I have and found that one man could comfortably support a family of five on a 40-hour-a-week factory worker salary. Such niceties began to fade in the 70s and 80s, though, as the world progressed.

Now, do your part and honestly evaluate the world around you. Keep in mind that the appeal to progress is just as much of a fallacy as the appeal to tradition. Tomorrow is not inevitably better than yesterday.

That's news to me: So when the man's wife needed an MRI, his salary could cover this back in the 70s? He was able to buy a car with airbags using his salary? He was able to give his wife a cell phone in the 70s that she could use in an emergency? He was able to buy himself a carbon monoxide detector for his house? If he got testicular cancer, he would live more than a year with his salary? etc. etc.

Once open spaces are now subdivided, health care motivated by usury, and wages lie stagnant since the seventies. Water crises, hemispheric pollution, and thermonuclear warheads, all are modern innovations which the prewar generations would be thankful to escape.

The present isn't inevitably better than the past. The future will not necessarily be rosier.