Abstract
The Double-Bubble economic crises that defined the first fourteen years of the 21st Century called into question the ‘American Dream’. The post WWII ‘Golden Age’ economic structure was undercut by a complex and prolonged period of crisis and restructuring beginning in the early 1970s. A new, neoliberal, era commenced in the 1980s: this new structure rested on the long-discredited concepts of Chicago-School market fundamentalism. Yet, some forward momentum was attained via enhanced military expenditures in the 1980s as well as the Information Technologies that purportedly underwrote the ‘New Economy” in the 1990s (when received economic opinion asserted that recessions and economic crises had been relegated to the dustbin of history). The implosion of the NASDAQ market in the spring of 2000 should have demonstrated that the neoliberal project had gone off the rails. But then, like a mythical Phoenix the U.S. economy seemed, momentarily, recharged by innovative financial engineering that spread hedge funds, syndicated loans, credit-default swaps, etc., across the economy: the mortgage market was but one locus of the financial legerdemain that gave shape and substance to this heady speculative era. The false policies of the neoliberal era accumulated for decades, creating the tinderbox conditions that ignited in late 2007 as the ‘Great Recession’ began, then followed by enduring conditions of economic stagnation through 2014.
Keywords: Income Distribution, De-unionization, Labor Productivity, The Tripartite Economy, ‘American Dream’, Kautsky
JEL codes: E22, E32, J08, J30, J51, N32
