I just got back from the shop with my dad, he was born in 1935 .. neither of us struggled to survive the 1950s.
It's dropped from a standard 40 hour work week to a 38 hour week for indexing a living wage, but things are more or less still as they were in 1907 (inflation adjusted) albeit with greater choice of consumerables.
It doesn't need to be all or nothing. It's possible to acknowledge that the 50s had a better economic outlook for the middle class in developed countries than it does now, despite the incredible advances in computing. And you might still prefer to live now, for social reasons or because you prefer the computing advances, despite it not delivering economically as much.
Either way, it does highlight a serious economic concern as computing continues to advance. The majority of the wealth is increasingly being concentrated by our tech overlords.
I’d arguing you cannot meaningfully separate them, they are on a continuum. As a thought experiment, you don’t know where you are going to land socioeconomically, which would you choose? Now or then?
