The U.S. had the only advanced manufacturing economy in the world. U.S. products were the best and the cheapest, if they had any competition at all. Within the U.S., oligarchic companies and oligarchic unions assured both high profits and high wages. And with both productivity and demand increasing every year, who noticed? In transportation—airlines, railroads, and trucking—government regulation assured “stable”—that is to say, “high”—profits and wages as well.
It all went to hell in the seventies, of course. Soaring inflation, relentless international competition, integration, not of southern schools but of the northern workplace, and urban riots and soaring crime, which caused property values in many neighborhoods to collapse, turned the life of the white working man upside down. And then the damn environmentalists showed up, trying to shut down everything with a smokestack.
Despite endless moaning from both the left and right about the good old days, life is much better for almost everyone today, if not in terms of constant dollars then in terms of goods and services, which is the point of having dollars. Houses are bigger, health care is better, cars are better, airlines are cheaper (though not as cheap as they used to be), consumer electronics are better, everything is better.
But a few things aren’t better. If you live in a declining area, like Detroit or Cleveland, things may not be better. In the old days, we didn’t have declining areas. Things always got better. Now, they don’t. There are have been a lot of bumps and thumps. The expectation that things would always get better—a rising straight line as far as the eye could see—has faded. It wasn’t very realistic in the first place, but people miss it.
Afterwords
I am a great believer in “science,” and western science all but assures that life does get better in the long run. However, the current economic miasma, unprecedented in my lifetime, is not reassuring. For whatever reason, the spectacular upheavals of the late Sixties did not upset me as much as the current situation, featuring absolute political deadlock on domestic economic issues, coupled with a willfully yet aimlessly brutal foreign policy, which is almost guaranteed to get us into yet another bloody, profitless war, this time with Iran. The Republican Party makes a fetish of irresponsibility, while the Democratic Party violates the most basic civil liberties of Americans almost as a matter of principle. How I hate living in “interesting” times! What’s the matter with ennui, M. Baudelaire? I miss it!
