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10 - Troubled times: the cultural dimensions of economic decline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Katherine S. Newman
Edited by
Michael A. Bernstein  and
David E. Adler
Foreword by
Robert Heilbroner
Katherine S. Newman
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Michael A. Bernstein
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

I'll never have what my parents had. I can't even dream of that. I'm living a lifestyle that's way lower than it was when I was growing up and it's depressing. You know it's a rude awakening when you're out in the world on your own. … I took what was given to me and tried to use it the best way I could. Even if you are a hard worker and you never skipped a beat, you followed all the rules, did everything they told you you were supposed to do, it's still horrendous. They lied to me. You don't get where you were supposed to wind up. At the end of the road it isn't there. I worked all those years and then I didn't get to candy land. The prize wasn't there, damn it.

–Lauren Caulder, age 40

There are many vantage points from which to approach the question of America's economic decline. Most of them, quite properly, involve the structural trends – demographic, industrial, and monetary – that constitute the intellectual terrain of economists and historians. But if we are to understand what the declining position of the United States means to ordinary people in the late twentieth century – workers, consumers, suburban folk, and urban dwellers – we have to consider how the macrotrends of job markets and housing markets, unemployment and underemployment have impacted upon individual lives.

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Understanding American Economic Decline , pp. 330 - 358
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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