Our Miserable 21st Century

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 6:58
Our Miserable 21st Century
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]

Our Miserable 21st Century
> From work to income to health to social mobility, the year 2000 marked the
beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States
By NICHOLAS N. EBERSTADT
Feb 15 2017
<https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/>

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and
deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged
and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal
bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible
even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump
as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood
anything about.
Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 election was a
sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray
famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and
self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest
from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact of Trump’s
election served as a truth broadcast about a reality that could no longer
be denied: Things out there in America are a whole lot different from what
you thought.

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America”
outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America
since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts
for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which
had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of
living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke
down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more
than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and
professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within
the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the
general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information
era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer
possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to
reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the
task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived
since the dawn of the new century.

II

Consider the condition of the American economy. In some circles people
still widely believe, as one recent New York Times business-section article
cluelessly insisted before the inauguration, that “Mr. Trump will inherit
an economy that is fundamentally solid.” But this is patent nonsense. By
now it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been in the
grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new century. And in
retrospect, it should also be apparent that America’s strange new economic
maladies were almost perfectly designed to set the stage for a populist
storm.

Ever since 2000, basic indicators have offered oddly inconsistent readings
on America’s economic performance and prospects. It is curious and highly
uncharacteristic to find such measures so very far out of alignment with
one another. We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between
three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and
employment. Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose,
America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.

From the standpoint of wealth creation, the 21st century is off to a
roaring start. By this yardstick, it looks as if Americans have never had
it so good and as if the future is full of promise. Between early 2000 and
late 2016, the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit
institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion. (SEE
FIGURE 1.)

Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still a fantastic sum
of money—an average of over a million dollars for every notional family of
four. This upsurge of wealth took place despite the crash of 2008—indeed,
private wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they were at
their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-estate assets is near or
at all-time highs, and America’s businesses appear to be thriving. Even
before the “Trump rally” of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets
were hitting new highs—and since stock prices are strongly shaped by
expectations of future profits, investors evidently are counting on the
continuation of the current happy days for U.S. asset holders for some time
to come.

[snip]

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