I’m getting old now, as I recently completed my sixth decade here on Earth. So it’s kind-of natural for me to look back on the days of my youth and count the ways in which they were better than today. But then again, perhaps there really were some things about the suburban world of the 1960’s and 1970’s that were better. A lot of young people of today — the “Millennials” — are pretty upset about their declining social and economic possibilities. Some of them even look back with envy and irony on the world that I knew when I was their age, perhaps questioning the fairness of why their parents’ generation (the “Boomers”) had such abundant opportunities for a good, comfortable life as compared with the challenges that they now face. <\/p>\n
In fact, the Millennials have created an Internet fictional character called “Old Economy Steve<\/a>“, to stand as a “meme” (something like a mythological sound bite) for their frustrations. Old Economy Steve is a series of short messages posted on a series of identical pictures showing a long-haired white guy who definitely looks like a refuge from That Seventies Show<\/em>. To be honest, I didn’t look all that different from Steve back then. And to be more honest, most of what they say about O.E. Steve’s world is more-or-less true. Back then, you COULD get a job with good pay right out of high school and be fairly sure that if you kept your nose to the grindstone, you would soon have enough to get married, buy a house, and raise a family. If you wanted to shoot a little higher, you COULD go to college and pay for books and tuition from what you earned on a summer job (I did just that!). And a college degree just about guaranteed a very decent job (that is, until the year that I graduated). No moving back in with mom and dad, not back in those days.<\/p>\n As with every ‘meme’, reality doesn’t completely fit with the story behind it. As Megan McArdle points out<\/a>, if you weren’t a white male, things weren’t quite so rosy. Blacks, Mexicans, women, farmers, small business owners, and other groups had to struggle and didn’t always achieve the “American Dream”. And yet, Mexicans and Blacks kept on coming up from the agrarian south in huge numbers to seek industrial employment in US cities in the 40’s thru the 70’s; perhaps they got the lowest jobs available, but they must have felt those were still better than what they had. And small business owners and farmers had the option of ‘starting over in the city’ back when industrial jobs were easy to come by. And despite sexism in the workplace, women still had a lot of economic choices back then, choices that aren’t as easy to come by in today’s economy — including being a stay-at-home mother, like my own mother was.<\/p>\n And by the same token, Steve himself, if he got out of high school in ’71 or thereafter (I was class of 71) started facing more and more career challenges<\/a>. The oil price shock of 1973-74 threw the economy into a nasty recession, and along with many of my colleagues, I had to wait a long time to get a job after college. And even then we didn’t get the jobs we were hoping for, we settled for most any steady gig. From that point on, the US economy continued along a “de-industrialization” path that closed all the factories (or got rid of the factory jobs, even when the factory stayed open). The unions that once insured job security and good benefits slowly weakened and contracted. Governments had to cut-back on education subsidies, and college tuition costs started their steep ascent. Energy prices wavered, but were never as reliably low as in the 1950s and 60s. <\/p>\n Technology and business management innovations came quicker and quicker as the 70s and 80s progressed, and things changed more and more rapidly. Many of those changes were good, as they offered new products, and made existing things cheaper and often of better quality. But as to the basics of participation in the economy — i.e. the ability to make a decent living, leave something for your kids, and save enough for a nice retirement — that seemed to get harder and harder for the “common man” (and woman).<\/p>\n So, before we knew it, much of the stuff that we bought for our households (tables, towels, refrigerators, radios, even our automobiles and oranges and lettuce) were being made (or grown) in Mexico or China or other far-off lands. Not long thereafter, more and more jobs once held by Americans were being “outsourced” to countries like India, where wages and benefits are so much lower. Cheaper computers and robots soon made it easier to build machines to do what people once did (e.g. assemble autos, run chemical plants, sell tickets, take your bank deposits, answer your questions on the phone . . . ) . And government “safety net” programs meant to help those who were affected by all these changes got stretched thinner and thinner, while businesses became more and more wary about providing permanent employment opportunities or decent compensation for those employees that it still needed. The “Old Economy” that allegedly coddled Steve was already starting to die even when Steve (and most of us Boomers) still wore those unfortunate hair styles. <\/p>\n What killed the “Old Economy<\/a>“? Or perhaps better put, why can’t the “New Economy” treat average people better in terms of offering decent job prospects<\/a> and stable middle-class lives (including affordable health care, affordable education opportunities, and freedom from all the upsetting, unanticipated changes that happen faster and faster these days)? Many articles<\/a> and books and web conversations<\/a> have been written on this subject. I have already mentioned some of these factors — e.g. advancing technology, growing economic internationalization (leading to Tom Friedman’s “hot, flat and crowded world<\/a>“), continuing wars, nationalism, terrorism, political gridlock, increasing chaos in the overall economic-social-political structures . . . <\/p>\n But if I had to boil it down to two things, which perhaps are just two sides of the same coin, I would cite accelerating technological advancement, along with the growing ability of employers to use that technology to get things done with machines instead of humans. I first read about what accelerating technology change might mean, way back when I looked looked like O.E. Steve — i.e., in Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock”. Many of the particular predictions made by Toffler were wrong, but one theme he kept on repeating<\/a> has come true with a vengeance. And that is that our economy, our society, and our political governance systems are changing faster and faster with every new year. And perhaps they are changing too fast for humans, such as we are, to successfully adapt our lives and society to them in a fair and agreeable fashion. It seems like I myself have seen 4 or 5 times as much change in how things are done in the world versus what my parents might have lived with. For the Millennials of today, that might be a factor of 10 or 20! <\/p>\n