DBWI: slow decline of U.S. middle class following 1973 oil embargo?

. . . If billionaires ensconced people in an echo chamber so strong that they think EVERYONE ELSE is biased and funded by billionaires, . . .
Plus, rightwing economics and politics play off a tough guy mentality, which can be appealing, esp. when it's contrasted with being weak and passive, instead of being steady eddie and middle-of-the-road.

You know, I went through my Libertarian Party phase in my twenties. It was a combo of we're not going to put people in jail for drug offenses, a person ought to be able to start a business, and stuff from the platform such as the claim that mandatory school attendance laws created prison-like schools with prison-like problems. It was heady stuff.

It took me a while to wind to the viewpoint that bloated corporate power presented a bigger danger, even with a liberal Republican like Rockefeller and a solidly liberal Democrat like Kennedy. And I still think people ought to be able to start businesses, just things like universal healthcare make it easier to do so! And I like to remind young people that 70% of businesses fail within the first two years. Yes, that's seven out of ten. And heck, this stat used to be 80%.
 
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. . . But then again, people were never gonna read Reason after the Holocaust denial shit.
I just don't remember Reason, a magazine you said before with regular publication? ? I'll take your word for it that was once upon a time in the mainstream of libertarian thought.

Sure seems like it went the path of hollering-in-the-hallway and kooksville right, and being all in favor of squelching someone down, as long as they're different than us of course!

I mean, Holocaust denial ? ! ? In the activist and creative 1970s, when we helped to sketch out a path for the next quarter century, in a publication which purported to be conservative and even libertarian? I mean, holy shit. Sounds thoroughly effed up to me. I can see why the thing didn't hang around.
 
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I really think that the election of President du Pont in 88, after the 8 years of the second Kennedy administration, brought about the shift from heavy to light manufacturing. The two years that he spent in his time from leaving his governorship in Delaware to winning the White House showed how important it was for a candidate to be out and meeting with voters across the country. His selection of Paul Laxalt for VP gave him important bridges to both the conservative wing who still were colored by the Reganite/Goldwater feud as well as to Western voters who were reluctant to tie the party to another member of the "Eastern Establishment" With the Republicans focused on job creation and balancing the increased social spending from Kennedy's massive expansion of Medi-Care into a national healthcare system, the need for more jobs and more employers in new and growing industries to balance the tax burden was almost liturgical in belief. The Du Pont administration saw where the technical work in building public transit vehicles, turbines for wind and water power, and electronic control systems for the management of everything would be the technically skilled jobs of the future. This created the teacher boom and the uptick in the STEM fields that we are still trying to build upon.
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As President du Pont explained, wind power in the late '80s was almost cost-effective on conventional terms, and once you add in greater energy independence, lower air pollution, and saving more oil for the future, it's a clear winner.

And as President Pete went on to explain, "We're going to take a medium step and look at feedback. I know it's as fancy spancy as a big huge project where we bet the farm, but medium steps with feedback is clearly the way to go." And for a brief period, the phrase "fancy spancy" entered the American lexicon.
 
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Deleted member 94708

OOC: AmericaninBeijing makes good points and in fact the issues with automation were predicted in the 1950s by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat's Cradle.

But to see an alternative history with just as much if not more automation than in the US, but no dismantling of the middle class, look at Japan. No immigration, offshoring is more limited, retention of lots of manufacturing capability, and more interest in non-oil and non-coal energy because they pretty much half to. You still wind up with little to no economic growth, lowered employment, and a lot lowered birth rate. But very different in terms of how the people in the middle of the society are treated.

This model is contingent on a falling population and still presents grave challenges in dealing with increasing numbers of very elderly people. It remains to be seen whether it is any more sustainable than America's current idiocy.

Though in fact Japan's recent real GDP growth rate of roughly 1% has equated to per capita income growth of 2-3% precisely because of that falling population.
 
. . . automation is still going to gut industrial employment, and rapidly.

Renewable energy, less offshoring, and strong unions can only slow this reality: we are rapidly reaching the end of the validity of our current model . . .

. . . Just as agricultural employment fell from 90%+ in 1790 to around 10% in the middle of the twentieth century to 0.5% today with production increasing all the while, . . .
I think this is at least 50 years off.

And I think a slight change in overtime law from 1978 (or '79 was it?) has made a difference. That law said, Look, if you pay someone under $30,000 a year, you have to pay them time-and-a-half for overtime, whether you classify them as salary or hourly. And that figure has been adjusted upward for inflation. I've debated with people online and they say, no, it's more the social norm that if you work too much more than 40 hours a week you lose face because it appears as though you're in over your head. But I say, this law is one of the things which has contributed to the social norm.

And then the Congressional bill in 2003 which redefine full-time as 38 hours a week. It did pass, but it was controversial. And this seems to be more in line with what you're saying, merely redefining the work week as shorter seems defeatist and the beginning of a downward spiral, and not a real plan for the future.

I guess, we shall see.
 
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Deleted member 94708

I think this is at least 50 years off.

And I think a slight change in overtime law from 1978 (or '79 was it?) has made a difference. That law said, Look, if you pay someone under $30,000 a year, you have to pay them time-and-a-half for overtime, whether you classify them as salary or hourly. And that figure has been adjusted upward for inflation. I've debated with people online and they say, no, it's more the social norm that if you work too much more than 40 hours a week you lose face because it appears as though you're in over your head. But I say, this law is one of the things which has contributed to the social norm.

And then the Congressional bill in 2003 which redefine full-time as 38 hours a week. It did pass, but it was controversial. And this seems to be more in line with what you're saying, merely redefining the work week as shorter seems defeatist and the beginning of a downward spiral, and not a real plan for the future.

I guess, we shall see.

OOC: Is this IC or OOC? I can't tell. My comment was OOC.
 
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Energy conservation is the less glamorous side of the equation, but it's pretty important, too.

For example, in the mid-'70s my state of Texas passed a law that apartment complexes had to show the last 12 months utility usage while occupied, before a person signed a lease, with the top three months in boldface for each utility. And the Texas Utility Commission spotchecks.
 
OP title made me scratch my head a little; are there examples of countries that saw declining middle classes due to a failure to transition away from fossil fuels? Finding a way to weaken unions I can see having an impact.

But here's another idea -- and bear with me, since this could be a little complicated -- what if average total employer expenditures per employee were the same as OTL, but the cost of benefits (e.g. health insurance) underwent significantly higher inflation, leading to actual wages becoming stagnant? I've read articles that argue that this kind of problem has kept parts of Europe from growing the spendable income of their consumer class, resulting in economic growth more sluggish than that of their neighbors. Not sure how this happens in America though -- on healthcare, maybe LBJ fails at passing Medicare/Medicaid, meaning that Nixon isn't able to pass CHIP just a few years later*; retirement planning... I actually have no idea how anyone could fuck that up.

Another way to squeeze the middle class could be incorporating a kind of Simpson's Paradox approach to employment -- one where segments of the population that have historically been payed less are employed in greater numbers, even as both said segments and their more fortunate counterparts are paid more than they have historically, taken in isolation from each other, but resulting a net loss or stagnation of average wage payments. For example, you could have a TL where women are made into a larger share of the workforce more quickly, where progress on equal pay is slow compared to OTL, or some combination of the two...

Actually now that I write that out, I don't see how the latter could happen; between Roe v Wade, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Republicans and Democrats tripping over themselves to prove who had the better feminist credentials in the later 70's and 80's, equal pay was always going to keep up with female worker growth. And even if some kind of 1950's style anti-feminist backlash managed to sway politics, it would in turn have resulted in men reasserting their share of the workforce, making it a moot point in this discussion.

OOC: obviously, CHIP is the early change I see here
 
. . . Another way to squeeze the middle class could be incorporating a kind of Simpson's Paradox approach to employment -- one where segments of the population that have historically been payed less are employed in greater numbers, even as both said segments and their more fortunate counterparts are paid more than they have historically, taken in isolation from each other, but resulting a net loss or stagnation of average wage payments. For example, you could have a TL where women are made into a larger share of the workforce more quickly, where progress on equal pay is slow compared to OTL, or some combination of the two...
And in a dystopian downward spiral, we might even combine racism and sexism. For example, office buildings in major U.S. downtowns might be happy to hire African-American women but not men? ? Or Nike factories in Indonesia might hire local women, even saying they're more submissive, but not men other than as security guards? ?

I just don't find it realistic. Plus, would require a union movement absolutely asleep at the wheel.
 
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https://consumer.healthday.com/ency...me-is-your-office-making-you-sick-646729.html

' . . . The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers recommends that ventilation systems pump in 20 cubic feet of fresh air per minute for every person in office spaces. In many cases, however, building operators pump in only 5 cubic feet -- giving the building air the appeal of a long-distance plane flight. . . '
Even with the less formaldehyde in carpet and furniture becoming a "thing" in the mid-'70s, there's still a built-in trade off. If the goal of energy conservation is to limit the amount of air we need to re-heat or re-cool, well, you can only push that so far and still have healthy indoor air.

Meaning, energy conservation can only achieve so much.
 
. . . failure of the hydrogen aircraft is mostly forgotten now. on paper hydrogen had 250% more energy than kerosene, alas even in liquid shape storage was a PITA.
They hoped a 747 would be large enough to house all those fat hydrogen tanks, but they were wrong, and not much room was left for passengers and cargo. . .
I quite agree that there are a lot of tech cul-de-sacs! :p

I'll go back to President du Pont when he said that trying a variety of things in medium steps is clearly the way to go. And then he added, And if that makes for a boring administration, I'll take that as a compliment (with that half-smile of his!)
 


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Yes, the Democrats were initially skeptical regarding global warming in the early 1980s. This embarrassing story has been re-told many times. Democrats in Congress and even within the Kennedy administration tended to view it merely as a Republican "talking point" against their public works programs and expanded oil and gas production.

Although I guess to the Democrats' credit as realists, once Republicans pointed out that the idea of global warming has been around since at least Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius published this paper in April 1896!, and even earlier with John Tyndall, and as the Republicans continued to patiently show graphs of average temperature and photos of glaciers and polar ice caps, the Democrats did come round. In their favor they said, we wanted to be sure of the evidence and also wait till steps were available where we could effectively address the problem. All the same, this was a black eye for the Democrats.
 
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Please see 1:39 into video. This UC-Berkeley professor is saying that wave energy is a very dense form of energy. For example, each square meter of coastal-floor carpet can potentially power two households.

I have no doubt it can work technologically. It all comes down to the question of . . . drumroll please! . . . whether it is cost-effective.

I also have no doubt that the professor and his team have an excellent chance of finding funding for small- and medium-scale experiments. Provided, of course that they'll have transparent accounting, which is pretty much a given these days. And the new kick among the American public? Provided they don't give away the store to partnering corporate interests. And I must say, I rather agree with this new kick! :) You want high trajectory? I think we would have done even better if these hadn't been such rich years for energy companies. Too many of these so-called public-private 'partnerships' seem to very much tilt in favor of corporation. Well, I guess that's life, at least for the time being.

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Yes, we have even modestly built up the American middle-class in the forty-four years since 1973. But somehow, I think we could have done considerably better.
 
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Have Federal Government run massive budget deficits, gut the industrial base, never revamp energy sector, finance resulting trade deficit with international borrowing or printing ever more dollars. Basically do everything you can to completely fsck yourself in 30-something years and the middle class will go down with the rest of it.
 
Have Federal Government run massive budget deficits, gut the industrial base, . . .
I like your post. :) It convinces me once again that people are much more knowledgeable today about economics than they were when I was a teenager in the 1970s. American citizens today generally know what last quarter's GDP growth rate was. They generally know what the unemployment rate is, what the inflation rate is. This might seem very routine, but it hasn't always been this way.

And with this greater interest and knowledge, not everyone is a Keynesian these days. I'm still a Keynesian (as boring and old-fashioned as that may be!). The argument I hear the most which worries me is that we don't pay down the national debt enough during good times--some years during both the du Pont and Bradley presidencies being obvious exceptions--and therefore we can't deficit-spend enough during the economic downturns to make enough of a difference quickly enough. Yes, there's more than a little truth to this. All the same, I think it's better to do something than nothing.
 
Another thing which may have derailed us is if we had bet too heavily on nuclear. It's fine having a few experimental plants, but nuclear is still not cost-effective, not even now in 2017 for crying out loud!!!

And we have never really fully solved the waste (and transportation) problem with much of the waste being stored "temporarily" at the nuclear plants.

There's an interesting story from the du Pont years. In the early '90s Energy Secretary Bruce Babbitt approached him with the idea of building a plant at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and basically betting on the come that high-efficiency transportation lines would continue dropping on price. du Pont complimented Secretary Babbitt on his political insight. Yes, the people of Nevada would much more readily vote to be the powerhouse of the American West, than the garbage dump. All the same, it would rest on the boring numbers. And in the end, the du Pont administration did not advocate for the plant.

And the citizens of Nevada voted for the waste storage facility, just barely, at 50.8%. Yes, we can enclose the waste in glass where it's less dangerous than when we dug it up. But it doesn't solve the safe transportation problem. And it adds to the cost. And nuclear is still not cost-effective. . . . . sorry, but it's not.
 
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Another thing which may have derailed us is if we had bet too heavily on nuclear. It's fine having a few experimental plants, but nuclear is still not cost-effective, not even now in 2017 for crying out loud!!!

Truthfully, all of the plants built from the 1960s and 1980s haven't been replaced, but there is a reason even Ontario Hydro and Hydro-Quebec, with all of their huge hydroelectric power plants, are building or refurbishing their nuclear power plants. The primary problem is that the power plants developed by Combustion Engineering, General Electric, Westinghouse and Morrison-Knudsen haven't seen use in North America yet. Ontario Hydro couldn't be much happier with its first Combustion Engineering System 120+ power plant, its been operating six years now and has had less than 96 hours of shutdown time in that period. Not four days in six years!

And we have never really fully solved the waste (and transportation) problem with much of the waste being stored "temporarily" at the nuclear plants.

There's an interesting story from the du Pont years. In the early '90s Energy Secretary Bruce Babbitt approached him with the idea of building a plant at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and basically betting on the come that high-efficiency transportation lines would continue dropping on price. du Pont complimented Secretary Babbitt on his political insight. Yes, the people of Nevada would much more readily vote to be the powerhouse of the American West, than the garbage dump. All the same, it would rest on the boring numbers. And in the end, the du Pont administration did not advocate for the plant.

And the citizens of Nevada voted for the waste storage facility, just barely, at 50.8%. Yes, we can enclose the waste in glass where it's less dangerous than when we dug it up. But it doesn't solve the safe transportation problem. And it adds to the cost. And nuclear is still not cost-effective. . . . . sorry, but it's not.

The problem here is that Du Pont and his successors still haven't moved on the M-K proposal from the mid-1990s about using the Hanford Site to reprocess waste. By the DOE's own admission, they can knock the amount of dangerous waste down by 96% using reprocessing, but everybody's still hung up on the plutonium that results. People, come on, that site has more security than Area 51, anybody who wanted plutonium for nefarious purposes would look at the number of security troops there and decide it wasn't a good day to die.

There is a reason Canada and much of Western Europe is betting big on nuclear energy. America is lucky to have gotten as far as they have, but with all the skills at their reactor builders, they are gonna get with the program eventually.

OOC: Vast amounts of clean energy without nuclear power stations in much of the United States borders on ASB. Wind Turbines can run at great efficiencies, but only at certain times, and they need backup at other times. Solar cells are the same. Hydroelectricity can be dependent on rainfall and water supplies. They can go far, but without any nuclear power stations in America, particularly with electric cars in huge numbers, you're gonna be burning huge amounts of fossil fuels. Period.
 
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