There is a new book by Norman Solomon, War Made Invisible:How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine that may speak to the issue of the popularity of US military engagements. One lesson from Vietnam was, “don’t let people know what’s going on.” To those critics who were paying attention, American intervention around the globe may not have been a good thing.
As to rising incomes, my sense of CPI calculations for housing costs is they are pegged to rental costs. For the 1980s and 1990s, including the years of the “Volcker Shock” that raised interest rates and slowed the economy, would the increases in housing costs, including mortgages, have blunted the rise in incomes? Also, while some incomes were rising in the 1990s, that tended to mean they were returning to previous levels after having dropped. If your wage drops by 10% and then you get a 5% increase, that raise is still a measure of stagnation. Born in the late 1950s and not inclined to see American military intervention as a good thing, the 1990s had little to cheer about, especially when the promised “peace dividend” vanished.
“Ennui” is a perfect term to describe the 90s. Having been born in 1972, I don’t feel like the 90s were particularly “optimistic” or “pessimistic”. I think they were more like a “golden age” of “meh”.
Another good example would be the lyrics from the Green Day song Longview. Or really any of their songs off of Dookie. Or the music of Nirvana. Or the movie Office Space. Or Falling Down. Or specifically Gen X films like Empire Records, Grosse Point Blank, Reality Bites, Clerks, or Singles.
I don’t think that comes from living in a time of prosperity. I think it comes from living in a time of uncertainty and lack of direction. Isn’t that the consistent theme among Gen X during that era 9 that inability to find purpose or meaning in traditional institutions like marriage, family, career, neighborhood, and so on?
Not for South Africa.
Apartheid ended. We could vote. Nelson Mandela was President. The Black middle class was growing. HIV rates were growing but not yet at the rates of the early 2000s. We hosted and won the Rugby World Cup. Generally we opened up to the world.
There were some blips - some isolated political violence, massive White flight, unfair foreign debt, the aforementioned AIDS increase. But overall, the 90s were still way better than the decades before or since.
Having been born in 1977, I overlooked a certain aspect of things that an older person would have been more likely to have noticed and felt at the time. With the internet having really taken off in the mid 90s (I like to think of 1995 as the exact year even though it was obviously a process), this meant that being a “cubicle drone” who only interacted with their computer during the workday became a more common thing. That may have been a significant factor in the boredom of the late 90s.
Born in 79, and yes I recall the 90s being a time of optimism. Not that we thought that the world was all sunshine and lollipops, but it definitely felt like things were moving in the right direction.
I remember globalization being presented very differently at that time. It was mostly about us cruelly exploiting poor countries. There was little concept of them out-competing the West…at least not in social conversation here in the UK (no need to cite an economist that had a contrary view, I’m just talking about overall perceptions).
FTR I am pretty pro-globalization, but we don’t need to go into that
95 is about when I entered the professional workforce, but I had a number of office jobs prior to graduating college. Imagine having to sit in an office cubicle 8 hours a day without any internet or email at all.
I think maybe the 80s was when people starting thinking about the concept of a “cubicle drone” in the first place - a sort nebulous white collar job as an anonymous, largely disposable, cog pushing paper or processing data for some large corporation. Comfortable, but ultimately stupid and pointless and not particularly satisfying. By the time I was in college, the Man Men / Wall Street concept of the workplace as a place where men (and to a lesser extent women) dressed up in power suits, drank martinis, and made multi-million dollar deals was largely a thing of the past (or at least on hiatus). And “tech” was not yet this thing where 20-somethings dropped out of college to become billionaires overnight. So to a certain extent, I think the experience for a lot of people in my age group was going off to college “because”, possibly taking out a huge amount of debt, maybe trying to enjoy yourself for 4 years, and having really no clear idea what you were actually going to do for a living once you graduate because sitting in some cubicle farm pushing paper until you die looked absolutely horrible.
Yes, that would have been included in the inflation adjustment.
Also, while some incomes were rising in the 1990s, that tended to mean they were returning to previous levels after having dropped. If your wage drops by 10% and then you get a 5% increase, that raise is still a measure of stagnation.
Well sure, but people were making more in real terms in 1997 than in 1979. And doing way better than in 1992, so of course they’d be upbeat about life. What’s your point?
Born in the late 1950s and not inclined to see American military intervention as a good thing, the 1990s had little to cheer about, especially when the promised “peace dividend” vanished.
The military interventions of the Clinton years, at least, were very low-level compared to before and after.
Before: Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Kuwait.
After: Afghanistan, the GWOT generally, and of course Iraq.
During: the Balkans, where we were basically keeping ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia from fighting each other.
If you’re “not inclined to see American military intervention as a good thing,” ISTM that the Clinton years were about as good as it gets.
And when did the ‘peace dividend’ vanish anyway? 2001?
Other than the huge amount of debt (which Biden is at least trying to address, thank goodness), it sounds like my experience in the 1970s. Most of the people I know didn’t know what they wanted to do after college, and spent their 20s trying to figure it out by trial and error.
I remember also when people treated web design as some new mystical career because people made a a bunch of money doing it in the beginning and too many quit their jobs took out huge loans to take classes and the like also people didn’t notice how easy it was going to be to make your own or places like go daddy etc I remeberin arguing with a RP game guild mate over this and her finally admitting years I was correct as she was never able to make it a dependable job so she went back to her original career she did say last time I talked to her that she had a nice side job of making websites for gaming guilds and clans in online gaming spots
another thing I seen a where a couple made a nascent web-based printable greeting card company that was mainly running as a hobby as they made the cards themselves and they had a few animated snarky ones that got noticed since you could send them in emails and they started making like 1 maybe 2k a month (in fact I used it once or twice)
American Greetings decided they wanted to do the same and bought out the whole thing for low double-digit millions … used it to start their own version of the idea … promptly lost a ton of money and shut it down like 2 years later …the original owners were talking about getting the IP back and relaunching the site as it originally was