@SteveRoth I think a lot of it was the youth politics of the time. The young were basically an interest group credibly threatening to burn it all down. They had to be bought off or crushed, and the politics of crushing middle class kids is hard (see Kent State). We’re seeing glimmers of that maybe in Gen Z labor militancy, quiet quitting, etc. The bogeyman of the Fox News /Trump / MTG demographic is used to try to keep the kids “reasonable”. Hopefully it fails.

@SteveRoth And, right? How can we do more of that? The 1970s were an economic achievement buried in smug calumny as some catastrophe that must never be repeated. Catastrophe for whom? It was, we should acknowledge, also a catastrophe for people with fixed-ish incomes and little bargaining power by which to increase them. But the miseries of that cohort are paraded like “main street” as a fig leaf for “wall street”.