How This All Happened
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
November 2018: How This All Happened
The American economy has changed a lot since the 1950s. That is obvious but what may not be so obvious is that although it has changed a lot, there were events that occurred in previous periods that led to what happened in the next period.
In other words, what happened in the 1950s is what caused certain events to happen in the 1960s and what happened in the 1960s caused certain events to happen in the 1970s and so on. As the author of the popular blog The Collaborative Fund and the author of this article, Morgan Housel, puts it, “My goal isn’t to describe every play; it’s to look at how one game influenced the next.”
This blog post really was a very interesting read on how one generation of Americans went from being savers due to fond memories of the Great Depression to spenders due to a thriving economy coming out of World War 2 and more lenient credit regulation all the way to debtors due to an overheated economy with even more lenient credit regulation and lower interest rates which eventually led to the housing bust in 2008.
What is also interesting from this post is the discussion on how income went from being very evenly distributed in the 1950s-1970s to very unevenly distributed throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and how the disparity in income distribution didn’t change how Americans spent their money very much. The old story on keeping up with the Jones’ still held up.
“But a central theme of this story is that expectations move slower than reality on the ground.”
