From article:
In March, Americans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in Alabama, where African Americans protested for voting rights and were met with billy clubs and tear gas. At an event in Selma, President Obama emphasized the considerable race issues that remain, but also celebrated the progress that’s been made on civil rights since the march. It was an all too rare example of a politician suggesting things have gotten better since the bygone days of Reagan, Kennedy, or Eisenhower, the Swinging Sixties, or the so-called Greatest Generation.
This veneration of the past is widespread. A recent poll asked Americans which decade of the 20th century they would most like to go back to; the most popular answer was the 1950s. That’s linked to a human tendency to judge things on a relative basis. For those who lived through them, the 1950s were a happy time of growth in both income and opportunity, while the past decade has witnessed stagnation and rising inequality. Yet by almost every other objective measure, life is simply much better now than it was in the ’50s for just about everyone—and that should give us considerable confidence that progress will continue in the future.
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