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Economics

美国能否第2次摆脱镀金时代

Jun 5, 2023 J. Bradford DeLong

伯克利——我们中有些人相比其他人对于未来的看法更为乐观。乐观主义者认识到，我们仍有可能避免陷入到美国的第2次镀金时代。

在镀金时代，生产能力从为民众提供必需品和便利转而被用于在寻求地位和其他无价值行为领域的过度开支。继承得来的财富往往发挥着主要作用，而且，往往被用于阻止和延迟任何可能颠覆现状的改变。

以全球变暖为例，上述趋度现在有可能抵消我们在未来两代人时间里原本可以取得的技术红利。恰恰因为煤炭和石油利益集团拥有足够的社会和政治权力以延迟朝向零排放能源的过渡，才致使我们陷入到这样的混乱境地。更为糟糕的是，社会及政治权势阶层将民主视为一个问题。

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J. Bradford DeLong

Writing for PS since 2002
252 Commentaries

J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022). He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.

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Alan Rhodes Jun 11, 2023

"(E)ven the most individualistic society needs some degree of social solidarity" to qualify as so much as a bit moral. The growing implication is that services providing individuals guidance toward future goals like retirement should include political action as part of their advice. This change alone could drastically affect both breadth and depth of citizen participation in government, and help shift us away from the unproductive financial economy.

I have never read or heard any financial planner, brokerage, or bank suggest that individuals vote to ensure their Social Security or Medicare is not diminished, or, better, that they grow. Pretending to offer the best advice, they ignore these matters, or worse, imply that there can be no hope. Their communications are self serving, but also betray an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the sort of compromises between individualism and social solidarity that even conservatives like TR, Carnegie and Hoover made.

The rise of our current gilded age has been brought about by a corresponding shift toward a financial services economy, exacerbating inequality, and, just as importantly, distracting people from their social responsibilities as precarity overwhelms their abilities to accurately discern all of their options.
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Per Kurowski Jun 11, 2023

If banks are allowed to hold less equity against loans to those considered more creditworthy, than against loans to those considered less creditworthy, does this increase the inequality in the access to the opportunity of bank credit?
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Charles Taylor Jun 8, 2023

A long process indeed. Thus the pessimism. If you are living during the long transition, it's hard to have reason for hope that the road will be built. This will come at a cost to a couple or more generations. The members of these lost generations will need help during their lives. Help that the last 40 years has proven is not a priority. Just drive through rural America today. What was the urban renewal of the past decades is now needed in rural America.
What's more, we have a leadership crisis. There are no Roosevelts today.
The times are much different also, think social media, automation, more integrated globalized labor, nuclear weapons, and on and on. The poor today are also different than the poor of the Gilden Age. They "know" how their opportunities don't measure up to those of their parents and grand parents generations.
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