Boom For Whom?

[Derechos]

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Let me start with a puzzle: why did faith in the wonders of financial deregulation persist so long?

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The point is that these are pure fantasies on the part of the right. The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

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If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

No wonder then, that Very Serious People — who, after all, get to be considered Very Serious because the elite likes them — have retained faith in deregulation despite repeated disasters.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/boom-for-whom/

[yurbud]

1. I will go one further: worldwide empire is great for whom?

When the sun never set on the British Empire in the 19th century, average Brits were still putting in 16 hour days 7 days a week in factories and coal mines and living in crowded, filthy tenements.

Today Great Britain is back to mostly just their original local islands, but life for working and middle class Brits is far better than it was at the zenith of empire a hundred or even 60 years ago.

So who did their empire serve? And who does ours serve?

We are the world's sole remaining superpower with military bases all over the place, but average Americans are feeling a real decline in our standard of living and hope for the future.

Like the post-war vs post-Reagan analysis, looking at an even bigger picture yields the same result.

Most of us are screwed for benefit of the very, very few.