You're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.
Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII. Complaining about AI buildouts causing electronics prices to regress by a decade or so begins to seem rather trite in comparison.
Lost Generation describes those who experienced WW1. Given that he turned 18 in 1918 it's certainly possible he enlisted or was drafted. The article implies he didn't join WW1. It's that experience rather than his exact birthday that would categorize him into Lost vs Greatest IMO.
Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
"Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination." - I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example. People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs. And so on. I don't see a lot of happy faces on the streets of America.
Meh, seems he's using arbitrary metrics to make arbitrary claims (which is fine). But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. It's like saying "Beaches in 2026 are so much better than beaches in 1926". Sure you could cherry-pick some metrics to make the case, and someone else could cherry-pick metrics to make the opposite case. Sort've a "talking just to hear yourself talk" kind've thing.
Even if food quality remained exactly the same… By definition Americans would still be on average slightly dumber, less healthy, and so on… since the population grew so much? (and grew older)
There’s no magical low effort way to avoid regression to the global mean, as the population more than doubles in size.
That takes serious, coordinated, and sustained work across decades to avoid.
I read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little has changed since 1922. The political climate (at least as portrayed in the novel) seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
In the same vein, his It Can't Happen Here is also well worth reading, as is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I'm shocked how much the average American knows about how things work. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I'm not surprised how quickly Americans are giving up their liberty.
How much and how little are logically equivalent, although in vernacular usage it is of course common to use how little when implying the amount is less than one might expect, and how much to imply the amount is more than one might expect.
Nit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
Great article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
> Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
Or keep pushing it to further and further extremes with each swing until it inevitably breaks under the strain. :(
I’m really not sure, if you look at things before the 20th century it’s difficult to see a pendulum swing pattern. That works relatively well between the 20th and 21st centuries, but I don’t think we can see it as a general rule. It’s also pretty dependent on the region you look at, and movements you decide to take in consideration or filter out. There is just so much room for biases, it’s easy finding a pattern because that’s what our brains are good at doing, but it doesn’t mean it is predictive of anything
That being said, this video from Three Arrows (aka Dan Arrows) “America coming Weimar moment” has interesting things to say on that specific comparison: https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g
I discovered the pendulum of social movements after reading Bertrand Russell's "The Ancestry of Fascism" at a relative young age (~16 years old), it only really made sense after my 30s though.
It required me watching, experiencing how things I had considered settled and humanity was over them started to turn back: the rise of fascistic tendencies in different societies, anti-intellectualism, etc. things that as a teenager/young adult I never considered could become societal issues again.
Basically we've been in a "4th Turning" for about two decades, and the 4th turning typically ends in some sort of crisis (hence the name for it, "Crisis"): Great Depression/WWII in the previous one, the US Civil War before that, the "Age of Revolution" before that, etc.
The idea behind it is lessons learned last until the people who lived through the previous one die. So the 4 "turnings" repeat every 80-100 years, and some sort of major crisis is expected around now - hence talk of another Great Depression or WWIII.
I don't see what GP means by "hijacked", GGP is pretty much a direct reference to exactly what it talks about.
Yeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
It has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever.
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
If so, we haven't hit the equivalent of Sept 1 1939 yet. That's when WW2 is generally considered to have started, but residents of Manchuria, Austria and the Sudetenland probably consider it to have started earlier.
Sep 1 1939 is when it escalated from a small number of 2-party wars to a massive multi-party war. It's not the day the war started, it's the day it became a "World War".
China supplying weapons to Iran and Russia. North Korea sending troops to Russia to fight in Ukraine, and along with Russia, conducting hybrid warfare across Europe and the United States. The US sending weapons to Ukraine and other EU allies. SOF from MANY countries operating in conflict zones and deep inside China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.
The only thing that hasn't really happened is a full economic mobilization. And Russia... may be close to that.
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
To both of your points: the beer hall demagogue wouldn't have gotten to Chancellor if the German elites hadn't decided that he really couldn't do that much damage and we may as well let him be chancellor to quiet down his followers. Even after the putsch, he got a very light sentence because the judge was sympathetic with his right-wing cause. You're both right to some extent. A huge amount of damage was done by one man, but he got to where he did because the German elites thought that he might be useful to their cause.
Indeed, and that is perhaps the most important lesson of Hitlers rise - dangerous people will always exist, and so it is critical to have systems that are resilient to them, and not allow them to be hollowed out just because the current crop of leaders looks like they can be trusted with more power and less oversight, because who knows what kind of madman will get power next.
> It's not that single person who threatens the world
The question is: is he enabling them, or are they enabling him? I suppose it could be working in both directions. That said: while the "elite" were problematic before his second rise to power, they were also more constrained.
I also have some question as to who the elite are? Certain individuals are more prominent these days, while others have faded in the background. While it may feel good to apply a singular label to the wealthy (or any other group we disagree with), they are not a single ideological entity. It's probably more beneficial to align ourselves with those who agree with us, rather than alienating them based upon a metric that is only tangentially related to their values.
It depends on how closely you tie the metrics and the values. Do you consider someone becoming a billionaire/trillionaire a reflection of their values or just a metric they happen to have?
>It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
I agree that Americans themselves are the root cause. Americans as a society are deeply, pathologically unwell and Trump is entirely their fault. I have no sympathy for any of them.
But only one person is the commander in chief of the US military, and the checks and balances that are supposed to keep him in control are not functioning.
yeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days)
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
You might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board.
The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.
I did a quick check, and the HUD point-in-time counts show the rate of homelessness was dropping slowly from 21.5 per 10000 in 2007 (the first year of a national standard), to around 17.5 per 10000 in 2020, then rose in 2023-2024 up to 22.9, and in 2025 was back down to 21.9. During the Great Depression this rose up to 100-200 per 10,000.
Keep in mind that "more homeless than ever" (and I would prefer "more people experiencing homelessness than ever") may be technically true, but per capita we've seen a post-covid bump that's likely already back to 2007 levels. Without understanding the trends I wouldn't predict what happens next.
I've done some research to try to help you understand more - can I ask you to think about your frame and beliefs and consider changing them?
I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Personally, I think GenX are the lost. (I'm a late GenX) Our colleages took the brunt of the global war on terror, and because we entered the workforce at the peak boomer pivot away from the pre-Internet era of business those of us that were in the corporate/government workforce were basically stuck waiting for people to die to move up. We're the people who got computers and internet in a way that neither our elders or children understand.
The millennials are the recipients of the great dumbing down. They get the inherit the wealth of their parents and grandparents, just in time for it to be inflated away to nothing.
Water tastes pretty gross in coastal Spain. In countries like Albania I wouldn’t even drink it at all. On Greek islands it is safe but everyone buys water from the stores.
Due to the age of many places in Europe there is also still a lot of copper pipe used for tap water. Not deadly but also not very healthy. In Amsterdam over 20 percent of homes have copper pipes.
Lots of good farmland, and it has lots of mineral resources that we often ignore rather than cut margins to mine safely.
The US's problems are entirely political. Geologically and climate wise it is a really great place. And it already has an educated populous and a significant amount of industrial hardware.
Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.
> Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Most European nations strongly protect free speech, allowing open public critique and satire of politicians, the wealthy, and the powerful.
> Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Several European countries actually lead global easy business rankings, some offering fully digital, single-day company registration, very little bureaucracy (not mine, sadly)
> Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
Europe isn’t a single country. We have multiple countries where you can create a company in no time, with little capital. And have freedom of movement within the whole EU
You're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII. Complaining about AI buildouts causing electronics prices to regress by a decade or so begins to seem rather trite in comparison.
Lost Generation describes those who experienced WW1. Given that he turned 18 in 1918 it's certainly possible he enlisted or was drafted. The article implies he didn't join WW1. It's that experience rather than his exact birthday that would categorize him into Lost vs Greatest IMO.
In the US, something like 98% of eligible men enlisted in WWI. There was no draft.
So yes, VERY high probability of service.
Well, then and the millennials
Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
"Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination." - I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example. People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs. And so on. I don't see a lot of happy faces on the streets of America.
Since he is explicitly comparing 2026 to 1926 I think his statement holds up.
That's how good propaganda reads. You have to be both subtle and partially true.
Meh, seems he's using arbitrary metrics to make arbitrary claims (which is fine). But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. It's like saying "Beaches in 2026 are so much better than beaches in 1926". Sure you could cherry-pick some metrics to make the case, and someone else could cherry-pick metrics to make the opposite case. Sort've a "talking just to hear yourself talk" kind've thing.
Even if food quality remained exactly the same… By definition Americans would still be on average slightly dumber, less healthy, and so on… since the population grew so much? (and grew older)
There’s no magical low effort way to avoid regression to the global mean, as the population more than doubles in size.
That takes serious, coordinated, and sustained work across decades to avoid.
I read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little has changed since 1922. The political climate (at least as portrayed in the novel) seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
In the same vein, his It Can't Happen Here is also well worth reading, as is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I'm shocked how much the average American knows about how things work. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I'm not surprised how quickly Americans are giving up their liberty.
Did you mean to say “how little”?
How much and how little are logically equivalent, although in vernacular usage it is of course common to use how little when implying the amount is less than one might expect, and how much to imply the amount is more than one might expect.
Nit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
Great article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
> Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
Or keep pushing it to further and further extremes with each swing until it inevitably breaks under the strain. :(
I’m really not sure, if you look at things before the 20th century it’s difficult to see a pendulum swing pattern. That works relatively well between the 20th and 21st centuries, but I don’t think we can see it as a general rule. It’s also pretty dependent on the region you look at, and movements you decide to take in consideration or filter out. There is just so much room for biases, it’s easy finding a pattern because that’s what our brains are good at doing, but it doesn’t mean it is predictive of anything
That being said, this video from Three Arrows (aka Dan Arrows) “America coming Weimar moment” has interesting things to say on that specific comparison: https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g
I discovered the pendulum of social movements after reading Bertrand Russell's "The Ancestry of Fascism" at a relative young age (~16 years old), it only really made sense after my 30s though.
It required me watching, experiencing how things I had considered settled and humanity was over them started to turn back: the rise of fascistic tendencies in different societies, anti-intellectualism, etc. things that as a teenager/young adult I never considered could become societal issues again.
So, we're about to have Great Depression 2 and WW3? Fun.
Sometimes I wish Strauss–Howe theory hadn't been hijacked. It seems noteworthy how similar (cyclical?) things are even if it's a coincidence..
A key feature of the human condition is thinking "this time will be different"
What do you mean hijacked? I'm not familiar with that theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
The relevant sections for these comments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Basically we've been in a "4th Turning" for about two decades, and the 4th turning typically ends in some sort of crisis (hence the name for it, "Crisis"): Great Depression/WWII in the previous one, the US Civil War before that, the "Age of Revolution" before that, etc.
The idea behind it is lessons learned last until the people who lived through the previous one die. So the 4 "turnings" repeat every 80-100 years, and some sort of major crisis is expected around now - hence talk of another Great Depression or WWIII.
I don't see what GP means by "hijacked", GGP is pretty much a direct reference to exactly what it talks about.
Aside, this meme is based on this theory: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men - "hard times" represents the 4th Turning, though it's oversimplified, which makes it not really a great match.
Crazy/extemist people use it as a way to justify their nonsense.
Yeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
We're kind of already having the WW3 part.
Not even close, unfortunately. WW3 would be massively worse than what we have now.
Unfortunately?!?!?!
I mean, if WW3 is coming, then that difference is very unfortunate.
More like Cold War 2
It has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever.
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
I think there's a compelling case to be made that WW3 started in 2014 when Putin invaded Crimea.
If so, we haven't hit the equivalent of Sept 1 1939 yet. That's when WW2 is generally considered to have started, but residents of Manchuria, Austria and the Sudetenland probably consider it to have started earlier.
It's only considered to have started then because that's when France and Britain declared war on Germany, and that's who wrote the history books.
Sep 1 1939 is when it escalated from a small number of 2-party wars to a massive multi-party war. It's not the day the war started, it's the day it became a "World War".
China supplying weapons to Iran and Russia. North Korea sending troops to Russia to fight in Ukraine, and along with Russia, conducting hybrid warfare across Europe and the United States. The US sending weapons to Ukraine and other EU allies. SOF from MANY countries operating in conflict zones and deep inside China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.
The only thing that hasn't really happened is a full economic mobilization. And Russia... may be close to that.
Putin started before that in 2008 when he invaded Georgia and no one said anything.
And a rapid increase in construction for new Chinese nuclear launch silos and actual underground nuclear testing.
Things are getting spicy.
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
It sometimes is a single person. Consider the failed beer hall demagogue who wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world.
To both of your points: the beer hall demagogue wouldn't have gotten to Chancellor if the German elites hadn't decided that he really couldn't do that much damage and we may as well let him be chancellor to quiet down his followers. Even after the putsch, he got a very light sentence because the judge was sympathetic with his right-wing cause. You're both right to some extent. A huge amount of damage was done by one man, but he got to where he did because the German elites thought that he might be useful to their cause.
All events have multiple causes. But history turned on what he did, and would have been very different otherwise.
Indeed, and that is perhaps the most important lesson of Hitlers rise - dangerous people will always exist, and so it is critical to have systems that are resilient to them, and not allow them to be hollowed out just because the current crop of leaders looks like they can be trusted with more power and less oversight, because who knows what kind of madman will get power next.
> It's not that single person who threatens the world
The question is: is he enabling them, or are they enabling him? I suppose it could be working in both directions. That said: while the "elite" were problematic before his second rise to power, they were also more constrained.
I also have some question as to who the elite are? Certain individuals are more prominent these days, while others have faded in the background. While it may feel good to apply a singular label to the wealthy (or any other group we disagree with), they are not a single ideological entity. It's probably more beneficial to align ourselves with those who agree with us, rather than alienating them based upon a metric that is only tangentially related to their values.
It depends on how closely you tie the metrics and the values. Do you consider someone becoming a billionaire/trillionaire a reflection of their values or just a metric they happen to have?
>It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
I agree that Americans themselves are the root cause. Americans as a society are deeply, pathologically unwell and Trump is entirely their fault. I have no sympathy for any of them.
But only one person is the commander in chief of the US military, and the checks and balances that are supposed to keep him in control are not functioning.
Still reading the article but it reminds me that I need to watch Metropolis now, I think it came out in 1928 or so.
no one is talking about the alcohol part?
yeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days)
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
You might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board.
https://americanbusinesshistory.org/superwealth-a-historical...
yes almost all americans now have running water and indoor toilets
except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that
with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose
The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...
The people that are homeless now would have been institutionalized or dead back then.
That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.
I did a quick check, and the HUD point-in-time counts show the rate of homelessness was dropping slowly from 21.5 per 10000 in 2007 (the first year of a national standard), to around 17.5 per 10000 in 2020, then rose in 2023-2024 up to 22.9, and in 2025 was back down to 21.9. During the Great Depression this rose up to 100-200 per 10,000.
Keep in mind that "more homeless than ever" (and I would prefer "more people experiencing homelessness than ever") may be technically true, but per capita we've seen a post-covid bump that's likely already back to 2007 levels. Without understanding the trends I wouldn't predict what happens next.
I've done some research to try to help you understand more - can I ask you to think about your frame and beliefs and consider changing them?
Feels like a bit of a dramatization.
I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian...
[2]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
> This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about.
Democrats are half of the uniparty of capital interests. They only exist to prop up the illusion of a functioning democracy.
"Look guys, the election was so close! Democracy is still alive! We just need to vote harder [for the lesser of two evils] next time!"
> It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Instead they're taking the opportunity to be insane. But the faithful are not allowed to admit that.
Personally, I think GenX are the lost. (I'm a late GenX) Our colleages took the brunt of the global war on terror, and because we entered the workforce at the peak boomer pivot away from the pre-Internet era of business those of us that were in the corporate/government workforce were basically stuck waiting for people to die to move up. We're the people who got computers and internet in a way that neither our elders or children understand.
The millennials are the recipients of the great dumbing down. They get the inherit the wealth of their parents and grandparents, just in time for it to be inflated away to nothing.
No offense but outside of money does the US have anything going for it?
Natural parks.
Tasty drinkable water from the tap in nearly the entire country. Being able to flush toilet paper. Free toilets almost everywhere.
Being a country for 250 years is also quite an achievement.
I’m European and have witnessed many wars on my continent in my lifetime. A childhood friend was shot down with a Russian surface to air missile.
The water is drinkable but in many places not what I would call tasty.
Water tastes pretty gross in coastal Spain. In countries like Albania I wouldn’t even drink it at all. On Greek islands it is safe but everyone buys water from the stores.
Due to the age of many places in Europe there is also still a lot of copper pipe used for tap water. Not deadly but also not very healthy. In Amsterdam over 20 percent of homes have copper pipes.
The best geography of any country by a large margin and a non-ethnic culture that believes anything is possible and celebrates the ambition to try.
The money is largely a side effect of these two things.
Europe probably has the “best geography” and the climate, though?
Coastal California is probably one of the nicest places on earth but generally US is quite harsh.
You can’t have the best geography if you share a land border with an expansionist power, as Europe does with Russia.
The US has pretty much all the possible biomes within its borders. Even active volcanoes
Lots of good farmland, and it has lots of mineral resources that we often ignore rather than cut margins to mine safely.
The US's problems are entirely political. Geologically and climate wise it is a really great place. And it already has an educated populous and a significant amount of industrial hardware.
The Mississippi river. Few understand what an advantage that river is.
And that’s in spite of the fact that we’ve in some ways crippled it with the Jones Act
Some of the most interesting cities in the world, NYC is so interesting and full of subcultures and energy.
Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.
> Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Most European nations strongly protect free speech, allowing open public critique and satire of politicians, the wealthy, and the powerful.
> Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Several European countries actually lead global easy business rankings, some offering fully digital, single-day company registration, very little bureaucracy (not mine, sadly)
> Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
Europe isn’t a single country. We have multiple countries where you can create a company in no time, with little capital. And have freedom of movement within the whole EU
Ask those returning home from world cup visits. They'll be in the best position to compare to their home country.