Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The problem is so big that is seems utterly impossible.
Even if we elect some bright-eyed big dreamer utpoist as president, the very structure of our government is so rotten that it will not permit any change. It's so broken that it really seems like it'd be less work to tear it all down and start over. Otherwise it's a generations-long battle to reform everything. Can you even imagine what it would take to get Congress to agree to term limits? They can't even agree to pay the national debt.
What can we do? Voting isn't enough, protesting isn't enough, what's left?
I really hate living here. The cognitive dissonance between the rah rah america best types and the people starving in the streets is just sickening. Something is very wrong in the world and it's so huge that you can't even imagine it getting better
I hope you are joking, or do you really believe this would be a solution to anything?
>> I really hate living here. The cognitive dissonance between the rah rah america best types and the people starving in the streets is just sickening. Something is very wrong in the world and it's so huge that you can't even imagine it getting better
I think you are living in a negative news bubble. Historically, the world is doing better than ever. Go travel, meet people outside of you circle if they are the gloom and doom types.
>> What can we do? Voting isn't enough, protesting isn't enough, what's left?
Start by working on your self, family, house, garden, friends, neighborhood, city,...
Yes, that’s true. If you read “Enlightenment Now”, there are tons of wonderful graphs showing life improving. And for almost every country, as it gets richer, it gets happier. But the one exception is the USA. We’ve gotten richer lately, but not happier.
Our government’s decision making ability is messed up. We have an excellent economy, but debt is increasing. Our government has income, but we nearly defaulted on our debt. Healthcare has been a problem for 30+ years.
My state of Texas is run by Republican primary voters, which are an extreme 10% of the population.
We need to end gerrymandering with single-party primaries. (I like jungle primaries with ranked choice voting.) We need popular elections for President (not everything riding on swing states). We need to remove the filibuster. We need to weaken the Speaker’s power, which caused omnibus bills rather than real debate.
I’ve seen good activism and change at the city level. YIMBY’s are making progress. They’re now working at the state level. But it is still hard to see us making the necessary fixes at the federal level. I have horrible worries about what will happen if we don’t fix those very soon.
It might just be that the structure and productivity of the post war economies, a lot of them heavily focused on manufacturing, had just become increasingly unprofitable?
It was. You can see it in the demographics of places like Johnstown or Scranton starting about 1950. They had a continual decline in population of about 10% per decade every decade. It didn't just start in 1980--it was well underway by 1980.
And people like to sing paeans to Reagan like everybody loved him, but roughly 40 million of us saw right through him both times and voted against that sack of shit. While those areas were going to decline no matter what, Reagan's policies absolutely strangled the old manufacturing economies while doing absolutely not one damn thing for the people being hurt.
I always want to slap people when they say "Things were better in the past(tm)". "Oy, I lived through Reagan. I remember 22.7% unemployment. It sucked to be poor; it sucked to be a minority; it sucked to be a laborer. In what fucking way was your poor, ignorant ass better off back then as opposed to now?"
Finally, over time, automation didn't help. The Natrona Heights, PA steel plant was brought back online recently. A plant that used to employ 10,000 men now employs a couple hundred engineers.
It's unfortunate. The main line would be awesome for transit. Really wish they'd build rail back up to Scranton from Philly too. PA has so much potential but the older generation needs to die off first and they gotta get the corruption out of the state legislature. Pennsyltucky isn't helping the situation.
However, there is a world of difference between "Things are getting a bit expensive" and "You have no job starting tomorrow and no hope of getting another one for the foreseeable future."
You can help cushion some the results of a disaster even if you can't stop the disaster.
I can go on and on. None of it ever materialized.
Reagan and Co. were definitely in the "We've done not a damn thing, and it didn't work." camp.
Keep in mind the Democrats controlled Congress during much of Reagans tenure. The President can't create laws, only support them.
Clinton ('93 to '95), Obama ('9 to '11) all had periods where the Democrats held every single office - the House, Senate and Presidency and could have passed whatever they wanted along party lines. Yet they didn't.
By the time Clinton got elected, the damage was done. The pension funds had been looted. The companies had declared bankruptcy and were gone. Families were divorced and torn apart due to men working 200 miles away for 10+ years. etc.
And I DO have beef about Clinton--NAFTA in particular. But nothing that Clinton or Obama did is even remotely on the level of the devastation during Reagan/Bush.
But presumably the damage can be reversed? If so, then you should blame every president after.
If it can't be reversed, then I guess it's not really worth arguing about?
Then comes along Reagan, defeats inflation (sure Carter started it, but Reagan didn't falter when the recession hit), then ushers in the biggest uninterrupted economic boom since the 60's and said "you should be proud to be American". He was elected with 51% of the vote in 1980 and remarkable 59% in 1984 (carried every state except MN).
Of course along with that came things the left finds abhorrent - belief in capitalism, minimal government, pride in being American (basically hate speech to the left), so Reagan became a punching bag for the left and despite 30+ years having passed, they still love to blame him for things that happen today.
But put into perspective, it shouldn't be surprising he was so popular at the time.
This is the template for automation of all jobs in all fields.
Automating all work seems like a great idea, at least in an economy where humans can survive without working.
At my age, my grandfather was five years from death, still laying on his back, out in the elements, welding facing up with slag dripping on him while boxcars rolled over his head. And it's not like he was making phenomenal money.
It is good that job is gone.
However, we never figured out what to do with all the people those jobs would employ.
That's exactly the problem it seems.
I don't know why this is unlikely. He was the smart brother and the only one who gave a shit back then.
Arguably (and I believe it) Ted K legitimately grew a social conscience in the 80s.
Incomes of the workers continued to increase, they were just outside the USA. Rich Americans were running a world economy, not just the American economy, so their incomes increased. American workers did well - their incomes remained high while competing with everyone in the globe.
First off, since when the "American Dream", earning "more than your parents"? The American Dream, as far as I know, what always "start with nothing and have a comfortable middle class existence".
And it's funny that the article complains about moving away from the New Deal politics. Europe, which didn't move away from New Deal politics, saw worse economic growth than the US did over the past few decades and if anything, Europe as well move away from the more extreme elements of socialism because it was choking their economy.
It's also full of "facts" that imply something that isn't true. "The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left.". This is an old trope that completely ignores the different tax structure back when rates were 70% (i.e. nobody actually paid them).
It then lambasts "Reagonomics" as "taking hard earned white money and giving it to black welfare queens" (yikes), yet ignores the fact that growth in minority incomes has been higher than whites over the past few decades and in fact, whites aren't even the highest income ethnic group any more.
This feels more like an emotional analysis than anything fact based. Of course you'll never find out the real reason for this economic changes if you don't look at the facts.
I wrote up a long “better” explanation I hope to share here later, but suffice it to say, this article greatly overstates the causation coming from the public’s political views when it really was a consequence of more material changes. Namely, communications technology, computers, and financial innovation started allowing smaller groups of people to produce value (obsoleting many low/mid provincial middle class jobs in the process) for much larger markets just as the rest of the developed world started to catch back up in manufacturing. As a double whammy plastics and aluminum hit prime time and disrupted the massive existing steel/textile base businesses they competed against. And the USSR began falling behind for their own reasons so nobody really worried about losing the lower/middle classes to socialism - but short of extreme isolationism it’s not like anything could really fix the competitiveness problem.
Also the article was discussing "greatest economy ever for the USA".
Portuguese industrialization only began in the post-war period, Spain was still rebuilding from the destructive civil war in the 1930s, Türkiye was rebuilding from it's civil war in the 1920s, and South America largely had extraction economies that industrialized thanks to mass immigration from Europe throughout the 20th century
Post WW2, the only standing untouched industrial countries were the US, Canada, and Australia. And those 3 countries led developmental indicators until the early 2000s when Western Europe finally caught up.
I don’t know about other South American countries.
I wouldn’t call Portugal an European power, they never had a significant population. Same for Switzerland.
Spain was completely destroyed just before world war 2 during a civil war
Most of Asia and Africa had been put under European control before world war 2, which actually was one of the reasons there was war: Germans had almost no colonies and wanted to expand
Turkey had lost world war 1 a few years back (Ottoman Empire)
Also, British India had de facto autonomy during WW2.
WW2 did help India industrialize, but British India was starting from such a relatively low base that it was basically playing catch up.
I'd recommend reading India's War by Srinath Raghavan to get an economic history of India during the interwar and WW2 period.
The socialist world wasn't necessarily stuck in place either: Yugoslavia's high point, the years of the vikendica and middle-class leisure travel across Europe and Asia, was the 1960s-1970s. Granted, Yugoslavia was outside the Iron Curtain, but even the USSR is instructive here: living standards were rising even there during the Krushchev era, which is why the Brezhnev era is regarded as such stagnation.
The people in charge of the economy ignored the reasons behind the actions of previous administrations, and when those measures began to hurt the economy you got a backlash from the voters. Nowadays, too few voters understand the economy to make any real economic arguments as campaign issues. The result is the left-right BS we get as an excuse for platforms.
There’s even a name for this bias - Baader Meinhoff effect
Here’s a Google trend: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...
It shows the usage of the term peaked in 2004 (Google only has data past 2004).
I'm with you that independent invention happens pretty frequently (which makes sense, because figuring things out 'which makes sense' tautologically makes sense), but that also means you gotta humble yourself when making claims of 'first!'
It's a common phenomenon
Source though? In what time period?
College doesn't make you better or anything but looking at my own family and where I grew up, it's not the college educated making up the biggest blocks of conservative voters ...