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Ask Slashdot: Did Baby Boomers Break America? (time.com)
"Automation taking jobs is only one symptom of a larger problem," argues an anonymous Slashdot reader, sharing a link to this excerpt from Steven Brill's new book Tailspin, which seeks to identify "the people and forces behind America's fifty-year fall -- and those fighting to reverse it." The excerpt has this intriguing title: "How Baby Boomers Broke America."
As my generation of achievers graduated from elite universities and moved into the professional world, their personal successes often had serious societal consequences. They upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones. They created exotic, and risky, financial instruments, including derivatives and credit default swaps, that produced sugar highs of immediate profits but separated those taking the risk from those who would bear the consequences. They organized hedge funds that turned owning stock into a minute-by-minute bet rather than a long-term investment... Regulatory agencies were overwhelmed by battalions of lawyers who brilliantly weaponized the bedrock American value of due process so that, for example, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long. Lawyers then contested the meaning of every clause while racking up fees of hundreds of dollars per hour from clients who were saving millions of dollars on every clause they could water down...
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable -- government agencies, Congress, the courts... That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It's the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners' winnings... [I]n a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
Brill argues that the unprotected need things like "a realistic shot at justice in the courts," writing that instead "the First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy." And he shares these statistics about the rest of America today:
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable -- government agencies, Congress, the courts... That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It's the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners' winnings... [I]n a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
Brill argues that the unprotected need things like "a realistic shot at justice in the courts," writing that instead "the First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy." And he shares these statistics about the rest of America today:
- For adults in their 30s, the chance of earning more than their parents dropped to 50% from 90% just two generations earlier.
- In 2017, household debt had grown higher than the peak reached in 2008 before the crash, with student and automobile loans staking growing claims on family paychecks.
- Although the U.S. remains the world's richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development...
Has he identified the source of a societal malaise? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
And is Brill's thesis correct? Did baby boomers break America?
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
Millennials: Facebook. Twitter. Selfies. Selfie sticks.
The root of all of these problems is that bribery is legal in the US. I would imagine that we have probably the most corrupt government in the modern world. Make bribery illegal again, and most of these problems would (eventually) go away, because we'd have a government that represented the citizens again.
I don't respond to AC's.
Is it? Here's $1 million if you'll change your opinion.
Not all boomers were involved in the financial frauds and messes. Those did indeed cause trouble, should have been blocked as illegal right away.
However, our government has been lousy at catching abuses, at least as far back as the 1800s. Hear of the "robber barons" of that time? The term was not spuriously given.
Boomers have contributed in many technical fields, for example, and without those contributions the state of computing and microelectronics would be far back of where it is. But to understand that you do need to know a little history.
It should be noted that the push to get EVERYONE able to buy a house came from government, and that broke down the finance rules that kept the sharks out, leading to the takeover by so many fraudsters (of many ages). As I recall this started in the Clinton administration, but effects were not instantly obvious. To really screw things up takes a computer, and to totally gefuck the world takes a government.
Most of us did the best we could with what we had to work with. I hope you do the same, and your children will complain. And so it goes across generations, the way it always has.
First up: The generational split is kind of a cheap division of humans in general. Few splits are really good though - but the artificial grouping on vague birth year ranges is particularly a weak way to draw meaning. Like, zodiac-level weak.
Even what we DO commonly believe about generations is largely about misunderstanding them. The whole "baby boomers were hippies" notion was largely based on statistical exceptions - sure, you could point to groups of hippies, but they largely did NOT represent the group's popular view.
All that said - sure - the net effect of a glut of children, who largely grew up believing more conservatively than their Roosevelt-era parent generation - is largely a negative in economic terms.
They took a nation that was able to produce large amounts of industrial-scale capability, and basically sold it for a large number of houses and cars (1980s), and now are at the stage where they are no longer economically productive, but instead are both voting to reduce social medical care, while using extensive amounts of medical care.
It's basically a triple whammy on the very system that enriched them. That's on average though - and largely the reason we got Trump - basically the old/white group was the dominant contributors.
So, they erroneously get credit for progress they largely didn't actually support, then vote against their self-interest, while stripping the nation of resources. Yeah - for an arbitrary group, they kind of aren't that helpful on average.
Actually it was the extreme postwar naivete of "the greatest generation", the generation that fought world war 2.
They broke the world in an attempt to build a better, non-violent world for their children --- the baby boomers, who grew up to be a bunch of assholes.
Oh the BITTER irony.
Letters from my GGGfathers would call you not only a liar, but a dupe. Your knowledge of actual history somehow permits you to make such a statement using the Ayn Rand lens of life, which is a zero-sum observation.
Although the US-UK affinity is pretty unholy, there were lots of reasons to enter WWI. And bankrupting the Russians was the way to crack the Berlin Wall, perhaps the only wise thing R Reagan ever did.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
There's just one thing that broke America: Hubris.
The belief that America is the greatest, best, top, first, you-name-it broke it beyond repair.
Hubris always turns a champion into a loser, from sports to finance to politics.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Probably good points but at risk of being misunderstood.
Can I clarify that there are 2 points made in this comment:
1) The North American civil war was more about money than slavery.
2) WW1 was a cost to the USA.
and 3, which seems to be implied:
3) Although WW2 created a situation that put the USA economy in pole position, the trend of inequality started by Lincoln via WW1 economics continued.
Viewing things as 'there was always this trend of inequality building from the start behind everything else going on and we need to see past all the economic changes' is a bit complicated.
I view things more from a money view point, which is - USA was wealthy after WW2 and it's tough at the top so it's been on it's way down. Inequality, things like this come 2nd place to the effects of wealth in general.
A blog I run for the wealth
These are the guys who went from the "we" generation of the '60s to the "me" generation of the '70s. It couldn't be their fault.
If you want to design and code a successful application, you has better understand the use case and the processes around that application. Just being able to 'code' is hopeless.
The problem with Brill is that 90% of the population can't keep up with him or argue with his points. This is likely almost entirely correct and truthful with plenty of support work to make a strong cogent set of arguments (as strong as can be expected of something outside of science.)
I'm not sure of the practicality of these academic exercises when something for the masses is likely needed.
"The Century of the Self" documentary is amazingly good considering it doesn't have the ability to be dense like a book can. I expect Brill to approach similar themes from different angles as that documentary. It's not just the boomers to blame; they are both the victims (of society) and the biggest perpetrators upon growing up.
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The blame is not on an entire generation, but on select individuals of that generation. The one-percenters, no matter what the age, are still the culprits.
Isn't that a question of density of population? Like in population has grown so much that everything is getting scarcer for everybody. I know the US are huge (I'm European), but nonetheless, some areas are so overcrowded that it's impossible but for the wealthiest to buy a property. The same goes for jobs: there are already a million people with the same skills than you but better at them, and available from all over the world thanks to globalization. It's becoming more and more difficult to stand out and not just be useless. You can make similar reasoning for almost all the things that people in their 30s have more difficulties to obtain than their parent. Isn't that all linked to the size of the population compared to the size of our little planet?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Don't want to pay market wages for basic labor? No problem, just hire an illegal.
Don't want to pay market wages for skilled labor? No problem, just bring in a visa worker.
"Waah intergenerational politics makes people click on headlines, so click away masses!" /.
FFS shut up, it's just more clickbait. This shit needs to stop appearing on
At the very least I expect the clickbait on here to actually be somewhat related to "clickbait for nerds". Not "clickbait for whiny morons."
The Western world used to plan for generational time periods. Companies were set up with the intent of providing a regular profit over time, slowly increasing, but overall being reliable producers.
Back in the 70s, some people started to decide that they could start selling bits of these to make a fast buck, so you could buy a company, split it up into components, and sell bits of it for more than you paid for it. Voila, instant profit, and it'd only take a year.
Then investors started to want these immediate gains more and more. So more of the regular reliable producers were split up.
That put the regular producers up against the profit margins of the breakers, and many were written off as being "not profitable", making it tough to get loans to continue operating, meaning they had to sell up (which went to the breakers to get bits sold off at profit to financiers).
Investors getting used to the fast money only started to look at the immediate future. Can they make money in the next year? If yes, then all's shiny!
Very very few people in the West are now asking the question "Where do we see ourselves in 50 years?". If you're not asking yourself that question, you can easily find yourself on a path that looks rosy for the next few years, but with a huge drop that you just don't see coming. Or by the time you do, there's sod all you can do about it; the inertia of all the short termist vision catches up with you.
Instant gratification isn't a long term strategy.
I was born at the end of the baby boom, we came of age in the late 70's and early 80's, when the country was going through a backlash against the counterculture and political tumoil of the late 60's and early 70's. Gone was the optimism and hope for a better world replaced by greed. Everyone was trying to get MBA or Law degrees. Engineering, science, the arts? Most people we're interested. As my age group entered the workforce and started and gained experience they only seemed to care about making money, and as much money as fast as possible. And remember, it wasn't only Wall Street. The whole Dot Com boom was awash from get-rich-quick speculative investing from the Boomers and managed by the late boomers. The whole cynical stupidity of the browser wars was driven by assholes to make the web into electric metaphors for things that the Boomers knew how to monetize.
The visionaries behind the Web were outgunned by the banal greed of Bill Gates who is a classic Robber Baron, who is now in the stage of life where he is trying to buy redemption with good deeds. And even then, his good deeds are making him money. I've heard this from a number of NGOs who have worked with his foundation. They don't give unless they can get. And then we had the fake hippie Steve Jobs who helped spark the PC revolution and then spent the last half of his life doing everything in his power to crush it and turn general computing devices that could be customized and extended to fit you into consumer electronics that forced people to do things the way that Jobs wanted you to do.
For every Woz there were a hundred or more Jobs. Woz and those like him, Steward Brand is an early boomer, Linus is a later boomer but they are the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So yeah, the late boomers, we really did and do suck.
As someone who will never get to touch a pension while Boomers guaranteed themselves thousands of dollars a month on top of social security, yes, they did. I'm only 31 and have been putting money into a 401k for a only a few years now, so I'll be lucky if I even get to retire before 70.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Delays in the implementation of a safety regulation? How does that cause the kind of structural problems we see? Would everything be great if regulation didn’t have to face due process?
Yes, all the time and energy spent trying to secure a government advantage is productivity lost. The solution is less government power and money for rich people to fight over. Then instead of using the country’s talent to shuffle pieces around the board, that talent could be used for productive work.
There are a variety of policy and market reasons for the transfer of wealth from young to old.
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* One reason for the age-based increasing income increasing inequality is the transfer of wealth and purchasing power from the society at-large to existing asset holders, who are typically older. And this is done via monetary policy.
Monetary policy is about trying to bring about prosperity via manipulation of the money supply. The net result of monetary policy is the transfer of purchasing power from one group to another. For example, inflation doesn't involve a transfer of money, but it makes a saver poorer and a debtor less poor by changing the purchasing power each one has, by changing the value of the currency. One uses monetary policy to stoke or reduce inflation. Or QE - Quantitative Easing. It was printing money to buy bonds (government debt and mortgage debt). The printing of money has some side effect - it is not consequence-free. The recipients of that money firehose were made wealthier. And the asset bubbles which resulted also made existing asset holders (physical (e.g. real estate) and financial - stock market went from 11K (2011) to 25K (2017) in six years) wealthier.
Governments through the ages have always wanted easy, controllable, predictable prosperity, but in reality achieving prosperity is much trickier and chaotic. It requires first the correct intelligence, temperament and values of the population. Then the population interacts with the natural world and creates legal and physical and security infrastructure. Then, more chaotic, is the creation of items that people value (not merely to satisfy speculative demand (which is quite volatile), like items to gamble on, but things that will satisfy consumption demand (which is more persistent) - demand to consume those items, both goods and services and perhaps non-speculative financial products). And then the march of technology to continue to improve social welfare and the standard of living. And then through some luck, that value and purchasing power must be distributed in some semi-equitable way to the population so that it can consume those things they value.
That's complicated and volatile and not guaranteed. Manipulating the money supply is much simpler. Prosperity through the stroke of a pen. Unfortunately, if it were possible, Haiti or Sierra Leone could become prosperous in short order. Obviously, that will not happen. But manipulating the money supply and the value of the currency to bring about prosperity has been a siren song for policy makers and leaders over the millennia. And the side effect today has been the transfer of wealth from young to older.
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* Also, straight up preying on the young by using them as pass through entities for government money firehosed to the education sector. The young get stuck with the debt, and education costs escalate because they're being paid by our rich Uncle Sam. Yet we all see the reports on how much wealthier those with degrees are versus those without.
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* Next medical costs and insurance. There are both policy and market-based reasons for this.
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* Then, offshoring of manufacturing and intellectual property - offshoring of the production of value. Again both policy and market-based reasons for this.
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* Finally, we're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution, with software automation. The effect is the same as what happened with the industrial revolution - one person could create a much larger amount of product because of technology. To summarize, it was the "consolidation of the production of value."
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So - the net result of all of these factors? Young people are f-cked.
It's dead simple to find proof it was about slavery; they stated it openly and on the record many times. Economics was the driver behind slavery; it is for many things... There are always multiple factors involved, but the institution of slavery was by far the largest factor and the reasons for slavery is beside the point...why they needed to believe in slavery is breaking things down; you can always do that and just keep going as far as you'd like. This is often a tactic to divert attention by focusing on underlying causes instead (you can always go until you get to flawed humanity then to the devil or whatever.)
FYI:
Lincoln also greatly undermined the free press! He cut funding; prior to him the press got a few % of the national GDP! I forget the number but today it would be one of the biggest government programs (subsidized not run by gov) after healthcare/retirement (military if you consider that a service.)
The civil war also led to the birth of the modern corporation of today and a massive empowerment of the banks, which led to their take over of policy and later the great depression...
FYI: The Civil War began BEFORE Lincoln got started; and many historians rank Buchanan as the worst because of his role in that war (though he did try to stop it, just didn't do a good job at it... because he sucked?)
Lincoln WON because he finally realized burning cotton would bankrupt the south. (Cotton was so big they based their money on it instead of gold!) Checkmate. It was always about cotton; that is true-- they have to live with themselves so they rationalize a culture of slavery to fuel their economy and "way of life" which many people will die for... Just like if you told meat eaters to stop eating beef for the health of the planet... that is almost civil war kind of stuff right there. Give me burgers or give me death!
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Linus is a later boomer
Linus Torvalds was born in 1969. He's Gen X, not a Boomer.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. America is due to experience the fate of Ancient Rome. Our elected leadership is corrupt and self-serving, income inequality and average debt is rising, and our infrastructure is decaying. Methinks revolution is not too far off.
Adjusted for inflation it takes about a dollar and a half today to equal a dollar in 2000. The chances of someone in the middle class making the same in inflation-adjusted dollars as their parents is damn near 0%.
I think I'm the first to post this here, so here goes a very brief (and therefore not strictly accurate) account of what's happening...
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer, by exerting continuous downward pressure on earned income (wages, salaries, and contractual work) and producing ever more extreme mechanisms for the wealthy (owners) to accrue increasing control over capital for their own benefit.
Baby boomers, millennials, the gig economy, precarious employment, anti-union legislation, political and legal corruption, environmental degradation, unhealthy and dangerous working conditions, immoral and illegal wars, racism and police brutality, etc., are all symptoms of capitalism working as it is supposed to. Nothing's broken. This is how our chosen economic system works by design.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism", post WWII until the mid-1970s, was the result of massive wealth redistribution, e.g. tax payer funded public infrastructure building that created millions of jobs, rapid expansion and subsidy of further and higher education, and progressive taxation, whereby the the richest paid the highest rates of taxes in order to fund govt. infrastructure projects, education, etc., starting from after the Great Depression, which itself was caused by massive wealth inequality. In other words, the USA enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented economic prosperity because it adopted a form of socialist policies known as Keynesianism.
What did I miss?
BTW, this guy made a whacky film that runs through the central concepts modern life as we experience them today. It's dense, covering a lot of ground in a very short time, so worth using the pause button while you think through what he's presenting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
As a Gen X'er I look at my parents generation and compare it to those who came before. My grandparents and great grandparents lived far less expensive lives than my parents.
My parents generation just consumed EVERYTHING in their paths. Cars, houses, financial stuff, etc. They set fire to their kids' and grandkids' futures to pay for their own present. And they are still doing it.
The fatter they get, both physically and figuratively the hungrier they get for more stuff. If they were gamblers it would be long last the time when they should be institutionalized for their problem. But they aren't. Thank God they will be dying out soon.
If we can get back to the standard of living my grandparents and great grandparents had, we might just be ok as a country.
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about the Civil War to dispute it.
Na, just kidding.
South Carolina
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
Mississippi
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Louisiana
As a separate republic, Louisiana remembers too well the whisperings of European diplomacy for the abolition of slavery in the times of annexation not to be apprehensive of bolder demonstrations from the same quarter and the North in this country. The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.
Alabama
Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republican party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new principles, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and. her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized
Remember that the act claimed to have started the War Between the States was the firing by the guns at Ft. Sumpter on the US Navy blockading Charleston harbor.
Nope. The US Army troops from Charleston were at Fort Sumter, having withdrawn there for safety from land-based Fort Moultrie, but the forces of the Confederacy refused to let them be resupplied, seeking to starve them out, an act of war in itself, but eventually the separatists decided they would go to war, and initiated direct aggression.
Of course, the whole business with the Confederacy began with the forces of the South trying to manipulate the political and judicial system for their immoral practice of slavery and its distorting effects on their own economic development. There was a reason a state like Ohio produced more hay than the South. They actually invested in something other than the parasitic luxury crop of cotton.
Without slavery or its inherent amorality.
Not that the rest of the country was much better, but there is something wrong with owning people, deeply so. No matter how much your "culture" insists otherwise.
Of course, it was really just the oligarchs of the South who benefitted, but they had to con the masses of people somehow. So they vehemently played up bigotry, racism, and resentment of the North, and that model has been applied across the world in various forms.
Russia, China, Japan, Germany, Rwanda, Ireland, Brazil...make the downtrodden angry at the wrong target, then steal from them as they run off a cliff.
This reminds me of a cartoon from the 60s with a caption of "your fault!" that shows some hippie pointing to his dad, who is pointing to the granddad, who is pointing to the great-granddad, who is pointing to eventually back to a monkey with a startled look on its face.
No, the baby boomers didn't create all the problems of the world.
Some of the things that drive me crazy, are the lack of fiscal responsibility and outright dishonesty over the last 60 some years in government.
;)
How anyone could think it it is OK to run up government debt, budget after budget with deficits, not properly funding the lavish pensions promised to public employees and now the outright corruption in the bureaucratic and political leadership in government. Just to name a few things.
Did the boomers run things well, the only answer can be no, not that well. Because the bill is going to be coming due soon. And most of the boomers that created the problems are going to be long gone or worst sitting pretty with their stash.
Just my 2 cents
People like to blame generations, but I think the overall loss of stability is to blame. I work in IT and am doing well, but I know that a CIO coming in and wanting to make his mark could send my job to Infosys or Tata and put me out on the street. You didn't have this in the baby boomer years...there were practically no layoffs and companies kept their workers for a full career. People could reasonably expect to work for maybe 2 or 3 employers their whole career, and now long tenure employment is very hard to find. Instead, you have people who uproot their families and move across the country at the drop of a hat. Some people do this every year or two.
Being nomadic means you never stay in one place for long and can't put down roots anywhere. This applies to physical location as well as workplace. In the IT field, it means that the majority of workers have absolutely no clue what the business they're working for actually does...I know consultants who take pride in that fact and are at a new employer every 6 months. Previous generations weren't so quick to jump from employer to employer. One of the reasons was that they had pensions, another thing that most newer workers will never see.
I think people who lived in better times were more content, not always looking over their shoulder to see who was going to offshore their job, happy to have a steady paycheck that allowed them to pay their bills, and a guaranteed retirement in contrast to the casino bet that is the 401(k) plan. I also think that the US had a much better mix of employment opportunities -- you could easily graduate from high school and have a high-paying factory job you could keep for life instead of being forced through college like we are now. I live in an area with high housing prices...nothing as crazy as California but still bad. A lot of this is due to those baby boomers desperately trying to cash out the only asset they have left for its maximum value because they lost their pensions and retirement accounts. This is one of the things that's going to make life bad for the younger crowd as we work through this slug of the population.
I blame academia, finance and the media.
No. But it sure seems like some whiney millennial types want to act like it.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
They give you an official generation card when you become an American citizen.
I mean, my fellow Americans.
Ux is a buzzword of this decade. The only ux I'd considermis HP-UX.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Make sure that campaigning is done in all states, not only swing states.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Although the U.S. remains the world's richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
What the fuck did you think was going to happen when you imported tens of millions of illiterate poor people from the poorest countries on the planet? You thought the average wealth was going to go up, you idiots? You thought literacy would increase? What the fuck is wrong with you?
It was the political class. BOTH democrat & republicans...the "inside the beltway" types that screwed things up. To "the rich" that give to both political insider parties, they pass laws, make rules, have "insider" info for those in the club and the hell with everyone else.
I have to lay it at the feet of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics.
He shilled for the very wealthy who had gotten the short end of the stick (very high progressive taxation) as a result of the Keynsian New Deal
While he was not actually from the Baby Boomer generation, his ideas influence them to behave how the author describes.
reference
And Gen-X actually.
"Everybody knows the game is rigged" Leonard Cohen
Everything Steven Brill complained about here can be attributed to a neoliberal agenda. Think the 1% and their sycophants. While some are baby boomers, it would be wrong to say that all baby boomers are neoliberals and are therefore at fault. Most are too ignorant to even know what happened.
I could get into the weeds with this, but it would be at least as long at EditorDavid's post, and it would bore.
~
"Wealth, Mr Hobbes says, is Power" - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
The people who broke America were mostly Baby Boomers, but that is not to say that all Baby Boomers are responsible. It was mostly banksters, lawyers, politicians (see previous), etc who happened to be Boomers.
Milton Friedman was a brilliant economist, the same can't be said of you if you actually think he could cause this even if he tried. What people like yourself always fail to comprehend is why the US doesn't have that kind of economy anymore, or why we even had it in the first place, why it isn't coming back, and why it was a total fluke to begin with.
It's very simple: Germany started two world wars, which caused European countries to blow up each other's infrastructure, and later, after being pulled into a war we didn't ask for, the US had to cause further destruction. Japan decided to destroy Asia's infrastructure, then they thought they could destroy our navy, but it didn't work, and so in order for us to eliminate their offensive capability we had to carpetbomb all of their manufacturing capability. And then USSR simply made the economic blunder of the millennium: they adopted communism.
What all of this lead up to was that now the rest of the world was hopelessly dependent upon us since we were the only country left with a large scale infrastructure to build what they needed. That's what created all of those jobs that are now gone. Eventually the rest of the world (except Russia after the fall of the USSR, as well as the Warsaw pact countries who were forced into communism) had a competent infrastructure, and since they were still poor, they could offer labor services at a lower price. So guess what happens? We start seeing those jobs go away, and they won't ever return. Instead we got something far better: A very high tech, high skilled economy, and our median income is presently the highest ever at $59k. This means that half of the country makes that amount or higher.
So your can stop pretending you know economics, and you can stop trying to blame somebody for this, let alone pin it on one economist for no particular reason.
If any of you had even a modicum of honesty and intelligence you'd be talking about the fact that America imported 1.8 million third worlders last year. The baby boomers turned America from a 90% white country to a 60% white country. They doomed America to be a third world shithole.
How can you talk about job scarcity, transportation scarcity (traffic), and housing scarcity without talking about the fact that American has about 100 million people that don't belong here? Dishonesty. Denial.
Life is objectively, scientifically going downhill
Not true!
Just look at the hundreds of millions of people in China who are doing very well, now. The same applies to India and most of the rest of Asia. All you are seeing is equality taking place.
There are two ways to equalise a society. You can either raise everyone up to the level of the best, which is expensive, resource-intensive and broadly unsustainable. Or you can push everyone down to the level of the lowest. Both result in an "equal" society - one where the range from the lowest to the highest is reduced. (Excluding the ultra-rich, as they will never be subject to the pressures of "ordinary" people).
What globalisation has done is to make the flow of capital, knowledge and goods into a two-way street. Americans and some Europeans became wealthy (i.e. income above the global average) because they were better at the high-value, knowledge-driven stuff - leaving the commoditised, low value stuff to the RoW. It is pretty obvious to all who care to look, that this is no longer the case. China has the world's best supercomputers, many countries have space programmes, AI will blossom in the far-east as their governments aren't hobbled by funny western ideas of "privacy" and can make huge datasets of personal information available to their corporations. Transport costs are so low that goods can be made whereever it is cheapest.
The only thing that has declined is the west's ability to meet its level of entitlement.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
He's a complete moron. Don't waste your time.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Why do you assume that there should be anybody committing genocide at all?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No. This was no more correct the first 50 times someone tried to alter history by passing this off.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong, and even a brief look at actual history shows that.
Coming out of WW2, we gave veterans the GI Bill. Hundreds of thousands of people could now go to college who would never have been able to without that assistance. In 1956 the US would start the interstate highway system, which would be critical to moving goods around (and fundamentally change our entire commercial supply system). And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.
We had the newly educated masses, the means for transportation, and a path forward. The innovation to come from that in electronics, material science, and miniaturization is what propelled the advances that most people today take for granted, everything from telecommunications to food preservation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Not a baby boomer, but if the summary given is accurate, this whole book is full of more B.S. than even Piketty was pitching.
Baby boomers aren't much for deregulation and the other statistics given are just as stupid. One example: The U.S. has the third-highest poverty rate? Not in any absolute sense. If you use the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.90/day PPP, basically nobody in the U.S. is under the poverty rate unless they refuse any help at all from anyone. If you take the U.S. centric threshold of household poverty, then you can be poor in the U.S. and still 2.5 times as rich as the median world household.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Yes.
Somewhere along the way, some of the boomers got it in their head that while they garnered and enjoyed vast benefits and rights by living in this country, they didn't have to live up to the most basic responsibilities that this country asked of them. They turned and started siphoning off everything that every other generation had invested for them, ignoring the fact that there were more generations to come. We see the culmination of that in the self serving, greedy politicians they've elected who are doing everything they can to destroy what's left of the federal government, and this country, purely out of their own greed.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I am enjoying this thread, because so many people have discussed insightful perspectives on the social and economic dynamics behind all of this. If nothing else, one can appreciate that the stresses on modern life bred by the Baby Boom generation are quite complex and multifactorial. As one of those Baby Boomers, here is another perspective on this topic that I have perceived as society has changed over these years. It suggests that some of the deficits of modern society are an unintended consequence of morally righteous movements in that era, activities meant to promote social equality and broader educational opportunities. Note - this is not an argument against education and equality, just an abstract observation of social and economic dynamics.
This thesis can be described as “workforce inflation with wage dilution”.
The post-war period circa 1945-1980 was, in the USA, an era of unprecedented optimism and middle class wealth. People could fulfill the American dream of home ownership, employment, and social security. Yes, there were negatives, like the Cold War and the A-bomb, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Generation Gap, but the anxieties were balanced by the inspirations. There were gadgets galore, easy lifestyle, cultural robustness, and a sense of purpose and mission in projects like the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the United Nations, Rock and Roll, Levittown and the suburbs, Route 66 and the open road, the Space Race, and so many others. This came on the heels of a well tooled industrial infrastructure, a highly skilled workforce (including Rosie the Riveter and the ladies), and a post war surge in college education. So, if you are living in the 50's or 60's, listening to Elvis Presley or Little Richard on your portable radio, watching the Smothers Brothers or the Apollo moon walks on a brand new color TV that you bought at a suburban shopping mall that you drove to in your Chevy or Olds, while the dishes and clothes are being washed automatically for you, life could hardly be imagined to be better.
That unprecedented social ease and economic robustness was the product of just half the population working. In that era, the women stayed home to "tend the hearth", while the men worked. With half the adult population at work, and half at home raising children with family values, then society, for the majority of people, was at a peak of "feeling good". Then came women's lib and educational and social equality, products of the Bay Boom era. Suddenly the workforce is diluted with twice the number of job seekers to do the same number of jobs that gave us unprecedented economic success. This is NOT a diatribe against women or equality. Translated to modern terms, that was the end of an era in which, in a society where committed domestic partnerships were the consistent norm, one partner was out of the house "bringing home the bacon", while the other partner raised the family, crucial to the perpetuation of primary education, values, and social norms for the next generation. So, at that time, we had extraordinary wealth, material largesse based on manufacturing prowess, and cultural optimism which required only half of the adult population to produce, while the other half of the adult population stayed at home to perpetuate respectable social values.
What happens though if the other half, the stay-at-home half, suddenly wants to and does enter the workplace? By spending less time at home, then social mores and family morals risk becoming diluted, corrupted, or forgotten. At the same time, the workforce is now doubled, twice the people working to make what was already a peak or epitome level of material production. The problem is that there is a certain fixed economic value in the existing material production. If a new TV is valued at $100, having two people instead of one to manufacture it does not change its relative value, and thus its retail price cannot vary too much. The company cannot charge $200 because people's wages have not gone up, so $200 is overpr
That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how US minimum wage correlates to DRC where people make less than $400 a year, because someone living there can survive for a year on that and someone here cannot survive on that for a month without being homeless.
Someone making US minimum wage there would be very wealthy, while here it's unlivable without government assistance for housing and food.
I call it Capital Suction.
In a stable system without war capitalism will just about by design breed this problem. The body public has to have the broader picture in mind which they often don't. "I'll buy one last Mercedes 500 SEL before global warming laws prevent me from doing this."
In a system bent on valueing capital over work and sustainability, capital will always win out over labor. Until capital suddenly isn't worth squat anymore. That usually is noticed when it's too late. We see it happening already with negative interest for Banks and other fat cats in Europe and the US. ... Helicopter money would actually be the better solution. The problem is that helicopter money usually only comes in form of war were everting is bombed to pieces and only then society gets to start over on equal footing.
We all are pretty much aware of this effect, if only subconsciously.
The super rich have prepared for this, with hideouts spread around the world, enclaves with landing strips, their own wells and land enough to grow food. The smart cyberpunks (us) have adopteda cyberpunk lifestyle that enables us to move on a moment's notice. The regular guy however will be screwed once shit hits the fan again.
The alternative is a ever growing global post scarcity society run by some semi benevolent conglomerate of Google and Co. or something.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Blame, Blame, Blame. Lincoln quoted the Bible when he said 'A House divided against itself cannot stand'. I think he was referring to the elites who get people to fight amongst themselves instead of looking at them, like they are doing now.
Time to evolve people.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
These books are always interesting and full of thought-food. But they never go one step higher and ask, "Why is it so?" It is the development of hyper-liberalism in the 1960s which placed the wants of the individual above the wants and needs of the group, the neighborhood, the nation. President Kennedy must have seen this coming with his famous line: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." But hyper-liberalism is the inevitable result of democracy and its fatal flaw.
It is the propensity of the human mind to assume that if a little of a thing is good then an extreme amount of a thing is extremely good. But that is never the case, not even with something as fundamental to life as water. And the hyper-liberalism that allowed birth control and abortion of citizens for the convenience of the individual and the rise of a sociopathic feminism that encouraged women to shed their vital role as the producers of well-formed population for the nation in pursuit of a male positon in all aspects of life; that re-defined marriage as a mere social and legal convenience for the individuals involved; that created the "me-ism" of sex and drugs culture; that led to nice-feeling but continuously growing budget-busting social programs, is the natural path we should expect a maturing democracy to folllow, a path to its self-destruction.
Yes, it feels right to blame the "boomers." But they are the result of the development of hyper-liberalism, not the cause of its results.
E Proelio Veritas.
...and I don't mean we're all baby boomers, I mean that baby boomers are the same people with the same motivations that I see around me every day. The immediate gratification and status and symbol seeking culture.
Baby boomers just happened to be the generation where it started rolling downhill faster. The current generation in their late 30's and early 40's (as one example) is simply pushing that faster and faster as the gears of our economy and society work more and more loose.
Want someone to blame? There's someone you can - it's YOU.
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The US economy was destined to be broken by the most siginficant event of the year 1913. That was the passage of the 16th Amendment enabling a US income tax.
50 years later, US President John F. Kennedy said, " "The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.” John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963 "
Since then, it has only gotten worse. According to the proponents of a major competing financing mechanism, the Fair Tax, 22% of the price of any good manufactured in the USA is comprised of the cost of US income taxes. The US income taxes, not labor rates, are the real reason that manufacturing largely fled the USA. Don't believe it? Consider that, according to the auto companies who whined in 2008 when 2 out of 3 were going bankrupt that workers were costing $78 / hr in total compensation. Sound high? Consider that it takes 30 - 33 person-hours to build a car in the USA. Multiply that out to get about $2,500 labor cost. Then plug in the 22% cost of US income taxes to a $40K American-built SUV. That's $8,800. So, $2,500 in labor or $8,800 in tax expense. Which would be better to get rid of, enslaving the workers and paying them $0, or getting rid of the income taxes, which are simply legalized stealing of people's money by the gov't.
Looking at income taxes from an unconventional point of view, they are simple slavery. What did the old slave owners do to slaves? They stole the proceeds of the slave's labor for themselves. What does the gov't do? They steal the proceeds of the American people's labor for a portion of the year. We talk of tax freedom day, which this year is supposedly April 19. Last year it was April 23. A trend in the right direction, but woefully inadequate. The gov't is essentially the slave owner, we are the slaves, and the situation exists from January 1 to April 19 this year.
Tax freedom day should be January 1, the income taxes should be totally repealed, and I favor the FairTax to replace them. The FairTax is a consumption tax on new goods and services that occur above poverty level spending for each person's living situation. That is, if you're a family of 4 and the poverty level is $24,000, the gov't gives you enough money in a monthly check to pay the FairTax on $2,000 of spending per month. If you're single, and the poverty level is $12K, you get enough money from the gov't every month to pay the FairTax on $1000 of spending for that month.
Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means committee, commissioned a survey to ask 500 foreign CEOs what they would do if the US passed the FairTax. 400 of them said that they would build their next factory in the USA. The other 100 said that they would move their company headquarters to the USA.
Sadly, we'll likely never get the FairTax passed because people have been successfully duped into believing that "corporate taxes" are paid by those mean old rich corporate executives who suffer mightily when they have to cough up those taxes out of their own pockets and thus diminish their playboy, high-living lifestyle to the delight of said unwashed, duped masses. The reality is that those mean old corporate executive simply raise the prices of the goods manufactured by the companies that they control, lower the wages of the workers in the companies that they control, and reduce dividends for the stocks the companies use for financing, all to take those monies saved to send the corporate taxes to the US gov't. Sadly, sometimes these price hikes, especially, make US products more expensive on the market than the foreign-made products built in countries with higher corporate income taxes (which was all other countries until earlier this year when Trump lowered the tax rates from 35%, where it had been since 1941, to 21%. Due to this reduction, the economy is "taking off." But it could be massively better if all the income taxes were lowered to $0.
The fallout from the drug-addled selfish Sixties is that the same hippies who once renounced materialism got old and then did a complete U-turn.
This is the same stuff they told me when I was in elementary school. To me at all sounds like a bunch of BS with the less creative and lazy trying to blame previous generations for their issues.
things they told me that I found were either not true or had no barring on anything in reality.
1. if you don't go to college and get a degree, you'll spend your life working a min. wage job and poor.
2. kids these days don't have a chance of making as much as their parents
3. you won't be able to afford a house as big/nice as your parents.
4. pollution will engulf the earth causing a global ice age.
of what I've seen..
1. I have no college degree, though make more than many of my friends who did go to college. I've seen people go to college and become poor and wealthy just as I've seen people no get a degree and do the same. This has more to do with motivation, creativity, curiosity, and the drive to learn then anything else in my opinion.
2. for many of my friends. I would say, indexed for inflation, many make just as much or more than their parents.
3. same as 2....
4. the narrative has changed a bit on this one... but a lot has changed in a good way in many areas.
summed up, if all you do is look for handouts and someone to give you something, yes your future won't go well, but if you have creativity, ambition, and the desire to learn, all they tell you is a bunch of BS.
It's you who needs a lesson. Reaganomics is what ruined America. He cut the top tier tax rate from 72% to 23% and raised taxes three times on the middle class, under the name of trickle down. He also cut corporate tax rates to the point where some companies like GE pay no taxes at all, and most of the big companies pay a smaller tax rate than teh average American does. The GOP has been repeating this pattern year after year, until the top 2% of Americans have over 50% of the wealth. The richest have seen their income increase 300% (not a typo) since Ronnie while the middle class, the engine that drives the country, has seen their income essentially stay flat, allowing for inflation. The economic records bear this out. To compound this, the middle class is now heavily in debt and paying more and more interest on borrowed money, just to stay afloat. Remember this fact: Back in the days of Eisenhower, before Ronnie gave the country away to the rich, the middle class could afford to live on a single income, own a new care, have a nice house and send their kids to college and still live comfortably. And this fact: When Clinton was in office, he raised taxes on the rich and left office with the first in decades budget surplus. When Bush came in, he promptly gave that surplus away to his rich friends, rescinded the tax breaks for the rich, and the country went back into debt again. So you want to blame somebody, blame the GOP. Want to fix it? Then return the tax rates to that of Eisenhower and the country will be out of debt in 12 years. There is no reason in the world why a person should be making more than a million per month, and expecting not to pay taxes on it. But don't be blaming the boomers or some economic theory, when reality and the plain stark facts explain it very clearly. The GOP, the party of the put America in the economic trouble it is in right now.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
On the other hand, the idea of completely changing your surroundings isn't inherently bad. I did more or less as they describe, I was horribly depressed, moved to a third-world country, and had to survive on my wits. It's certainly a way to have different problems.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
with the installation of the federal reserve, and its been a downhill slope ever since, which accelerated more after ww2. But we can just blame a whole generation instead of realizing its the rich banker c**nts, like it always has been.
in this country the way to relative success remains to be working for government regulated industry the percentage of unionism is 85 % vs the 15% in the private sector
...which is all irrelevant since there is ample government assistance for housing and food.
You can also do the obvious "boomer" thing and just get a fucking room mate and stop pretending you can have it both ways. The European welfare state comes with some real trade offs. Americans think they can get all of the free goodies, avoid all of the associated taxes, and still live larger than anyone else.
A lot of what millenials whine about sounds vaguely familiar to those of us from previous generations.
If anything GenX has squandered the best economic opportunities of the last 100 years.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This is just part of a natural cycle. Major social disruptions tend to reduce inequality: wars, revolutions, plagues, etc. In between, inequality increases steadily. The last major disruption to American society was WWII. At the end of the war, inequality was at historic lows. It's been going up ever since.
Maybe we'll find a way to break this cycle and reduce inequality without needing a war or plague to do it for us. But I wouldn't bet on it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Lots of Baby Boomers opposed the policies that have wrecked America, but, unfortunately, there are enough economically illiterate people of all ages who vote Republican to ensure America was wrecked anyway. Sure, a small portion of the population is doing well and they own most stuff anyway. That's the problem right there.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Sure, some boomers were involved or complicit, but there were a lot more of the "greatest" generation, who had a lot more power in the late 1970s-eary 1980s.
Most of the problems we see -- starting with inequality, can be documented as being a direct result of supply-side economics. The UK is in the same boat, due to Margaret Thatcher.
I hope that the Millennials learn the lesson we hippies did not -- that the struggle is endless.
Ronald Reagan was not a baby boomer.
No sig? Sigh...
...none of those were boomers. The modern era of the Rape of America started with Powell and Nixon. By the late 60's the ship was sinking, and by now all that's left is the poop deck, and everyone's at the poop deck right now, and ankles are already wet.
We got fucked, plain and simple, and there's no fix for it other than to let it sink, and build a new one.
I'm so bitter and dismayed at what's happened to our nation in the past 50 years that I struggle to find words to express it without taking 3 pages.
Maybe an acronym or two will work: TARFU. FUBAR. And BOHICA, every election cycle BOHICA. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The rape of America is so thorough and well done that most people don't realize that every generation AFTER "the Greatest Generation" got robbed blind. Especially the boomer kids. Their parents robbed them blind, and X, and Millenials too.
The Greatest Generation did it. And we just rolled over and let ourselves be fucked.
Fuck it all. Burn it all. The only fix is revolution.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
If they had the evidence they could make the accusation.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
No. This was no more correct the first 50 times someone tried to alter history by passing this off.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong, and even a brief look at actual history shows that.
Even at the immediate end of the war, the myth doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
For example, there's the issue that most of Britain's industry was beyond the effective range of Germany's bombers - and hence did not take significant damage. In fact, that industry was far stronger at the end of WW2 than it had been at the beginning. A lot of the old Victorian-era industries had received long-overdue modernization. Many new factories were built for wartime production. Large numbers of women entered the industrial workplace and learned new skills - vastly increasing the size and capability of the potential industrial workforce.
Other advanced British Commonwealth nations such as Australia and Canada didn't take significant wartime damage either - and received many infrastructure improvements that improved their economies as a result of the war. For example, huge amounts of surveying, road building, and construction were done in Canada to support flying aircraft to the Soviet Union.
Sweden, which stayed neutral during the war, was still supplying a large percentage of the world's supply of ball bearings - a major industrial contribution.
The Soviet Union suffered some industrial damage, but was able to move many factories before the Germans reached then, and also received massive amounts of aid from the USA and Britain - including huge numbers of vehicles (especially trucks and trains), advanced technology, lots of machine tools (and entire factories). It seems likely they ended up with a stronger industrial base than they started with.
In short, as you mention, the ideas that the rest of the world was bombed into the stone age and hence unable to compete with the USA for many decades after the war ended, or the idea that the rest of the world was hopelessly dependent on the USA, are simply not supported by the facts.
For that matter, if there had been "hopeless dependence", Britain and all those former British Commonwealth nations would now drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side).
There was no guarantee that the USA wouldn't come out of the war and go straight back into an economic depression. A lot of people at the time expected it to happen. That it didn't happen was due - as much as anything - to the fact that FDR died and many of his bad policies were finally dismantled.
Somebody let the rabble in.
Brill's article is a brilliant game of self-deception and self-aggrandizement. If you read the original article, his thesis is basically that: after the war, universities started admitting students based on intellectual merit instead of their parent's social or financial situation. This led to a large supply of brilliant and educated people like Brill who gave corporations the mental horsepower to overpower the system.
Ahem. Sounds more like the storyline of the crack epidemic as told by the government, i.e. cheap, plentiful drugs overpower societal controls, aided and abetted by misguided, high-powered individuals. Brill is suggesting that universities graduated mainly high-class idiots until he and his generation came along. According to Brill, this movement was caused by powerful, well-meaning people who forgot that My Fair Lady is fiction, thought that they could mold smart boys into gentlemen. (Not trying to exclude girls & women here, but the white-male privilege thing was still going strong at the time.)
BUT, maybe Brill is on to something: his new generation of non-old-boys-club graduates were not only smart, but free from the old-boy social restrictions on behavior. These were people who were not bound by--and probably scorned--the rules of gentlemanly behavior. They didn't have to worry about being shunned by "society" when they pulled nakedly sharp moves with bad societal consequences. Or at least they didn't have to worry so much about what people would say if they got exposed.
I wasn't there, but I get the impression that there was an unwritten code of behavior among the powerful until Brill's generation came along. It was unwritten, but it was a powerful force that limited government & business action as surely as the constitution. That's gone now.
In its place, we now have "greed is good." Except in jest, stating that in public would have gotten you kicked out of any respectable gentlemen's club (no, not a strip joint -- an upper-class, male-only social club) 60 years ago. Yes, greed is an energy that has power, but it ends up consuming everything, much like anger is an energy but only in small doses. And greed has indeed consumed us.
The constitution and the government built upon it are no substitute for basic social norms. I'll bet that guys who wrote the constitution just assumed a certain social code (we do know these were religious men) as a backdrop to a constitutional republic, didn't even think that "men of good will" could rise to prominence without it.
I don't like reading about people who have recovered from booze, drugs, gambling, or being elite Baby Boomers. Spare me the Good Catholic or the whatever moment.
I'm not sure sure it is broken. If it is broken, then it was every bit as broken in the past, only in different ways. Make America great again implies it is not great now, or that it was greater in the past. I think that way of thought is about seeing the whitewashed America of the past that looks like like the Dick Van Dyke show, ignoring the ugly underbelly at the time. Economically things seem pretty tough now, but times were even worse economically in the past if you were black (north or south).
You saw the letters PPP, right? Meaning parity in what you can purchase...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Your very first assertion started out factually incorrect, so you're failing right out of the gate here. Germany was never at any point the second largest economy after the war, that was without a doubt the USSR. Germany's position kept going down from distant third until the noughties, where it remains at 5th, just behind India. More to my point here, you know the UK and France were still dismantling Germany's heavy industry until 1950s, right? And yes, Germany's economy did recover quickly, but primarily because of three things:
- The guy the US appointed to run Germany's economy made a pretty daring (yet, common sense under freshwater, read: Milton Friedman's, economics) move that even the US felt was a bad idea at the time: He ordered the removal all price controls, thus introducing a free market to Germany. This did the initial part almost overnight.
- The Marshall Plan, which fed enough dollars into Europe that they were able to import capital goods (i.e. earth movers, industrial equipment) that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to obtain due to a lack of purchasing power.
- The reconstruction boom, which every postwar economy experienced, not just Germany's.
That does NOT mean their industrial capability suddenly recovered to its pre-war levels. While the rest of the world was still rebuilding, the US was already in just the right place, and was growing even faster than the rest of the world as a result of its giant head start, making the US the top economy (by GDP) for the first time ever, until just recently. The same is also true of Japan, especially given Douglas MacArthur, who was Japan's governor at that time, made an effort to reconstruct Japan, with the direct assistance from the US, who paid laborers to travel there and assist. (By the way, the US didn't ask for reparations from anybody, while European countries did.) While virtually all countries experienced large growth, the country that by far experienced the fastest growth was the US, until 1973 when the first major postwar global recession happened.
China also rediscovered capitalism at this time, by the way, and their growth rate almost overnight began to outpace that of the US. Also for those who don't know, China has had the world's highest GDP by far until about the turn of the century, and stayed that way until communism ended.
Anyways, getting back to the original topic of why the US did exceptionally well at the time:
Fortunately we were carried further by having built industries that the rest of the world had not scaled to just yet, like our large aerospace manufacturing and heavy industrial equipment manufacturing industries for example. While the rest of the world has mostly (but not entirely) caught up to our industrial capability (hence those jobs are largely gone, but nonetheless it remains a large portion of our GDP) we now have by far the largest tech industry as our ace in the hole, which continues to carry us forward. And yes, presently the rest of the world is hopelessly dependent upon our tech industry, just like they were for our manufacturing industry in the past, so we're still in this game, just not with the same jobs.
Here's a well researched paper on all of this, by the way:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-eco...
And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.
Actually that was a huge burden on our economy at the time. In today's dollars, that would be about $122 billion, and its economic returns weren't an
You may not be in love with her party but it is a good interpretation of the data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The middle class is one injury, debt, accident away from being homeless...
As it has always been... even when the publus lacks a vote, their favor is curried by those in power.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Anyone who doesn't realize just how long exponential growth can continue has no understanding of the sheer scale of the universe.
- Me
... one in eight Americans might visit the 1 percent for a year, only one in a hundred stay there for a decade or more. - https://bit.ly/2GY7EV8
Yeah, the people who walk miles carting jugs to get their daily dose of clean water probably feel so sorry for you with your "lifelong student loans, horrible salary" and "money for computers and phones just to stay in society". Consider your personal riches the next time you turn on a faucet with running water.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The War on Drugs was started by Republicans as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.
To suppress non-whites.
The War on Poverty started when the War on Drugs was an obvious failure.
To suppress non-whites.
Almost eveything the Boomers have done is racist, design to destroy the country, so long as it does more damage to non-whites than whites.
Learn to love Alaska
Fuck yeah.
We need to hammer apologists until they accept reality; just like nazi/holocaust deniers. It's really the same irrational behavior that creates these atrocities:
People who can't accept the truth and handle it rationally invent all sorts of excuses to avoid it. It builds up and can create a framework whereby culture, beliefs, mythology, and the warping of religions all support a collective delusion. The South did this to justify their GREED and made it part of their whole way of life so their economy could continue.
Revisionism doesn't just apply to history, it creates it too.
BTW, it's not leaders lying into war-- this is a whole grass roots movement with many people involved all rallying around slavery as their central issue! To the point they started a WAR over it; not simply by just voting (and losing.) If the conspiracy to make the war was the real cause... the propaganda which got the southern masses motivated WAS SLAVERY (and associated tribalism in which they ALL contributed.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You're making a LOT of false assumptions. For one, half of my family lives in the north, and in fact weren't even in this country at the time of the Civil War. The other half were definitely not slave owners either. In fact, most people are not descendants of slave owners. You had to have big bux to afford a slave.
For another, if you read carefully, I have not at any point attempted to excuse the antebellum south for slavery. In fact, what I am doing is pointing out that the north should not be excused either. Is it possible that that is what you are actually upset about?
If you want to see forces that acted against slavery at that time for ethical reasons, look to individuals on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. It is they who eventually prevailed and got slavery out of the U.S.
According to this methodology, the U.S. has more poverty than Mexico does.
Do you really think that passes the smell test? If so, you've never been to Mexico.
Their poverty measurement is based on "half the median household income of the total population" of the country. As a result, the richer a country is, the higher the absolute level of wealth under which someone is considered "poor". So you can be non-poor in one country while living in a dirt floor concrete-walled shack, but "poor" in the U.S. in an air-conditioned apartment with TV and Internet.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Let's see... find people to blame. Better that they are not young people, because we need their energy and lack of wisdom. Better make them weak, unpopular, and unimportant. Make every one angry at the scapegoats so they won't think about the government as culprit. Then, make sure that the government is portrayed as the only solution. Then institute austerity measures ... increasing the blame on the scapegoats. Oh wait... this is only history of course.
If human population keeps growing ~3% per year, in the next 10,000 years, every atom in the observable Universe will need to be in the body of a human. No room for planets, stars, or anything else. Even numbers so large that they represent the scale of the Universe are no match for log. Log(Universe) = small number exponential growth consumes all.
lol, why not ask Sweden, Norway, or even Canada, our neighbor, about democratic socialism and how that works out for them? Oh wait, you already drank the Republican propaganda Kool Aid. Great idea, clodhopper!