Quote Originally Posted by Deborski View Post
It depends on the area you are talking about in any country, I suppose. I've visited some of the places where I grew up and the biggest changes I noticed were 1) the population increase/number of houses 2) more shopping malls, more franchise restaurants and fewer locally-owned businesses 3) less wild places, more encroachment on formerly wild lands.

In Russia, changes have been sweeping in the major cities, especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as others - but life in rural villages has barely changed at all. There are still many villages where people draw water from communal wells, have no internet access, and sometimes no roads or the area is accessible only by horse or by boat, if it is by a river for example.

I am not opposed to all of the changes which have happened. Some changes are great. But not all change is for the best.

If I could live in Spokane 40 years ago, as opposed to today, I might pick then because even though these days there are gains in human rights (civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, etc), the income disparity is greater than it has been before and the cost of land has greatly increased. Forty years ago, a common person could still hope to make something of himself, have a good career and a paid retirement if he was loyal to his company. He could buy a home, provide for his family and although we didn't have as many shopping malls or McDonalds or Walmarts back then, there were still many locally owned businesses where people did their shopping. And the wilderness was still almost pristine in many places.

Now, America is beginning to resemble one big sprawling strip mall from coast to coast. I guess it is inevitable. But not all of that progress is good.
I'm not going to argue over any of your points made here (most of which I would actually share); but what I meant was actually the attitude, and the system in general, now and back then, without considering the technical progress. If we take two major cities as an example, one in the U.S. (let's say NY), and one in Russia (let's say Moscow), and two points of time - now and the mid-1970s, we're going to see that now, those two cities have very much in common, and typical residents live in similar environment, and they look and behave in similar ways; while 40 years ago, that was not the case at all; even 30 years ago that still wasn't that way; people in the USSR couldn't buy stuff from foreign countries, other than that approved by their "dear leaders", people couldn't go abroad, people couldn't even watch cable TV! I remember myself watching the "Back to the Future" movie for the first time; when that guy living in 1985 who ended up in 1955 said to the family that had hosted him that their household had 2 TVs, they thought he was teasing them, because "no one's too rich to have 2 TV sets"; after I watched that, I thought of the countries where most people weren't too rich to even afford 1 TV in 1985, and guess what, one of them was the USSR! That's what I'm talking about, in the USSR, the progress and the prosperity of people were artificially held down by their government who probably thought that those things were inconsistent with their "super valuable idea of communism"; during the Perestroika, their government stopped that pressure, and people saw what they had been denied for decades, and of course it made lots of them unhappy; but that was just meant to be, the question was when. Well now, there are some people in Russia who favor that system for some reason, but at the same time they realize what it was like, and they are very unlikely to be willing to live under such a system.