[HN Gopher] Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History
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Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History
Author : safaa1993
Score : 22 points
Date : 2023-11-25 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| FrankWilhoit wrote:
| It was a revolt against accountability, nothing else.
| gustavus wrote:
| Because in part the greatest economy came out of being the only
| economy left after 2 world wars wiped out pretty much everyone
| else's and the Iron Curtain was brought down to trap 1/3 of the
| worlds population under a genocidal communist dictatorship.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The USA wasn't "the only economy left" except for the immediate
| postwar years. The 1950s and 1960s, the period when the US was
| doing so well according to the linked article, also saw
| economic booms for France ( _les trente glorieuses_ ) and West
| Germany ( _Wirtschaftswunder_ ), for example.
|
| The socialist world wasn't necessarily suffering, either:
| Yugoslavia's high point, the years of the _vikendica_ and
| middle-class leisure travel across Europe and Asia, was the
| 1960s-1970s. Granted, Yugoslavia was outside the Iron Curtain,
| but even the USSR is instructive here: living standards were
| rising noticeably during the Krushchev era, which is why the
| Brezhnev era is regarded as such stagnation.
| toasted-subs wrote:
| You could say the same thing about China under Mao.
| aredox wrote:
| "left-leaning parties [...] have become dominated by college-
| educated voters and lost working-class support", which then
| proceeded to elect college-educated right-wingers with fanciful
| (and wrong, or more accurately deceptive) economic theories.
| xkekjrktllss wrote:
| In fact, left parties were savagely demolished by the CIA,
| under direction of American capitalists.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| "The Jakarta Method."
| kdwikzncba wrote:
| A pet fantasy that I have is to coin a phrase. Now I don't know
| if this is a coincidence, but since I started using the phrase
| "free market fundamentalism" a couple of years ago I've seen
| other people use it. For example, its used in the subtitle in
| this article.
| Sai_ wrote:
| Was it the other way around that you read "free market
| fundamentalism" or something similar and co-opted it into your
| daily usage, and now you're seeing it everywhere?
|
| There's even a name for this bias - Baader Meinhoff effect
| kdwikzncba wrote:
| It's wasn't that. If it had been that I wouldn't be
| suggesting that I came up with it.
| addicted wrote:
| You almost certainly didn't come up with it. I've heard it
| being used in the 90s at least and its usage was rampant in
| the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
|
| Here's a Google trend: https://trends.google.com/trends/exp
| lore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...
|
| It shows the usage of the term peaked in 2004 (Google only
| has data past 2004).
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| Noam Chomsky used the phrase in the 1990s...
| kdwikzncba wrote:
| I couldn't find that, but googling I've found there's even a
| Wikipedia page [1]. Oh well... Not sure saying I "re-
| invented" it is even worth bragging about.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_fundamentalism
| pram wrote:
| It wasn't just the US. The energy crisis seems to have had
| extraordinary long tail effects. Everything was stagnating in the
| 70s and then we end up with Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, etc.
|
| It might just be that the structure and productivity of the post
| war economies, a lot of them heavily focused on manufacturing,
| had just become increasingly unprofitable?
| sampli wrote:
| Recently, The Atlantic has been putting out some of the best
| mainstream articles I've read in a while.
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(page generated 2023-11-25 23:01 UTC)