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Old 12-17-2007, 04:35 PM   #143 (permalink)
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Loquitur, do you really want to leave your point where it is? I pointed out in response to your claim that periods of significant (unprecedented?) technological innovation drive increasing wealth inequity...THAT the post WWII period in the US contradicts your claim.
It was a time of the most equitable wealth distribution since the industrial revolutuion . It was a period of unrivaled techno innovation and mass production and marketing. The transistor was invented in 1948, the Eisenhower interstate highway system begat Disneyland, Holiday Inn, the tourism industry, the supremacy of the car and bus over the rail network. TV and TV advertising came into every living room, and then it transformed from b&w into color broadcasts. Segregation ended and the space race emerged and matured. It was said that the unforseen benefits to civilian products innovation from NASA programs was amazinly huge. Frozen tv dinners and microwave ovens were developed and marketed, as was the laser and it's many uses and in 1962, touchtone phones ushered in digital communications.
The new highway system drove auto sales and suburban homebuilding and shopping malls. Middleclass grew and moved from the city to the burbs. Mostly, in that first 20 years after the war, women stayed home and families enjoyed all the progress I,ve described on one income, Dad's....

Union membership was at it's peak, legitimized by 1935 New Deal legislation and the impeded by 1947 Taft Hartley.

Then, in thw '70's both union membership and equitable wealth distribution began the delines they are still experiencing today.

My point about Greenspan is that he was wrong about mortgages, he created and encouraged the housing valuation bubble via extreme Fed rate cuts and loosening mortgage lending policy, and he was wrong about periods of great innovation driving wealth inequity. The opposite happened in America during the period I just described.
New Deal mandatied bargaining power of workers drove equitable wealth distribution and Taft Hartley broke that.
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