Those "good old days" are mostly just an invention of modern propaganda, a narrative that people nowadays tell themselves about the past, so they have some sort of ideal reality to work towards and hope for the future. Norman Rockwell, George Quaintance type shit, and now you can have it AI generated. Never mind the leagues of working class men that still went underpaid, lived in shithole stick houses, died of the black lung, never mind the segregation and systemic racism and redlining which reinforced all this shit, never mind the fact that the system is and always has been a zero sum game with haves and have-nots. That all gets whitewashed, and people get presented some ahistorical vision of the good old days when you could get a king sized snickers for a nickel.

Probably somewhere in the 1800s