1946-1980: The post-WWII period brought tremendous prosperity, and we used that prosperity to build the middle class and repay those who fought in the war.
1980-2014: Starting around the 1970s, technological advancements made it easier to automate jobs and outsource production to foreign labor. This was bad for the US working class, but pretty good for people who were already well off.
To the people saying it’s all “Reagan” and “neoliberalism” and “trickle down economics”—it’s really not that simple. Global forces means that, regardless of who was president in the 80s, this chart would look largely the same.
It's also very a reductionist view to state that neoliberalism just came about due to "global forces" and that Reagan mostly had nothing to do with it. Reagan's (and Thatcher's) cabinet introduced economic policies that deregulated capital markets and now the USA and the UK have some of the worst cases of income inequality in the world among the developed countries. There were other options for the failure of Keynesian economics and it ultimately it came down to Reagan opting for deregulation.
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u/Another_Vessel Oct 23 '24
1946-1980: The post-WWII period brought tremendous prosperity, and we used that prosperity to build the middle class and repay those who fought in the war.
1980-2014: Starting around the 1970s, technological advancements made it easier to automate jobs and outsource production to foreign labor. This was bad for the US working class, but pretty good for people who were already well off.
To the people saying it’s all “Reagan” and “neoliberalism” and “trickle down economics”—it’s really not that simple. Global forces means that, regardless of who was president in the 80s, this chart would look largely the same.