And it’s not just in the US that this descent is present. In her autobiographical book Feria, Ana Iris Simón tells of her working class parents who by age 30 had two kids, a house, and a stable, comfortable life. In year 2019, a much more educated Simón, on the other hand, couldn’t hope for the kind of economic well-being that her mailwoman mother easily achieved back in the 1990s. Simón’s entire generation was scraping up a miserable existence out of a patchwork of temp gigs long past the age when their parents were making enough to live comfortably.
Again, why? Different countries, yet a very similar and a very steep decline. Let’s not be materialistic and only look at the economic factors. Have people become happier? Do they take fewer drugs, suffer less from addiction, have more kids, have happier, longer marriages?
Well, no. Then let’s discuss why this happened. If the favorite Soviet author Communist John Steinbeck would agree with Donald Trump that America is less great now for a regular working man, then we are definitely on to something here. There’s a wide bipartisan consensus that something important has been messed up. There was some discussion of this in very early noughties but it dried up since then. Unless you go to the very far right, you won’t find anybody even trying to figure out what went wrong.
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