{"id":18143,"date":"2013-04-11T16:41:56","date_gmt":"2013-04-11T21:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=18143"},"modified":"2013-04-11T16:48:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-11T21:48:34","slug":"the-40-year-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=18143","title":{"rendered":"The 40 Year Recession"},"content":{"rendered":"

If anyone wants to know what is really going on in this country’s economy they should look very far away from the stock market and very close to their friends. A friend of mine hates her job but she soldiers on every day because she can’t find another one. Another friend lost her job unexpectedly and now doesn’t know what she and her family will do. They were getting by as a dual income and now can’t afford to be a single income even though her husband is a professional. <\/p>\n

I left a company of mostly unhappy people that feel stuck in their jobs. <\/p>\n

There’s a bright note if you say we are living through a dismantling of the glitter and gold dust world we’ve been believing in over the last few decades, and that has pointed people back to basics, into thinking about what matters, into mattering. But there’s the dark part which is the fact that a way of life most of us grew up believing and aspiring to – the middle class – is fading away into oblivion. <\/p>\n

And this didn’t start yesterday, this has been going on over a very long period of time<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Between 1971 and 2007, real hourly wages in the U.S. rose by only 4%. (That\u2019s not 4% a year, but 4% over 36 years!) During those same decades, productivity essentially doubled, increasing by 99%. In other words, the average worker\u2019s productivity rose 25 times more than his or her pay.<\/p>\n

This was, of course, a bonanza for corporations and for the richest Americans. In 1976, the top 1% of U.S. families held 19% of the country\u2019s wealth. By 2000, they held 40% of it. In those same years, 58% of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1%.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another friend lost her job a year ago and having never found another to replace it, decided to start her own company. This is what I’ve and others are doing to reinvent ourselves in this brave new world, but in doing this you have to give up a lot of what had become familiar, comfortable, the “norm” and brace yourself for uncertainty, different forms of currency, and a reimagining of what you know. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If anyone wants to know what is really going on in this country’s economy they should look very far away from the stock market and very close to their friends. A friend of mine hates her job but she soldiers on every day because she can’t find another one. Another friend lost her job unexpectedly and now doesn’t know what she and her family will do. They were getting by as a dual income and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-4ID","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18143"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18148,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143\/revisions\/18148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}