Late, Great Middle Class
The first realization from the article is the degree to which we'd taken for granted the confluence of factors that gave rise to America’s post-WWII extraordinary economic boom (click: Manufacturing's Last Boom). It just seemed at the time to have been . . . ordained.
Only in retrospect do we appreciate that so-called golden age which featured a privileged middle class with those union wages that afforded the worker a home, weekends off, a two-week vacation, and one of those defined-benefit pensions. Okay, perhaps that’s an oversimplification (even nostalgia, as they say, isn't what it used to be).
But events, both external and self-inflicted, marked the slide e.g. the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard (worthy of its own discussion), or perhaps Vietnam and the domestic dual mandate overreach called the Great Society, or the 1973 oil embargo, or most likely the way those countries we reduced to stunned fish in WWII woke up and proved to be formidable competitors. In any event, that world monopoly franchise we’d enjoyed is pretty much in the rear view mirror.
The article’s choice of Bethlehem Steel to illustrate the come-down hit home given that my own college experience (Lehigh University) was in its literal shadow and its demise roughly coincided with my time there. But what really came to mind were those Reagan-era beer commercials with their mythic playlets featuring romantic idealizations of men in groups who blast through mountains or pour molten steel in factories, the work all grit and grin, as they retire to flip around iced cans of sacramental beer and debrief one another in a warm sundown glow of accomplishment. As for Reagan, he enshrined work in his rhetorical "community of values," along with family, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.
Long gone now are those factories along with their union wages, hefty pensions, and that grit and grin. Something beyond economic security has been lost with contract employees working from home behind a screen. The financialization model signals a new world order with many "employees" relegated to piece parts interacting with other piece parts, wherever situated, or even, yes, with AI. The transformation of that once-great Bethlehem Steel site into a casino serves as an apt metaphor.
We are left to ponder the role of manufacturing in America's future prosperity and what that might mean for the late, great middle class. The article offers a glimpse of the future as it cites several examples which are largely dependent on innovation, skilled labor, low interest rates and complex global supply chains. It concludes: we can't create America's fleeting golden age but we can imagine a new industrial strategy if we stop using the past as our blueprint.
Details to follow.
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