From the oil, internet and housing bubbles to the Utopian Bubble
Michael Barone and Victor Davis Hanson both write about this “crazy year” with its topsy-turvy politics. Barone notes one oddity:
absent from political coverage, and even from many of the candidate debates, has been discussion of public policy. Voters lacking signposts in this open field have responded in ways that don’t make much sense: Republicans concerned about the economy tilted toward Mr. McCain, who once said he didn’t know much about the economy, and Democrats eager to withdraw from Iraq tilted toward Mrs. Clinton. The ideas vacuum in campaign 2008 still remains to be filled, and opinion may still take sharp and unpredicted turns.
Yes, it’s a very odd year. But is anything significant changing, or is the strangeness just one of those things that happens from time to time? We believe there is a reasonable likelihood that something significant might be afoot. It’s hard to say precisely what it is. However, one factor might be generational.
We have had it good in America for a very long time now, and memories are short. Indeed, memories of economic privation among the last two generations of Americans are, broadly speaking, non-existent among the young in much of the middle class. Unemployment is 4.9%, almost non-existent, and yet some people seem hysterical. The last time unemployment averaged over 10% in a year was 1940; the last time it touched that level even briefly was a quarter century ago, in 1983. (By contrast, unemployment is many of the grittier parts of the world often averages 20% or 30% or more.) So young Americans really haven’t seen hard times like those that were common to previous generations.
Thus, at least a generation and a half of American middle class young people have a very different perspective, and sense of entitlement, to relative comfort and the boons of technology than did their immediate forbears. We’ve made this point before, but it seems to get ever more acute. Thomas Sowell notes, for example, that the statistical reason that the “middle class is disappearing” is that its members have moved up, not down.
Toys, technology, entitlement, and a decline in paper routes and mowing lawns. There is no end to the mischief that idle minds and idle hands can get into, and this we have the strange obsessions with nonsense in the US and much of the world in recent years — from cigarettes killing a billion (yes, billion!) people to the so-called Planetary Emergency we face.
As Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.” Thus we would not be surprised to see some nutty experimentation in Utopian ideas in the next few years as the younger generations of Americans come up and the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers continue to fade or disappear. That generational shift might be one of the things that contributes to this topsy-turvy political year.
But we think there might be something beyond the generational shift at work. We have had many asset bubbles over the last several decades. The oil bubble, the internet bubble, the housing bubble, and on and on. But we have also had a bubble in Utopianism itself. Just look around. Bubbles often end in a desperate frenzy. We wouldn’t be surprised if one aspect of Obamamania, for example, is the wish to cling to a utopian dream in a time when so many significant stresses threaten to burst the bubble.