What would the 1950s think of 2013

[dosed150]

I think the plentiful food would be a massive shock, we still had rationing here till 1954,

The ethnic diversity, theyd had some immigration from the commonwealth, but would probably be shocked if they walked around london today

the fact that we had joined the EU, seeing as we hadnt really been involved in the early efforts

i'm not sure our place in the world would be a surprise, the empire was breaking up already then, our middle eastern misadventures would be no surprise to someone from the 50s i'm sure

I think they may be surprised about European peace lasting this long

 

[Lord Baal]

I don't ever remember comparing Gates to Da Vinci. And no one can do anything without some source of funds, be it from nobles, family members, or investors. And Gates also dropped out of Harvard.

Gates has been described in magazines in the past as a "modern-day da Vinci." Gates dropped out of Harvard for the same reason Zuckerberg did; he already had a successful business and therefore did not need to co.ntinie his studies. It's not like he dropped out of community college and started his own tech firm in his parents' basement. Gates is far more akin to Edison, a highly-intelligent individual who was a very good businessman.

I think the point is that Gates is neither an inventor nor innovator. He is an extremely successful businessman. But he himself invented no product or service.

Bingo.

Back on topic, I think an Australian would be astonished that we allow colored folk to immigrate here now, and have a female prime minister. They'd be even more stunned at how bad both sides of politics are. Our closeness to oth Japan and China would likewise stun them.

 

[Tee Kay]

Australians are no longer knighted. That'd be new.

 

[Masada]

I don't think a female Prime Minister would be that shocking, given that Australia has had female Parliamentarians since the 1920s. I doubt her being an atheist would be that contentious either (see: Alfred Deakin and Spiritualism). The hardest Parliamentary thing would be having colored people in Parliament.

 

[Plotinus]

I'm fairly sure they'd find gay marriage surprising, but perhaps not much more surprising than all of the other changes to marriage there have been in the past century. Men wearing wedding rings and women not vowing to obey their husbands would be pretty shocking to many people from a century ago.

[Off-topic: Masada, that quotation in your sig is by Augustine, not Aquinas. You can see it here (Latin only!) part 19.39.]

 

[Masada]

[Off-topic: Masada, that quotation in your sig is by Augustine, not Aquinas. You can see it here (Latin only!) part 19.39.]

Damn, I finally got caught out. Time to find another quote to misattribute!

 

[Leifmk]

As far as Norway goes -

the biggest surprise, I'd think, would be the level of material prosperity, and the relatively low percentage of people doing "real jobs" (as in anything that gets your hands dirty). Back in the 1950s there were still a lot more people barely making ends meet as small-time farmers, fishermen and farmer-fishermen. Most folks got no more than 7 years of education and nobody had any idea about all the oil underneath our bit of the North Sea. There was post-war rationing of many goods still; automobile sales were also rationed with waiting lists and so on.

Media overload. Television only had limited trial broadcasts here during the 1950s, and there was one single national radio channel. Telephones were on manually operated exchanges and were not found in every house (in fact there were still long waiting lists to get a phone line installed even in the late 1970s).

Ethnic diversity, at least in the urban areas (out in the boondocks you can still go for days in some places without seeing a non-white face). In the 1950s you'd not expect to see a black person in Oslo.

Religion, public perception of morality, etc. Back in the 1950s the Church was a thing to be reckoned with, and cohabitation outside of marriage was in fact illegal until 1972, as were homosexual acts (both of these were only sporadically prosecuted, mind you). We'd been fairly early on the women's suffrage front but equal rights were still rather far away -- married women were mostly expected to be housewives, many professions were barred to them, etc. These days we have full gay marriage (and most of the opponents of this have already gotten over themselves), and being born out of wedlock ain't no thing at all. (Marriage is still pretty popular but people tend to do it later than in earlier generations -- often waiting until they already have a kid or two.)

Informality. Norwegian has a formal form of address [1] but these days it's almost completely dead. Newspapers frequently refer to people such as the Prime Minister by first name only.

[1] Famously, in 1895-1896 the explorer Fridtjof Nansen was on an extended expedition in the Arctic with only one companion, Hjalmar Johansen; the two men had to share a sleeping bag for a year and a half, and barely made it back to civilization alive. About halfway through, Nansen suggested it might be time to drop the formal address; Johansen replied that he needed to think this over.