OldTrapper
Well-Known Member
Something you should read, and then actually think about.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/two-miserable-decades_756477.html
The economics of the 1970s, for example, were brutal. In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since the mid-1950s. (The postwar average has been about 5 percent.) By 1975 unemployment had more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. While people were working less, so was their money, as inflation ate into the value of the dollar. In the 1960s, the inflation rate rose above 2 percent only twice—until 1968. At which point it began steadily increasing, reaching 11 percent in 1974, 9.1 percent in 1975, and 11.3 percent in 1979. To understand the effect this financial terror had on the national psyche, consider how often inflation fears have recurred during the last 30 years—even though inflation hasn’t topped 6 percent since 1982.
Everyday life wasn’t much better than economic life. Terrorism first came into vogue in the 1970s. Sometimes it was a thuggish hijacking, with criminals commandeering an airplane and demanding passage to Cuba. Sometimes it was deadly, like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nobody much remembers it today, but in March 1977 Muslim radicals with machine guns and machetes marched into the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, just five blocks north of the White House, and took 100 workers hostage. They herded the hostages onto the roof, where one was killed and two others were shot over the course of a standoff that lasted two days. Simultaneously, affiliated terrorists took over D.C. city hall, where future mayor Marion Barry was shot and a radio reporter was shot and killed.
<snip>
And worse may be in the cards. In addition to everything else, the ’00s have featured an accelerating social stratification. Charles Murray detailed the new phenomenon in last year’s Coming Apart, and it boils down to this: Where lawyers once married their secretaries, they now marry, and stay married to, other lawyers. High school dropouts, meanwhile, have children with, but do not marry, other high school dropouts. With weak family formation and slack attachment to the workforce creeping up the socioeconomic scale, patterns that were once unthinkable start to seem inescapable.
In the spring of 2012, I had coffee with an enormously successful young Internet entrepreneur. He had no special technical genius; he’d majored in social studies at Harvard. But, he informed me, he had been “early at Facebook.” Which was his polite way of saying that as an undergraduate he had befriended a classmate named Mark Zuckerberg and, by chance, gotten richer than Croesus.
Still in his mid-20s, he worried that the American middle class was on a road to extinction. In the near future, he explained, the only people able to make real money would be elites in the tech sector, like himself. There would be, he allowed, a class of tradesmen who could make a living servicing the elites. “For example,” he said, “I like artisan pickles. So there will be a place for people in Brooklyn who make really good artisan pickles, for people like me.” But outside of the artisan-pickle-makers? Nothing. “We’re headed,” he said unhappily, “for the kind of social divide they have in Brazil.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/two-miserable-decades_756477.html
The economics of the 1970s, for example, were brutal. In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since the mid-1950s. (The postwar average has been about 5 percent.) By 1975 unemployment had more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. While people were working less, so was their money, as inflation ate into the value of the dollar. In the 1960s, the inflation rate rose above 2 percent only twice—until 1968. At which point it began steadily increasing, reaching 11 percent in 1974, 9.1 percent in 1975, and 11.3 percent in 1979. To understand the effect this financial terror had on the national psyche, consider how often inflation fears have recurred during the last 30 years—even though inflation hasn’t topped 6 percent since 1982.
Everyday life wasn’t much better than economic life. Terrorism first came into vogue in the 1970s. Sometimes it was a thuggish hijacking, with criminals commandeering an airplane and demanding passage to Cuba. Sometimes it was deadly, like the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nobody much remembers it today, but in March 1977 Muslim radicals with machine guns and machetes marched into the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, just five blocks north of the White House, and took 100 workers hostage. They herded the hostages onto the roof, where one was killed and two others were shot over the course of a standoff that lasted two days. Simultaneously, affiliated terrorists took over D.C. city hall, where future mayor Marion Barry was shot and a radio reporter was shot and killed.
<snip>
And worse may be in the cards. In addition to everything else, the ’00s have featured an accelerating social stratification. Charles Murray detailed the new phenomenon in last year’s Coming Apart, and it boils down to this: Where lawyers once married their secretaries, they now marry, and stay married to, other lawyers. High school dropouts, meanwhile, have children with, but do not marry, other high school dropouts. With weak family formation and slack attachment to the workforce creeping up the socioeconomic scale, patterns that were once unthinkable start to seem inescapable.
In the spring of 2012, I had coffee with an enormously successful young Internet entrepreneur. He had no special technical genius; he’d majored in social studies at Harvard. But, he informed me, he had been “early at Facebook.” Which was his polite way of saying that as an undergraduate he had befriended a classmate named Mark Zuckerberg and, by chance, gotten richer than Croesus.
Still in his mid-20s, he worried that the American middle class was on a road to extinction. In the near future, he explained, the only people able to make real money would be elites in the tech sector, like himself. There would be, he allowed, a class of tradesmen who could make a living servicing the elites. “For example,” he said, “I like artisan pickles. So there will be a place for people in Brooklyn who make really good artisan pickles, for people like me.” But outside of the artisan-pickle-makers? Nothing. “We’re headed,” he said unhappily, “for the kind of social divide they have in Brazil.”
