Page 217 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

The leveling out of classes meant a leveling out of lifestyles. Normal people
drove Chevys. Rich people drove Cadillacs. TV and radio equalized the
COBACOBA
entertainment and culture people enjoyed regardless of class. Mail-order
catalogs equalized the clothes people wore and the goods they bought

regardless of where they lived. Harper’s Magazine noted in 1957:

The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves
with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner,

radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his
house, and so on indefinitely. The differences between his automobile and
the poor man’s are minor. Essentially they have similar engines, similar
fittings. In the early years of the century there was a hierarchy of
automobiles.

Paul Graham wrote in 2016 about what something as simple as there only
being three TV stations did to equalize culture:

It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families
would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at
the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the

Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.⁷⁵

This was important. People measure their well-being against their peers. And
for most of the 1945–1980 period, people had a lot of what looked like peers

to compare themselves to. Many people—most people—lived lives that were
either equal or at least fathomable to those around them. The idea that
people’s lives equalized as much as their incomes is an important point of
this story we’ll come back to.