Misplaced nostalgia.

[DynamicSpirit]

It wasn't so much young people becoming disengaged, it was more about the West falling behind what I've termed authoritarian capitalist economies.

OK, fair enough.

I don't think we are falling behind though. What's happening is more like, a number of traditionally much poorer countries (such as China) have been rapidly industrialising and are catching us up. Those countries are experiencing much higher growth rates but from a lower per capita base. We're not falling behind in standard of living because we still have higher absolute standards of living.

The higher growth rates from newly industrialising countries shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It is after all a lot harder to sustain high growth rates when you are already one of the wealthiest/most industrialised countries, because there's no one richer than you that you can sell to/undercut/copy their strategy/etc. Much easier to do that when you are starting from a low base and catching other countries up!

 

[Calthrop]

Just my own (born 1948) subjective experience: many, many people remark on the overall scene of drabness / run-down-ness / privation in Britain for a good while post-World War II -- I never at the time had any sense of that -- the encompassing world seemed to me brightly-coloured and generally glorious.

I'm a bit older than you, but like you I never at the time had that sense of drabness in the 50s (late 40s most definitely!)

Thanks – interesting to hear. I, born in summer 1948, have zero personal memories of the ‘40s; per your observation here, one sees something of an upturn coinciding with the start of the new decade. I certainly have got the picture that in the few years immediately after World War II, things were decidedly rough; but it seems that a fair number of people would have us believe that everything was dreary, shabby and privation-ridden until, say, ten years after the conflict’s end.

For various reasons it has long struck me, that that view likely exaggerates things somewhat. A matter which I have mentioned previously on this board: the fact that it was possible for a preservation society to come into being and successfully rescue and rehabilitate the Talyllyn Railway from 1951 on, suggest to me that in those years, things must have been better than at utter rock-bottom. Otherwise, there would only have been a very few, highly fortunate moneyed and leisured individuals -- simply not enough of them to preserve a seven-mile-long railway: everyone else would have been in a position only to manage -- just -- to be inadequately fed, clothed and sheltered, and if lucky, to splash out on a half-pint of weak “austerity” beer on Saturday night -- with absolutely no money, time, or other resources to spare for so frivolous a luxury as railway preservation. We know that with the Talyllyn, there were lots of ordinary folk who had their “mite” to contribute, towards making the thing happen. Just one sign among many which I’ve picked up, that it must have been a bit better than total bleak awfulness in those years -- re which some commentators nowadays, talk almost in Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” terms.

[I wrote: "...we who remember everyday steam and think of it as idyllic and delightful, tend to gloss over its rather stark downsides..."]

My memories of steam are much less positive—filthy rolling stock, pretty poor performances, etc. Except of course for steam on some of the prestige ordinary trains and on some of the specials we got in the 60s, which really did shew us just what it could do.

Again -- I being that bit younger than you -- for me, it was mostly a matter of my simple kid-type perception that a steam-worked rail system was a marvellous and delightful thing: by the time I was of an age to be cognisant of such subtleties as good / not-so-good loco performance, the last run-down few years of steam were upon us anyway.