Yet by 1950, almost all the accouterments of modern life are in place. The world of Mad Men is, technologically, not so different from our own.
Mad Men is not set in 1950 but 1960-70. This is not a minor quibble: for ordinary people in the West the world was remade in the 1950s and 1960s and this was widely regarded as being the fruit of Progress. Suddenly (and it really
was sudden in many countries) people were no longer poor; they could afford to buy
nice things, they could afford to buy disposable things too. They could live in nicer houses, nicer houses lit by electricity. These nice new houses even had inside toilets as a matter of course. They didn't even have to leave these houses in order to be entertained, because of that new democratic miracle of a cultural medium: television. They could afford to buy cars, and did so in numbers not predicted by city planners or motorway engineers. The landscape around them was changing: in the cities and in the towns wartime damage, old slums and (regrettably often) buildings that were just
unfashionable were swept away and replaced by shiny new constructions of concrete and glass. The countryside contracted in the face of private suburban development and new state-planned settlements (the exact balance depending on the country in question), and changed in other respects as farmers too decided that Progress was the way forward (the consequences for the environment were not positive). And, my God, look at all the breakthroughs of Science And Technology! A man in space! Another on the moon! Incredible!
An argument for stasis of a sort in the West does exist, but you can't date it any earlier than the 1970s if you want to be taken seriously.
That's not what postmodern means. We've been over this before.
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