> From: joanna <123hop at comcast.net>
>
> Compared to the present, my father's life in the U.S. 1963-2002, reads
> like a socialist fantasy
Life expectancy is up from 69.9 in 1963 to 77.3 in 2002.http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_06.pdf
OECD statistics are that annual hours worked per American employee have fallen from 2,033 hrs in 1960 to 1,817 hrs in 2003. http://www.ggdc.net/dseries/Data/hours/OECDH05I.xls
In 1947 Americans spent 23.8 per cent of their income on food, a figure that has fallen steadily to just ten per cent in 2001. http://www.facster.com/Food_Consumption_Per_Capita_and_Food_Expenditures_(1929_to_2001)_z17786.aspx
: starts life over at fifty as an immigrant with
> just the clothes on his back and family of four; gets white-collar union
> job; retires with SS, Pension, medical benefits (that my mom still
> benefits from); sells house for 10+ times what he paid for it; kids put
> themselves through college, MA, Ph.D. with hardly any debt.
Forgive me Joanna, but you seem to be describing two generations, one that worked as clerks, the other armed with MAs doctorates. Tell me again, which has the better life?
Isn't this an expression of the same nostalgia that these Washington Post writers found:
"4 in 10 of those surveyed said, it would be better to return to the gender roles of the 1950s, a dimly remembered world of television's Ozzie and Harriet and their blithe suburban existence." Richard Morin and Megan Rosenfeld March 22, 1998
Joanna writes
> It is also a fact that after the free market
> was introduced, life expectancy in the FSU plumetted by a good ten
> years,
'High death rate for men predates Soviet demise' http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4774 by John Haaga (Population Today, April 2000)
'During the 1960s, though, life expectancy in the United States rose rapidly, while life expect-ancy in the Russian republic faltered and began to decline. The gap between East and West in life expectancy, like the gap in economic performance, grew steadily wider.'