Your analysis, Lauren, is very helpful in understanding what our present predicament is.
I was born an American in 1951, and thus became a direct beneficiary of the postwar expansion, which lasted until, I suppose, sometime in the 1970's.
So it was a good long run of expansive prosperity.
We should look back into our US history to more deeply understand what prosperity reall is.
In recent years, the word "exceptional" has been a controversial adjective used to describe this nation.
America is exceptional, but not because we are any better than anyone else, or anything like that.
America's history is exceptional because:
~ The early stages of our productivity--1700's--were initiated on an east coast with 3500 miles extending westward across an undeveloped continent. Indigenous people were far less developed in technology and the extractive machinery which later made our great expansion posssible.
~ Our boldly opportunistic and--yes, racist-- conquest of indigenous peoples was accomplished through an exploratory expansion that later morphed to exploitive and ultimately rapacious gathering of natural resources.
~ We were literally converting the earth itself into machinery and "civilization"--turning the earth itself into "goods." This phase went into overdrive when we coupled the steam engine with steel and industrial varaciousness.
~ In the history of the world there had never been a cultural hegemony that so conveniently coincided with an (the) Industrial Revoltion. This is why our history is exceptional.
~ Now, long story short and cutting to the chase, the conditions that brought all this about cannot ever--and will not ever--be duplicated on this earth, in human history. Our great Expansion done came and went.
~Now everything runs on financial steam instead of industrial steam, and that steam bubble burst in 2008. Now we are running on--yes, consumption-based-- hot financial air.
Our present pandemic circumstances will terminate our recent consumptive gasping and bring us to a new nadir of necessary cultural and economic definitions and values, probably based on the idea that converting our industrial and consumptive habits into a conservancy mindset instead of our obsolete consumption infrastructure.
