Even the 90s was already 2 decades into Neoliberalism and median incomes and quality of life were already degraded from the peak.

Yesterday I was watching the film "The End Of Oak Street" and it started as this whole dream suburbia life, about a couple with two children and they lived in a nice good-sized suburban house, and I was thinking "bullshit!".

Then it turns out the guy had lost his job and was earning money one the side to keep going by doing pizza delivery. "Complete total bullshit!"

Now from the clothes, the cars and so on it didn't look like present day but some point in the past. At the end of the film we find out the story took place in 1981.

Even then, not so sure pizza delivery was enough to just barelly keep paying for that back then - maybe if the house was already fully paid.

(Mind you, it was pretty realistic in that there wasn't a single black person living in that suburban "dream").

Look at the Historical Economic data from the US, most notably Equality, Median (NOT the mean) Incomes, Social Mobility and in the US it all starts falling in the 1970s, a bit later in most of the rest of the West except Eastern Europe (which was under the control of the Soviet Union back then and thus had it's own problematic trajectory), first slow but accelerating after 2-3 decades with the last 1-2 decades being quite a fast fall.

Quite literally the peak prosperity for the common American was back in the late 60s/early 70s and by the 90s things were already worse than that, though since the fall was accelerating most of the collapse in purchasing power and quality of life for average person happened afterwards.