Essentially, it shows how the post-WW2 social contract that linked productivity improvements to median income gains was shattered in 1974.

– John Robb at Global Guerillas

I was born in 1974, about three weeks before the resignation of Nixon. This is what I think the economy is. This is what I learned by default. This is what I expect. This is normal to me. "Upward mobility", and eighties yuppies, were only on television. Some people think of America as a place you shouldn't expect to get ahead unless you work hard. I grew up thinking of America as a place where you shouldn't expect to get ahead if you work hard. When I dropped out of a University I couldn't afford and entered the workforce full time in the nineties, "Lateral mobility" became the natural catchphrase, where moving from company to company was the only way one would ever advance in pay or benefits. And, ultimately, by the turn of the century, self-employment ended up the only way to actually get what I wanted.

Education, careers, retirement, home ownership, investments and savings - these were all mirages to me. They felt like lies at the time. And now, as the ant's colony crumbles and is stripped bare by the locusts of Wall Street, somewhere, a grasshopper is smiling.

I didn't believe society then. But at that time, it was only a hunch. It is with a rather bittersweet sense of schadenfreude that I now have an entire argument. When the grasshopper begs the ant for food, he may at least be fed. But what is a grasshopper to do when the ant, wiped out and exhausted, comes calling?

Comments –Nato