Neil Howe: It’s going to get worse; more financial crises coming

[MillsT_98]

(07-29-2016, 04:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We approach the economic crisis of the End of Scarcity, when overproduction threatens to become the norm.

Contemporary elites have been using it, paradoxically, to cut pay, worsen working conditions, and raise economic rents; as such they establish their own class privilege as the sole objective of us all. All the fruits of technological change, human toil not necessary for a level of survival suitable for livestock, and old investment still workable end up going to the economic elites. We are expected to exult in the sultan-like indulgence of those elites.

Let me suggest a group that does not fit that pattern: the Old Order Amish. I doubt that many of us would like to live as they do with their rejection of even the most wholesome of entertainment, their limited education (they keep repeating eighth grade until the school-leaving age of 16), and their limited opportunities in life (practically no white-collar or professional jobs). They are good businessmen, practically re-creating the Gilded Age without the ostentatious display of Gilded elites.  Male chauvinism is the norm; women simply work like men. But they don't have an economy  that better serves legalized loan-sharks than working people. Nobody gets rich among the Amish.

They have given up any prospect of living in the post-industrial age by maintaining technology (except for productivity of farm goods and their marketability -- refrigerators and even solar power are OK, but even a transistor radio is prohibited).

But how great is economic modernity if it comes with gross exploitation characteristic of a plantation society or a fascist regime? I question whether our economic elites have any virtues. What is so great about a loan-shark economy?

Maybe we'll overcome that during the 4T—maybe it's what the 4T is all about.