
A new history asks: Has all the progress of the past 100 years come undone? - samclemens
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/11/these_united_states_reviewed_history_of_america_by_glenda_gilmore_and_thomas.single.html
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marknutter
As another commenter pointed out, the title of this article is heavily
editorialized. And I think that's the most interesting part of this link.
There seems to be a growing appetite in this country to stoke the flames of
class warfare. Perhaps it's because, despite the Great Recession and those two
wars you never really hear anything about anymore, our generation truly does
not have any great struggle to arm ourselves against. Poverty rates are
dropping precipitously around the globe as is violent crime. We have an
embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury. Our life expectancy rates
are ever increasing. I think we Millenials are, more than any generation
before us, desperately in search of our great cause. As we continue to see
American wealth "trickle down" to developing nations as labor is shifted
overseas, it brings into starker contrast the wealth inequalities between us
and our 1%, ignoring of course the irony that we Americans collectively are
the one-percenters of the world.

~~~
rtpg
>We have an embarrassing wealth of food, technology, and luxury

But we still have a significant portion of the population that has to work 2+
jobs to survive. America is the only developed nation in the world to my
knowledge where this is expected, let alone imagined (hell, in France it's
illegal to have two jobs).

Americans (myself included) should be ashamed at how much of an abject failure
we've been to so much of the population. Say what you will about Western
Europe, but pretty much everyone will get 3 meals a day there.

~~~
eronhp
France also has double digit unemployment rates.

~~~
toyg
Complete feudalism had 0% unemployment. Best system ever!

Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the "create jobs!" mantra. Jobs for job-numbers'
sake has little point, in practice it's just further enslaving the population.

The government has an incentive in keeping unemployment down and cut spending,
so it forces people to work shitty jobs by taking away subsidies, which in
turn drives down salaries and only helps high-manpower low-skill enterprises
like burger-flipping. Is that good for society as a whole?

People working two jobs (great for employment numbers!) are not bettering
themselves, they're just producing more surplus for owners, often not even by
choice. It doesn't really matter if you have 0% unemployment but everyone is
forced to do stuff they don't like in order to survive.

~~~
marknutter
Nobody is forced to work any job, at least not here in the U.S. No more than a
lion is "forced" to hunt and kill antelope.

~~~
toyg
A vegetarian lion could technically survive. A human being needs food (which
he cannot grow anywhere, due to property laws) and shelter (which he cannot
build anywhere, due to property laws). Does the US government hand out free
food and shelter for all?

If not, you _are_ forced to work. You can choose what to work on, but that's
about it. Even something as passive as investing capital or extracting rent
requires some work. Being homeless is a full-time job asking others for money.

Whenever you'll get free food and free shelter (we can argue about clothes),
_then_ you won't be forced to work.

~~~
marknutter
> Whenever you'll get free food and free shelter (we can argue about clothes),
> then you won't be forced to work.

And to provide that, others will be forced to work. So no matter what we end
up with some people being "forced to work", which I don't agree is even a
thing. Even if you could just live off the land you'd be "forced" to work a
hell of a lot harder to survive than you would getting any minimum wage job.
You are perhaps underestimating how bad life sucked before modern society took
root.

------
cryoshon
" In 1900, the wealthiest 10 percent pocketed 41 percent of the nation’s
income—a number that would only be surpassed in 2010, when the top 10 percent
took home 48 percent of the national income. "

Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age. A
travesty of the highest order. Remember when people were protesting this in
the streets and were hung out to dry by the media and their fellow citizens?
Remember when those protesters were smashed by the cops for having the gall to
ask for a better deal? That happened in the US, not China or Russia.

"The authors are only the slightest bit sympathetic to Obama. They concede
that he operated under conditions not of his own making. But he “was not a
transformational president.” He caved to Wall Street in bailing out the banks
without demanding any meaningful reform; the Affordable Care Act may have
insured millions, but countless others have been forced to pay more because
its biggest beneficiaries were insurance and drug companies. And his foreign
policy effectively continued to do by stealth what George W. Bush barely kept
secret at all: drone strikes, secret wiretaps. Other fundamental problems that
began at the start of the 20th century have re-emerged under Obama: racial
segregation abetted by a criminal justice system that is the New Jim Crow;
anti-immigration nativism, which has hardly been helped by an immigration
policy whose only achievement is a record number of deportations. Meanwhile,
as of 2012, a woman still made 81 cents for every dollar a man earned."

My sentiments as well.

~~~
stevetrewick
_> Ah, so we are now officially more unequal than during the gilded age_

Unequal with whom ? You are considerably _less_ unequal with millions of
people who a decade or two ago were desperately scratching their survival out
of subsistence farming.

Some people would call that a win. YMMV.

~~~
cryoshon
A relative win against people who aren't even in the proper frame of
reference. It's the same as saying "you have a refrigerator, people in Africa
don't even have that!" which isn't even a true statement to make these days.
Extreme poverty is on the endangered list.

The frame of reference is in-country and between the country's peers. The
worrying part of this frame is that relatively poor places like Latin America
are catching up or have caught up already. We are losing ground.

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cheriot
I was all ready to rant about how the social, medical, and scientific advances
of the last 100 years matter more than a few economic stats. The question
actually posed by the book is more narrow/interesting than the article, "How
far has our democracy come?" rather than "Has all the progress of the past 100
years come undone?"

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393239527/)

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flubert
'"But that book was written in 1908. Based on what I've seen on Downton Abbey,
things were a lot different then."

Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology
and industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily
course corrected by a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two
overspeculating brokerage houses. There were also, simultaneously, great
advances in progressive causes like worker's rights and food quality, all on
the background of decreasing importance of religion among educated whites in
favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were
incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional
morality manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of
new porn the likes of which never existed before.

"That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids
inherit, what did they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?"

I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Men starts
1960.'

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown_relate_t.html)

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Hytosys
So, to sum up... Our wages stopped rising in the 1970s, because:

* Decreased demand for US workers — factories closing to move to other countries; technology replacing human labor; increased capitalist competition with a global economy consisting of countries finally recovered from their wars

* Increased supply of US workers — the women's liberation movement; the continued influx of immigrants

The country's rotting social justice can successfully be expressed in terms of
the prosperity of its workers.

~~~
randomsearch
I'm not sure about the US, but the in UK you need to add to that the fact that
inequality has soared, so the rich have taken more of the gains.

A major cause of this problem is the regressive tax system that has been
developed by successive governments in the UK.

~~~
Hytosys
Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make as well:

[https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product...](https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/productivity-
and-real-wages.jpg)

The increasing gap between wages and productivity symbolizes growing
exploitation — the inequality you're talking about.

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vlehto
>One could argue—and not with pride, but deep unease—that global dominance
was, if not the only, then an essential ingredient to reducing domestic
inequality.

History keeps repeating itself. Usually any civil rights have come with the
expense of either fighting in the military or funding the military. I just
wondered how suspiciously easy it was for women to gain their rights, but
total war seen in world wars explains it nicely.

Organizations only change when they have to. With fall of soviet union,
stagnation of American civil rights progress seems inevitable. Rise of China
could be a good thing for Civil rights. But in the post-Vietnam high tech
weapons age, it's likely to be "how can we motivate people to pay more taxes"
than the seemingly more equal "how can we motivate every man to fire a rifle".

Any suggestions?

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donatj
The argument that our successful being very successful is a bad thing never
ceases to be wrong. Our poor are also the richest poor in the world. Making
the rich poorer would do nothing to help the poor and quite the contrary hurt
them. Bill Gates and his malaria work for instance have done far more good for
Africa than all the aid the government has ever provided.

~~~
cryoshon
Our poor and even our middle class struggle to get medical care due to the
insane costs. Poor people in Europe don't have that problem. Poor people in
Latin America don't have that problem. It doesn't sound like our poor are rich
enough.

American exceptionalism is a cult which needs to be liquidated... there is
nothing special about despotic distribution of resources.

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aaronmhatch
Thanks for posting.

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thomasmarriott
No.

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moootPoint
Betteridge's law of headlines to the rescue.

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Sven7
Progress towards what?

For the developing world to get to the basics (rights/health/edu) the
developed world is used to, we need a couple more planet earths in terms of
resources.

We seem to end up with what happens in nature. Randomness. In one ecosystem a
couple of whales and whole lot of plankton, in another a couple lions and
herds of wildebeest.

So progress towards what? It's not entirely clear. And where are the
incentives to produce consensus about it or even focus on it? We can be doing
a much better job creating those incentives.

~~~
tim333
>to the basics (rights/health/edu)... we need a couple more planet earths

I don't think that's true. Human rights, health services and education needn't
use much resources. The ability the whole planet to drive 3 ton SUVs might be
an issue but that's a different matter.

~~~
Sven7
We have been trying to get the basics into the third world for a long time
now. It's not cheap because its not easy.

I am not even talking about the extreme cases like Somalia and Afghanistan.
Even in countries like India and China try getting a good
lawyer/policeman/doctor/teacher to stay in areas where they are most needed.
They have no hope of any semblance of the lifestyle their urban counterparts
enjoy.

And I pulled in the couple more planet earths from sustainability calculations
Craig Simmons did for the Guardian a while back.
[http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.ht...](http://www.theguardian.com/greenliving/story/0,,441590,00.html)

