David Brooks has a good column this morning about how today is a pivot point in American history. Excerpt:
Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.
[snip]
In the next few years, the nation's wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.
We're probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.
In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.
Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal, recessionista chic has arrived, as the Age of Consumerism perhaps gives way to the Age of Scarcity. Lest we who look forward to the benefits of simpler time romanticize the coming austerity, our CC blog commentator Rich has this stark warning from his own experience. You really have to read this:
It's nice to think that in hard economic times people will pull together and do what they can for each other. But "social cohesion" isn't the only possibility. Let me sour the mood a bit with an alternate vision.When the farm credit crisis hit full steam in the mid-1980's, the economies of towns all through the Great Plains collapsed. There were counties where male unemployment reached 40-50%. Populations shrank as people fled for the cities to find work. Small businesses went under because the local farmers couldn't afford their products and services. Oil states like Oklahoma and Texas got a double-hit as oil fell below $15 a barrel.
There was no "pulling together" beyond the occasional rare gesture. Alcoholism went way up. So did crime. Fights broke out anywhere young males congregated. My family of six crowded into a tiny house with no telephone or air conditioning (a big deal in Texas). We sometimes went up to a month without electricity because it was unaffordable. It was much much worse for many others. Many, like me, eventually left.
Cities don't always get off the hook either. Read up on Detroit. It has been in serious decline for two decades, yet you don't find much in the way of civic virtue and community groups who have been able to slow that decline.
My point is that the character and experience of the people involved matter. The people who suffered through the 1980's farm collapse and the 1990's disintegration of Detroit were not the same post-WWII generation that dealt with Austerity Britain. They were largely post-modern. More specifically, they were post-Me Decade. I understand the need for hope in the face of hard times. But you need to consider the possibility that life will get much worse, and that the people around you will not handle it well. Then you'll have to just muddle through. We all will.
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"I remember in the 1980s sitting in the bar near my broker's office and all of us having a wonderful time mocking the unemployed steel workers and making jokes about what was uglier, the dispossed farmer's wife or the farmer's pig.
It will be the same."
Yes, just as the poor will always be with us...so will ginormous asses like Charles Cosimano.
Mike
The Baby Boom generation is an affectation of demographers who look at numbers of births in the years 1946 to 1964. But if you really want to see a generational shift, consider the years 1946-1955 as one discrete cohort. It was those born in those years for whom the Vietnam War was the formative experience. The last of that cohort turned draft age in 1973, the year Nixon declared victory in Vietnam and brought the combat troops home.
Nixon had already pulled the plug on the anti-war movement four years earlier when he created the lottery that immediately informed 2/3 of all males that there would be no war in their future. The 1955 cohort was just entering high school with attitudes already formed or forming. For their younger siblings, however, the refrain became "Hey, if it ain't gonna bother me, I don't care what he does." Thus 1955 was the beginning of the "Me Generation" for which eveything must be smooth and from whom nothing could be demanded.
Civilizations have the morality & ethics that they can afford. If we become substantially poorer, I don't expect us to be able to afford much, either on an individual basis, or as a nation.
I'd like to think that deleveraging & the recession will force a new sense of frugality upon Americans. But it's also quite plausible that our government's response to the situation will be characterized by Jubilee (i.e., mass debt defaults (oops, I meant "forgiveness")), and bread & circuses (oops, I meant "stimulus checks").
12:39 was mine.
During the 30's, my grandparents ranched some miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's not exactly a crossroads of America. I am told that every so often for several years, men would come knocking on their isolated door begging for a job as ranch hands in return for food. No money, just food. A depression will not be fun.
Jim Cole
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