Most of the world’s wealthiest and best-governed countries got there without super-rapid bursts of growth. Denmark, which has a per capita income of about $52,000 and is frequently ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world, never experienced what anyone would call an economic miracle.
.. From 1890 to 1916, per capita growth averaged about 1.9 percent per year, and if in 1916 you had forecast that this pace would continue for another 100 years, you would have been off by only about $200. Denmark had positive growth about 84 percent of the time and no deep recessions
.. U.S. growth rates at the time were typically below 2 percent, and even lower up through 1860, hardly impressive by the standards of today’s China or India — or for that matter today’s U.S. The big advantage of the U.S. is that it avoided major catastrophe for long periods of time, apart from the Civil War, and pushed ahead with fairly steady progress.
.. It’s hard for economies at or near the technological frontier to rapidly improve living standards, because invention is usually slower than playing catch-up by borrowing technologies from wealthier nations.
.. Many export industries are automated and hence don’t create as many middle-class jobs as they used to.
.. In other words, today’s world may resemble the 19th century more than the last few decades.
Emerson: On Analysing History
In analysing history, do not be too profound, for often the causes are superficial
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Boomers have an unrelenting death grip on America
Donald Trump was born in 1946. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947. And as a result, the candidates, and their campaigns, are reflections of the same Boomer anxieties.
.. our self-representation of the latter half of the 20th century basically mirrors the average Boomer’s memory of his own life. In the 1950s, a Boomer would have been a child, and this is the decade we look at through rose-tinted glasses — simpler times, albeit wonderful ones. The 1960s we look at as a decade of trouble but also boundless possibility and fun, just like teenage years. Like young adulthood, we mostly remember the 1970s as a struggle, with high oil prices, unemployment, and inflation — the struggle of getting set up and making your way in the world. By the 1980s, a roaring decade for many, the average Boomer would be in the flower of life, with a young family. And the prosperous 1990s would be when the Boomer’s savings are finally starting to pile up.
.. Of course, the reason why that aspect of Clinton’s message works so well is because Trump is such a perfect foil for it. If Hillary is the Boomers’ nostalgia-filled ego trip, Trump is the Boomers’ fear of impending doom and insecurity. Trump is often compared to George Wallace and Richard Nixon.
.. our two political parties are obsessed with fighting the battles from those eras. The argument they are engaged in is how to return to which misremembered fantasy of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Trump we saw: Populist, frustrating, naive, wise, forever on the make
Even after all those hours of interviews, Trump seemed not quite real, a character he had built to enhance his business empire, a construct designed to be at once an everyman and an impossibly high-flying king of Manhattan, an avatar of American riches.
.. Throughout the past century, Americans were periodically drawn to voices arguing that foreigners or The Other were responsible for the nation’s troubles: Father Charles Coughlin, a priest who used his nationwide radio show in the 1930s to deliver an America First message laced with assaults on Jews; and George Wallace, a segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for president in the 1960s and ’70s as a populist preaching that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republicans and the Democrats; and Patrick Buchanan, a Washington insider and presidential candidate who encouraged voters in the 1990s to rise up as “peasants with pitchforks” to take their country back from politicians who had failed to stop illegal immigration and the ravages of free trade.
.. The last three presidents had struggled fairly publicly with their fathers. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama wrote and talked about their feelings of abandonment. Their resolve to prove themselves helped propel their meteoric ascents, tempered by a charisma perhaps born of their lifelong need to win attention and love that were missing from their upbringing.
.. Yet in an office dedicated almost entirely to celebrating Trump’s success and performance, nothing spoke to the man’s private passions or predilections, nothing to indicate a hobby, an artistic interest, a literary bent, a statement about his credo, his crises, or his dreams.
.. In one of his books, “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” he had asserted that visionary business leaders succeed “because they are narcissists who devote their talent with unrelenting focus to achieving their dreams, even if it’s sometimes at the expense of those around them.” He approvingly quoted a writer who said, “Successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world.”
.. He expected his day-to-day work style to be similar to what he’d done for decades. At Trump Tower, he kept no computer on his desk, and he avoided reading extensive reports or briefings. He went with his gut. He tweeted what he felt, confident that his heart was right where the people were.