Not Your Father's Economy

What is going on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?

This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 but we see all around us the detritus of unashamed prosperity. What is going on?

That is what Mark Brown asks as Ford announces plans to lay off 30,000 workers in the next few years.

I don’t pretend to understand the economy any more.


I don’t understand how our economy can keep churning while all the good, blue-collar jobs keep disappearing, relegating more and more people to lives of earning less.

Says he:

I grew up in a railroad family in a community where the breadwinners for most of the other families worked in factories. The railroad moved the raw materials to the factories or the finished products to market. It was an easy economy to understand.

Now everything has changed.

Mark Brown is saying that the world is waiting for someone to write a book that will make the complex understandable, that will reduce our present economy down to a sound bite that politicians and media people can spout without really even understanding it.

In reality, the US economy has not changed since the industrial takeoff in the years after the Civil War. It has been continental, market driven, and always driving towards lower costs, wiping out industry after industry as new ideas and new processes appeared and undercut the old ways.

It’s just that up to now in spite of everything, you could pretend that the economy was all about sturdy workers making things and transporting them to market, rather than an abstract continental crapshoot of costs and profits and losses, of numbers and instant fortunes and terrifying bankrupties.

So, where is the genius who will peel the scales off our eyes?