Louis Fed, their successors, the millennials, are in danger of becoming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they entered an ascendant middle class. The fading prospects for the new generation are all too obvious. This is a global phenomenon: starting in the 1970s, upward mobility for middle and working classes across all advanced economies began to stall, while the prospects for the upper classes rose dramatically. This trend has been most pronounced in the economy, where income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy. Yet in recent decades this country, along with many other liberal democracies, has begun to show signs of growing feudalization. In contrast, as Jefferson noted in 1814, America had fewer “paupers,” and the bulk of the population was “fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families. At least among whites, there was also far less poverty in America, compared to Europe’s intense, intractable, multigenerational poverty. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal authority. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order-mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past.
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