though not uncommon) and color TV was still several years away. Your phone was a shared party line. You had one car which wasn't reliable by modern standards.

Another way of looking at that is you could own a home and a modern car, and support your entire family and have the latest technology all on a single income.

TV wasn't worth having in 1950 for most people, if they even got reception at all, but by 1955 75% of homes had state of the art TVs. Phones improved over the decade as well, and pretty much everyone had at least one in their home (technically owned by AT&T). What people had seems primitive to us, but it was all new and constantly improving to the people at the time.

Today our experience causes us to expect that greed and enshittification will make everything both worse and more expensive, but back then people were excited about the future and about how technology would make their lives better while getting cheaper because that was their experience.