David Foster Wallace on Life and Work. Life Learning Today. Overwhelming Evidence: Good Old Days Are Now (mjperry.blogspot.com) Overwhelming Evidence: Good Old Days Are Now The chart above is from a 1995 Reason Magazine article "The Good Old Days Are Now," by W. Michael Cox, senior vice president and chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Forget what you've heard in the media about "working harder and getting further behind. " Most Americans today have both more leisure and better goods than they did even 10 or 20 years ago, and most of us certainly live at a much higher standard of living than our grandparents or great-grandparents, despite the fact that many people today mistakenly think their standard of living is declining.
Exhibit A: Look at the evidence in the chart above, and consider that further improvements have been made since 1990. ShareThis Copy and Paste.