TL:DR
My take on it is that ignorance is bliss. For instance, there has been conflict in the Middle East for centuries, but few people knew and fewer cared because we didn’t have nearly the instant information sharing we do now. Hell, many households didn’t even have a TV!
It was also a time of less greed. Management earned less than fifty times what their workers did, and any prosperity affected everybody; a rising tide used to lift all boats.
@JLeslie I haven’t found info from that far back, but the median household income in 1967 was $6.156, so I imagine it was closer to $5,000–5,500 in the fifties.
@john65pennington And how many hours did it take to earn that $10? I am underpaid and I earn that in under an hour after taxes. Don’t look at it in dollar amounts; look at it from how long you have to work to afford something.
Right now, you can get a new VW with more power and more options for fewer months worth of the median income in America, or about the same. ($2,000 is harder to get at $5,000/yr than $17,000 is at $50,000/yr.) So, despite all of teh corporate greed we have had recently, we are still more prosperous than we were in the 1950s though not as good as we were at the end of the Clinton years.