Saved from someone who posted it long ago:

"....that labour spent the first half of the nineteenth century learning the rules of the capitalist game and the second half applying them, then the first half of the twentieth century saw the apparently irresistible triumph of labour, and the second half its eclipse and fall - or almost."
--Eric Hobsbawm


60 years ago an entire generation of working class men returned from the most traumatizing conflict in human history and practically demanded a better life for themselves and their children. They felt they had earned it. The political and economic nerves of our society could not agree more. This generation, they felt, which had endured nothing but turmoil, hardship, poverty, economic ruin and the horrors of mass-mechanized war, had deserved to live the rest of their lives in comfort and stability.

So the war generation moved to the peace and quiet of suburban housing divisions around the cities. Everything the war generation asked for, they got. They wanted nothing like the Great Depression to ever happen again. An international system called the Bretton Woods was set up to safeguard this. They wanted affordable housing. They got it. They wanted stable incomes, with stable companies that valued their position, their work and their contribution. They got it. They even wanted their children to be smarter and better educated than they were--they wanted to send them all to college. From a generation where most did not have much beyond a grade 8 education, this was unheard of. Yet they got it. Most of the Universities, in fact, were brand new at the time, and needed to fill their halls with students. They would take anyone who applied.

All the concessions delivered to the average joe gave strength to a burgeoning new population demographic: the middle class.

The children of the middle class--the boomers--ended up becoming the whiniest, most spoiled, most self-absorbed generation on the face of the earth, because they grew up in this post-war period where everything was literally given to them on a silver platter. Life, they were constantly told, was going to be different. It was going to be better from then on. And they were the chosen generation, growing up with this sense of entitlement.

Most economists pinpoint the exact year when things began to change to be 1973--also known as the year when the middle class was the largest, and had the most power. Many things happened that year all at once that shook world economies and society in general, which had been relatively firm and stable since the Second World War, including:

1) The dissolution of the Bretton Woods financial contract
2) The removal of the Gold Standard in the World Bank (actually 1971)
3) OPEC flexes its muscle
4) The number of union workers reached its peak, and has been steadily declining ever since
5) Women's Liberation Movement was at its height. Title IX enacted (actually 1972)
6) Leo Strauss died

A lot of these things actually freed up corporations and made global trade more laissez-faire, which is what they wanted. The war generation desired world economic policy that deliberately prevented Depressions, so it was relatively benign, safe, and steady (and crash-proof)....forever moving slowly forward, with everyone on board. Like a bus. But 1973 is heralded as the year that Boomers suddenly started moving into positions in power en masse, and a revolution in economic thinking occurred: to them, global markets should move faster and quicker, like a race car.

Economic inertia is akin to a big hulking ocean liner, not a speedboat. Just as a big boat takes several miles and hours to turn on the high seas, when a gigantic change is made, it often takes years to manifest. Such it was that the world-sweeping policies in 1973 really started coming into play in the 80s, where it started behaving exactly like it was up until the 30s: big gains, but also big lows. Dow jumping and falling hundreds of points all the time (something that wasn't really a regular occurance until Reagan took office).

The Women's Liberation movement probably had the largest effect in the early 70s. Boomer women were the first generation that not only wanted to work the same jobs and positions as men, but felt they deserved equal pay and power for it as well. Suddenly, a whole generation of families had instantly doubled their income! When such a radical revolution occurs in an economic system, it immediately tries to right itself to cope with the influx of new capital, beginning with the first and most expensive commodity humans can buy, which sets the standard for every other purchasable thing on the planet: real estate. In the span of 18 months, houses tripled in value. This resulted in MASSIVE inflation.

1973 changed everything, though no one really noticed for several years. The 80s is when people started noticing that the middle class was shrinking, unions were evaporating and corporations were making more money than ever. Because the new school of boomer companies realized that the true secret to riches wasn't steady, productive growth like their parents corporations of the 50s and 60s, but rapid, massive growth very quickly. The way to do this, of course, is via venture capital and the stock market. But it wasn't foolproof. The Savings & Loan scandal, the crash of 87, and the cutthroat acquisition, merging and selling of companies popularized in films like Wall Street highlighted the decade's economic excess. A lot of people at the top made a lot of money really quickly, but as any economics 101 student can tell you, that means a lot more people at the bottom lost a lot of money as well.

The mid-90s tech-boom carried this new math to logical extremes. Companies moved so fast, they were not stable (and not intended to be). Rather than settling down and consolidating their gains, corporations used their income to create more companies. A lot of them were created, made money, and dissolved in a matter of months when funding ceased. Whole divisions and departments of corporations were created to service specific tasks, and then discontinued and dissolved as soon as they outgrew their usefulness.

This makes sense from a corporate standpoint, and is all well and good in the name of business to maximize profit. But think of the people employed by these "flash companies". When a job of that nature is so uncertain.....how can you even plan for yourself, much less your future or your family's future.

In addition to that is the magical world of outsourcing. America used to be one of the industrial and manufacturing giants of the world. Then in the 70s and 80s, manufacturers moved their jobs overseas. Phil Knight even told Michael Moore one time that the reason why he didn't have any Nike factories in America is because Americans aren't interested in making shoes.

But maybe he's right. Maybe that kind of work is beneath the average American. That they are too good for that. America doesn't want to be a manufacturing-based economy anymore. No, it wants to be a SERVICE-based economy. So all the Americans who previously filled up manufacturing employment stats then started filling up service employment stats.

Now America is outsourcing its service sector jobs overseas. Why? Because Americans don't want to serve people. That's for immigrants and poor people. Americans are much better than that.

No, what America wants to be instead now is a management-based economy. Yes. A whole country of people who's sole purpose is to telling other people what to do. Like, well......like Americans. Americans don't want to work, they want to run, own, operate and control companies that make other people work. Like Gekko said: I create nothing. I own.

A person with an MBA who goes from a $40,000 Marketing Supervisor to a $18,000 short-order cook is still counted as gainfully employed, but is it actually better for the economy? Do you think they're going to lower their standard of living and stop buying $7 coffee at their bohemian coffee house because they can't afford it? ......to today's consumer, not being able to afford something is not the same as not deserving that lifestyle.

So in effect, all the concessions given to the war generation to live comfortably were taken away from them when they died. The pendulum took a hard swing to the left after the war, as an apology to the generation that had to live through it and the Depression, and since 1973 has been swinging back to the right. Today, what do we have?

Double-income families that can't seem to make ends meet.

College tuitions that no one but the privileged can afford. Students in debt are practically indentured servants for several years, paying off a degree that guarantees them no job. Working class families can barely afford them.

As a result of the above: graduate students working minimum wage.

A public education system that is currently #18 in the world, with horrid reading and mathematics levels, understaffed, underfunded, and not preparing students for their futures.

Because of the failure of the above, the rise of private schooling and homeschooling for the privileged.

Criminal imprisonment of an entire class of people who hurt no one but themselves.

Healthcare no one but the privileged can afford.

The most inequitable distribution of affluence and the flaunting of this inequitable distribution of affluence (thanks to media) in human history.

I don't know about you, but I don't know a single person under 30 who reasonably expects to collect social security.

Companies that hire you for so long as is needed, and then discard you. Contract and temporary employment is cheaper than full-time. No one can gain a line of credit, because there are no stable jobs that last more than a year or so before they're moved, changed, dropped, outsourced or laid off.

A system of employment that favours quotas, equalization, parity, and maximizing stock dividends rather than actually hiring competent people to put out a decent product that people will buy.

Unions that--while once championing the power of labour and the spirit of the people--are now shunned, ostracised, spit on, and betrayed by their fellow workers.

A middle class that is being squeezed by the government and corporations alike, sponsoring a trend that, in 100 years, should see the annihilation of middle America altogether.

Credit card companies so voracious that they occasionally hand out cards to pets and children. People, incapable of saying no to credit they are awarded but don't actually have, are racking up record amounts of consumer debt and have resorted to begging for money on the internet to finance their habit.

You can probably think of many more.