A Gen Z Guide to American Political Economy

As mentioned in my first blog post, we are in the 2nd Gilded Age. For the 99% of us, it’s a scary time. We’ve been here before. Unfortunately, the U.S. goes through cycles of crisis and recovery and then promptly forgets that history. Lasting economic change requires a full accounting of what happened. It all started in the 1950s. During World War II, people around the world saw the horrors of racism, racial hierarchies and inequality. In the U.S., racial hierarchies remained ingrained after the Civil War thanks to Jim and Juan Crow laws. An increasing backlash to the oppression of minorities and women and lack of opportunity spurred the creation of the Civil Rights movement and pushed the Supreme Court under the Warren and Burger Courts to expand rights under the scope of the 14th Amendment. President Lyndon Johnson worked with Civil Rights leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Following these advances came the inevitable backlash. The segregationist Southern Democrats switche...

My age places me in the first couple years of Generation Z. Many of the people I know who are also in my generation are either in despair about the state of the world or are very angry and resentful. That leads them to take positions that are extreme in ideology and substance. While their anger and despair is understandable, it prevents them from grasping the history or context, so they can’t formulate a complete and logical plan of action. The context, according to most political economists, is that we are in the 2nd American Gilded Age, which began in 1980. Patterns in our Gilded Age mirror the first that started after the Civil War and ended around 1901. Then and now, there is tremendous inequality, poverty, political corruption, environmental degradation, political polarization, gridlock, and narrow elections, over-the-top materialism, systemic financial risk and robber barons with large amounts of political control (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc). As Mark...