Which turning and archetype is most joyful?

[David Horn]

(05-08-2020, 08:19 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(05-07-2020, 11:20 AM)David Horn Wrote: Are you really that out of touch?  This all started with Ronald Reagan, and his trickle down Morning in America. Some places it started even earlier, as capital used its clout to disadvantage (or eliminate entirely) the laboring class. This took decades, not years. The bottom 50% of the population saw their resiliency drop below zero: no economic cushion, no reliable job,  social disruption as men lost work and women became breadwinners.  Why do you think the opioid crisis happened anyway?

You're confusing two different transitions.  But hey, you give me a chance to post my favorite graph!

I've posted that graph myself on several occasions. As I noted, Reagan only institutionalized what the owner class was creating out of whole cloth. My home town went down before 1970, because it was already depleted when I returned from Vietnam in February of that year.

Warren Dew Wrote:The split between productivity and wages happened in the early 1970s, so obviously Reagan could not have had anything to do with it.  That split was made possible by relaxation of immigration restrictions at the very end of the 1960s.  Immigration becoming essentially unrestricted was what allowed employers to keep wages down; to get additional workers, all employers had to do was import them, whereas while immigration was restricted, they had to pay US workers more to attract them.

Immigration is also ultimately the cause of the opioid crisis: flat wages eventually led to hopelessness by working class whites, and then pharmaceuticals companies convinced immigrant doctors to overprescribe opioids.

What started the ball rolling was not immigration. It was the arrival on the scene of the largest bump in the workforce in the history of the nation. We're not called Boomers for nothing. All of a sudden, the balance between jobs to be filled and those available to fill them flipped solidly toward capital. That was also the beginning of the labor union decline. Opioids were just the penultimate step in the process. The last step will be one of two: revitalization of the rural/less-urban production economy or permanent depletion of that society.

Warren Dew Wrote:Now that gap between the productivity line and the wage line went somewhere.  Some of it went into the pockets of the employers.  But some of it also went into the pockets of people who received welfare, most forms of which started in the "Great Society" program of the 1960s, and some went into the increasing financial requirements for Social Security and other retirement costs for GIs and Silents.  As you may recall, this is specifically called out in Generations, where the 2T "deal" was that the GIs got a comfortable retirement in return for butting out of politics.

If you are blaming the poor for their fate, then you are as tone deaf as the politicians blaming the drastically underpaid meatpacking workers for living in cramped quarters and spreading COVID-19. In both cases, you are still a bit behind Marie Antoinette's, "Let them eat cake." There is no justification for pointing fingers there. This was a problem created by greed -- full stop! It's only gotten worse since then.

Warren Dew Wrote:Economic growth continued apace, albeit benefiting mostly nonworkers of various stripes, until the early 2000s, thanks to free market competition.  However, competition also winnows out the weaker companies, and regulatory capture - regulators starting to work for the companies they regulate, rather than for the consumers - prevents new competitors from arising.  The result is that free market competition stopped, along with productivity growth, which is what marked the transition to the fourth turning.

You're a few decades late attributing this to cronyism. Your graph tells the tale. Just read it. When the government makes common cause with the strong against the weak, the results are a given!