I do some things getting better, but it just seems like people don't care as much as they use to about simple values. Be honest, work hard, don't cheat people.
And yeah it's competitive but I feel like these days lots of cruel things people do is totally unnecessary and is simply done out of malice.
We are also still grappling with the effect of the baby boom. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. It's complicated, a confluence of factors.
When I was a young child, in the early 80's in Texas, my mother was specifically told by her boss that she couldn't get a promotion within the company because she was 1. Female, and 2. Catholic. Only male protestants (also white, but my mom met that requirement) could be promoted within the company. They didn't even try to hide it, and admitted it openly.
This was not a small company either, it was a major one, and big enough that suing them over it wasn't a reasonable option for my parents, at the time. Around the same time, she found out that said company was one of the more open minded, because most in the area wouldn't even hire Catholics for any position.
'Simple values' as recently as 25-30 years ago, only applied to white people that followed the same religion. Everyone else was discriminated against constantly, but unless the national news covered it, everyone pretended it didn't exist. The internet made this discrimination far more visible to everyone, and far harder to deny.
So it's not that the past was more honest or hard working, they just lied, cheated, and oppressed people in secret, and back then it was a lot easier to keep it hidden.
I feel like this post could be indirectly in response to my original reply in this thread and continued in spirit by others, I could be wrong, but I feel the need to respond as such. In the terms I've laid out, in the past, we had only reached the one-to-all level of communication. The national news (radio, television) was an outgrowth of the one-to-all regime that began with the written word. Recall that I openly conceded that the new regime was accompanied by both advantages and disadvantages, then merely addressed the one disadvantage that pertained to the topic at hand. I would agree with you that increased exposure of discrimination is one of the advantages that accompanies the new all-to-all regime. In other words, I don't mean to suggest that the internet is all bad, I'm merely saying that it comes with its own host of advantages and disadvantages.