[quote=enron_by_the_sea][quote=Ash Housewares][quote=weberlin]
I was merely making an observation, not whining about entitlements. My question remains unanswered. How did people in the 1950s live an extravagant lifestyle (compared to 1900) on one income, and why didn’t the same argument work for the next 50 years (2000 vs 1950)? I contend the answer is globalization. I’d love to hear other theories. Please enlighten me.[/quote]
Maybe 50s was an aberration! Infrastructure/industries in most of western Europe & Japan was destroyed in WWII. USSR and eastern Europe was destroying themselves with communism. China was just getting out of messy civil war embarking onto another couple of failed social disasters. India just become independent with zero infrastructure about to enter into a few wars and famines.
It took good two decades (or longer) for rest of the world to rebuild their societies, educate their people and so on…
It is not like there was no globalization in the 50s-60s. But rather in the 50s – 60s, products produced in US by US producers/businesses/exporters had very little competition. The world needed US whatever the price. China couldn’t produce anything anyway, so it was not a threat. There was not many educated Indians, so there was question of doing any back office work there…
I am not saying that USA can not compete (although there seem to be many people who believe that on this board.). Afterall we were the world’s workshop before China. It is just that when you need to compete, it doesn’t feel so good! Easy money is always more popular that hard earned money[/quote]
Very good points, enron.
I think it’s important to understand why Americans are “whining” about the demise of the middle class though. Nobody likes to give up what they have or were accustomed to. Otherwise, we’d never hear divorced men and women complain about the other spouse ripping them off. Whenever we lose something, we look around for someone to blame for the loss. Oftentimes, there is a real person there who is benefitting from our loss. In divorce, it’s the other spouse/kids because when you split a whole pie into fractions, those fractions will always be less than the whole, regardless of the division. Likewise, when developing nations benefit from our losses, it’s only human nature that those on the losing side will feel resentful.
You can’t blame Americans for feeling “entitled,” because the middle class lifestyle is what’s been preached to us since our birth. Everyone born here was told that our lives would be better than the generation before us. It’s like a religion.
There is no question in my mind that we are slipping behind. Our wealth, relative to others (which is all that matters when determining who is “successful”), is definitely on the decline. Personally, I think there are ways to prevent it, or at least slow it down, but those who benefit from the accelerated pace (developing nations AND the wealthiest capitalists from the developed nations) are a much bigger force.
