N.Y. Times has an interesting on-line opinion “Our Broken Social Contract”. It contrasts two very different explanations for American malaise. ( - what’s the effect of the “?_r=0” in this URL?)
David Brooks blames a lack of
I think there may be some validity in Brooks’ view. But there is a strong alternative explanation:
Economist Alan Krueger, OTOH, blames the uncritical worship of the free market in the 1980s which, as paraphrased by Tom Edsall
Some dispute opinions like Krueger’s by saying that it is global competition that has forced businesses to scrimp on employee compensation. Krueger disputes that by presenting a Federal Reserve graphic showing that American corporate profits as a share of GDP averaged about 5.5% throughout 1950-2000, but have recently soared to 11%.
Who’s right? (Mods, feel free to move this to GD if it belongs there.)
Sounds to me like people are bowling alone… Brooks and Krueger are certainly focusing on different metrics and outcomes of this social breakdown, while Putnam looks more closely at possible causes. But I can think of plenty of places that people might feel like they’re connecting to the world, but aren’t actually building any sort of social capital doing so (social networks, internet message boards, and maybe even some forms of reality television). There’s more stratification in both the workplace and our personal lives, and that self-perpetuates when we are forced to interact across those divides.
IDK, but personally, I noticed attitudes change when employers started raiding pension funds, ignoring any expectation of lifelong career w/ a company, shipping jobs offshore, etc. I’m not saying there weren’t necessarily valid and perhaps even inescapable constraints that made most or all of those necessary - if not in the short then the less short run (ok, not the raping of pension funds and such). But my perception is that this was generally done with virtually no consideration for the effects those actions had and no attempt of any kind to ameliorate them. If anything, it seems efforts were made to lobby for the ability to proceed on the same tack with even greater abandon.
That’s when I noticed people taking the ‘look out for number one’ attitude deadly serious. That’s always been a standing joke among the people I worked with and I did a fair variety of blue collar jobs, if only for maybe weeks or months at a time. Everything from dock and factory work to driving a fork lift to driving a 32ft bus (my longest gig). But people were still loyal if they felt they could expect loyalty in return. They wanted to believe that, but eventually I think it became impossible.
For white collar people, that realization I think took much longer and when it came, I think it cut that much more deeply. I haven’t had to deal with that shit for many years, but I doubt things have gotten any better and I doubt they will any time soon. There’s no economic incentive so it won’t happen. And I think that’s the point. That didn’t used to be the ONLY consideration.
