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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

> Cheer up. Contrary to what many believe, men's chances in life have never been better than now.

Not for men without college degrees.

Yes, also for men without college degrees. Even most welfare clients are better off than an average man in 1776, 1861, 1914, 1940 etc. and they in turn had way better lives than men in the stone, bronze, or iron ages and men in the Medieval period.

I wouldn't even want to change for a successful young, white American male in the 1960s or whenever America was at its industrial peak.

Look, we are so lucky at this point in time in the Western world. Far from everything is great, but we live long lives in comfort, mostly painless, mostly without death or disease or hunger, mostly without war, we date around for fun during a decade or two, travel as we like, wherever we like, get entertainment on demand, chose our own profession, before we marry out of love when we are in our 30s or even 40s. Kings would envy our comfortable lives and I bet even Cary Grant would envy the dating life of a regular young man armed with Tinder.

I disagree. My wife's grandfather, who I'd consider typical, bought a house and provided for a family of four in Palo Alto while working at a local Safeway. A job that required no college degree but only the willingness to show up and take some pride in his work. It was a modest yet peaceful and satisfying existence.

As far as comfort, I'd don't accept the premise our lives are more comfortable now than in 1955. My guess is most young men would gladly trade the latest dating app and the interwebs for the conditions of the typical 1955 US male.

>As far as comfort, I'd don't accept the premise our lives are more comfortable now than in 1955. My guess is most young men would gladly trade the latest dating app and the interwebs for the conditions of the typical 1955 US male.

Does that include being drafted into the Korean War? The Vietnam War? The Suez Canal Crisis?

Also, does that include black men? Gay men?

The issues under discussion are as challenging for black men as they are for men of other races. Possibly more so, since they have to deal with all the racist bullshit in addition.

I wouldn't have thought gay men were under consideration here, since we're talking about marriage to women.

I was talking about the issue of the rose-colored view of America in the middle of the twentieth century. My point was that even if America in 1960 really was better than America in 2017 for uneducated white working-class men, that's a pretty small segment of the American population. Our country, while from from perfect, is significantly less racist, sexist, and homophobic than it was then.

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