There really was a Golden Age*

I do think your thesis is a good one. One factor is that the quality of public education uniformly rose significantly during this same period, affording opportunities probably never before seen, and probably not as well expressed in the public/private divides that now lay along racially unequal terrains, especially given the conservative favoritism of the private. As anecdote I am a product of the public sector of education K-12 (California), and now enjoy a retirement that my parents and ancestor subsistence farmer-types (Tennessee) could not imagine. What I worry about is that those grand days of seeing education as a public good are restricted if not gone, and with that hope for the middle- and lower-classes economically to improve their own futures.

YES! –
my homeland –
once –
had ”the GREATEST Party Economy on TEH WORLD –

BUT –
the Virus took care of that.

Right?
(kind of of?)

And now – what did Mr. Lindblade from Fort Lauderdale say:
”Fort Lauderdale dealt with similar spring break problems in the 1980s and early ’90s, until the city and businesses decided to make some changes, he said. One major change: Hotels started charging more money for rooms. “We’re not catering to an under-$150-a-night” crowd, Mr. Lindblade said, adding, “We’re $300 to $500 a night, and that’s just a different crowd.”

The effect, Mr. Lindblade said, has been notable. “It’s a family-oriented atmosphere,” he said, “and that’s been great for our economy.”

AND I sooo wish that somebody would –
once –
write a book about the real US Economy – and how it ”worked” -(or didn’t) for the average Spring-Breaker as _ THEY WANT THEIR F… PARTY BACK –
and that can’t be only done – NOT by raising taxes for the Rich -(as Switzerland has proven)
WE -(the government) – just HAS to give EVERYBODY enough money to be able to pay the 300 to 500 bucks per night in Fort Lauderdale…

AND do you guys know that for everybody who is ”a mutt” –
(as Obama called himself) –
that the Obama Years truly were ”the Golden Age” –
as in the Obama Years EVERYBODY was so… nice –
to
US
Mutts…

Nobody sane doubts that ‘les trentes glorieuses’ were a golden era, and the only blindspots in the West are that this was also a golden era outside the capitalist world: despite all the horrors and missteps of the Communist countries, you were undeniably and unarguably better off in China and Russia in 1975 than in 1945 (and in the Eastern Bloc there’s not even any debate about it).

But the question is: why, in the capitalist ‘democracies’?

This article and the first graph might give a clue:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/us-workers-strike-data-2020

Until the trend line for this graph picks up (and I don’t mean just a small upturn either), I predict that worker’s wages will remain stagnant and working conditions will continue to decrease (or at least, that that will be the general trend, specific counter-examples notwithstanding).

I think we can all agree that post war economic policies did something right that we should want to understand and learn from, but with the caveat that some of the conditions of the postwar successes cannot simply be recreated. These conditions include a devastating world war in which US liberal democracy and Soviet Communism defeated fascism, thereby discrediting right wing politics and economics for a generation. And of course, the global economy, the structure of capitalism, as well as of the working class, where very different from today.

Also, my point stands that growth will always look more impressive when you start from a low base line. We shouldn’t be nostalgic for those growth rates and for the economic paradigm that undergirded them. Our period’s problems can only be exacerbated, not solved, by dirty growth (and clean growth is a chimera).

I see no contradiction between critically analyzing and even admiring the progressive aspects of the postwar period (or any other period), and resisting the politically regressive nostalgia and glorification that invariably come with the Golden Age discourse. And that nostalgia is very real in the US (to a much lesser extent in Europe), it has been a persistent feature of the Trump-age political discourse. On the right, that nostalgia quite explicitly endorses the unapologetically racist and patriarchal culture (*). In parts of the left, I see a naive nostalgia for the working class/union culture of the period (**), blind to its problematic aspects and again blind to the fact that we live in a different world with a different capitalism and different working class.

(*) “seven in 10 Trump supporters prefer the more culturally homogeneous America of 1950s and that the same proportion of Clinton voters believe that American society has changed for better since then.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/where-nostalgia-fits-in
(**) That tendency is most obvious among the Jacobin „class first“ crowd. An example of this discourse in Europe is Didier Eribon (Retour à Reims).

That golden age was a function of US hegemony achieved by its victory over the Axis. In the 1950s, American automobile, steel, oil, petrochemicals industries, etc. generated enormous super-profits. The reemergence of German and Japanese industry cut into these profits and led to the rust belt. When China entered the world market, it made American profitability even more fraught. I wrote about this about 20 years ago:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/peter_camejos_long_wave_l.htm

Another name the Golden Age has been called is the Great Acceleration. Referring, for the most part, to the great acceleration of carbon emissions that underlay all that prosperity.

From my (Working class) perspective, the distaste of conservatives for laborers with even a little power was insufficient to explain the damage done to organized labor. It required joining conservatism to white supremacy.

“The Golden Age ran from the end of the War to the early 1970s.”

That’s a bit sweeping. Rationing only ended in 1954 in Britain. Both potatoes and bread were rationed only after the end of the war too. A Golden Age and rationing of food looks like a difficult combination.

AND – isn’t…
Joe…?

From this ”Golden Age”?

AND
that’s why we have this ”Golden Age” –

a… gain?

Mr. Quiggin, I think you are mistaken on many levels. Firstly, economic growth injected vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and no serious climatologist would claim, absent hard evidence, that particulate pollution “offset” this. (The Clean Air Act did not apply outside the U.S., where particulate pollution continued to increase and yet so did global warming.) In other words, the “golden age” was also the golden age for global warming, and eventually made it possible to heat up the planet without anyone in authority seriously noticing (although science fiction writers were talking about it in the 1960s).

The problem, and I think the reason why you so flippantly dismiss the issue, is that if you restore a golden age level of economic growth, you will probably also restore a golden age level of carbon dioxide injection and thus doom human civilisation on the planet (or at least run a serious risk of that).

Of course, nobody knows how to restore a golden age level of economic growth to the West; it certainly couldn’t be done by reintroducing the economic policies of the 1940s to the 1960s, because too many powerful people oppose that, and also because there are now substantial competitors to Western manufacturing.

I’d argue the real Golden Age, in terms of quality of life and cultural production, was the 1990s.

One thing I think that should be always pointed regarding the Golden age lasting until the early 1970s (I finished school in the early 1970s), is that this period was a period with a relatively stagnant workforce. The combination of the pill and the post war baby boom meant that the early 1970s saw a massive demographic change. It was also the time when the US went from a net exporter of oil to a net importer. It is not just economic policy that mattered. There were important external factors.

@22 I just don’t think nostalgia is the right approach. See 9.

Another anecdote: I think it was in the 1972 annual meeting of the GE Large Steam Turbine Engineering Department that Jack Downs (then head of that organization) told us something like this: “We are scheduled to ship 25 large (500-1000 Megawatt) steam turbines for nuclear plants next year. We have never shipped that much Megawatt capacity in our history and I am not sure how we are going to do it.”

It turned out we didn’t have to, as most of them were cancelled, as were most of our backlog which was scheduled out to 1980. The electrical power industry had had enough issues with nuclear plants and went back to fossil fuels. We might have been that close to keeping AGW at a significantly lower level.

(None of those we did ship had any significant engineering problems as far as I know. We supplied Fukushima turbines but not the plant design.) (Fossil-fueled turbines run at higher temperature, pressure, and RPM, and did have some problems.)

Of course, with going-on 8 billion people we were bound to have bigger and bigger problems. The next pandemic is probably not long away. There were less than four billion of us when I was born.

A longer response to JQ 25: Your framing suggests that everything has been going downhill since the 1970s, after the great strides made especially in the 1960s. I would dispute that framing, not that I don’t appreciate the momentous progress that you point out, but history is more complex. There have been setbacks in some areas, small and sometimes large steps in the right direction (e. g. LGBTQ rights) in others. In any case, activists who lived through and participated in the struggles of the 1960s hardly believed they were living in a glorious golden age! They experienced horrible, oppressive conditions, which motivated them to work for change. Their testimony should be enough to dispel any „golden age“ fantasies.

As you know, I’m very much in favor of learning from history, learning to better understand our own time through the study of the past. But we must understand each time as shaped by its specific conditions.

Nicholas Gruen said “Certainly not me”, nor I.

Name change.
Instead of the golden age, how about “The Tolerant Age” as argued below  “Tolerance of individual rights appears to be closer to an ultimate driver” …”… however, cultural transmission has been accelerated and reconfigured by technological changes (33), and future tipping points may not be readily predicted from 20th century trends (1).” 

From;

“Religion, Secularism & the Golden Age.

“Our recent paper in Scientific Advances shows that, in the 20th century, secularisation occurred before economic development and not the other way around. 
https://theconversation.com/religious-decline-was-the-key-to-economic-development-in-the-20th-century-100279

“Religious change preceded economic change in the 20th century

“… also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization. These findings hold when we control for education and shared cultural heritage.

“Our observation that secularization preceded economic change further rules out a bicausal relationship between income and religion (13–15) as well as the theory that socioeconomic advances cause religious practices to be phased out (3, 4, 17).

“Our findings do not mean, however, that secularization was the ultimate cause of economic development. Both secularization and economic growth may have been driven by something else, with secularization responding faster than GDP. This likely rules out technological advances as the ultimate cause, as it is hard to imagine how religion could respond faster to technological change than GDP.

“Tolerance of individual rights appears to be closer to an ultimate driver, in that more people are included in economic activity, especially women (24, 25). The tolerance factor, which is most highly loaded on individual rights for divorce and abortion (table S11) and therefore likely to correlate with women’s rights generally, was a better temporal predictor of GDP per capita than the secularization factor. 

“Our results showed that education is predictive of future GDP, but not of future secularization. 

…” we used EFA to allow the patterns of variation to emerge from all the WEVS data. 

… “That is, the persistence of generational values is consistent with both the theory that intergenerational change is a coherent mode of value change (5, 17) and the theory that demographic shifts, rather than economics, drive modern cultural change (1).

“Controlling for shared history did not substantially alter our findings, 

“The pace of change and its causality are important dimensions for future study. … In the 21st century, however, cultural transmission has been accelerated and reconfigured by technological changes (33), and future tipping points may not be readily predicted from 20th century trends (1).”…

“… also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization. These findings hold when we control for education and shared cultural heritage.”…
18 Jul 2018:
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar8680
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/7/eaar8680
  

For those of us with wayward reading habits: there was, certainly, a Golden Age. Kenneth Grahame did the business in the 1890s. But enough of the ribbing. Thank you, it’s an enjoyable exercise to read the drafts and attendant comments.
Without getting into “marking the essay” stuff: my reading comprehension was taxed in getting the sense (under the graph) of which country you’re referring to re- unemployment insurance – the States or Oz? And. If the heading, excitingly, tells me the Golden Age is to be explained, you can’t imagine the depth of frustration and disappointment I felt when you tell me (last paras) it isn’t the place for that explanation! I felt led-on, emptied of hope, a dead parrot was in the offing. Or sump’n.
It remains of great interest to me how different perceptions of the post war period are. I can’t dispute the gross data indicating improvements in economic conditions. I don’t get the sense though, from the drafts, of how such conditions derived from a low base. And yes. The low base was, unsurprisingly, uneven in its “manifestations”. Given the depredations of war on wider Europe and elsewhere globally, it was hardly a golden age for one heck of a lot of people. But, the USians and Antipodeans did have a Golden Age I can’t deny. Living for over fifty years in Australasia I’ve repeatedly met incomprehension about post-war conditions in other countries by Anglo-Celts downunder. I was telling someone last Sunday about the school I went to, as a littlie, just after the war. There were day kids, and the “residential kids” housed at the school. Kids who were displaced and orphaned (from the east end of London) by the intensity of the bombing of the docks and industries there. I had dropped from the skies myself, gauging by the reaction.
So, a period of Golden Weather is sorta rather more apt for me – if gold has to be the preferred mineral. It’s certainly been a Golden Age since then for that important percentage who need to maintain their lifestyles in style…

This is a rather long review by Erik Baker of Thomas Frank’s latest book but has some relevance to the current debate by examining closely some of the class contradictions of the post war era.

The postwar prosperity that Frank yearns for, always unevenly distributed, rested on direct federal subsidies for immense corporations in the defense and agricultural sectors and the selective drafting and application of labor law and business regulation along the fracture lines of race and gender. … Middle-class consumers of the era certainly benefited from low prices and cheap credit. But if it was populism, it was not one that Frank has the conceptual tools to come to terms with. Nor, for that matter, is it one that we should aspire to recreate today. …
The radical labor movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s ultimately failed because they proved unable to overcome the divergences in short-term interests that the postwar political economy had established among a working population divided by geography, race, and gender.

These tidbits are not meant as a summary of the essay, which is both long and deep and worth reading if you care about US centric economic and political history. Its treatment of Frank’s theses is more cursory than I would have liked.

“Political nostalgia, an uncritical turn to an unusable past, is among the greatest dangers for the left today.”

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-people-it-depends/

I disagree. First of all, the politics of the way the New Deal and other great social programs were either set up or not set up was very much tied to race. To put it euphemistically, “compromises” had to be made with the Southern Democrats. And whatever solidarity there was around the New Deal and WWII and the Cold War was at least in part the product of exclusion — of non-whites, women, foreigners, non-hetero people, and “communists.”

It is certainly true that these marginalized/excluded groups — not just African Americans but also other groups (e.g., farm laborers who had been excluded from New Deal policies) — fought against their exclusion. Was this struggle a good thing? Yes. But the struggle was certainly not unique to this time period, and the fact that there were some limited successes (you might even say moral successes) does not, in my opinion, make this era a golden age.

Then you have women — the middle-class women who were, I guess you could argue, ‘taken care of’ economically but did not have economic agency. and the working class and poor women who were not. There was a brief period of time when women like my mom could take low-paying jobs once the kids were old enough and boost family incomes, but those jobs were pretty darn crappy. (My mom worked at a department store for 10-15 years and never made above minimum wage.) Nowadays, a lot of lower-income families are not making it with two adults working . . .

Then there’s organized labor — I’m no expert but it seems pretty clear to me that there was always an eye toward maintaining corporate profits, no matter what the “rank and file” wanted, especially the non-white members. For example, the Teamsters helped the growers bust the farmworkers union, and the AFL-CIO organized a bunch of construction workers to bust up an anti-war rally (this is something I read about the other day).

I would further argue that the successes of struggles for inclusion are part of the story of the end of the so-called golden age. I’m thinking here about Heather McGhee’s narrative of the public swimming pools — when Black citizens fought for and managed to win access to public amenities, many municipalities responded by shutting down those amenities. Similarly, public schools (some of them, anyway) were ordered to integrate but . . . well, anyway, I think there’s a connection between rights struggles and the loss of the NewDeal/WWII/Cold War “consensus.”

Another aspect of that golden age was the near-total restriction of immigration from non-white countries, which ended after the immigration reform of the mid-1960s. Not to mention the mucking about that the US did in other countries to prop up the American Standard of Living.

I think I’m losing my train of thought, so I’ll stop here. I don’t mean to imply that there wasn’t anything good about those decades. I just don’t see them as Golden — in part because it has not been all downhill since then. I won’t go on and on about it, but I will say that I, as a white woman, have a whole lot more economic options, and a better standard of living, than my mom did.

and isn’t the question if these ”Good Ole Times” –
(as my grandfather used to say)
when he still could go golfing –
were a:
”Golden Age” –
are as… as irrelevant? to the question if we can get to a ”Golden Age” by giving everybody enough money to be able to go golfing –
and how to do that – as the question if WW1 had anything to do with some of my friends really desperately wanting to go shopping again?!

“Sulfate particulates do, in fact, offset anthropogenic global warming to a certain extent”

There is a – speculation is probably the best word – that coal fired shipping had something to do with it too.

We know that iron fertilisation of the ocean works. Works in that some portion of the algal blooms ends up sinking down to become rock. The arguments are about how much and whether that’s a useful amount.

We know that fly ash from coal burning is largely a ferrous aluminosilicate which adds both iron and silicious acid (that might not be quite the right name but in some ocean areas this is the limit of the growth of the biome) as well as potassium and phosphorous to seawater.

So, lots of boats running back and forth spraying fly ash over the oceans sequestrates some CO2. Whether that sequestration is more than the CO2 from the coal burning is something I don’t know. But it will be more than the same shipping using oil, a change that largely occurred post WWII for merchant shipping.

mary s, of course you have a point. The period 1945-1975 was not an unalloyed blessing for everybody. However, when you say that nowadays you have a better set of opportunities than your mother had, I wonder whether you are not something of an anomaly. As far as I know, to a very large women in the U.S. are discovering that the opportunities available to them are worse than the opportunities that their mothers had. Ditto for blacks.

There may have been a loosening up of restrictions for the middle and upper classes, which is no bad thing in itself, but loosening up job reservation when there are no jobs available is a devil’s bargain, as we have discovered in South Africa where “broad-based black economic empowerment” has simply enabled a few hundred african people to become filthy rich while almost everybody else (but particularly africans) has grown poorer because the job market has collapsed, trade unions have been obliterated and salaries have dwindled.

I may be wrong, but this is the narrative I’m hearing and I’d be interested to hear what others are saying. My impression is that the surge in economic inequality in the United States has hit poor people, women and black people particularly hard. In which case the liberties won in the 1970s and 1980s (has much happened since then, apart from gay marriage?) are not really applicable to a big chunk of the populace.

@43

People talk about the ’30 Glorious Years’ but it was actually more than that: It was only in about 1977 that the Callaghan, putatively ‘Labour’ Govt. ditched Keynesian pump-priming of the economy with predictable consequences (it’s often forgotten that the famous Boys from the Blackstuff was originally set pre-Thatcher, i.e. under a ‘Labour’ Government: cf also the ‘Labour isn’t Working’ Saatchi ad).

Likewise, Reaganism really began under Carter, but not in the first few years. It was only in about 1979 that Carter turned firmly against Keynesianism and started what was effect a proto-Reaganite mode of governance. It was Carter, not Reagan, who put Volcker in charge of the Fed, and began Reaganism (in all but name) in 1979.

So it was really the ‘Glorious 35 Years’. And given that, we can see that the claim that ‘no one’ cared about LGBT rights etc. in this period as the pernicious nonsense it is. By the late 1970s, all the ‘current’ modes of protest (anti-racism, LGBT rights, feminism) were, so to speak, ‘up and running’ and it was only the cultural backlash of the 1980s that slowed progress. But this was not enough to stop them, and, as we saw in the 1990s and then into the 21st century, the eventual triumph (or in the case of feminism and the environmental movement, semi-triumph) of these movements, or at least their move into the mainstream. The 1960s and 1970s were also the period when the modern anti-racism movement really got started.

These movements also very clearly and explicitly came out of the New Left The original title of the LGBT movement was Gay Liberation (and Women’s Liberation): the word Liberation of course coming from the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. In the 198s0 it was the Bennite wing of the Labour Party (cf Ken Livingstone) which fought harder and most effectively for LGBT people and also achieved the most, environmentally (e.g. the car ban in London, investment in public transport) while the Labour Right babbled on and lost election after election.

As I say you have to question why so many people are anxious to question the objective facts.*

*Of course, this is a rhetorical point! I know perfectly well why they are, but I thought I would just raise the question…..

I don’t have the time or energy to comment on most of the substantive questions being discussed in this part of the thread, but I have to protest Hidari’s claim that the word “liberation” was somehow originated by the NLF and other movements in other contexts borrowed it from the NLF. While of course parts of the New Left supported what they viewed, not without a certain amount of justification, as the Vietnamese revolution, there is zero historical evidence that the NLF had some kind of patent of origin on the word “liberation.”

@58

‘People often put growth at the center of everything for this era, but I feel like the relative economic equality was really the more salient factor. ‘

Yes absolutely. There is a more general trend. here, with elites doing everything in their power to portray the 1970s as the ‘worst’ decade of the 20th century (presumably worse than the 1930s, or the 1940s, who knows?) while at the same time portraying the 1990s (gag) as the best. ‘The decade that taste forgot’ and all that.

But in fact huge amounts of stuff got achieved in the 1970s. As the cliche has it, ‘the 1970s was when the 1960s really happened’. and, a related cliche ‘In the 1960s there was a lot of talking, but in the 1970s things actually got done.’

And one of the things that got achieved, apart from the fact that the 1970s were a Golden Age of Labour militancy (there were a lot of strikes, which is obviously a good thing) was that inequality went down. A lot. 1979 (a year that is excoriated in elite discourse: ‘the winter of discontent’ and all that) was in fact the most equal that the UK has ever been (in terms of the Gini Coefficient). It was this move towards a more or less egalitarian/more fundamentally just and equal society that Thatcherism and Reaganism fought hardest against and of course inequality spiralled upwards in the 1980s, because that’s what Thatcherism and Reaganism were all about.

I won’t derail the conversation, but one of the things that has been most irritating about ‘the discourse’ in the last few years is that, if you go back about 5/6 years, there was a really good, really positive discussion ‘in the air’ about inequality. People were talking about Picketty, they were talking about The Spirit Level, inequality was seen as the key issue of our age. Now of course that discourse has been altered and we spend all our time talking about….ahem…’other issues’, which economic elites find much easier to assimilate and ‘capture’ and use.

Elites will fight tooth and nail to avoid ‘the discourse’ being about inequality, because they don’t want a more equal and just society, because they think (entirely correctly) that the price they will pay for a more equal and just society is that some of ‘their’ wealth will get taken away from them in the form of taxes.

‘I don’t have UK stats, but I’m pretty confident that the minimum level of inequality in both Oz and the US was reached in the early 1970s’.

You could well be right, I couldn’t find the answers online quickly. But it was definitely at some point in the 1970s.

Again as you rightly point it was Callaghan in 1976 who said: ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.”‘ which was a crucial first step in the repudiation of Keynesianism and the de facto adoption of (a form of) moneterism.

Again, as cannot be clearly stated enough, under a Labour Government.

‘As for the 1990s, they look now like the rightwing analog of the 1960s, a time when victory seemed assured but when, in reality, disaster was just around the corner.’

Yes.

@62

‘Not sure if this matters, but you seem to have put your email in the name box? I merely draw it to your attention in case you’d like it fixed…’

Hi
yes I would like it fixed, and yes, obviously that was a mistake…if it was easy for a site operator (say, the writer of the OP to fix it) that would be great.

Fixed – JQ

@63 Thanks!