It’s always interesting, and sometimes gratifying, when you see that another writer has, obviously independently, come to the same conclusion as you have yourself. In my most recent Washington Examiner column, I argued that we cannot resurrect the postwar America that, in different ways, inspires nostalgia in both liberals and conservatives. “Postwar America,” I wrote, “was the result of unique circumstances — economic dominance when competitor nations were devastated, cultural uniformity that followed from a universal popular culture and the common experience of military service (16 million Americans served in the wartime military; the proportional equivalent today would be 38 million).”
Today, thanks to a link from Marginal Revolution economics superblogger Tyler Cowen, I ran across another economics blogger, Branko Milanovic, who makes a similar observation. “I am skeptical that ‘the happy days of the 1960s’ will ever come back. This is the idea that I somewhat jokingly called ‘Make America Denmark Again.’ That world made sense with the technology and the policy as it was in the 1960s but not today. The world of large-scale manufacturing, homogeneous working class, trade unions, capital controls and a quasi-closed economy (U.S. exports and imports combined were less than 10 percent of American GDP in the 1960s; they are more than 30 percent today) is over.” Sounds pretty smart, eh? Or at least I thought so.
