How do you square that rationalization with the fact that you could buy a house on a high school diploma and a factory job back then? :p (With a pension! Everyone had those back then. What even is a pension? I don't know. It's something like "the company keeps paying you when you stop working", I think, but it sounds dope.)
I think if you compare then vs now in absolute terms, you'll find that the house wouldn't be considered adequate today, the insulation was bad, the plumbing questionable and electricity wasn't there (depending on when you compare to, but it needs to be sufficiently far away, few people said in the 80ies that nobody would work by 2020).
Quality today is generally much better and "average" isn't the same. I read a piece one some woman who lived around 200 years ago and she traveled to a city ~100km away, which was a noteworthy biographical event back then. That's a distance some people do daily on their way to work these days. Travel to a different continent? You'd be exceptional if you did so once in your life, today that's available to most people in the West to do once a year (granted, it won't be the luxury version, it'll be like my trip to NYC 25 years ago where we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated, the elevator was out once and we had to climb 12 floors but it was super affordable).
