Marc Levinson writing recently in The Wall Street Journal provides a very pessimistic view for the American Dream, ‘Why the Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore: The long boom after World War II left Americans with unrealistic expectations, but there’s no going back to that unusual Golden Age’:
People who had thought themselves condemned to be sharecroppers in the Alabama Cotton Belt or day laborers in the boot heel of Italy found opportunities they could never have imagined. The French called this period les trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years. Germans spoke of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, while the Japanese, more modestly, referred to ‘the era of high economic growth.’ In the English-speaking countries, it has more commonly been called the Golden Age.
[…] The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U. S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 21, 2016.
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