I think the root problem is political: recognizing that USA's extraordinarily successful mid-century economic model was the result of a compromise by the ruling capitalists to avoid facing a European-style revolution (e.g. Bolshevism) at home.
As the Cold War reached its heights in the early 60s, that delicate equilibrium was destroyed, and the capitalists had a new mandate. State regulation, labor unions went from "necessary evil to avoid revolution" to "evil", and the robber barons could return to their early 20th century form. Thus we got the 70s and endless financialization.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
As of ~2019, the US had the world's 4th highest median income, even adjusted for cost of living -- easily the highest median income of any large country.
And the median income in the United States has been growing rapidly. Sort the table by "Absolute Change" and you'll see that in absolute terms, the US median income grew the 5th most over the period from 2009-2019. Again, the US is comfortably ahead of other large countries when measured according to this statistic. (For example, US workers saw over 2x as much wage growth as Canadian workers did over the same time period.)
Speaking as an American here, it frustrates me when Americans fail to realize how good they have it compared with people from developing countries. Americans are some of the world's richest people, yet they still insist on hoarding as many good jobs for themselves as possible. When Americans talk of "reducing inequality" it often seems hypocritical.
I genuinely don't understand why it is that the people who are best off also complain the loudest.
Housing, healthcare, education and other living expenses are astronomical. We can't just look at the high incomes.
Successful for the elite, yes. Not for the median American.
People who earn the median income are hardly elite.
Median income earners will never own a home in current conditions. That's a significant downgrade from past generations. We are not better off.
House prices in the US are high, but not remarkably so. (E.g. Canada's house prices are higher.) I'd argue that expensive US houses have more to do with NIMBYism than the overall health of the US economy.
Focusing on housing in particular is itself a form of cherry-picking a single statistic. The median income data I linked is adjusted for cost of living, which includes housing and other stuff.
The last 3-4 years have been awful for the median American. The "prosperity" of 201X-2019 was funded by loose financial conditions: it's basically just debt. Purely debt-driven "growth" should not be mistaken for a healthy economy. And we are feeling the consequences of that debt-driven growth now, with high inflation, recession conditions, and a global sidle away from the dollar.
Taking national wealth or GDP and implying it's shared equally amongst its citizens would be an absurdly disingenuous argument.
You're not doing that, are you?
There really was a vast right-wing conspiracy. It started with this memo.[1]
Here's the background: [2]
Understand that, before this, businesses rarely had lobbyists or engaged in political action. That totally changed in the 1970s.
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Po...
[2] https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arm...
Yes. Communism was a competitor which kept capitalism from acting like a monopoly. Once communism was no longer taken seriously, capitalism was unrestrained. When the USSR finally ran down, there was no stopping the push to plutocracy.
It's not that communism was a better system. It was that the existence of an alternative kept capitalism from getting out of control.
I do think physical capitalism exhausted itself, but it was more in the 90s and 00s that we see more psychological capitalism arriving with the first internet products that have no physicality associated with them - social media and networks. Then we have a real (or apparent) exhaustion of physical capitalism.
It makes me recall one of my favorite cars that was never built, the Norwegian Troll. The government decided not to expend their limited capital to the company as they could trade fish for Ladas to get cars.