Audio Set (Dec)

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I'm enough of a nerd to enjoy digging dad out of the Zuckerman's IRS database, and when I do, I see two very different chapters in American history from 1945 to 1980, when I see a chapter of prosperity capitalism where incomes rose for the entire workforce. And from 1981 forward, I see a chapter I would call enrichment capitalism. Yeah, I wonder if that contrast between prosperity capitalism up to Reagan and enrichment capitalism from Reagan forward has caught other people's attention too.

Oh yeah. People like me have been talking about that for four decades, literally. I had a 1992 article about that transition. If you look at it as a as a as a bar graph, the the first post-war generation is this picket fence and the second generation is a step ladder with for the first step of it being below ground in terms of rates of change of income. So, no, there's a there's a total transition. Everything changes around 1980.

Now, if you go a little bit further back, however, and I think this is also relevant, that middle class society, the one I grew up in, the that that period of broadly shared growth, that's not the way America always was. America was a very unequal society in 1929, but it's a quite equal society by 1947. And closer up. Look at the data says that that happened quite suddenly. It happened really largely during World War two.

It's what you call your golden calls the Great Compression. So the middle class society that we had for a generation after World War Two was created by the rise of unions and a favorable political environment, by the use of government power to equalize wages by high taxes on top incomes. So it's actually telling you that that that the kind of society we have now is a choice. And I think that's the point we're accustomed to, which is that growth is very much concentrated in the hands of a few people is not a necessity.

And in fact, it's not something that's beyond the reach of the political system. We we remade ourselves away from a plutocratic society once and we could do it again.

The question is, how does the race question fit in as an overlay to all of this? And what we talk about the prosperity society? Was that truly a prosperity society in terms of distribution? We can talk about capital accumulation during 200 years of slavery. There's a new debate about reparations, which is going to permeate a lot of the political discourse. How do you play that out in terms of an analysis and then obviously a political program?

Yeah, the the truth is that despite a lot of overt racism, that postwar period of prosperity was even even blacks benefited from it. That doesn't mean that that there wasn't also a horrific amount of of of raw racism in the society, but there were benefits for just about everybody. Race played a crucial role in the political transition. Do you ask why did why did politics turn so suddenly rightwards in the United States? And the answer is basically it's the delayed effects of the Civil Rights Act.

The New Deal coalition, it's sad to say, was a coalition between a pretty liberal social and racial as well, a group in the North and and Southern segregationists who were willing to sign on to a bigger government as long as it didn't endanger white supremacy, because at that point, the South was still quite poor. And so what's happened now is the racial issue is critical to everything, the racist, racist, why the United States doesn't look like other advanced countries in terms of a social safety net.

You know, it's central to to everything, but maybe we can transcend that. That's that's one of the big unanswered questions in American politics.