& BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2022-02-17 Th: My principal aim with this ‘Stack over the next six months is to flog my book.. So here are Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century, forthcoming from Basic Books on September 6, 2022 <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>; 97th-98th sentences, with commentary: "It is in hopes of transcending the nonsense to glimpse the world aright that I’ve written this grand narrative. It is in that spirit that I declare unhesitatingly that the most consequent thread through all this history [from 1870 to 2010] was the economic...
Economic trends rocking the world over and over again 1870-2010: when Boomers or Boomers’ parents talk about “the way things used to be” in reference to the period you are describing, the implicit span of time forming their concept of the good old days is surprisingly limited, barely more than a generation.
I’m a middle Boomer. I grew up in a medium-sized Ohio industrial town where, as with many others, “everyone” had “always” worked in “the factory,” in this case Big Three automaker plants (we had one of each).
As it turned out, for my hometown “always” really only described the three decades from the 40s to the 70s. The factories I mentioned started as wartime defense plants that transitioned to civilian manufacturing after the war. For my parents’ generation and mine (the first couple decades, anyway), they had always been there.
My point is that the extent to which a particular person experiences waves of change as actual, and destabilizing, change depends in part on the amplitude and frequency of the waves. I think that one of the reasons many people in my part of the world have gone a bit crazy in recent years is that the waves are coming too high and fast. There’s not enough time between waves for things to solidify into a new normality, which can then be experienced as stable and dependable. All that is solid melts into air, as somebody once said, and many people don’t like to see their world melting.
None of this is news to you, of course, but your description of what has been going on in the long 20th century definitely resonates with my subjective impression of what has happened here in Ohio during my lifetime.
#actually, the waves had been this fast in this furious and this large since 1870. But America’s Midwest had always successfully surfed the waves until the coming of neo liberalism in 1980…
Thanks. I guess I need to read some more Midwest economic history. The thing that puzzles me is what exactly about neoliberalism precluded the Midwest from riding the 80s wave also, or was it primarily the direct and indirect effects of the Volcker Recessions. As a side note, I started my career as a corporate M&A lawyer in Cleveland in the early 80s, and from then into the 90s it seemed like our Midwestern clients were mostly sellers and rarely buyers. By the mid-90s the corporate landscape was almost unrecognizable.
I think Thiel has earned himself a place as the great enemy of all journalists forever, but indeed that makes them see him as more important than he actually is to Republican politics. (And to Silicon Valley, as well) .
Economic trends rocking the world over and over again 1870-2010: when Boomers or Boomers’ parents talk about “the way things used to be” in reference to the period you are describing, the implicit span of time forming their concept of the good old days is surprisingly limited, barely more than a generation.
I’m a middle Boomer. I grew up in a medium-sized Ohio industrial town where, as with many others, “everyone” had “always” worked in “the factory,” in this case Big Three automaker plants (we had one of each).
As it turned out, for my hometown “always” really only described the three decades from the 40s to the 70s. The factories I mentioned started as wartime defense plants that transitioned to civilian manufacturing after the war. For my parents’ generation and mine (the first couple decades, anyway), they had always been there.
My point is that the extent to which a particular person experiences waves of change as actual, and destabilizing, change depends in part on the amplitude and frequency of the waves. I think that one of the reasons many people in my part of the world have gone a bit crazy in recent years is that the waves are coming too high and fast. There’s not enough time between waves for things to solidify into a new normality, which can then be experienced as stable and dependable. All that is solid melts into air, as somebody once said, and many people don’t like to see their world melting.
None of this is news to you, of course, but your description of what has been going on in the long 20th century definitely resonates with my subjective impression of what has happened here in Ohio during my lifetime.
#actually, the waves had been this fast in this furious and this large since 1870. But America’s Midwest had always successfully surfed the waves until the coming of neo liberalism in 1980…
Thanks. I guess I need to read some more Midwest economic history. The thing that puzzles me is what exactly about neoliberalism precluded the Midwest from riding the 80s wave also, or was it primarily the direct and indirect effects of the Volcker Recessions. As a side note, I started my career as a corporate M&A lawyer in Cleveland in the early 80s, and from then into the 90s it seemed like our Midwestern clients were mostly sellers and rarely buyers. By the mid-90s the corporate landscape was almost unrecognizable.
No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
The books at home
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
But in later years, Jon sang "no women" instead of "no weak men".
:-)
I think Thiel has earned himself a place as the great enemy of all journalists forever, but indeed that makes them see him as more important than he actually is to Republican politics. (And to Silicon Valley, as well) .
Maybe “those beats won’t sweeten themselves“ as an alternative tagline?