I'm enough of a nerd to enjoy digging data out of the Zuckerman's size database, and when I

do, I see two very different chapters in American history from 1945 to 1981, when I see a
chapter of prosperity capitalism or where incomes rose for the entire workforce, and from
1981 forward i see a chapter i would call enrichment capitalism. I wonder if that contrast
between prosperity capitalism up to Reagan and enrichment capitalism from Reagan forward
has caught other people's attention too.

Oh yeah. People like me have been talking about that for four decades,literally. I had a 1992
article about that transition. If you look at it as a bar graph the first post-war generation is this
picket fence and the second generation is a step ladder with the first step of it being below
ground in terms of rates of change of incomes. So, no, there is a total transition. Everything
changes around 1980.

Now if you go a little bit further back, however, and I think this is also relevant, that middle-
class society, the one I grew up in, that period of broadly shared growth, that’s not the way
America always was. America was a very unequal society in 1929, but it's a quite equal
society by 1947, and a closer look at the data says that that happened quite suddenly, it
happened really largely during World War two.
It's what Claudia Goldin calls the Great Compression. So the middle-class society that we
had for a generation after World War two was created by the rise of unions and a favorable
political environment by the use of government power to equalize wages by high taxes on
top incomes. So it’s actually telling you that the kind of society we have now is a choice and i
think that is the point we are accustomed to, which is that growth is very much concentrated
in the hands of a few people, is not a necessity. And in fact, it is not something that is
beyond the reach of the political system. we remade ourselves away from a plutocratic
society once, and we could do it again.

The question is, how does the race question fit in as an overlay to all of this? And when
we talk about the prosperity society, was that truly a prosperity society in terms of
distribution? We can talk about capital accumulation during 200 years of slavery, there is
a new debate about reparations which is gonna permeate a lot of the political
discourses, How do you play that out in terms of an analysis and then obviously a
political program.

The truth is that despite a lot of overt racism, that post-war period of prosperity was,
even blacks had benefited from it, that doesn't mean that there wasn't also a horrific
amount of raw racism in the society, but there were benefits for just about everybody.
Race played a crucial role in the political transition if you ask why the politics turned so
suddenly rightwards in united states and the answer is basically the delayed effects of
the civil rights act, the new deal coalition-sad to say- was a coalition between a pretty
liberal social and racial as well group in the north and southern segregationists who were
willing to sign on to a bigger government as long as it didn't endanger withe supremacy
because at that point the south was still quite poor. And so what's happened now is that
the racial issue is critical to everything,the racist wave in united states doesn´t look like
other advanced countrys in terms of social safety net. it's central to everything, but
maybe we can transcend that, that is one of the big unnanswered questiones in the
american politics.
You know, it's central to to everything, but maybe we can transcend that. That's that's
one of the big unanswered questions in American politics.