So Much For Capitalism / Let's Talk About the Weather

One of the books on my QE list is The Golden Age of Capitalism, a kind of economic history retrospective of Europe's trente glorieuses from 1945-1975. Along the same lines, Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, a history of the European twentieth century, starts with a discussion of the unprecedented changes that happened in the same period, which he sees as being ultimately more consequential than the world wars. The point in both cases is that about 1970 was the best time to be an average schmuck in a first-world Atlantic nation. And it's gone downhill for average schumucks ever since (on the other hand, it's a totally kickass time to be a CEO or a Chinese industrial magnate.) My generation is the first in America in the twentieth century that will not do as well as its parents did.

What horrifies me the most is that, as this this smart guy often points out, the American economy has been running on credit for the last twenty-something years. As long as housing prices kept going up, people could sort of sustain borrowing against their houses and not go under. Between that and the nigh-universal phenomenon of credit card debt, Americans were able to sustain lifestyles they couldn't actually "afford" in the traditional sense. And now, with the collapse of the sleazy, despicable sub-prime mortgage practices, the whole house of cards is teetering.

There's no right answer for this shit (except that it started with Reagan.) And the more I read, the more I'm reminded of some good advice I got from this one girl recently, that to a certain extent all you can do is take care of yourself and try to keep your head above water.*

Then there's the weather. I'm not going to harp on about the rain again, just note something I noticed recently. Part of America's European cultural inheritance is its love of sunlight and heat. "Our" ancestors (apologies to non-European descendants) starved and froze when the winters were too long. Sunlight meant the crops would grow, while too much rain meant that they'd rot in the fields. Likewise, until the massive demographic shift after WWII from the rust belt to the sun belt (think: family from Detroit moves to Phoenix), most Americans lived in areas of the country that more-or-less corresponded to northern European climatic conditions.

I guess part of my sourness every time I hear people talking about how it's a "nice" day when it's day 200 of a drought or it's 80 degrees in October is that the conditions that our cultural perception of weather were based on are gone. In other words: I am objectively right to love rain and cold, because it's both necessary for life and endangered. (Insert tongue-sticking out emoticon.)

To sum up: lucky us, we get to live through the decline of American prosperity and the acceleration of climate change. And as usual, I'm pretty sure Dick Cheney is behind it all.

* A position made more difficult when you're ostensibly a socially-engaged would-be academic, not that being one makes much of a difference.