A wildly disproportionate number of our culture’s best and brightest were inspired in their pursuits by a childhood exposure to fantasy & science fiction. This reality isn’t anywhere near as widely appreciated as it should be, so it always gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when I come across some mention of this fact in the media. Here’s one that’s new to me: Paul Krugman, Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, writes of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series: “That’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.”
I recently read Krugman’s new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, which is worth checking out. Krugman basically argues, with lots of data to back up his assertions, that: 1) The shared middle-class prosperity of the New Deal era was not the result of impersonal economic forces, but was rather a direct result of federal policy. 2) The collapse of the American middle class in the eighties and nineties was similarly not the result of impersonal economic forces (technology, globalization) but was again the direct result of federal policy. (Other countries faced the same economic pressures, but only America experienced a collapse of the middle class.) 3) Over the past thirty years, American workers have greatly increased their productivity, mostly as a result of technological innovation, but these workers have not seen any increase in their wages, since all the additional revenue being generated is simply being absorbed by the massive salaries of upper management. 4) America’s tortured race relations play a major role in the country’s distinctive unwillingness to provide a strong social safety net for the poor.
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