Abundance
In 1956, the average teenager’s weekly income/allowance was $10.55, equal to the disposable income of a family in the early 1940s.
About 10% of burials in NYC in 1889 were in potter’s fields. In 1900, 1.75 million children between the ages of 10 and 15 — almost 1/5 of all children in that age cohort — were in the work force. Children provided 1/4 to 1/3 of the incomes for working-class families, which spent more than 90% of their household earnings on food, shelter and clothing. In 1900, Americans spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine, and less than 2% of Americans took vacations.
By the end of the ’50s, the number of Americans enrolled in colleges exceeded the number of US farmers.
A 1962 Gallup poll found that only 10% of mothers hoped their daughters would emulate the choices they had made in their lives.
More than two-thirds of women who turned 18 during the ’50s claimed to have slept with only one man by their 30th birthday. Compared to only 2% of women who reached adulthood during the ’70s.
“Land of Plenty,” George F. Will’s review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance