Sometimes I get a bit conspiratorial about the fact that whenever people want to give an example of how terrible life was in the past, they always mention primitive or agrarian times. It's almost never comparing life today with 100 years ago. (It's like they're finding a straw-man period.) But as Eric Weinstein has mentioned in plenty of interviews (e.g. in his latest one with Peter Thiel), life for the boomers were actually arguably better on average than it is for millennials today (and we're not talking about engineering millennials here).

According to the "inequality" framing, that is irrelevant, the important thing is that the lack of luxury was uniform across society.