After WWII everything boomed. What if we have been in a economic bubble that started 50-70 years ago.
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Bubbles are between corrections. We have not seen a correction since 2008 so we are almost 20 years without one. Kinda funny because we were about due with covid but it kinda short circuit it. Sure we had the drop but it was so short a time span it had no real effect and we kept on expanding with new vigor.
The romans had their bubble… Go back further than WWII and this could be the capitalist bubble.
Check out Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’. Relevant part is that wealth distribution was at its most equitable from ~1945 to 1980, after which nearly all new wealth generated from increased production (i.e. computing/internet/tech/etc) was captured by the top 10% of earners, and within that 10% it’s crazy skewed towards the 0.000001%.
Wars artificially boost economies, simply because military shit needs to be built during the war, and blown up shit needs fixing after the war. The French even have a word for it.
War also turbocharges scientific research, and post-war economies derive incalculable benefits from new scientific discoveries. You can thank Nazi Germany for the jet plane and landing man on the moon, WW2 Britain for the sonar and the computer (I guess you can thank Nazi Germany for those too in a sense…), Cold War USA for the internet, etc etc.
When all that artificial growth stops, unemployment returns, states borrow out of proportion to maintain social programs for an aging population, everybody gets poorer, lack of education and religious thinking come back as a result, people vote for populists to solve their problems because they’re not educated enough to know better, the populists start new wars, and when the war is over, everybody swears it will never happen, reconstruction begins, everybody becomes richer again, rinse, repeat.
We’re in the populists-start-new-wars phase now.
Well, also all of the US’ competition had been bombed all to hell. That helps give you a head start for a while, especially when they’re paying you for a bunch of the stuff needed to rebuild.
Except, as the Internet example proves, we can have the wartime scientific research boom without the actual “war” part, so that’s what we ought to do going forward.
The Cold War was 100% a war. Just ask any of the 3rd world countries that served as proxies and lost millions of people to a war that was definitely hot for them. And when I helped my old man build a nuclear shelter in the backyard when I was a kid, it sure felt real to me too.
Hell, today’s North Korea and Cuba are direct results of the fucking Cold War.
I’m not ignoring Vietnam etc.; I’m just enumerating them separately.
Most Americans can’t comprehend that level of destruction because they’re always safe. Ironic I should be telling you this as well.
No. A bubble is when, on paper, money goes up, but no real value (products, amenities, innovations) are created to back it up.
There have been a shit ton of new creations in the last 70 years. A lot of inflated paper money as well but its mostly not a bubble
If the “bubble” lasts for more than a generation it’s a “golden age” instead.
My take on this is that the US truly experienced a period of ‘greatness’ for around 40yrs, starting with FDR’s response to the Great Depression in the mid-30’s. Then you have post WW2, and the US was considered something of a hero nation around much of the world, plus was one of the few major countries with lots of intact production going on, with lots of demand around the world. For some decades there, you could work a job like gas station attendant and make a salary good enough to buy a home and support a family (I may be exaggerating somewhat, but the point’s made).
Nothing is ever perfect, and of course you had various minorities getting the short end of the stick, or outright blatantly discriminated against, as with African and Native Americans. But for the larger populace, I understand that you really could live a pretty comfortable life, with social safety nets available if you were struggling.
Cue Jim Crow laws being struck down in the mid-60’s and a huge hippie movement to relax norms and expand one’s mind, and by the late 60’s you had the furious right-wing, dog-whistling movement responding by electing Tricky Dick, and it’s been a slow (but increasingly quick) return to the robber barons, blatant discrimination and the breakdown of democracy.
I’m not super well-read on all this, so might be missing some key points, but my take is that the USA as a whole has not remotely appreciated how good things were for ~40yrs, starting with most Boomers. It took the Muckrakers, two Roosevelts and the Great Depression to claw our way out of Monopolies and corporations taking over everything, and now we’ve lost most of that, and are hurtling towards 1984, even as civilisation itself is heading towards… a pretty rough ending.
you present it more eloquently but I very much feel this. I think one big thing is the fall is so slow at first that it is barely noticable but its an accelerating function so eventually the veolocity was such that it was becoming very obvious. Its amazing that so many seem to respond at this point with the head in the ground reaction.
The americans sure have, at least a sort of loan bubble combined with enforcement of debt taking (reserve currency, dumping the gold standard, the petro dollar, all the wars about oil & the petrodollar).
Seems like luck is running out though.
Hell yeah, we been riding the economic advantage of providing weapons and not loosing people or infrastructure. Now imagine if the government just ordered a bunch of housing, yeah sure they go into debt but people become more productive
Ya never know
