02-07-2019, 02:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-07-2019, 02:08 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-06-2019, 11:17 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(11-20-2018, 02:32 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote: IMO it was the hedonism promoted by pop culture that encouraged people to run up a debt.
It certainly "helped", but the "spending = good" ideology started in the 2nd Turning, when the last Nomads were dead / out of power, and the hubristic Heroes took over, and nobody held them back.
The spending = good ideology certainly started in the 1T, the 1950s and early 1960s, and it took off from a similar ethic promoted in the 1920s. These are the sources of consumer commercial culture. The Awakening pushed back against this, and offered different ways of life from that culture.
Hedonism certainly expanded during the Awakening as well, but at first this did not require a lot of spending or commercialism. That came later when the boomer hippies became yuppies and went back to the ways of the 1T during the 3T, along with everyone else including the new nomads.
If you mean government spending, though, that goes back to the previous 4T, when Keynesian economics came to power. Austerity came back in the late 2T under Reagan, although government spending continued despite the preaching about fiscal conservatism; it just became spending on things we didn't need (a huge military buildup), and not paying for it. Reagan thus created the enormous national debt which his successors and ideological followers Bush and Trump expanded further. That was a bit different from the Great Society spending of the early 2T, which was for both things we needed and for a war we didn't.