I think that's overcomplicating the issue. Ultimately, good science takes time, and the academic culture doesn't allow for that.

I don't know about that. Even Harvard has a big grade inflation problem. And non-elite colleges are trying to make it as effortless as possible to get a degree.

grade inflation is the right thing to do as long as employers and post graduate schools keep looking at grades or gpa. if you do strict "fair" evaluation you put your students at a disadvantage compared to same level students at other schools that grade more relaxed. grades should be feedback not something to compare with others instead we should set up a standard state exam (pass/fail, unlimited cheap retakes) to decide if you get a degree. but until that happens keep on inflating

I don't see it. The 1930s weren't that long ago, there are still people alive who lived through them. If you were talking about ancient Egypt, you might have a point.

I recommend you read the book "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, about a Black America in the early/mid 20th century.

Personally speaking, I found the book very 'awe-inspiring'/it made me go 'wow' a bunch, because I found the author's experience so completely different from my own :)

The 1930s had radically different opinions on race, gender, religion, and a host of other things as compared to today.

The world has entirely different values today than circa 1930. This is...obvious? Read a book or Wikipedia page? I don't know what else to tell you.

The world doesn't have values, people do. And many of them are the same.

it's usually inappropriate to feed a troll, but I'll just say "olympic gold champion was congratulated by literally Adolf Hitler, but not his own country the Unite States - because he was black"

You had your fascists and you had your anti-fascists where antifascists were blamed for what fascists did.

As a brown person in the US, I certainly would have felt a difference between then and now…

It is, however, the setting of On the Road.

Well yeah, but that's just selection bias. We shouldn't take precautions around strangers because it's more likely that daddy will rape you?

What data measures "childhood freedom"? That sounds more like conjecture.

You can lookup the studies on loss of 3rd spaces and the relation to mental health in adolescents (and adults, albeit to a lesser degree). This is pretty well-trod science

Well trod doesn't mean good. Social science is notorious for bunk. How many can actually support a causal relationship?

This is something that could only be said by a sheltered suburban kid

You think malls didn't have security on the past?

I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)

Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.

They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.

That's easy to say if you'd never had to live in a slum, but constant noise actually has negative health effects.

Apparently all cities now are slums?

Us plebians don't live in expensive NYC penthouses.

All urban living situations that are not NYC penthouses are slums?

Even in the nicest apartment I ever had, I still had to listen to my upstairs neighbor scream and beat up his wife.

sounds like a sample size/bias problem to me. maybe you're just drawn to slums?

Ah the libertarian solution. "Just stop being poor"

lol, no--you just made an unsubstantiated (and stupid) claim that any apartment that isn't an NYC penthouse is a slum, and i countered that you can't use the limits of your own experience to reliably define what the world contains

As someone who has lived in NYC, yes. The vast majority of housing in NYC is slum quality at insane prices

That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!