Debate: is life better today than it was in the early 1900's
Side: yes

People are a lot less healthy today than they were 100 years ago. Obesity is at an all-time high.Certainly, as I said, the world is not ideal today. But we live 25 years longer and we're probably not going to die of tuberculosis or lose our children to pneumonia, thanks to advancements in the medical field. How can you know those facts and continue to say we are less healthy than a people who did not even live to 50? People are not as physically active as they were then. People then did not sit in cubicles all day in front of a computer. They were outside in the fresh air and sunshine tending their gardens (which, by the way, were grown in quality soil with little or no pesticides) or working on their farms. There is no data on poverty rates in the 1900's, but even if it was high, it wouldn't mean much because most people lived off the land, not the dollar. A self-sufficient farmer had little need of grocery money. I suspect that many farmers living under the poverty line actually lived better lives than many wage-earners at the time who were above it.Sure, many people did live like this. Today, many people still live like this. But you are describing the United States as though it was nothing but spacious, idyllic farmland from coast to coast, and that's kind of silly. Don't forget that even for the people who did live like this, life was not easy; there is still the matter of disease and inflated infant mortality rate, as well as the huge amount of physical labor this lifestyle demanded. Not that hard work is bad, but it certainly leaves little time for education or personal pursuits. Meanwhile, urban growth was exploding and cities housed about half of the population. They certainly did not spend their time 'outside in the fresh air and the sunshine tending their gardens'. They spent their time in factories and tenement buildings, fighting poverty, disease, and overcrowding. This time period also saw the largest influx of poor immigrants in American history, which only worsened conditions in cities without any sanitation laws.The literacy rates today are nothing to brag about. Quality of education is pretty much at an all-time low. See Charlotte Iserbyt's book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. I would not argue that education in America is a sad affair, especially in relation to the achievements of other countries. But remember, this is not just a debate about how good/bad things are now, it's about how good/bad they are in comparison to the 1900s. In the 1900s, many people never attended school, and plenty of those that did only received a few years of it. Rural schools were staffed by a teacher with little formal education themselves teaching a class that was not even age-graded. Urban schools were so overcrowded they had to turn students away. I would gladly bet that, at any age, the average student of today would have a better, more complete education the average student of 1900.People who had money had real value in the form of gold and silver coin, not paper money and blips on a computer screen. America is now the number one debtor nation. People today are insane, they call debt wealth .The fact of the matter is that people today, even the relatively poor, have longer lives, more space, luxury, and leisure time than their equivalents 100 years ago. I am not claiming that America has no problems, just that the length and quality of life for its citizens has increased. This is pretty hard to factually argue.