Which turning and archetype is most joyful?

[Warren Dew]

(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!



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.

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.

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.