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Old 03-26-2016, 08:54 PM   #113
Infornific
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Default Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae

I'm coming late to this conversation, but the year is actually at the beginning of my adult life so I have a decent memory of the era.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has an online inflation counter but as it happens cumulative inflation since 1988 is 100%. So when in doubt, take modern prices and halve them.

Politics was less polarized then - conservative Democrat and liberal Republican were not yet oxymorons. Admittedly, that was in part because the Republican party was still building itself up institutionally but party identity was a less reliable indicator of political views than it is now. In some ways things were reversed - the Republicans seemed to have a lock on the White House while the Democrats kept control of Congress. California was not yet a liberal state. The younger generation (Gen X) tended to be more conservative/Republican than the boomers. I would say on the whole the country was more conservative - the conventional assumption was that the Democrats needed a moderate white preferably Southern candidate (Gore or later Clinton) to win back the White House. If you're curious, the 1988 or 1990 Almanac of American Politics is very cheap and provides a useful political snapshot and perhaps more importantly capsule histories of each state and congressional district.

Anti-gay prejudice was much more common and acceptable then. Being gay was grounds for a dishonorable discharge from the military and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was still five years away. If you need a secret to hide for a basically decent NPC, sexual identity is a good one. This is also in the middle of the AIDS epidemic.

There were significant cultural divides between young and middle aged that don't really exist today. The draft ended in 1973. So men over 40 would have served in the military or would have an explanation for not doing so - I remember most of my male public school teachers were veterans. Who did and didn't serve in Viet Nam was a major political question as Dan Quayle found to his sorrow. Korean War vets and even a few World War II vets were still in the work force and active in public life. There were other significant social changes in the 1970s. The sexual revolution went mainstream in the 1970s as did feminism. And the Civil Rights Act was a little over 20 years old in 1988. Thus, someone who was 50 came of age in an era when male military service was the norm, the Jim Crow system still existed, when women were blocked out of many professions and when rules for sexual behavior were very different from 1988. Someone who was 25 in 1988 grew up in a very different world culturally.

Elaborating on female characters - women were scarce in senior positions in public life. The law schools and medical schools had opened up in a big way less than twenty years before. Congress - both parties - was overwhelmingly male. I don't know if you want to get into that but it could be significant for a young female character. Incidentally, the Silence of the Lambs came out (book, not movie) in 1988 so that might be of interest for a popular view of the FBI at the time.

Regarding computers, my personal experience was that it was not purely a geek thing even in 1988. Most people didn't have or need email accounts but email accounts and internet chat boards were pretty common among college students and a number of professions and hobbyists. Wargames came out five years before so the idea of hacking was already in popular culture. The events of the Cuckoo's Egg weren't public as of 1988 but I think the FBI was already involved. The Morris worm has already been mentioned and would hit in November - might be a good way to confuse the characters if they don't know history.

This is my own impression but college students were more independent of their parents. College was cheaper in real dollars and it was easier to pay through work and scholarships. Helicopter parenting wasn't a thing - indeed there were sometimes complaints of too little supervision. Part of that was communication - calling long distance was costlier and texting didn't exist then.

I realize this is more roleplaying background than hard data but hopefully something here will be useful.
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