> On Dec 24, 2008, at 6:18 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> In his US News interview he also said there was a 1 in 3 chance of a
>> Japan-like decade of stagnation. Japan is Japan, but I don't think
>> the American polity/psyche could handle that without some deep
>> adjustments.
>
> I wonder about the comparisons. Average unemployment in the U.S. over
> the last 15 years has exceeded Japan's worst in the 1990s. Their
> poverty rate is lower than ours. Have average Japanese workers
> experienced 35 years of flat to declining real wages?
I don't know much about Japan. Shouldn't forget that US workers did manage to compensate for flat/declining wages by building up debt and sending more family members into the labor force. Now those sources of support are tapped out. What now?
But all of that is a little beside the point. The reaction of the polity/psyche to economic changes isn't based only, or even mainly, on "objective" measures like inflation-adjusted real wages or family income. One of the most fruitful contributions of the new trend within poli-sci called constructivist political economy has been to point out that economic crises are socially constructed. (Like for example, for decades after WWII Britain was thought to be in long-term decline because of its chronic "balance of payments crisis." Well, under Blair, Britain was racking up huge c/a deficits but it was no longer coded as a "crisis.")
In the US, decades of median-wage stagnation were not constructed as a crisis, but a decade of GDP stagnation surely would be. When something becomes coded as a national "crisis" it legitimizes people's grievances as being more than just individual problems or personal failings. Plus, economic stagnation doesn't sit well with American self-identity. Brings to mind one of the classic works of consensus history (now never taught in grad school), David Potter's 1958 book _People of Plenty_. From the Amazon blurb:
> America has long been famous as a land of plenty, but we seldom
> realize how much the American people are a people of plenty—a people
> whose distinctive character has been shaped by economic abundance. In
> this important book, David M. Potter breaks new ground both in the
> study of this phenomenon and in his approach to the question of
> national character. He brings a fresh historical perspective to bear
> on the vital work done in this field by anthropologists, social
> psychologists, and psychoanalysts.
SA