This version of the 1950s lifestyle is true in the sense that the median American family indeed had three kids and a dog named Spot and a breadwinning husband who worked at the factory, on and on. But the idea that the typical family was better off then than now—that they were more prosperous and more secure, by nearly any metric—is easy to debunk. Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 1965 it was $42,000. In 2021 it was $70,784. Life described the 1950s as prosperous in a way that would have seemed unbelievable to someone living in the 1920s. The same is true
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