How Caleb Crain got the 1950s wrong. 

Ideologies are armies of conviction for making the world a better place. The ideologically-minded tend to have Manichean worldviews: our side is great; their side sucks. One way ideologies instill confidence and hope is by romanticizing a time or place where one's ideals were at least partly realized: see, it was done before, so we can do it again, but even better. 

For some, that romanticized time and place was western Europe and North America during the 1950s*.  Exhibit A, care of Mr. Crain:

For the next few decades [post WWII years], the world’s leading economies were tightly managed by their governments. America’s top marginal tax rate stayed at ninety-one per cent until 1964. …The result—highly inconvenient for free-market fundamentalists—was prosperity. In the three decades following the Second World War, per-capita output grew faster in Western Europe and North America than ever before or since. There were no significant banking or financial crises.

During America’s golden age of full employment, the economy came, in structural terms, as close as it ever has to socialism, but it remained capitalist at its core, despite the government’s restraining hand…American unemployment, which had ranged between fourteen and twenty-five per cent in the thirties, dropped to an average of 4.6 per cent in the fifties. The new wealth was widely shared, too; income inequality plummeted across the developed world. And with the plenty came calm.

- Caleb Crain/Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy?

Ok, now for the reality, starting with another quote:

“A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959: one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head.”

 - Stephanie Coontz/The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. p.31

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* With the understanding that the 50s, like the 60s, include a few years of the following decade.

Next: More on how Caleb Crain got the 50s wrong.

References:

Caleb Crain Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy? May 14, 2018 Issue of The New Yorker (print edition included the headline “Merchants of Doom.”

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap Basic Books; Revised, Updated edition (March 29, 2016)