And talking about benefits, would you claim that life 50 years ago was the same for the average citizen as today? Because if not, to me it seems that people work less (see chart) for more (see what you have).
The labor market was way different 50 years ago (and especially even a little bit further back), because you generally had one bread winner working e.g. 1930 hours to support an entire family. In 1960 only 7% of households were single person, now it's 38% [1]. So now you have people working 1760 hours to support, in many cases, only themselves.
This [2] site has a plethora of data about the inflection of basically everything that happened in 1971. 1971 was when the US defaulted on its agreements under Bretton Woods, enabling it to begin printing money at its own discretion, which is essentially when our current economic era began. Vast amounts of wealth has been generated, but it has come with costs.
And talking about benefits, would you claim that life 50 years ago was the same for the average citizen as today? Because if not, to me it seems that people work less (see chart) for more (see what you have).