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Notes -
The dirty little secret was this basically failed in the US - rates of severe endemic poverty among old people were massive even pre-Depression, which is what led to support for Social Security in the first place. It turns out a lot of people either just don't care about their parents or are barely surviving on their own, that another mouth to feed may tip the scales.
So, yes, we have a less connected society, but severe endemic poverty among retirees basically doesn't exist and now there's a massive class of consumers who didn't exist. Win-win for the social democrats and the capitalists.
I wonder how much of this is genuine econometrics/history, how much was and is pure political posturing (either to drum up support for programs like SS or to maintain that general zeitgeist), and how much is just "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then". Looking at figures like this, I lean toward "everyone was just poor back then". James T Patterson wrote:
with some numbers that are in various year real dollars, comparing how different 'standards' for poverty have changed significantly over time. Were old people poor back then? Almost certainly; everyone was poor back then. It's the absolutely phenomenal success of American capitalism that has made us just absurdly wealthy in comparison that has been the major change. It's extremely difficult to 1) actually break out detailed age-based numbers in that era and tell a significant story about what did/didn't "work" in the context of universal poverty, and 2) have any sense for whether something "working/not working" in the context of universal poverty says much about a world where we have literally 10x more wealth.
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