Settlers is weird in some places - and I still haven’t read most of it, just skipped around - like scoffing at college education as essential, but i think there is a lot of interesting stuff in there too
Settlers is weird in some places - and I still haven’t read most of it, just skipped around - like scoffing at college education as essential, but i think there is a lot of interesting stuff in there too
I think a decent amount of this can be explained by that Settlers was originally published in 1983. A lot of these ‘luxuries’ had really only come into prominence throughout the 20 years before that, and the white flight suburbia car hell project was just coming into its stride.
And I definitely took it as its not that these things are ‘bad’, bourgeoisie ‘luxuries’, etc. But to highlight the shear amount of extra wealth that was concentrated into the American labor aristocracy- in comparison to the rest of the world.
Being 40 years old might be an explanation for some of this, but that still makes it a less useful resource in 2023. I don’t think it’s a very good explanation for a lot, though – public transit wasn’t that much better in the 80s (and more people lived outside of cities altogether), electric washing machines had been around for decades at that point, and eyeglasses were common for even longer. In context of 1983 these still come off as indicators of basic development more than anything a country should be criticized for.
And while I agree the author is implicitly comparing the U.S. to the developing world, your job as a writer is to actually make that comparison, because why would your audience know how common glasses or washing machines are in other countries?
makes sense!