Which turning and archetype is most joyful?

[Blazkovitz]

(05-07-2020, 07:53 AM)sbarrera Wrote: How about this: the joy of the 1T was fake, the joy of the 2T was ebullient, and the joy of the 3T was frenzied.

Beautiful wording

The joy during the last 1T was undermined by fears of nuclear war and a feeling that civilization failed since it led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. But those who survived the 4T, like Jews who went out of Nazi camps, experienced very real joy.

[Warren Dew]

(05-07-2020, 07:53 AM)sbarrera Wrote: How about this: the joy of the 1T was fake, the joy of the 2T was ebullient, and the joy of the 3T was frenzied.

That sounds pretty accurate.

[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.

[Bob Butler 54]

(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!



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 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.

I can agree with the chart and that things got worse starting with the election of Nixon, but disagree about the causes, or would supplement them. That was when the progressive era ended, the conservative era began. I put the break around the convention in Chicago and the election. In the progressive era labor unions were strong as were benefits. The advantage of increased productivity went to the laborers more, instead of the elites. Watergate, the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, the national malaise, all contributed to things going bad. Reagan's voodoo economics and shipping jobs overseas made it worse later.

Certainly there was enough going wrong in the 70s to go around.

[Eric the Green]

Ha ha. It is obvious that the trend exploded with Reagan. The gas-shortage recession led to downturns after 1973, but wages were at least recovering if less quickly than productivity under Nixon-Ford. Then along comes Reagan and the gap widens. Compensation, as the graph shows, made very modest recoveries under the moderate "new" Democrats (non-FDR/LBJ Democrats) Carter, Clinton and Obama, despite furious Republican opposition and obstruction, but under Republicans it actually declined or went nowhere. The gap widened particularly as the 3T got going in Reagan's second term, after he won by a landslide and soon after the early 1980s recession ended.

[Warren Dew]

(05-08-2020, 01:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The gas-shortage recession led to downturns after 1973, but wages were at least recovering if less quickly than productivity under Nixon-Ford. Then along comes Reagan and the gap widens. Compensation, as the graph shows, made very modest recoveries under the moderate "new" Democrats (non-FDR/LBJ Democrats) Carter, Clinton and Obama, despite furious Republican opposition and obstruction, but under Republicans it actually declined or went nowhere. The gap widened particularly as the 3T got going in Reagan's second term, after he won by a landslide and soon after the early 1980s recession ended.

You need to look at the timing more carefully.  There was a mild recovery in wages in the last year of the Ford administration and the first couple years of Carter, but that quickly tanked in the middle of Carter's term, which is why he didn't get reelected.  There were mild gains in Clinton's second term and Bush's first term.  There was a step gain in the 2008/2009 recession when the lowest wage workers got laid off, raising the average, but you guys always blame that on Bush, not Obama.

All of these were minor blips in the straight line of real wages, and none of them compared to what productivity was doing.  The gap continued to widen and widen, thanks to the easy availability of immigrant labor.

[Eric the Green]

(05-08-2020, 07:13 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(05-08-2020, 01:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The gas-shortage recession led to downturns after 1973, but wages were at least recovering if less quickly than productivity under Nixon-Ford. Then along comes Reagan and the gap widens. Compensation, as the graph shows, made very modest recoveries under the moderate "new" Democrats (non-FDR/LBJ Democrats) Carter, Clinton and Obama, despite furious Republican opposition and obstruction, but under Republicans it actually declined or went nowhere. The gap widened particularly as the 3T got going in Reagan's second term, after he won by a landslide and soon after the early 1980s recession ended.

You need to look at the timing more carefully.  There was a mild recovery in wages in the last year of the Ford administration and the first couple years of Carter, but that quickly tanked in the middle of Carter's term, which is why he didn't get reelected.  There were mild gains in Clinton's second term and Bush's first term.  There was a step gain in the 2008/2009 recession when the lowest wage workers got laid off, raising the average, but you guys always blame that on Bush, not Obama.

All of these were minor blips in the straight line of real wages, and none of them compared to what productivity was doing.  The gap continued to widen and widen, thanks to the easy availability of immigrant labor.

No, thanks entirely to the Reaganomics policies. It's interesting that you can look at this obvious conclusion from this graph and ignore it is amazing.

[Eric the Green]

Another thing you ignore is that the downturn in 1980 was not due to immigrant labor, which is good for the economy, but to the second gas crisis that happened because of the Iran Crisis. Buying into Trump's scapegoating of immigrants is, to put it mildly, wrong, but lots of white folks have fallen for it, especially in red states and counties.

[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!

[David Horn]

(05-08-2020, 11:53 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I can agree with the chart and that things got worse starting with the election of Nixon, but disagree about the causes, or would supplement them.  That was when the progressive era ended, the conservative era began.  I put the break around the convention in Chicago and the election.  In the progressive era labor unions were strong as were benefits.  The advantage of increased productivity went to the laborers more, instead of the elites.  Watergate, the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, the national malaise, all contributed to things going bad.  Reagan's voodoo economics and shipping jobs overseas made it worse later.

Certainly there was enough going wrong in the 70s to go around.

Amen! That era is still the benchmark era for social decline. When you start high, the fall looks all the worse. We both failed to mention the two oil embargoes ('73 and '79) that raised the cost of fuel and nearly everything else in weeks, not years. 1973 is also the point where the two-income family became the norm -- exacerbating the imbalance of jobs to workers for good.

And that's only scratching the surface, to be honest about it.

[David Horn]

(05-09-2020, 12:28 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Another thing you ignore is that the downturn in 1980 was not due to immigrant labor, which is good for the economy, but to the second gas crisis that happened because of the Iran Crisis. Buying into Trump's scapegoating of immigrants is, to put it mildly, wrong, but lots of white folks have fallen for it, especially in red states and counties.

Exactly!  Nothing needs to be added to that.  Then again, we both lived it as adults.

[pbrower2a]

A 3T begins happy but goes sour. The elites become more powerful and demanding, and although the elites may pretend to support some self-righteous causes they find hedonism profitable -- for separating fools from their money.