If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980,
just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.
What happened?
Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.
www.theatlantic.com
The transfer of wealth from the working class, to the morbidly rich. That's what happened. We now just need to teach this to the Gen Z and later generations, and how to take that wealth back from the "Entitled Worthless", of whom it does not belong.
There are many erroneous assumptions expressed in the comments, and some reasonable points raised in the OP and especially the linked
Atlantic article. But even the perceptive Atlantic article mostly only addresses domestic issues. It barely touches on what I consider the key issues … of the differences between old and new international economic forces.
The generation born around 1940 was raised in a unique period where U.S. capitalist competitors in Europe and the world were destroyed by WWII and the U.S. straddled the world as the overwhelming “numero uno” in world production, trade, manufacturing capacity, technology, and above all in possession of ready capital.
Our major political-military competitor was the huge but backward bureaucratic communist USSR, which was also destroyed by war and later proved no match for capitalism in productive capacity, though that was not always so evident back then. The USSR’s planned economy had certain advantages in the immediate postwar period, but its internal contradictions and dictatorial nature treating conquered Eastern and even Central European nations proved too much for it.
The gradual rebirth of real economic competition from a reborn Europe, Japan, South Korea, (only much later China) as well as our own mistakes (i.e. Vietnam) tended to undercut the U.S. artificial monopoly position as world economic giant — this was indicated by our having to abandon the antique and always creaky Gold Standard in 1971. This competition — decade by decade — undercut our unions, as cheap labor abroad, increasingly skilled and hardworking populations in other countries, and the fundamental advantages of a world division of labor and resources undercut domestic U.S.-based industry. U.S. capitalism essentially
had to adapt to a world of rising
international capitalism, even as it devoted much of its efforts to containing and opposing Soviet and “world communism.”
While we were busy opposing communism, we did at least end Jim Crow in our own country, something absolutely morally necessary — and something also needed to avoid being stigmatized during the Cold War as an apartheid regime by the USSR and by newly independent or ex-colonial African, Asian and Latin American countries. It was natural, almost inevitable, that more and more of the “Old World” and also some new “Asian Tigers” developed, and in some areas their factories utilized new advanced capitalist production techniques that further undercut old U.S. heavy industry.
After the collapse of the USSR, many Americans thought our leadership would be permanent and unchallenged. What arrogance! That overlooked all the real economic changes that had occurred and were occurring in the world economy.
That doesn’t mean our country must fall apart, or that we are inevitably trapped into a future where financial or high tech capitalist oligarchs rule over an American population of declining standards of living. No, scientific progress still holds out great possibilities of a better future for all —
especially for Americans.
But there is no way back to the immediate post WWII period. Whatever mistakes we — or other societies — have made in the period since WWII, we now need forward looking policies that face the world
as it really is. The last thing we need is to consume ourselves in domestic civil war or chaos over idiotic “culture wars.”
