In the 70s I rented an apartment for $425 per month when you could earn around $7.00 to $8.00 per hour painting. Today the painters job may fetch $15 to $20 per hour, but the same apartment rents for $3500 per month. Hard to make that rent without a way more lucrative job.
I have long believed and found that many of my age agreed that the peak in real earning capacity for most workers came in the early seventies despite government claims to the contrary. Lately I have seen some studies that seem to confirm this as well as one saying that the hourly paid worker had the easiest time paying rent back around 1953. A lot of people like to point to all the things that even “poor” people have now that were not available to anyone sixty years ago such as cell phones, computers etc. but those of us who remember the fifties and sixties know that an awfully long list of things have been lost since then. In those days a young person could finish high school, go to work and earn a living, having a home and family at an age when today’s young people are still looking around and wondering what the heck is going on. You did not see a lot of thirty plus age people still sponging off parents and grandparents as you do now. You certainly did not see so many young people with huge student loan debt and no job worth calling a job if they have a job at all. Today’s recent college graduates are settling for the kind of job that would have gone to a high school dropout in those days.
It was also a time when a person could call this a free country without sounding like an absolute idiot.
My father was a carpenter, back in the fifties he worked on some very nice new home construction, custom built houses for which he built custom cabinets in the kitchen. In those days a REAL carpenter was one who could frame the house, put on the roof, panel the walls, install the windows and doors and then build cabinets. The contractor who employed him built a new house for the local school superintendent, his wife was a teacher and they were building their dream house for which they had saved and planned for many years. They spent fifteen thousand dollars. That will get you a small storage building now or apparently four months rent on an apartment in your area.