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Showing Original Post only (View all)Man I'm sick of nostalgia for the 1950s [View all]
It wasn't a "good economy" and I would love that zombie idea to die.
The postwar economic boom was based on pushing women out of the formal economy and robbing wealth from African American homeowners and farmers. And for that matter a lot of the prewar New Deal was too. You can't abstract away the racism and sexism because they were the engine that powered white male prosperity during that time. That high wage growth only lasted for as long as the workforce (at least for "good" jobs) was limited entirely to white men; once it was expanded to PoC and women, the latter's wages went up significantly (in that they started to receive wages), but the white male anger at the "stagnation" they felt as the necessary result of that is still echoing today.
All your faves are problematic, and that's doubly true of the alleged golden age. We need to stop pining for it, stop trying to recreate it, and actually come up with our own model for how the economy should look.