Both in the American environment and now in the Russian public environment, there is a persistent myth about the "golden time of the 1950s-1960s in the USA", when the lives of ordinary people were supposedly the best. For example, part of this myth is when a single working husband could afford to buy a house and a car, support a wife and three children.
In fact, such a standard applied to no more than 40% of households, and their per capita consumption of goods and services was 2-4 times lower than today. A typical example is the size of pensions in the United States from the 1960s until today.
The graph shows their value in constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, of 2025.
In 1960 the average pension in the United States was 2.5 times lower than it is today - about $800. By the way, if we remember that according to the dollar PPP in Russia is about 40% of the American dollar, we can estimate how much a fair average pension in Russia should be now: 40% of an American pension of 2071 dollars is about 800 dollars in Russia, or about 65 thousand rubles. in the current lesson.