1970s essay
Access options available:. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds. The Shock of the Global: The s in Perspective. Notes and index.
A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny
In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the s is given short shrift — sometimes no shrift at all. This is wrong. Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate. Inflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people.
It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since. Here is the story:. The United States of the s experienced many social upheavals.
But in one realm, all was copacetic. The economy roared. The gross domestic product was increasing between 2 percent and 6 percent, wages grew, jobs were stable. The year was an annus horribilis — assassinations, riots, a bitter presidential race. Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture.
It hit 5. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing.
For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals. How different this was from previous economic crises! In other words, the average family of was near poor. But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves. Americans had spent decades just getting more and more ahead.
Now, suddenly, they were falling behind. Today that tract of land along the Monongahela River where the works once stood is home to the usual chain restaurants and big-box stores, those ubiquitous playpens of the low-wage economy.
The money market account was born in the s. Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend. Credit cards, which had barely existed in , began to proliferate.
First of Omaha Service Corporation opened the floodgates for banks to issue credit cards with high interest rates. Total credit card balances began to explode. Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.
And so came the s, when the culture started to celebrate wealth and acquisition as never before. So that was the first change flowing from the Great Inflation: Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound. There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation.
As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side. Reagan cut taxes significantly.
Inflation ended which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed. But walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments.
There are signs this mind-set is changing. The Trump tax cut of is consistently unpopular. Still, we have a long way to go. Dislodging year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth. But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce. They have enormous power, and in a country this polarized, they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.
They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich in. A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?
Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage? The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better. Sunday Review The Real Legacy of the s. Here is the story: The United States of the s experienced many social upheavals.
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Cultural Changes Of The s And s. words (5 pages) Essay in History. 10/05/17 History Reference this. Disclaimer: This. These essays (and a concluding overview by Steve Early) are complemented by informative “case studies” of workplace confrontations. Kieran Taylor's essay, a.
Jo Freeman is one of those people whom Kipling would praise for keeping her head while those all around are losing theirs. Yet Freeman wondered if getting rid of rules and leaders was actually making feminism more open and fair. After a hard think, she concluded that, if anything, the lack of structure made the situation worse: Elite women who went to the right schools and knew the right people held power and outsiders had no viable way of challenging them. She decided to write an essay summing up her thoughts. That a decentralized cryptocurrency like bitcoin gives ordinary folk control over high finance.
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We live in the shadow of the s. A careful reconsideration reveals a lot more.
“You Might Very Well Be the Cause of Cancer”: Read Bernie Sanders’ 1970s-Era Essays
In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the s is given short shrift — sometimes no shrift at all. This is wrong. Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate. Inflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people. It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.
THE GOOD OLD 70S: The End of the Amerian Century
Thats a nice aticle. Could you send me a link where you got the data from ons? I couldn't find them Thanks a lot in advance! Really nice article. However I wasn't able to find the data on the ONS website. Could you send a link where to find that? Thanks in adavance! It took the tax directly out of income tax. Now, gains from land were tax free.
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The 70's is different then anything in the world today. No one knows quite what sprung the free filling people into partying every night. Was it the rock blasting off of balcony in Hate as h Barrie? Was it the people that were the first anti-wariest, or the rebelling against the neat form of the 50'sand 60's?
ESSAY || Radical Black Love on Screen and Its Criticisms in 1970s Mainstream Media ❤️💕✨
But then nothing much is going to happen in the s anyway. Moynihan is a politician famous for his predictions, and this one seemed for a long time to be dead-on. The seventies, even while they were in progress, looked like an unimportant decade, a period of cooling down from the white-hot sixties. You had to go back to the teens to find another decade so lacking in crisp, epigrammatic definition. It only made matters worse for the seventies that the succeeding decade started with a bang. In the country elected the most conservative President in its history, and it was immediately clear that a new era had dawned. In general the eighties, unlike the seventies, had a perfect dramatic arc. They peaked in the summer of , with the Los Angeles Olympics and the Republican National Convention in Dallas, and began to peter out with the Iran-contra scandal in and the stock market crash in But somehow the seventies seem to be creeping out of the loser-decade category. Their claim to importance is in the realm of sweeping historical trends, rather than memorable events, though there were some of those too. In the United States today a few basic propositions shape everything: The presidential electorate is conservative and Republican. Geopolitics revolves around a commodity oil and a religion Islam more than around an ideology Marxism-Leninism. The national economy is no longer one in which practically every class, region, and industry is upwardly mobile. American culture is essentially individualistic, rather than communitarian, which means that notions like deferred gratification, sacrifice, and sustained national effort are a very tough sell.
Category:1970s essays
Bernie Sanders jumped into the crowded race. This story was published during his first presidential bid. Last month Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent socialist seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, repudiated a essay he wrote for the Vermont Freeman , an alternative newspaper, which included depictions of a rape fantasy from male and female perspectives. Yet as the New York Times recently reported , during his years as a contributor to the Freeman in the late s and early s, Sanders often wrote about sexual norms, as he presented a broader critique of repressive cultural forces that he believed were driving many Americans literally insane. His early writings reflect a political worldview rooted in the fad psychology and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the era and infused with a libertarianesque critique of state power.
