A Moment of Communion with Paul Krugman
Steve Sailer was struck by the exact same passage as I in a profile of Paul Krugman:
Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”
Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”
To state the obvious, this is in many ways a profoundly conservative sentiment. Note the love of the particular, specific and local lived experience, and also the lack of conventional liberal observation (in this passage) of the greater racism of that era, or the conformity and sexual mores against which ‘the Sixties” rebelled. I think that seen in its best, and correct, light, what Krugman is expressing here is the desire that as many people as possible should have access to this kind of middle-class life.
I’m somewhat younger than Krugman, but as they say, the future arrives unevenly. I grew up in a small town with an experience not unlike this. I’m very sympathetic to Krugman’s choking nostalgia. It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it.
The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.
Almost anybody who experienced it this way (and of course, not everybody did), intuitively wants something like it for his own children. The tragedy, in my view, is that, though we all thought of this as the baseline of normality, this really was an exceptional moment in our nation’s history.
My motivation in writing about political economy is, in some ways, much like Krugman’s. But rather than seeing that moment as primarily the product of policies like unionization, entitlements and high taxes, as is Krugman’s view, I believe that it was primarily the product of circumstance. We had just won a global war, and had limited competition; we had a huge wave of immigration, followed by a multi-decade pause; oil was incredibly cheap; a backlog of technical developments had yet to be exploited and scaled up, and so forth. We can’t go back there, at least not exactly.
This difference in diagnosis leads me to radically different views about what we should do now.
(Cross-posted at The Corner)
To me, the tragedy lies in the fact that, just as there is here a fusion between a liberal and a conservative in what they identify as a society worth working for, there is typically a fusion between many liberals and many conservatives in exacerbating our problems: privileging means over ends, or mistaking means for ends.
As your token capitalism skeptic, I would merely like to see attitudes like the one you are expressing here— the idea that we have to make do with less and dial back our expectations, which is becoming quite popular— be synthesized into our national narratives and our narratives about capitalism. For the entirety of my conscious life, the supremacy of the capitalist system and of American capitalism in particular have not merely been sold, but sold with the most outsized, triumphalist language possible. It’s not that this system is merely the best we have, but the best possible; it’s not that this system is well-suited for human flourishing, but that it is the ideal system for human flourishing; it’s not just that it provides some material abundance to some people but that if we hold on long enough it will provide great material abundance to everybody. And not only was this opinion expressed with confidence it was expressed with a kind of withering, superior insistence.
Now, suddenly, as I approach my 30s, there’s this inversion. Now, the idea that capitalism ever could deliver that kind of abundance that widely is the disqualifying opinion. And it is enforced with the same kind of effortless superiority and derision, usually by the same people who enforced the inverse merely years ago. You kind of go, wait, what? This is the American dream that has been sold to me, explicitly and implicitly, my entire life. If it were only a matter of people being lied to their whole lives and of hurt feelings, then who cares, right— ideology exists for a reason. But of course the conversation determines the policy, and the speed with which the expectations of abundance alters has everything to do with how people act politically.
— Freddie · Apr 29, 01:36 PM · #
“We had just won a global war, and had limited competition; we had a huge wave of immigration, followed by a multi-decade pause; oil was incredibly cheap; a backlog of technical developments had yet to be exploited and scaled up, and so forth.”
Well, that’s an empirical argument. There’s a lot to sort out there. Do you have a link or two at hand that would spell out how that has worked?
At your “Keeping America’s Edge” link, you posit a strict dichotomy between “innovation” on one hand, and “creating a sclerotic economy” on the other. But it’s not clear to me that the data warrants that assumption.
Germany, Canada, and France, for example, have growth about as much as the US in the past 30-40 years. (Lot of vagueness in that sentence, I admit). Do Canadian banking regulations really retard innovation and growth?
I am worried that Paul Volker was correct when he said that the only financial innovation of the past 30 years was the ATM. And I’m concerned— would love to be proven wrong— that the growing concentration of economic activity in the US financial sector in the past 30 years has not led to more innovation and the more efficient allocation of capital— that it’s been hoarding at best, predatory at worst.
I’d ask, is there such a thing as global economic competition? The rise of China makes us better off, does it not, because we can engagine in trade (voluntary excchange) with them? It has surely hurt certain sectors in the US, but our consumers like to purchase more cheaply made things from China.
I am not at all a skeptic of capitalism, but I think Freddie’s point is well taken— if you, or others, really believe that prosperity and an increase in the wages and quality of life for the bottom 90% of American earners is a fluke and a thing of the past, that’s rather an important thing to stress over and over again.
Off Topic: “On average, a 1% increase in gas prices has caused: i) a 0.32% increase in the population living in the inner city and ii) a 1.28% decrease in low-density housing units.” http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/04/gas-prices-and-sprawl-in-canada/
— reflectionephemeral · Apr 29, 03:28 PM · #
Lots of people look at their youth with nostalgia. Among people of my age, there is a lot of nostalgia in Russia for the 50s and 60s. I almost share some of that nostalgia, because some aspects of life in the Soviet Union in those days reminds me more of the world of my own youth than current life in the U.S. does. (I presume I don’t need to provide my anti-commie credentials, which are probably better than those of anyone else here.)
Life was good (my mother would insist that no, we were not poor) but I guess I was always aware that life was not the same for everyone. My father was a Lutheran pastor in rural, northern communities, but would sometimes mention that he had been visiting the father of one of my friends in jail. In fact, jail visits were part of his routine for a few years. As a little tyke, I was not completely unaware of how people ended up in these places, and what kind of violent or otherwise disagreeable home lives some of them had. I knew some of these people, and my parents had no problem letting me associate with some of the people who others thought were not fit company for their children.
I am thankful I didn’t grow up in suburbia. At the time I was aware there was such a place, and I didn’t see how people could stand that kind of life.
I do miss the greater egalitarianism of those days. It was kind of a shock to me to realize after I came out of a grad school cocoon in the late 70s that it was no longer possible to earn a respectable living in some of the lines of work in which it can be done in the 60s. Some of the jobs I had back in the late 60s were still around, but could no longer provide the same socio-economic status.
Since then we’ve had improvements in transportation, communications, and other technology, which have created more of a winner-take-all world. We’ve also had increased growth and centralization of government, and especially growth and centralization of regulation, which have also created more of a winner-take-all world (which has also created the kind of bubbles which will only get worse if current trends continue). Getting rid of leftists and establishment Republicans would help enough to be worth doing, but I don’t think all of the growth in socio-economic inequality can be blamed on them.
— The Reticulator · Apr 29, 04:48 PM · #
Reticulator, c’mon, your gut may tell you that government regulation has grown like a tumor since the 60’s, but it’s completely untrue.
By and large, in the last 40 years, the U.S. has moved more often to deregulate, especially if you hold this period in contrast to the 40 years before it.
Now, by your lights, the recent mood of deregulation has no doubt been insufficiently robust. However, you aren’t saying that. You are somehow claiming that federal regulation has expanded since the days when you and your faraway counterpart, Ivan, enjoyed malteds and followed the triumphs of Sputnik simultaneously over eerily similar versions of the Argosy TA1. On what grounds, man?
— Tony Artaud · Apr 29, 05:28 PM · #
The market forces that have increased inequality in America have also hit the other OECD countries. But they’ve remained comparatively equal, because they have stronger social insurance states. None of them have just won world wars. They all face greater external competition than the US taken as a unit. Their immigration pattern is the opposite of the one you are describing regarding the US in the 1950s. Oil is more expensive than in contemporary US, let alone 1950s US. Productivity has stalled in the same way it has in the US. Yet, they don’t have the same extremes of after-tax wealth and poverty It’s not utopia, but if America had higher taxes and better social services, it would be more equal as well.
— Pithlord · Apr 29, 06:20 PM · #
“We’ve also had increased growth and centralization of government, and especially growth and centralization of regulation, which have also created more of a winner-take-all world (which has also created the kind of bubbles which will only get worse if current trends continue).”
I could be wrong, but I believe the sort of “bubbles” being talked about where far, far more common in the days before the modern regulatory framework.
Mike
— MBunge · Apr 29, 07:17 PM · #
The real poet laureate of the suburban egalitarianism is Benjamin Schwarz, culture editor for the Atlantic:
In the new July-August 2009 Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest volume of Kevin Starr’s history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963. It makes me nostalgic for what once was. Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:
“It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country’s dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. … In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.
“It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and — thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine — were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost. …
“Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific — and prosaic. California, as he’s argued in earlier volumes, promised “the highest possible life for the middle classes.” It wasn’t a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered “a better place for ordinary people.” That place always meant “an improved and more affordable domestic life”: a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space … and a lush backyard — the stage, that is, for “family life in a sunny climate.” It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles “common man” who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933,” addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile.”
“Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class — the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners … But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination … and how the Golden State — fleetingly, as it turns out — accomodated Americans’ “conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life.” …
“This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all — as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico’s Bidwell, the East Bay’s Tilden, and San Diego’s Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized — some would say homogenized — a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA — times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, “there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions.”
“To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a “typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.”) Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had — by those Starr calls the “fiercely competitive.” That’s just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream …”
Basically, that was my quite lovely childhood in the San Fernando Valley 1958-1980: ping-pong on the screened-in porch, swimming, backyard barbecues at my relatives’ houses, Yosemite, long hours at the library two blocks away, tennis at the park three blocks away, golf on municipal courses, and UCLA (for my MBA).
Schwarz’s review of James M. Cain 1941 novel “Mildred Pierce,” “The Great Los Angeles Novel,” in the current issue of The Atlantic is similarly outstanding.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 29, 07:21 PM · #
Jim,
Reading your “What is to be done” piece at the link, I’m struck at the gap between the diagnosis (which makes a lot of sense) and the remedy. Basically, it comes down to unwinding the emergency measures taken by the federal government in late 2008/early 2009 (which will surely happen) and “deregulating the schools”, about which much is left to the imagnation.
Fair enough, I suppose. But even if deregulating the schools led to an improvement in mean performance (granted arguendo), it seems likely that it would also mean an increase in variance in performance. This tradeoff might be worth making, but it isn’t going to increase cohesion.
— Pithlord · Apr 29, 10:28 PM · #
Pithlord,
I give a more comprehensive view of how I think we ought to handle welfare state, that hopefully puts school deregulation in some context, in this article.
Best,
Jim
— Jim Manzi · Apr 29, 10:32 PM · #
This piece took me back to a simpler time. A time when appeals to nostalgia were (supposedly) only resorted to by the like of Reagan and Thatcher; and, therefore, Bad.
These new kids don’t play by the good old rules either. In my day, if someone said he wanted to bring back a past government policy, you could assume without even asking that he also wanted to bring back the technological conditions that were around at the same time.
I liked this tune a whole lot better when Archie and Edith sang it.
— Paul Zrimsek · Apr 29, 10:59 PM · #
Reading nostalgic reverence like this is shocking to me when relatively so few Americans experienced these times in these ways. Like Norman Rockwell paintings, they become a mythical era expounded upon by those with happy, but admittedly vague memories to structure a false vision for what all future political and social agendas should aim to accomplish. But the future is a different time with different problems, to the degree that no future American society can be fueled, monitored, researched, structured or experienced the way it was in the 50s and 60s. If that idea seems depressing and you long for “simpler” times, you are deliberately ignoring the fact that these times came with a great deal less social, political or economic awareness or responsibility. We can be simple or we can be wise, but we cannot be both.
— Tony Chavira · Apr 30, 12:47 AM · #
Jim, as I understand it, you are proposing replacing broad defined benefit public pension schemes like social security with a combination of a safety net/ welfare tier for the poor and a defined contribution tier for everyone else, and you are proposing making it easier for regulated private entities to provide public services, especially in education.
I’m more sympathetic to the second proposal than the first, but the main point is that neither would improve social cohesion.
— Pithlord · Apr 30, 02:37 PM · #
My childhood can be described more or less the same. But I spent my childhood in one of the poorest Eastern European countries first under the late 80’ communism and then in the “Wild Est” years of the early 90’. This period cannot be described in any way as “great”. But still my childhood can be compared to that of Jim Manzi or Paul Krugman. And yes, today things are different even here. I agree that many things have changed in the last 40-50 years and many changes were for worse (i’m not conservative for nothing) but I feel like everybody has there own Very Bad Thing That Ruined Everything (women liberation, greedy businessmen and so on). Yes many of those did play a part but I thing the big change was peoples expectations. I see this loss of childhood as the end result of the long modern drive to eliminate risks. This is a good thing when you’re building airplanes but not so good when raising kids. We have domesticated ourselves to the point that we are like animals in a zoo. We have everything we need, we face little risks but we are bored and fat.
Oh, and another thing. Both my parents worked. This is and was something normal then as now in my country. So I never understood this American (and German) obsession with mothers not working. It seems so Victorian to me. Like the child will became a gang member if the mother does spend at least 10 hours a day with him.
— Y ddraig werdd · May 1, 10:45 AM · #
It is NOT the case that childhood was safer then. Just the opposite. More children died in accidents, and more were victims of crime. We were allowed more freedom in our youth despite those risks. Parents since then have developed a higher bar with regard to child safety. I don’t know whether that is a cause or consequence of childhood becoming more safe. Or maybe neither.
But it’s a mistake to look back on those halcyon days and think, “it was safe to let your kids roam free.” It wasn’t safer then than now. There was just a different perception of risk.
— Russell · May 1, 09:05 PM · #
“It is NOT the case that childhood was safer then. Just the opposite. More children died in accidents, and more were victims of crime.”
I wonder if that is true in general, and also whether it was true of those particular places. I presume it’s true of things like car accidents, but I wonder if it’s true in a Lenore Skenazy sense.
“There was just a different perception of risk.”
I don’t know if there was a different perception of risk, but there was definitely a different way of risk management. Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids is always a breath of fresh air on this subject. She may have voted for Obama for all I know, but she gets one of my Leviathan Ankle-Biter awards just the same. And if it’s true that childhood is safer now, we need more of her approach to child-raising, not less.
— The Reticulator · May 1, 09:39 PM · #
I’m more sympathetic to the second proposal than the first, but the main point is that neither would improve social cohesion.
That must be a very special definition of social cohesion that you’re using. Are you sure you’re not confusing social cohesion with social conformity enforced by the government? Do you think the United Kingdom, with its ASBO’s and a decided lack of defined-contribution social welfare systems, is a wonderful example of social cohesion? (General principle: You can’t have a welfare state without a police state.)
— The Reticulator · May 1, 09:43 PM · #
No. I don’t think welfare states are necessarily more cohesive. If and to the extent they encourage young men not to work, they are damaging to social cohesion.
However, as Jim himself says in the 2 pieces he links to, laissez faire capitalism isn’t necessarily good for social cohesion either. It may be efficient to let declining industries and regions die, but it has a social cost.
I’m willing to defend defined benefit pension schemes, but my main point is just that at the end of this post, Jim suggests he’s linking to some conservative-friendly, market-oriented ideas he has for addressing these problems, and, whatever their merits, they don’t really.
— Pithlord · May 1, 11:03 PM · #
Pithlord, I’m glad you prodded me to read those two articles of Jim’s. I think they’re very good starting points for discussion, and they do show a way to improve social cohesion. Maybe his ideas aren’t enough, but they would help.
They would help to correct the extreme individualism and loss of community that is produced by our current version of the welfare state. Jim wrote that the welfare state can undermine capitalism. That’s true, but a more serious problem is that the welfare state can undermine social cohesion. The kind of welfare state he is talking about is different. It’s one in which people are allowed to make significant life choices.
Leftism is is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may make a consequential life decision. Consequential life decisions affect family and community members. They put us in relationships in which we depend on each other (or allow us to be in such relationships). That’s where your social cohesion comes from. Leftists don’t like that, because these dependent relationships compete with dependence on the government. Defined-contribution systems, broadly speaking, are ways of allowing people to make consequential choices, yet not abandoning those who would otherwise be left hopelessly behind. They provide welfare, minus the attendant corruption that we have in our current system.
There are a couple of points in Jim’s articles that I’d like to learn more about.
1. He said that “the estimated percentage of 15-year-olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than in Western Europe, because unmarried European parents are much more likely to raise children together.” I would not have guessed that. Would like details.
2. He mentioned that Sweden and Netherlands have some sort of school choice that works well, though he didn’t use the term “school choice.” Would like details on that one, too.
And there is one other point on which I’d like to take him to task. He speaks of regulation and under-regulation as though it’s a matter of degree. I hate when people do that, whether they’re on the left or the right. I wish we would instead talk about TYPES of regulation. There are some types of regulation that are prone to abuse and corruption — which tend to make the regulatees subject to extortion for political purposes. There are other types of regulation that are not so prone to corruption. They tend not to provide as many government jobs for the oppressor class, but it’s not as simple as saying regulation bad, deregulation good.
— The Reticulator · May 2, 04:56 AM · #
“They would help to correct the extreme individualism and loss of community that is produced by our current version of the welfare state.”
As opposed to the extreme individualism and loss of community that is produced by our current version of capitalism?
Seriously, is it possible to have an intelligent discussion with someone who links the welfare state to “extreme individualism” mere weeks after right wingers were practically gushing over Ayn Rand, a woman who deifies individualism and essentially denies the very existence of community?
Mike
— MBunge · May 2, 02:33 PM · #
As opposed to the extreme individualism and loss of community that is produced by our current version of capitalism?
They are certainly different, but I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that these two types of extreme individualism and loss of community are opposed to each other.
Seriously, is it possible to have an intelligent discussion with someone who links the welfare state to “extreme individualism” mere weeks after right wingers were practically gushing over Ayn Rand, a woman who deifies individualism and essentially denies the very existence of community?
I should hope it’s possible. If you are debilitated by lack of intelligence or excessive prejudice and bigotry, I suppose it could be difficult for you to take part in that discussion. But I’ll bet you can handle it.
— The Reticulator · May 2, 05:00 PM · #
“If you are debilitated by lack of intelligence or excessive prejudice and bigotry”
Recognizing a crank is a crank is neither prejudiced nor bigoted. I’m not sure what sort of hippie education you had growing up, but not all ideas, all arguments or all argumentors are deserving of or entitled to equal treatment. If your family and/or associates have mollycoddled you into thinking there is…well, that would explain a whole lot.
Mike
— MBunge · May 2, 05:27 PM · #
Recognizing a crank is a crank is neither prejudiced nor bigoted. I’m not sure what sort of hippie education you had growing up…
The teachers at my rural high school in Henning MN were more liberal than I was, but they taught us how to identify the logical fallacies in statements like this:
Seriously, is it possible to have an intelligent discussion with someone who links the welfare state to “extreme individualism” mere weeks after right wingers were practically gushing over Ayn Rand, a woman who deifies individualism and essentially denies the very existence of community?
I forget now whether that was in Mrs Bredberg’s English class or one of Mrs Halvorsen’s history classes, but we were expected to be able to identify the kind of faulty technique shown here. We were tested on examples like that.
I didn’t run into my first proto-hippies until the summer between my Junior and Senior years.
— The Reticulator · May 2, 07:42 PM · #
“I forget now whether that was in Mrs Bredberg’s English class or one of Mrs Halvorsen’s history classes, but we were expected to be able to identify the kind of faulty technique shown here.”
The only thing faulty is your grip on reality. And I suspect your teachers would be disappointed to see you’ve grown up into the sort of ideologically blinkered fool who tosses around puerile phrases like “oppressor class”. Seriously, what it is about right wingers like you that makes you so unself-awarely echo the language and thought processes of communists?
Mike
— MBunge · May 2, 08:19 PM · #
Jim Manzi,
I shared your childhood experience, and that of Steve Sailer as well. I grew up middle class in california in the 60s and 70s. I do think that you are partially right that it was the result of particular circumstance, but you are wrong to dismiss unionism as a reason for the character of that time. Unionism was a big part of the particular circumstances. The growth of the middle class of the fifties and sixites was the end result of the union movement. The middle class grew and dominatied in that time because plumbers and auto workers got middle class wages and benefits through their unions. IN other words, blue collar workers joined the middle class becasue of thier unions. Another thing to remember is the power of the GI bill, which was very generous government benefit that paid for education and housing of soldiers returning from WWII (like my dad and uncles). Considering how many returning soldiers there were, the effects of this benefit were enormous.
But, this brings me to my final point. We are always in a particular set of circumstances. It is important to remember that circumstances change. Therefor—and I think you have made this point in another post—that it is very difficult to predict what the circumstances will be 30-40 years from now. And so, to me, to totally change our social system to in response to an uncertain future, especially in a moment when fears about the future are high and politicians are stoking and using these fears with only the the next election in mind. I agree we need to do something about the debt but I would take cautious regular steps knowing that things will be different than we pictured in the future, and that circumstances. In other words, I wouldn’t throw a huge chunk of our social system on the fashionable panic of the day. Especially when the cuase of the future debt is the result of the fact that we have an extraordinarily expensive health care “system,” something with enormous room for improvement.
— cw · May 3, 01:10 AM · #
The only thing faulty is your grip on reality.
A person who has a mind defective enough to write the following is hardly a person to judge who has a grip on reality:
Seriously, is it possible to have an intelligent discussion with someone who links the welfare state to “extreme individualism” mere weeks after right wingers were practically gushing over Ayn Rand, a woman who deifies individualism and essentially denies the very existence of community?
It must take a dark and twisted mind to somehow allow fans of Ayn Rand keep him from having an intelligent discussion.
And I suspect your teachers would be disappointed to see you’ve grown up into the sort of ideologically blinkered fool who tosses around puerile phrases like “oppressor class”. Seriously, what it is about right wingers like you that makes you so unself-awarely echo the language and thought processes of communists?
What makes you think such language is used unself-awarely? I started to explain the general principles behind it, but then deleted those sentences after I realized they probably couldn’t be understood by someone who somehow thinks Ayn Rand fans make an intelligent discussion impossible.
— The Reticulator · May 3, 03:26 AM · #
“What makes you think such language is used unself-awarely?”
Uh, because it was obvious to whom you were applying such language. You’re like the white guy who bitches about how black folk can use the “N word” but he can’t.
And by the way, whining like a little bitch is not an effective debating technique. “Oh, you’re being prejudiced!” “Oh, you’re being bigoted!” Oh, you’re being unfair to Ayn Rand fans!”.
Just to restate the point, conservatives just went through an orgy of praise and celebration of Ayn Rand, a woman whose philosophy is obssesively individualistic and essentially denies the very existence of any sort of community. Now we come here to have right wingers talking about how the welfare state promoted extreme individualism and loss of community. Unless you’re calling Rand a welfare state-loving liberal or you’re calling the welfare state a Randian concept, the conflict is obvious to anyone who isn’t a crank. Which explains your responses.
Mike
— MBunge · May 3, 02:18 PM · #
Uh, because it was obvious to whom you were applying such language. You’re like the white guy who bitches about how black folk can use the “N word” but he can’t.
If you look back at the nonsense you wrote, you will see that you were the one who was whining and bitching about the use of a term.
Could you try to be at least as intelligent in debate as Sarah Palin?
_And by the way, whining like a little bitch is not an effective debating technique. “Oh, you’re being prejudiced!” “Oh, you’re being bigoted!” Oh, you’re being unfair to Ayn Rand fans!”.
You do appear to be prejudiced and bigoted, another couple of terms you’ve been whining and crying about. If you could read for comprehension, you would note that I never complained that you’re being unfair to Ayn Rand fans. You aren’t. But you are being pretty stupid and illogical.
Just to restate the point, conservatives just went through an orgy of praise and celebration of Ayn Rand
You seem to have some problems with logic. You said conservatives went through an orgy of praise and celebration of Ayn Rand. Does that mean all conservatives went through an orgy of praise and celebration of Ayn Rand? Does that mean most conservatives did? Does that mean some conservatives did? Do you understand the difference between those three? Do you now understand how you are being bigotted and prejudiced?
a woman whose philosophy is obssesively individualistic and essentially denies the very existence of any sort of community.
As many conservatives have pointed out over the years, perhaps starting with Whittaker Chambers in National Review magazine many years ago. Try not to be so ignorant.
Now we come here to have right wingers talking about how the welfare state promoted extreme individualism and loss of community. Unless you’re calling Rand a welfare state-loving liberal or you’re calling the welfare state a Randian concept, the conflict is obvious to anyone who isn’t a crank. Which explains your responses.
Uh, no. I think you need to enroll yourself in a remedial logic class.
— The Reticulator · May 3, 03:10 PM · #
When I was a teacher, patience was not one of my strong points. Maybe I should be more patient with Mr. Bunge and help him understand his flawed logic. Perhaps he can understand the problem with his last statement if he looks at this sequence, which follows the same logic:
1. Bullets shot through the brain can kill a person.
2. Joe is dead.
3. Therefore, Joe was killed by bullets shot through his brain.
— The Reticulator · May 3, 03:51 PM · #
1. When you fall back on this sort of pedantic bullshit, even you know you’re losing the argument.
2. Pointing out that members of Group A are condeming X at virtually the same time that members of Group A are celebrating X is not a logical fallacy. There are certainly criticisms to be made of it as an argument, but it is not a logical fallacy. Calling it such only proves you don’t know what the term means.
3. If you think Whitaker Chambers is more influential on and representative of modern conservatives than, say, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity…you are even dumber than you appear.
4. Recognizing cranks, fools and morons for what they are is not prejudice or bigotry. Calling it such only proves that you are a whiny bitch who has no appreciation of actual prejudice and bigotry.
5. Your patience is perfectly fine. You’re just a crank who can’t tolerate people who call you on your crankitude.
Mike
— MBunge · May 3, 04:45 PM · #
1. When you fall back on this sort of pedantic bullshit, even you know you’re losing the argument.
You haven’t yet demonstrated that you know what an argument is, or how one is lost.
2. Pointing out that members of Group A are condeming X at virtually the same time that members of Group A are celebrating X is not a logical fallacy.
No, it isn’t, but that isn’t what you were doing.
There are certainly criticisms to be made of it as an argument, but it is not a logical fallacy. Calling it such only proves you don’t know what the term means.
Here is a page about logical fallacies. You have been guilty of several of them in this thread. Would you like me to identify them and analyze them for you one by one? Or do you think you can figure them out for yourself without whining and moaning about “pedantic bullshit.”
3. If you think Whitaker Chambers is more influential on and representative of modern conservatives than, say, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity…you are even dumber than you appear.
The relative influence and representativeness of Whitaker Chambers and Rush Limbaugh is not relevant to the discussion. You trying to commit every logical fallacy on that page or something?
4. Recognizing cranks, fools and morons for what they are is not prejudice or bigotry. Calling it such only proves that you are a whiny bitch who has no appreciation of actual prejudice and bigotry.
But you ARE guilty and bigotry from the word go, when you assume that all members of some vaguely identifiable group think alike, and that that is what keeps you from having an intelligent discussion, when it is really your own bigotry and lack of intelligence that keeps you from having an intelligent discussion.
5. Your patience is perfectly fine. You’re just a crank who can’t tolerate people who call you on your crankitude.
Name-calling is not a substitute for argument. (I think you just committed yet another of the logical fallacies that re listed on that page. I am going to be disappointed if you reply to this without committing yet another. And try to be original and not just repeat the first ones, OK?
— The Reticulator · May 4, 12:44 PM · #
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— DCCTV · May 6, 07:56 AM · #
Oh, Dr. Manzi.
You post is not brilliant or insightful. You and K-thug are just waxing nostalgic over a world that never was.
That era of American Exceptionalism farmed the third world like feudal serfs.
The new arms race is human capital and anglosaxon christians are paupers. There are more high IQ Indian children than there are american children all together.
You are an american conservative that lives in France, lool.
Do your children go to french schools?
You have no street credit.
— matoko_chan · May 10, 02:34 PM · #
Deleting my comments is not going to change the reality of the situation.
Sailer knows what I say is true.
Anglosaxon christianity was a fabulously successful ESS, and ruled the world for a lonngg time.
But globalization and social media and universalism and islamic EGT resistance to proselytization are going to kill it dead.
And Dr. Manzi is a retired millionaire living in France with french schools and french healthcare.
tant pis
— matoko_chan · May 10, 03:08 PM · #
You have no street credit.
If you want to have street cred, you have to use the right term.
— The Reticulator · May 10, 04:09 PM · #
lool
okfine, have it your way. Dr. Manzi is not legit.
nostalgie de la suzeraineté , Jim?
— matoko_chan · May 10, 04:59 PM · #