I well remember wading knee-deep along New Road on my way to the Trocadero Hotel in Surawong for a beer. No fun at all. I won't bore you with the mathematics but a few calculations show that life is relatively cheaper now than it was in the 1970s. Communications are very cheap these days, with the Internet. Phone calls overseas are not expensive.
Electrical appliances are tremendously good value here.
And I saw a T-shirt in Makro the other day for just 29 baht. You knew everyone. Bangkok was, at least for Westerners, like a village. Houses were mostly two or three storeys high, and this contributed to the feeling of living in a small town not a city. You can see this in the Sukhumvit car chase in 'The Man with the Golden Gun', the Bond film made in 1976.