delong252_ Spencer PlattGetty Images_USinequality

Economics

Kan Amerika ontsnappen aan zijn tweede Gilded Age?

Jun 5, 2023 J. Bradford DeLong

BERKELEY – Sommigen van ons zijn optimistischer over de toekomst dan anderen. Wij optimisten denken dat het nog steeds mogelijk is om te ontsnappen uit de valstrikken die Amerika’s Tweede Gilded Age voor ons heeft gelegd.

Tijdens zo’n Gilded Age worden de productieve capaciteiten niet meer gebruikt om de meeste mensen te voorzien van eerste levensbehoeften en gemakken, maar in de richting gestuurd van exorbitante uitgaven ten behoeve van het zoeken naar status en andere waardeloze activiteiten. Geërfde rijkdom speelt meestal een grote rol en wordt vaak ingezet om elke transformatie die de status quo zou kunnen ontwrichten te blokkeren en te vertragen.

Neem de opwarming van de aarde, die nu een groot deel van het technologisch dividend dreigt te neutraliseren dat we anders de komende twee generaties zouden hebben gehad. We zitten in deze puinhoop, precies omdat kolen- en oliebelangen genoeg sociale en politieke macht hadden om de transitie naar emissievrije energie te vertragen. Erger nog, segmenten van de sociaal en politiek machtigen beschouwen democratie als een probleem.

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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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