Steve Sailer was struck by the exact same passage as I in a profile of Paul Krugman:
Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”
Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”
To state the obvious, this is in many ways a profoundly conservative sentiment. Note the love of the particular, specific and local lived experience, and also the lack of conventional liberal observation (in this passage) of the greater racism of that era, or the conformity and sexual mores against which “the Sixties” rebelled. I think that seen in its best, and correct, light, what Krugman is expressing here is the desire that as many people as possible should have access to this kind of middle-class life.
I’m somewhat younger than Krugman, but as they say, the future arrives unevenly. I grew up in a small town with an experience not unlike this. I’m very sympathetic to Krugman’s choking nostalgia. It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it.
The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans — by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.
Almost anybody who experienced it this way (and of course, not everybody did) intuitively wants something like it for his own children. The tragedy, in my view, is that, though we all thought of this as the baseline of normality, this really was an exceptional moment in our nation’s history.
My motivation in writing about political economy is, in some ways, much like Krugman’s. But rather than seeing that moment as primarily the product of policies like unionization, entitlements and high taxes, as is Krugman’s view, I believe that it was primarily the product of circumstance. We had just won a global war, and had limited competition; we had a huge wave of immigration, followed by a multi-decade pause; oil was incredibly cheap; a backlog of technical developments had yet to be exploited and scaled up, and so forth. We can’t go back there, at least not exactly.
This difference in diagnosis leads me to radically different views about what we should do now.
I've always thought that c. 1959 was the peak of human civilization, as experienced in the USA, Canada, Western Europe, and a few other fortunate climes (Oz, etc.) I say civilization as opposed to technology of course. We can't credit it all to the American post-War boom, as even Europe was thriving.
Critics of the 50s always want to say those were "simpler times." Actually, they were the most delicately complex times know in history, when hundreds of millions could safely sleep with their doors unlocked if they chose. When young women could walk down the street in almost perfect safety, and children could play outside unsupervised. When blacks and other minorities in the USA made huge, huge economic and social strides between 1945-65 (not due to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but simply due to moral pressure and social uplift).
Unfortunately like all complex things, the post-War civilization was fragile. It gave way too soon to a reversion to the savagery of the past, what we now call complexity, though it's difficult to explain how the modern morass of illegitimacy, poverty, and ignorance that so recalls the worst pathologies of the 1800s is so much more complex than the now widely-disparaged Eisenhower era.
It is indeed amusing to find that as with so many avowed liberals, when you scratch Krugman, you find a conservative foundation underneath the radical varnish. But it's not surprising; many of us conservatives started out the same way.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMight I suggest that both Mr Manzi and Mr Krugman are hearkening back to eras that only existed in the minds of little boys?
As a child of the 80's, I can assure you that we had all the same joys growing up in Colorado. Up on a summer morning and out to roam the neighborhood, back for lunch to eat some Campbell's (Captcha!) soup and then down to the local pool for some afternoon cooling down.
We even played flashlight tag at the local golfcourse at night.
I remember that time without anxiety, all while my parents wrestled with high inflation, bad unemployment numbers, the height of the Drug War, and- worst of all- the advent of MTV.
Likewise, Mr Krugman's childhood Eden was a walled garden where he was too juvenile to notice how scary the world really was. The 50's and early 60's saw the formation of the Soviet Bloc, the Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis and Assassination of JFK. Domestically, in addition to the issues around race and gender mentioned by Mr Manzi, Liberals will also insist that SIMPLY EVERYONE was either terrorized by or of the Red Scare.
While part of being a Conservative is longing for the good ol days, we must not succumb to the all too liberal impetus towards moon-eyed idealism. It was great when we were kids because we were kids, with loving families that sheltered and nurtured us. That is the Conservative Dream that we should be striving for.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis post brought back poignant memories of those times for me, too. I have a different take on the formula for the "paradise lost" of those halcyon days.
We lived knowing that life will deal us hardships (an accident, a storm, an illness), and that this is as God designed it. I think it made us less focused on asking government to fix the impossible, and more focused on living the life we had. We certainly accepted more personal responsibility for ourselves than I believe Americans do today.
We didn't look to a government in some far off city to make us thinner, keep us (unrealistically) safe from all dangers, right all wrongs, save us from storms, deliver "justice."
It was a time when we (having grown up in Florida), looked to the Marine Patrol as trusted "cops" on the water who would help us if our boat ran aground or if we lost engine power. Now, they are despised, as they have outsourced the "helping" part and instead spend their time stalking us to perform unconstitutional search and seizures of our property, not to help us but to look for a fish of the wrong size or a whistle that isn't loud enough.
When a hurricane hit, we hunkered down, then the whole neighborhood got together and helped each other fix stuff in the aftermath. We shared food. The men roamed the neighborhood with chainsaws, tidying up the fallen trees. Not once do I remember hearing anyone ask why the Federal government wasn't in town yet to save us.
I am saying a simpler time meant less government, and we were all the better for it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis sounds exactly like my childhood growing up in the 80's. I don't think economics have anything to do with it though. Instead, I think it started with the nauseating baby boomers treating their children as an extension of their own vanity rather than simply giving them freedom to just be children. And as this becomes the cultural norm, even parents who aren't idiots are sort of hamstrung by the organized activity and "play date" culture that surrounds them. When I'm back in the suburb where I grew up, I hardly ever see kids out playing. It's kind of sad.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI blame lawyers and politicians, predominently of the liberal persuasion. It is now illegal, or at least dangerous, to do many of the things we used to do without a thought.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe worst thing has been the destruction of women, in the name of equality, a truly pernicious falsehood. Children could roam because Mommy was never very far, and readily available in case of emergencies. When Mommy had to go to work, it resulted in the destruction of real child rearing. Housing prices also started up, because now young couples had 2 incomes, so they weren't as frugal as they should have been. Real estate taxes rose, eventually so much that noone actually owns their home anymore, you just pay the previous owner to purchase the right to rent it from the government.
Now that we've introduced stress through ludicrous levels of regulation and taxation, litigation, work rules, et al, life sucks.
Did none of you see this coming by 1968 or so? Then you are all fools.
This is what slavery looks like. Can someone tell me the exact point of taxation when we can be considered slaves? Must it be 100%, or would 50% be enough? I'd just like to know, because I might want to ammend my tax filings and change my profession to "slave".
What you and former economist Krugman remember nostalgically (and, based on my recollections from growing up in the same period, accurately) has almost nothing to do with economics. Materially, today's poor are better off than were the middle class Krugmans, Manzis or Veals of the 1950's. The difference between now and then lies in the moral universe.
If I may add a further bit of anecdotal data: When I was a boy, I never had a key to our house. It was never locked, except when we went on vacation.
Note, too, that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous memorandum on the imperiled state of the black family at a time when the black illegitimacy rate was 20 percent. That's roughly the rate among whites today.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it."
Lovely.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTom Veal, what you say may be technically true as far as the poorest of the poor - better off today than their predecessors, and better off even in some material respects than the 1950s middle class - mostly due to the expansion of the welfare state.
Unfortunately, the same is not necessariliy true of the lower middle class, the working class, the blue collar workers; as opposed to the welfare class.
But let's not give technology too much credit. A rising innovative tide has lifted all boats, but it's lifted those of workers much more slowly than it has the idle rich and the shiftless poor (no, not all or even most welfare receipients and such are shiftless, but it would be ridiculous to pretend that in a nation of 300,000,000, none of us are lazy and idle).
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@ AbeFroman: my childhood in the 70s / early 80s also had a lot in common with the supposedly romanticized one of the 50s that Krugman described. But things were changing, here in Miami for instance. By the time my younger sisters grew up in the 80s / early 90s, it was no longer safe or desirable for kids to play outside. I don't see anyone reminiscing about the early 2000s for instance. If there were remaining pockets of stability into the 1970s and 80s and beyond, that doesn't contradict Manzi's thesis.
Your point about kids not playing outside anyomre is a very striking one. I agree with you that play dates and kids' overscheduled lives are part of it. So is the Nintendo culture and 250 cable channels and DVDs and Tivo and the Internet. So is ubiquitous air conditioning. So are smaller family sizes. And rootless families that seem to move from house-motel to the next domicile constantly, never even knowing their neighbors. And the (over)concern about safety from traffic and predators.
It's strange to go jogging for four miles and see zero children, where 30 years ago there would have been dozens of football and basketball games, girls jumping rope or playing on the sidewalk, etc. It's like a Twilight Zone world with no one under 20.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePatrick J: Fortunately, what you write has no basis in reality. Technology has benefited everybody, tremendously. The poor are better off not because of welfare, but because technology has made goods both cheaper and of better quality. The middle class has more and better paying jobs, as well as better and cheaper goods.
The world is better for everyone who is willing to work. For those who just want to sit back and cry about how other people aren't taking care of him the way mommy and daddy used to. Life is tough, and deservedly so.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusethat piece makes me want to like the guy- GET THEE BEHIND ME!!
:)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMarkW, I'm not the one ignoring reality. Technology has made more goods available, but it has also made more goods necessary. None of us want our families to grow up with only 1950s-era techonology in terms of medicine, appliances, TVs, other luxuries, etc. But unlike the 50s working father, today's equivalent has to see his wife work equally long hours and their 1.5 kids be raised by strangers at day care in order to provide what his 50s counterpart could do for a family of five on his own. The fortunate few in the upper and upper middle classes who don't have to go down that route are indeed being separated from the masses.
And it's not all about technology; as Jim and others have discussed, the social fabric has broken down. Perhaps a child of a single mother on welfare has more access to AC, TV, even food and medicine than a 1950s child of two married parents did. I'm not discounting the overall standards of living that have improved since then. But that child of divorce or illegitimacy is also a lot more likely to be molested by one of his mom's boyfriends. Or to turn to crime (not solely out of poverty of course, since we've already agreed he has more access to wordly goods than his 1950s suburban counterpart). And so on.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCount me in the court with the Sausage King of Chicago-- I grew up in the late 1970s / early 1980s with a childhood not far removed from that of Krugman's and Manzi's halcyon days.
I grew up in Chicago, hardly the safest city in America, but you knew that there was a "bad side of town," and the rest of the city was, well, about as average as you can get. Street football and softball, bike rides with the friends, all varieties of tag (Red Rover, Ghost in the Graveyard, flashlight), etc., etc. All my relatives & friends had dads who worked and moms who stayed at home-- out of a giant extended family, MY parents were the first people I knew to divorce in 1985, both a metaphorical *and* literal loss of innocence.
What's changed? Well, this:
1. The aforementioned divorce rate.
2. The loss of shared cultural experiences (TV, film, military service, blue-collar work, manual & mechanical labor performed by dads and sons instead of day-laborers)
3. The explosion of ominpresent sensationalist media desperate for content (every person you see is a killer / se xual predator / child kidnapper, so don't talk to strangers, hide your kids, and lock the doors!)
4. Social changes. Rise of the white collar workforce, separation between classes, increase in disposable income that led to a society-wide competition in conspicuous consumption (all deemed a social good because, hey, "consumer spending drives the economy")
5. Video games and the internet. When all you had were four television stations (three of which played *soap operas* all day long), kids had nothing to keep them inside. Now, kids have 500 channels, three gaming consoles, computers, cel phones, and all manner of electronic gadgets to keep them busy-- and isolated from the rest of the natural world.
6. Who has kids anymore? Not people living in expensive cities. People in suburbs still have kids, but they're all atomized, hidden away in cul-de-sacs with no sidewalks four miles from anything worth walking too.
I'm sure I could list off another dozen factors, but those are some of the obvious low-hanging ones.
Human beings and human nature hasn't changed, but American society, for all the good it still has, most certainly has. Some of these changes may be the fault of economics, but I'd agree with the contention that FAR MORE of the changes resulted from the inexorable march of technology and the breakdown of the nuclear family (the latter a social ill ACTUALLY WELCOMED AND CELEBRATED by the Left).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOvert has hit the nail on the head. What Krugman and Manzi describe is the sense of safety and well-being that attends INNOCENCE. But the times were not innocent in any sense other than relative to today. The innocence is an element of childhood; liberals have simply never grown up. That is the source of their affection for the nanny state: having discovered that their parents cannot forever shield them from the vagaries of the human condition, they seek a surrogate who can.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have a four- and six-year old who count on me to provide them with the same experience that Paul and Jim so fondly recall. I will do that for as long as I can; but when the time comes for them to grow up, I will explain to them that they must put away the tag flashlights and make their own way in the world.
If Paul Krugman stopped to think about it, he would realize what he is pining for is a time before his philosophy began to win and take hold and the only way to get to what he pines for is to abandon his philosophy and help undo what it has done.
Good luck with that, Paul Krugman.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePatrickJ: You confuse desire with necessity. One could easily live with only those consumer goods that were available in the 50's, if one wanted to. And your cost of living would be way less than todays.
The reason why many women work today has absolutely nothing to do with technology. Many of those women want to work. Are you going to force them back into the home against their will.
Of those that feel they have to work, many of them are working for things they don't really need. Bigger TV's, fancier house, deluxe vacations.
Technology doesn't force people to want these things. They do that to themselves, all on their own.
This is equally true of both the poor and the middle class.
You seek to shift the blame from the people, where it belongs, to society.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse>"The tragedy, in my view, is that, though we all thought of this as the baseline of normality, this really was an exceptional moment in our nation’s history."
I don't think that's true. I have elderly relatives who grew up in NYC in the 1930's and 1940's, and their description of life back then is remarkably similar to how Krugman describes Long Island in the 1960's. The sixties were not really that exceptional, except by contrast with what came after.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMarkW, you're just putting words in my mouth now. No, I do not seek to shift blame from the individual to society. BTW there is no such thing as society in the absence of individuals; pointing out and denigrating societal trends is in fact holding the individuals in that society responsible for negative developments, not excusing them from them.
It's odd that you were talking about reality a few posts ago and now you're suggesting an unrealistic back to the past solution. Whether they should or not, people aren't going to go back to 1950s standards of living, any more than in that era they would have settled for 1890s standards, even if such a compromise would have meant avoiding the 50s rat race. And so on back in time. Note that if the 50s were functional, it wasn't because everyone was willing to settle for "simpler" standards. What we retroactively see as simple was cutting edge, then.
If we want to duplicate the good points of the familial, educational, and social stability of the past, we can't do so by literally trying to go back to B&W TVs and clotheslines. We need to be as forward-thinking in our era as responsible individuals of the past were in theirs.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse>"MarkW, you're just putting words in my mouth now."
You're going to discover that putting words in other peoples mouths is, along with obnoxious ad homs, the sum total of MarkW's debate technique.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe true poet laureate of nostalgia for middle class suburbia is Benjamin Scwharz of the Atlantic Monthly.
In the July-August 2009 Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest volume of Kevin Starr's history of California: Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963. It makes me nostalgic for what once was. Schwarz is a half-decade younger than me and, I would guess from this, had a similar San Fernando Valley upbringing:
"It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country's dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. ... In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles's working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.
"It was a sweet, vivacious time: California's children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and -- thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine -- were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it's a time irretrievably lost. ...
"Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific -- and prosaic. California, as he's argued in earlier volumes, promised "the highest possible life for the middle classes." It wasn't a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered "a better place for ordinary people." That place always meant "an improved and more affordable domestic life": a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space ... and a lush backyard -- the stage, that is, for "family life in a sunny climate." It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles "common man" who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933," addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile."
"Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class -- the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners ... But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination ... and how the Golden State -- fleetingly, as it turns out -- accommodated Americans' "conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life." ...
"This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all -- as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico's Bidwell, the East Bay's Tilden, and San Diego's Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized -- some would say homogenized -- a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA -- times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, "there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions."
"To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a "typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.") Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had -- by those Starr calls the "fiercely competitive." That's just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That's a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California's dream ..."
Basically, that was my quite lovely childhood in the San Fernando Valley 1958-1980: ping-pong on the screened-in porch, swimming, backyard barbecues at my relatives' houses, Yosemite, long hours at the library two blocks away, tennis at the park three blocks away, golf on municipal courses, and UCLA (for my MBA).
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