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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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He seems to have picked a bad year for his "but you couldn't doordash a poke bowl" example, as some cursory Googling gives me the inbuilt AI answer:

In 1959, American restaurants were dominated by diners and drive-ins, which were popular for their casual, affordable atmosphere and classic American food. These establishments often featured chrome and vinyl decor, with a menu that included burgers, fries, milkshakes, and other comfort food staples.

So if we're talking the rise of fast food/takeaways, 1959 was the year, baby!

Fast-food restaurants became a big part of the 1950s culture due to many other new innovations. Fast food restaurants became very popular during the 1950s because families were busy and they needed a place where they could quickly pick up food; people also wanted to be able to get quick food that they could eat in front of their new TVs.

What was buzzing, cousin, during the bleak and barren year 1959? Well, a lot, it seems. That pot-shot about tiny black and white screens? It was the Internet of its day, Scott m'man, just as in 2091 the Scott Sumner of that day will be laughing it up about the people back in 2025 who never even got snail tentacles quantum replicated for their micro-nutritional tasting menus and they didn't even have neural-net brain implant entertainment centres!

During the 1950s, the television became a huge part of the lifestyle. By 1954, over two-thirds of Americans owned a television and this helped form a national culture. Television changed politics by allowing speeches and political advertisements to be televised; things such as civil rights movements, documentaries about Communism, and other big news were aired on television. Many "Wild West" shows also became popular including: Davy Crockett(mid 1950s), Rin Tin Tin(1954-1959), and Gunsmoke(1955-1975). Variety Shows became very common because most programs were televised live; variety shows included musical performances, comedy skits, and animal tricks that were all hosted by engaging host. Television during the 1950s changed the society by allowing families to gather around to watch a performance, for speeches to be heard around the country, for the first commercials to be televised, and forming a national culture.

Plastic seats in your car? Plastics were the wonder material of the future!

During the 1950s decade, cars and other vehicles became more popular due to the affordability and needs for them. After the war, people in the United States believed that roads needed to be better, so the government's money started to be spent rebuilding roads; after roads were made better, everyone wanted a car, and to go on road trips or even camping. In 1950-1951, hardtop convertibles became popular from manufacturers like Chevy and the Buick Motor Division. In 1953, cars were being made with plastic fiberglass or a magnesium body; wrap around windows and wire racing wheels were often seen on cars; in 1953, three cars had air-conditioning and 50% of cars had an automatic shift, and by the end of the 1950s, Americans loved sports cars. Towards the end of the 1950s, station wagons also became very popular for growing families. Automatic transmissions, power brakes, power steering, power adjusted front seats, power window lifts and air conditioning were starting to be used in cars, and by 1958, 80% of cars had automatic transmissions. Cars became longer, lower, wider, and faster; chrome became heavily popular on cars; many cars were designed to look like something from the future to satisfy the people's ideas of fantasy. More cars were being produced and purchased during the 1950s because the economy was booming and families were growing , and the popularity of these vehicles lead to a new way of life.

Women's clothing styles during the 1950s dramatically changed because of the new styles and trends (like rock n' roll), as well as the ability to purchase new fabrics (a lot of new clothing designs and colors were inspired by Asian clothing) because of the great economy.

Booming economy, growing families, mass communication, mass transport, new kinds of eating experiences, a gap between childhood and adult life where you have more leisure time, more money, and more options with popular culture becoming attuned to you rather than your parents (the rise of the teenager), the New Look in fashion for women, affordable modern luxury for the average person: so tell me, the equivalent of $100,000 in 1959 or the equivalent of $12,500 in 2025, which sounds better to you?

That pot-shot about tiny black and white screens?

These days we have big screens, but most people spend the majority of yheir time staring at tiny 5 inch ones. So maybe size doesn't really matter.

It's about the FOV ratio if we're being pedantic. Some napkin math suggests that a typical smartphone matches a 55"-ish TV in its angular size, so a small TV is going to be objectively worse unless you're seated very close.

And even with all the problems of modern streaming TV services, the 5 inch smartphone screen is color, plays at high resolution, lets you watch programs when you want (mostly), and has a huge variety compared to a 1950s TV. And you can afford to have one for several family members.

The original comment is "compare what we have now to what they didn't have back then", which is fair along one axis. But not along another, which is "now you too, Mr and Mrs Average Citizen, can have a TV set of your very own!" In 1959 people only had tiny screens for black and white TV? No, in 1959 ordinary people now had access to the cutting-edge modern technology of TV!

Imagine what VR fantasy tech will be invented in sixty years time. Is it fair to laugh at people in 2025 for not having the latest evolution of that tech, compared to whatever VR tech is around now?

If you are dumped back in 1959 from 2025, yes you are going to miss all the advantages we have now. But "oh goodness me, I can't doordash a poke bowl" is a stupid example to pick, since right now in 2025 I can't doordash a poke bowl since I don't live in the Big City where you can get this (and even if I could, I probably wouldn't).

If you have to live in 1959, having the 1959 equivalent of $100 grand is the way to do it.

By that logic, being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age; in other words, any era has technological improvements that seem impressive at the time. If people in 2125 have it better than we do now, then it's preferable to live in the future. But we don't know what things will be like then. We do know what things were like in the 1950s, and just because they seemed amazing at the time, they were objectively worse on almost every metric. In 1900 it would have been a big deal to have electricity, the telephone, and the phonograph record. In 1850 it would have been a big deal to have access to cheap textiles and mass-produced farming implements. But go back to then and you get a worse standard of living than people in the poorest parts of the world have today. If you think that the standard of living for a rich man is preferably, that can be achieved for a relatively modest sum of money in today's terms.

being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age

Being a hunter-gatherer of any rank would probably kind of suck, because being a hunter-gatherer sucks -- but being an Assyrian king sounds kind of fucking awesome? I guess you'd want to be a successful king so you and your family don't get wiped out in a war, but the day-to-day would have to be pretty great, no?

I suspect the luxuries of being a king would just barely pave over the jank of living in ancient Assyria, for someone who is used to the modern era. It's probably like that effect bidet users claim where you're going to hate pooping anywhere without access to a bidet afterwards. Sure, having a harem of the best concubines antiquity can offer would be great, but without penicillin, salt and adjustable faucets?

That's the point. The two strains of argument against Scot Sumner's argument are:

  1. The fundamentals might have been better in earlier times - social life, community, family formation.
  2. Humans care about relative wealth and comfort, not absolute. Plus lots of other stuff like prestige, respect, etc. that you can't get from being a poor man even in the modern age.

That's basically the same argument that a certain type of degrowth leftist makes. If relative wealth is all that matters, then economic development in and of itself doesn't make sense because it just increases the treadmill. The only way to improve society as a whole is through fundamentals, which would include redistributing wealth to blunt the pain of being at the low end of the economic totem pole.

Yes, it is, and indeed I have a certain amount of time for the degrowth people on that basis. They're usually a lot more honest and consistent than the 'white heat of industry' technocratic ones or the 'don't worry about it, comrade, everything will work out once the revolution comes' strain. I think that their ideas are much better-founded than alternative ideologies but usually ignore the fact that:

  1. People have genuinely different capabilities...
  2. ...therefore keeping society relatively equal requires shackling the most capable in society, which is quite difficult, strongly negative for them, and...
  3. ...not a good idea in a competitive global system.

Plus, if you have to halt growth, now may not turn out to be the best place. It might be that there's a better equilibrium at a higher tech level where all the fundamentals can be protected but everyone is more comfortable overall. On the other hand, it might not turn out that way, in which case you have to remember that mod cons are not ultimately what makes life worth living for people.

Yep. A significant part of the damage to health and happiness comes from being at the lowest social rung - not just from having to eat ramen instead of steak. If everyone else was in the same boat, the psychosocial experience would be much less painful.

Edit: a word.

Television already went into diminishing returns at 1080p and the rise of streaming, never mind 4K, and can't improve much more. Video games also have gone into diminishing returns, which is why there's nothing original on the PS5. I don't believe for a moment that we're getting significant VR.

Someone could have told Gutenberg the same thing about books that you're telling me about TV improvements. To which the answer is that it would take hundreds of years to get mass market paperbacks, a hundred more to get ereaders, and those aren't improvements in books so much as they are general improvements that happened to be useful for books.

While the restaurant problerm is exaggerated, I'm not so sure about the fast foods. There were fast food restaurants in 1959, but a lot of the fast food types we have today didn't exist--the variety was less (I suppose the same also goes for the restaurants). Also, pokebowls are fast casual and that category of restaurant didn't exist in 1959 (never mind pokebowls specifically).

If she really wanted a poke bowl in 1959, Sumner's daughter could have gone on vacation to Hawaii, but she probably wouldn't have enjoyed the native version on offer since the traditional dish underwent a lot of development and changes between "what the native Hawaiians ate", "what they ate after European contact expanded available ingredients", "what poke was like when it started getting popularised as a commercially available dish" and "what poke is like now, in the mainland versions and 99 other fancy varieties everyone has had a hand in mixing up".

As far as I can recall, McDonalds was takeout only in 1959, they didn't have tables inside the restaurant. And they didn't have pickles or onions for your burger.

McDonald's menus through the years video here.

Interesting to learn that for the Catholics, someone introduced the Filet O'Fish in competition with the Hula Burger (a slice of pineapple to replace beef for people not eating meat on Fridays).

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