Why do photos of cities from the 50s/60s always look so much

>always look so much comfier
Nostalgia?

Mostly white people.

>>1549786
Because you have an emotional bias, plus they are generally of lower quality

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

Everyone in the photos is in good shape, is dressed nicely, and the cars were styled better because of the complete lack of safety regulations. Any other answer is wrong

>>1549786
A small layer of blur is one hell of an effective device. Couple that with a slightly distorted colour palette from early colour films, and you get comfy versions of pretty much anything.

There were one fifth as many people on Earth.

On a scale from 2 to 11 life was approximately 20% comfier every 10 years you go back in time

>>1549846
This

Population in the US has more than doubled since then, and urbanized to boot.

Imagine your favorite cozy bar suddenly drawing in twice the patrons. You used to be able to chat with the bartender, now it's too loud and hectic. There's always some loudmouth stumbling around and spilling a drink on somebody else. The bathrooms are constantly trashed and filthy. The owners are rolling in money, but everybody else is jostling for a seat at the bar and waiting half the night to get a booth.

infrastructure wasn't complete dogshit
film photography looks neato

Just remember that there was lead in the paint, lead coming out of every car and no regulations on noise so you could go deaf just from standing on a street like that for too long.

Oh, and asbestos.

>>1549889
How bad could it have been, we're still here after all

>>1549786

They are just different enough that you can imagine your life being happy. What the differences are don't matter.

>>1549904
It caused the 70's.

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>>1549846
Really makes you think, huh.

>>1549904
>How bad could it have been, we're still here after all

Who is "we?" This is the era when everyone who could afford to moved away from cities.

>>1549926
People, asbestos and lead were pretty much everywhere

>>1549920
This, hippies were a product of asbestos and lead breathing parents whose children were mentally disabled

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>3 generations of "L" cars

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>>1549875
i hate other people so much

>>1549932
>People, asbestos and lead were pretty much everywhere

Yes they were. But more concentrated in the cities. The air quality was not only highly unpleasant but literally making people crazy.

>>1549875
Do you know how economics works senpai... The number of bars hasn't been frozen since the 1960s. Still I sympathize with attempt to blame Normies and overpopulation

>>1549904
I'm pretty sure if fucked our genrration. Totally anecdotal, but my parents and all their friends had lived in the cities and then moved to the suburbs and basically all their progeny are failures or have mental problems

>>1549948

And who started setting policy around the late seventies and early eighties. This is the generation that lived through Reagan and still insist he was small government; they lived through Clinton and still insist he was liberal.

All they did in the sixties was hang out, with virtually no impact on politics.

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>>1549823
>Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

Nonsense, I'm 48 years old and other then no Internet, things generally were much better before and have only gotten worse.

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The 1950s was without a doubt the greatest decade in US history. Booming economy, creation of the suburbs while most cities were still fairly nice, niggers were civilized (no welfare state or war on drugs), etc.

>>1550042
i think he was using the bar as a metaphor for the world around us.

>>1550659

Except for technological and medical advances...

Yep. I'd rather life in a period where cancer was a automatic death sentence.

Least I could smoke in doors at meal times.

>>1550735

Due to government spending and highest era of tax bracketing which Regan god rid of.

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>>1550801
DELET THIS

>>1550042
>he number of bars hasn't been frozen since the 1960s
But the amount of space basically has.

>>1550810
Cities have only gotten larger with time.
I may be biased, because I'm from empty-spaceburg Canada, but there's plenty of room to grow.

>>1550801
>government spending
Topkek. The exponential debt era of spending didn't occur until after LBJ's welfare state and the Vietnam War

>highest tax brackets
This has been debunked thousands of times by economists. Nobody actually paid those marginal tax rates because there were so many loopholes back then. You'd have to be an actual retard to believe that an economy can grow if small business owners were giving the government 90% of their revenue

>>1550844
Revenue and income aren't the same thing senpai.

>>1550797
>Yep. I'd rather life in a period where cancer was a automatic death sentence.

Cancer is still an automatic death sentence for most people, the medical industry is just stretching out the death by “treating” it to make a buck off it.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is doping everybody up for all their bullshit “conditions”, that suddenly plague modern society.

I will grant that trauma medicine is a lot better nowadays.

>>1550845
Correct. Which means you actually believe that said business owner was giving Big Brother a 50%+ business/corporate tax rate in addition to paying high tax rates on his personal income. No fucking way an economy would grow with those Venezuelan-esque controls

>>1550870
I wonder what /biz/ would say about an income rate capping at 60% with a business rate capping at 20%.

>>1550829
>I may be biased, because I'm from empty-spaceburg Canada, but there's plenty of room to grow.
>Canada
>plenty of space
hahahahah
HAHAHAHAHA

>>1549786
I think that's because the cities were actually places to live back then. Now, other than few exceptions, North American cities only have offices and commercial zones. Everyone lives out of the city and cities look deserted. Walkways and ground level shops also adjust for this. You can only find coffee shops and novelty stores in cities. There used to be people who'd actually try to buy things or services in the cities.

Checkout downtown Tampa for example. It looks objectively beautiful from afar, but you don't get a vibe or whatever when you actually try to take a similar picture because it's just empty with no people on the streets.

>>1550918
Are you fucking with me there, bud? Canada is 80% forests and fields.

>>1551041
Fuck off, we're full.

>>1551072
Oh, so you're just memeing. Okay, bud. Good night.

>>1550844
>he doesn't understand progressive tax rates
reagan was garbage, but i'm glad that he exists so that morons can self identify by admiring him

>>1549802
this

>>1549802
People will say "this", but I find it's true of pictures of non-white countries as well.

>>1549786
Because you've played too much Fallout?
Also probably because grainy film looks warmer than digital photos.

>>1549786
this was when glass and steel was still a novelty, most things were stone or had a stone facade

>>1550659
>Nonsense, I'm 48 years old and other then no Internet, things generally were much better before and have only gotten worse.

You mean YOUR life has gotten worse. You miss being young, that's all. And even that wasn't as good as you remember it.

Cities were comfy because the wealth was still more or less housed there. It was in thie 60's when a mass suburbanization happened and all the middle class left the city. Cities were massive shitholes back in the 70's and 80's and have only recently been improving due to the gentrification and urbanization of modern families.

>>1550042
Here in England the population has doubled and the number of pubs has more than halved.

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>>1551285
ITT: Leftists embarassing themselves by thinking they understand how tax brackets work

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>>1549786
>Why do photos of cities from the 50s/60s always look so much comfier than modern city photos

You have to keep looking.

I like the cyberpunk aesthetic.

>>1551642
>life was better back then, I'm 20
>HAHAH MY MAN HOW CAN YOU EVEN KNOW, YOU WEREN'T EVEN ALIVE YET

>life was better back then, I'm 50
>DUDE NOSTALGIA GOGGLES AND CHILDHOOD BIAS LMAO

>>1552051
rekt

>>1550860
it isn't what the fuck u talking bout

>>1550860
You're a monumental fucktard.

>>1552051

Yes, those are two forms of nostalgia. What's your point?

>>1552882
That you completely dismiss any personal account as being untrustworthy, which is a sign of retards deep in denial.

>>1552882
It's not nostalgia if you never experienced the event.

>>1552887

No, I dismiss vague "muh feels" accounts as untrustworthy because they are untrustworthy and because I take history seriously.

>>1552905
>because they are untrustworthy

Says who? They are certainly more trustworthy than whatever you and other people who never experienced it have to say about it.

>>1552911

Let me put it this way. In order to take "things used to be better!" at all seriously, I would need some evidence that an unusually high proportion of people feel that way, compared to other places and times. Because there will always be many people who feel that way no matter what. And if there WAS a higher proportion, even that would not be direct evidence, since "things actually were better" is just one possible explanation for why that sentiment might become especially popular, and history is full of counterexamples.

>>1552933
Most people who experienced the 50s agree that the 50s were better than now. There was more social mobility, more jobs, less crime etc, those are statistical facts.

>>1552942
>Most people who experienced the 50s agree that the 50s were better than now.

Citation needed.

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>>1549786
I find it too (for the 80s), but I'm not a nostalgic. Go watch Koyaanisqatsi, it gives you a great feels for the aesthetic.

>>1552952
>those buildings

Pretty sure they look like that even now.

>>1552945
https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/08/01/half-white-americans-life-better-50s-60s/

>>1552952
>>1552964
Yeah it looks the same, what you like about the 80s images is the film stock

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>>1552972
Gotta agree. I was born in '86 and never really experienced the 80s, but I consumed a ton of 80s music and films growing up and after some time I realized I wasn't really nostalgic for the 80s but for the media image of them. Like even when you look at the 80s retro media nowadays (synthwave, poster art etc) most of them are outright based on movies.

I reckon it's the same as people basing their love for the 50s on car and vacuum cleaner advertisement (I'm not saying the 50s were bad or anything, just that people have an incorrect impression).

>>1552969

So, less than half. Of WHITE Americans. Not limited to people who actually lived through it. So not really supporting the claim at all.

But supposing it did, how does this compare to how elderly people in the 1950s viewed the 1890s, for instance? As I said, there will always be a large baseline of nostalgia.

And suppose it is in fact an unusually high amount, does this mean the 1950s were actually better? No, because there are lots of other possible explanations, e.g. the rise of certain kinds of political rhetoric.

>>1552998
>Of WHITE Americans

So the vast majority of the country?

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>>1552964
>>1552972
No, I mean buildings are not built in the same way. They had more practicality, now it's all about showing off.

>>1552998
You're just engaging in useless rhetoric excercise. The fact that objective statistics highly correlate with the nostalgia means there is probably something to it.

>>1553009

How did I know you would pick on that and ignore the rest? Anyway, the difference is 47% vs 39%.

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>>1553013
Yeah because most buildings built nowadays look like those Dubai towers ...

The NYT building looks exactly like those 80s buildings and it was built in '07.

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>>1553013
>They had more practicality, now it's all about showing off.
Yeah, no one would have built super-tall buildings just to show off back in the day.

If anything it's more interesting that the West mostly stopped competing in that race.

>>1553017
>You're just engaging in useless rhetoric excercise.

No, I'm doing the opposite of that, actually. I'm looking for data, NOT rhetoric.

>The fact that objective statistics highly correlate with the nostalgia means there is probably something to it.

What statistics? What correlation? I only see one data point, and even that is dubious.

>>1553013
>Now its all about showing off
And this is bad how?

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>>1553040
So you are not aware about the data from the 50s compared to now? I thought this was common knowledge.

>>1550042
Anon, you're not getting it.

>>1553056

What is this supposed to demonstrate?

>>1553038
>the West mostly stopped competing in that race
if you win every race the other contenders will get bored and stop playing

>>1553065
That the unemployment rate was lower?

>>1553065
>I can't read filenames

>>1553071
>>1553072

So the unemployment rate has gone up and down many times but with an overall trend that is almost flat. So?

>>1553086
>overall trend that is almost flat

Are you memeing right now?

To put it in simplest of terms: a larger percentage of people had jobs in the 1950-1960 than in 2006-2016

>>1553068
The US was winning, though.

>>1553038
>West mostly stopped competing in that race

5 out of 10 tallest buildings in the US were built within the last 10 years.

>>1553114
But not the tallest buildings in the world.

>>1553124
One WTC is the 6th tallest building in the world and it was completed two years ago.

>>1553098

Very slightly larger, with a difference much less than short term oscillations. If that's your killer piece of evidence, I think you've shown the opposite of what you intended.

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>>1552992

>>1549786
Lack of urban congestion. Populations have exploded everywhere the last couple of decades until maybe the last 10 or so in the developed world. So you had enough people for cities to feel lively but no so much that there are cars everywhere and the sidewalks can't be seen beneath the sea of people.

Likewise there was still a sense of aesthetic to everything compared to the sterile glass monstrosities that make up a lot of modern cities now.

>>1553044
One day you'll grow up and understood.

>>1549786
>>1549842
>This. /thread

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>>1553129
I don't know if the story is the same in the US, but at least from the UK there's a reasonable chance that even if the unemployment rate has levelled off, it only tells half the story.

Because of shit like pic related.

>>1549968
Now your bed, food, water, car and 7/10 other things you come in contact with turn you into some "depressed" "bipolar" emotional woman with man-tits. What do you want? At least they were all skinny or built fat and didn't burden themselves with a work-generator on their person at all times that they ironically pay to use.

>>1550797
Being bed-ridden in chemo and drugged up on death's door is "surviving cancer" by current standards, so long as you stay that way for three years before it finally gets you. Let's not play games here.

>>1551670
Alcohol is haram.

>>1552037
It's US cities that look comfy because everyone was skinny or builtfat back then and everything was brick and steel, as opposed to concrete and glass full of fatties in cargo shorts.

Cyberpunk isn't a thing here for all the "millennial" sissies gentrifying the cities with more glass and steel offices and beige generic "luxury" apartments. The only grungy anything in our cities are the nigger nests and those are just pre-gentrified areas.

>>1556425

Remember how that happened: boomers grew up in suburban hugboxes. So now as cities repopulate, the second generation spawned in it wants to make the world around them recognizable to themselves.

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>>1556042
>from the UK there's a reasonable chance that even if the unemployment rate has levelled off
not sure if the same applies to the UK

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf

if anything productivity peeled away from compensation after Thatcher which is counter-intuitive

>>1550659
>48 year olds wasting time on 4chan
Huh maybe society has gotten worse

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>>1552037
Yeah cyberpunk has a really captivating aesthetic

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>>1549786
A limited color pallet and grain does wonders to your photos. Why do you think weebs like anime cells so much?

>>1558041
Interesting. I wonder if it's down to Major finalizing the limits on union activity (With rules more than slightly inspired by "In place of strife", a Labour plan from the 70s. Ha.)

>>1558380
Funny, isn't it?
Cyberpunk is just Japan/any Far-East city during night.

>>1549786
This picture doesn't make any sense.
In the foreground, the truck is going forward while another car whizzes by right behind it and people walk on both the crosswalk closest to the viewer and the one on the right, as if they could all somehow have the right of way. The elevated transit platform has a multi-car train as well as single-car trolleys. Also, the platform continues down the street and then suddenly disappears.

>>1550985
>Tampafag
I hate it here so much! Everyone acts like Ybor is such a quirky fun place, but it is just as devoid as everything else.

>>1559043
And electronics stores on every corner with computer technicians either working in corps on in the cheap.

>>1550055
I unironically believe it's the suburbs

I can't pinpoint why but for some reason they aren't good for human development

>>1556042
>Because of shit like pic related.

What, that pay has more than doubled?

>>1560449
>In the foreground, the truck is going forward while another car whizzes by right behind it and people walk on both the crosswalk closest to the viewer and the one on the right, as if they could all somehow have the right of way.
The Loop is literally still like that, m8.

>The elevated transit platform has a multi-car train as well as single-car trolleys.
Those are different models of L" cars.

>Also, the platform continues down the street and then suddenly disappears.
It curves to the right, around the buildings.

>>1562770
Might be worth mentioning, those tracks *were* once shared with suburban trolleys, but this picture looks like it was taken a few years after those services ended.

>>1560449
The traffic is probably moving much slower than it appears from the picture; the truck is finishing a left-hand turn after the pedestrian couple, with the blue car traveling forward at a much faster speed as there is no one in the crosswalk. The guy attempting to cross on the right is an asshole and will probably get himself killed. I believe the platform "disappears" because it veers off into a side-street, the turn itself slightly visible but obstructed by buildings and construction.

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>>1562786
Judging by his cap, I believe he's actually pic related.

>>1562790
So I was right?

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>>1549908
You gave me the feels. Good job anon

they make me want to die

>>1562834
Why

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>>1551566
Absolutely. Here's tokyo in 1950. A bombed out shitheap of black markets, child prositutes and near starvation.

>>1549786
modern architecture haden't destroyed most cities jet

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>>1562936
>loli prostitutes
sounds pretty comfy

>>1562738
Productivity and Wages are no longer linked.
Productivity has grown far more than wages.

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Here's some Iran in the 60s...

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>>1564589
Kabul, Afghanistan...

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>>1564591
Egypt before they removed Nasser...

You get the point I think.

>>1549786
The great burden of knowledge. People where more into their work and family than obsessing with ego and the self and 'promoting' one self under pretense than be honest.

I reckon it's also the comfort and convinience from technology that makes people just horrendous touches.

>>1549786
The 90s look so comfy

>>1549786
People aren't being stimulated 24/7 by electronics
I think that may add to some of the stress that people have in their daily lives.
A lot of this is new for a society to be connected the way we are now.
We're living in a new age my friend the information age.

>>1564589
I've always felt bad that we don't have a western-friendly Iran today.

I'd like a friendly Iran as a regional power and oil provider over Saudi Arabia.

>>1565931
Both Saudi Arabia and Iran do horiffic shit to ther people, the only difference was that in Iran there were several botched attempts at fucking with the Iranian government by the US so its a big no go when it comes to trying to be buds with Iran. Oh yeah, they also want to nuke a majority of the middle east, maybe that aswell.

>>1549786
Aesthetics unrelated to your experiences don't evoke the same emotional response.

>>1550870
>Big Brother
Figures you'd get your information from that piece of shit lit.