Most people neglect correcting for inflation, and conveniently forget that salaries have in many cases risen much faster than prices. This is especially the case for non-essential items, where people can simply refuse to buy something if they feel it is overpriced. With other expenses though, the pattern does not always hold. It used to be recommended that monthly housing costs should not exceed 1/4 your monthly income. Now it is 1/3. People used to have 20 year mortgages, now they routinely get 30 year mortgages. Our standad of living is certainly higher, but we now usually have two wage earners per family, not one. In some areas, particularly medical, inflation-corrected prices have skyrocketed.

When I was growing up, my widowed mother had an $80/week job as a secretary, and we lived a modest but comfortable existence. We had a fairly decent car, a subsidized apartment in the projects, and later, a clean tract house in a humble but respectable neighborhood (one paycheck a month went to the 20 year mortgage) and private major medical insurance was available from the Cuban Club (a non-profit co-op, sort of an ethnic non-governmental socialized medicine) at $8/mo. We had full bellies, clothes on our backs, shoes on our feet and both the kids went to college at State schools. Of course, VHA, VA, GI Bill, and my deceased dad's Social Security helped a great deal. This would not have been possible today.