I went to body pump after work tonight. Angie, who is actually a very good instructor, decided that we all needed extra beatings in anticipation of the upcoming weekend. Suffice it to say I was dragging ass by the time we got to the pushups and crunches. They suck!
I had begun a long post about Wisconsin and the bait and switch tactics that Scott Walker is using, in concert with his other sick GOP governor buddies, to try complete the cruxifiction of the middle class. But that will have to wait till tomorrow.
However, I would like to steer you towards a mini-book I downloaded last night for my I-pad. It is called, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
It is by a guy named Tyler Cowen and his central premise is both pessimistic and optimistic in the long term. His thesis is, that our tired old notion of American exceptionalism-something the poster child repeats again and again to the fat, lazy and ignorant specimens of Americana who adore him-just isn’t going to sustain the USA for either the short or the long term. Allen West’s dream of rerturning to McKinelyville will destroy the very people who elected him. Cowen makes no secret that for the short term at least, life for the middle class is going to get worse and worse:
America is in disarray and our economy is failing us. We have been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and talk of a double-dip recession persists. Americans are not pulling the world economy out of its sluggish state — if anything we are looking to Asia to drive a recovery.Median wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s, and this multi-decade stagnation is not yet over. By contrast, the living standards of earlier generations would double every few decades. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government spending even when the middle class feels squeezed, the public sector doesn’t always perform well, and we have no good plan for paying for forthcoming entitlement spending. To the extent Republicans have a consistent platform, it consists of unrealistic claims about how tax cuts will raise revenue and stimulate economic growth. The Republicans, when they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the Democrats. How did we get into this mess?Imagine a tropical island where the citrus and bananas hang from the trees. Low-hanging literal fruit — you don’t even have to cook the stuff.In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century: free land; immigrant labor; and powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.The problem won’t be solved overnight, but there are reasons to be optimistic. We simply have to recognize the underlying causes of our past prosperity—low hanging fruit—and how we will come upon more of it.
Now Mr West-does not like to hear that-he’d rather place the blame on anyone else-Muslims, Unions, CAIR, Olbermann, or any other convienent scapegoat- that his learning impaired followers love to hear bashed.
The problem is, as an explanation its lacking. Cowen’s central idea is that the pace of innovation has slowed, and that we are now on a “technological plateau” that makes further growth challenging. If you consider technology in the broad sense (energy, transportation, home, etc), this makes sense as things have not changed a lot in recent decades.
He points out too, that what technological innovations that have occured-and he fixates here on the internet, are actually accelerating the growth of income inequality, because in the long run they don’t enhance GDP. Without, some careful planning-and redefinition of our values, the technological growth will only reduce available jobs-not add them. Which is fine for the rich bastards at the top of the scale-but sucks for the rest of us.
I’m looking forward to see how he proposes we get out of that time trap.