Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you're saying. By any reasonable measure, the quality of life of the median human inhabitant of Planet Earth is better than it was 20 years ago, when it was better than it was 20 years before. You probably hit some dips for the World Wars, but if we can avoid any more of those, I don't see why we would want to stop the positive trendline that has accompanied and depends on economic growth.
> I don't understand what you're saying That's because you use "quality of life" as if it meant purchase power or access to gadgets. And even that's wrong -- people in the 50s could support a family of four/five and get their kids to college with a single office job. Present day middle class, not so much. In fact it has been shown time and again that wages have been stagnating (when corrected for inflation) since the…
Second, it is absolutely nuts to suggest the average American citizen was better off in the 1950's. 1950's America still had a substantial amount of truly crippling poverty, it had millions of citizens who had almost no chance at that great office job due to their race or gender, and life expectancy at birth was lower by almost a decade.
And yes, that's before you figure the months of salary to buy, say, a refrigerator, that the median wage earner can now afford on a week's pay. A refrigerator, by the way, that will be larger, last longer, and use substantially less energy than the one from 1955.
Or the huge growth in sales of air travel, entertainment, dining... luxuries in the 1950's that are commonplace today.
Yes, access to cheap credit makes it easy to bid up the prices of scarce resources like slots at good colleges or houses in desirable areas, but the average American isn't paying out of pocket much more for those things as a % of their income than they were 70 years ago. And of course the colleges are much nicer places to live and study than they were, and the houses are bigger and better constructed.