The Debate on Whether America’s Best Days Are Past, or Ahead

This is all too common with the NY Times.

  Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who 
  has patiently developed the proposition in a series of research papers 
  over the last few years, has bundled his arguments into an ambitious new 
  book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” (Princeton University Press).

  “If you are sitting in Silicon Valley, rich and at the frontier of 
  technology,” said Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard, “it is probably true 
  that things are getting better.”

  The same can’t always be said for the rest of us.

  The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed

With automation they need less of our work, so we should work more for less, while the capital they have amassed does most of the work through automation.

Logically nothing we do as a species makes sense unless looked through the logic of economics, consumption, and production. It's a system with its own logic and we are so conditioned to think in its terms that we can think of no other way of organizing people and/or work.

The best days for America was the American Dream as George Carlin said you have to dreaming to believe it. It was simply a hope that more of that money would trickle down to pretty much anyone if they worked hard enough.

That hope is no longer there. No matter which way you frame it.

That's somewhat true because housing restrictions in major coastal cities have become so draconian, raising prices; moving to cheap places like Texas, Phoenix, or Atlanta is one way to increase leisure over consumption. But there may be other issues around the productivity hits that dividing up brainwork creates: http://jakeseliger.com/2016/01/09/the-more-you-do-it-the-bet....

What you're looking for, is "standard of living." And the part they're not really making explicit, is that economists have long accepted as a truism, that the best predictor of "standard of living" is productivity.

Suggest a 4 day week and people think you've lost your mind.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18315

>Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative "exercise in subtraction" suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades.

Completely agree - however it (sadly) leads me to think of the popular quote that is something along the lines of...

"born to late to explore the Earth, and born to early to explore the stars."

Exploration is great and it's worth pursuing, but making it a main goal and coincidently (or on purpose) an excuse for ruining our only real existing livable planet is I think wrong.

The fall of America is not just a noteworthy individual experience, it also heralds the potential collapse of pax Americana which has framed innovation for the last half century.

Why? I'd rather live in a mostly automated robotic leisure society where I "work" 10-20 hours a week and enjoy my life here than break my back mining space rocks for some market wage so it can be put into some mass advertised consumer product no one really needs. And then what? Dig up that planets resources and continue on to the next ad nausea?

I think if we could pick a purpose it would be endless comfort and leisure. This could be possible once we finally nail some things politically and technologically. The idea that we'll export 20th century capitalism to the stars seems very questionable to me (The same way its laughable to look back the the USSR's ideas of exporting Communism to the stars or just another step back into exporting feudalism/slavery/mercantilism to the stars being just as silly). By the time that's feasible we'll see 20th century capitalism as antiquated because we'll be able to do some much more with AI and robotics. Scarcity will be much less of an issue.

[1] http://www.prb.org/Multimedia/Video/2010/humanlongevity.aspx

On top of that, being depressed about it certainly isn't a reasonable reaction to reality, just an emotional reaction to perception. It's probably worse than pointless since the most likely use would be as a rationalization for giving up.

Those pining for the productivity of the 50s and 60s certainly are allowed their biases, but be aware this includes making sure women and minorities can't get good jobs and keeping college enrollments expensive and out of reach for many. You needed to be a middle-class or higher white male to get the benefits of society at that time. Why do we assume in this hypothetical where we go back in time and enjoy those peroids that we aren't a woman or a black person or that we don't care about any of the social issues of the time?

Also, I hope you're not a steelworker in 1960's in this scenario or actually any manufacturing, because in a decade your job will disappear permanently due to foreign competition. Oh and all the good jobs are "company men" jobs so daily overtime is expected, drinking with your coworkers is expected after, socializing only with your coworkers is expected, and the family is the sort of thing your wife manages and who you interact with on the weekends.

Look at the progress of medicine, science, human rights, rates of violence, access to information, etc. All have improved dramatically and continue to.

A lot of the policies, morals, and ways of thinking about work are vestigial elements in our society from a time that no longer exists. The way we work, what we do, what we consider "productive", how we distribute wealth… none of these things really make sense when you sit down and think about it. But we are so wrapped up in the past that we continue to sell that dream and use "capitalism", "freedom", and the "market economy" to justify policy, morality, and ethics.

We are entering an era of technological progress and innovation with a mindset from a time before the transistor existed. There will be a point in time when we will have to move away from what we think of today as free market capitalism. There will be a point in time where we have to rethink our ideas around individuality and what it means to be "self made". We are already butting up against this transition period, and it's being met with firm resistance. It will be painful and I don't see it happening in my lifetime, but it will happen. And we can't look backward to the way things were unless we want the world to go back to the state it was when those things were true.

If we ever want to live in a Star Trek universe we will have to completely reprioritize… everything. We will have to refocus and science and education and realize that 9/10 current jobs are completely unnecessary.

America has a real hatred for "freeloaders." We are raised to believe we are special and unique and possible of doing great things on our own. Raised to believe that if we are smart and work hard and make it, that we earned it. That we deserve to live a better life than others. It's mostly bullshit. When you think about it it's obvious. But we don't think about it, we just do, because the alternative makes us uneasy.

I have only ever met a handful of extraordinary individuals in my lifetime. They are few and far between. Most people, including myself, add very little value to society. The amount I get paid relative to what I actually do is so wildly out of whack it's hard to stomach sometimes when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror. I do not deserve the life I live. Then again, neither does anyone around me. But we all pretend we do, and we move forward. Some (most?) probably never stop to think about it and believe they deserve it.

TL;DR The economic, political, moral and ethical models that emerged in the post-war era no longer apply. We should recognize this and start to rethink them, as they were really only designed for that point in time. The past is, hopefully, irrelevant.