Stagnation

The "Greatest Generation" surely knows better, but insufferable baby boomers can revel in annoying younger (and even lesser) generations by asserting a distinct lack of innovation in popular music since approximately 1980.
To pre-codgers (like me) it seems like everything one could listen to now (including hip-hop) was already in play while Reagan slumbered through sultry Oval Office afternoons. Since then, my aching joints confirm a prejudicial conviction that cultural innovation has been merely soulless and silicon based, and not just because of iTunes.

But Robert J. Gordon is more serious and better informed. He provides a persuasive analysis of the stagnation of mass living standards in the "developed" world, a phenomenon that began settling down upon us during the dismal 1970s. Probing deeper than commonplace retellings of the triumphs of military Keynesianism and the uniquely un-devastated status of the US following World War II, he looks back to Second Industrial Revolution.

In his new book, 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth', Gordon highlights five great "invention clusters" originating between 1870 and 1940, but which did not become fully deployed (for maximum productive returns) until the 1970s.

These were:

• Electricity (and electric motors which powered everything from factories to refrigerators and hand tools),
• Urban Sanitation and Hygiene (think clean running water, Pasteur and Lister),
• The Internal Combustion Engine (think supermarkets, suburbs, and the current rarity of stepping in horse shit),
• Chemistry (think petroleum products -"Plastics!" and modern pharmaceuticals) and, of course,
• Modern Communications Media (phonographs, photographs, radio, and motion pictures in all their various manifestations)

Gordon expends a great deal of erudition debunking the comparative significance of any high-tech, computer, or internet revolution that may have bedazzled us since Jimmy Carter started building houses. Contrasted with the radical transformations wrought by the Five Invention Clusters on living and working conditions, the impact of our gadgets and connectivity is quite trivial indeed.

So can we blame Trumpism (really a shorthand term for an emerging major political realignment) on the demoralizing effects of diminishing returns as the Five Invention Clusters ran out of steam . . . gas . . . juice?  Gordon identifies other "headwinds" working against rising living standards. These include worsening inequality and the warped capacities of modern education systems.

In the meantime corporations are hoarding trillions that we should employ constructively and humanly, one of our political parties denies any human responsibility for climate change, and the G-20 leadership dismisses the need for major change while luminaries like Warren Buffet try to reassure us that all is well and will continue to be that way if we only trust in Hillary.

Still, one of Noam Chomsky's less trumpeted (and more hopeful) claims is that, the US anyway, has become far more "civilized" than it was before the 1970s. He backs this up in numerous ways. The most engaging of these is the contrast between the tardy, reactive, popular response to the Vietnam War versus the more proactive resistance against interventions in Central America and the Middle East, the latter even more startling in the aftermath of devastating 911 terror attacks on home soil.

Our elites are flummoxed by Donald, aghast at Bernie, and whistling in the dark while dodging investigations and indictments. Their cluelessness, (if that's what it is) is the best argument for more and truer democracy. Let's hope it doesn't come in Trump's clothing.