You have correctly identified human nature as the culprit, as it is an all matters.
Having lived through those times, I can tell you that the reason George Bush lost to Bill Clinton was mainly because of his no new taxes pledge, being broken and as a result, Ross Perot coming in and taking more votes away from him than from Bill Clinton; in addition, Republicans laid down on Bush—a lot of them just sat out the election because of that broken promise.
As to the triumph of the Soviet Union, it was a quiet triumph; people including me couldn’t really believe their eyes and ears as they saw the Soviet Union just “Wither Away”, but not in the way Mark anticipated; though it was a triumph of capitalism, free markets, and free people, it was somewhat reminiscent of what happened to Winston Churchill after the incredible triumph against all odds—after World War II the people focused on their own financial circumstances, and demanded that the state provide them with things like national health, and move to socialism much to the detriment of the empire.
Clinton came in, promising the healthcare fix much as the socialists did in the UK; that of course, never happened, which was shocking— in the event, Clinton did end up balancing the budget, which was amazing, and also provided one of the biggest economic booms in my lifetime, which I believe was his benefiting from the Reagan Revolution and, of course, the digital transformation.
The irony is Clinton couldn’t get elected dog catcher, even nominated in the current DSA-dominated Democratic Party. He was a deficit hawk, a law-and-order guy, and not particularly interested in raising taxes because bullshit already done that dirty work for him.
I did have a high school teacher who taught economics, law, and business and he told us, in the mid-1970s, how good things really were. He would read books and tell us the general insights from the books. I thought he was unusual then and I now think we was even more unusual.
I am 74. I assure you that, at least among whites, the optimism of Americans was deep, pervasive, impossible to not share unless you were a student at Berkeley. It was utterly broken by the decade extending from televised back and white (apt) scenes from Selma to the gas station line-ups in 1973. All that happened in between those years was an unrelenting destruction of that deep optimism. As if a parasitic wasp has inserted an egg into a cocoon and it hatched in the early sixties.
"Materially, Americans are far better off than they were during the Cold War."
If you're talking about the median real wages of men employed full-time, they are no better off than they were in 1980 (or perhaps significantly worse off if you take into account how the rate of CPI increase understates the rate at which the real-world cost of living increases by about two percent). Labor force participation rates for men are down, while the fraction employed part-time has generally been higher. Younger men have been hit particularly hard by these trends.
There is also a growing class division in America, which I would attribute to the shift to massive fiat money creation since 1971. The sectors that have flourished tend to be institutions that are on the fiat money gravy train and thus can afford to pay higher wages and benefits (the latter of course including Social Security and Medicare, which have grown enormously since the mid-1960s), while tangible capital-intensive portions of the productive sector have withered away. America now has only 60% of the manufacturing jobs it had in 1980 in spite of the total working age population rising to 175% of what it was in 1980.
There are also many other interesting effects of the shift to fiat money, like the increases in the prices of durable goods relative to non-durables, creating windfall paper capital gains for those who can afford to purchase things like homes. However, the physical stock of capital goods hasn't been soaring in proportion to the increases in net worth--while overall material prosperity is readily apparent if you only refer to measures of present consumption and overlook the growing class differences in wealth and income; a very different picture emerges if you focus on America's ability to grow its future productivity out of its own privately-invested net savings. Once you take the future into account, there is good reason to fear what the future holds in store for the American economy.
Net savings as a fraction of national income has been steadily declining since the enactment of Medicare and the shift to fiat money, and recently this fraction has hit zero percent. I have been among the doomsayers warning about this anti-thrift trend over the past thirty years, but most people find the slogan "Medicare for all!" much more pleasant to contemplate than honestly facing up to the fact that the welfare state has been deindustrializing America over the past sixty years and that reducing "entitlement" benefits and reviving private thrift is the only way to reverse this trend.
From a national events basis, I would say the 1960s mood was worse than 1970s. We had three major political assassinations in the five years between 1963 and 1968. Political and antiwar protests culminated in the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970. In its wake hundreds of colleges suspended classes and ended the school year early, including Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard. Thirty ROTC buildings were bombed or burned during that first week of May. I was inspired by your question, "So what's going on?" to listen to the Marvin Gaye song of the same name. I recommend it for a sense of what the mood was at the time (1971).
Scott Alexander has a good related post today (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness) about how "happiness scales with log(income), not with income". I think that's a big part of it. It's kind of inevitable that a society trying to perfect itself obsesses on the few small remaining pockets of brokenness, and ignores the vast and growing realm of things that work.
Plus, of course you know your illustration shows a sexual assault in progress - that poor woman was undoubtedly scarred for life by it, if she survived at all. We are now trained from childhood to object explosively to assaults that earlier generations shrugged off as too infinitesimal to complain about. Perhaps a side effect of helicopter parenting.
It sounds like you believe that leftists, academics, and journalists were sad, but that’s just calling the sky blue.
My Dad was pretty optimistic about America throughout the time period your mentioning, and most people seem to consider 1945-1965 as a kind of golden age.
You have correctly identified human nature as the culprit, as it is an all matters.
Having lived through those times, I can tell you that the reason George Bush lost to Bill Clinton was mainly because of his no new taxes pledge, being broken and as a result, Ross Perot coming in and taking more votes away from him than from Bill Clinton; in addition, Republicans laid down on Bush—a lot of them just sat out the election because of that broken promise.
As to the triumph of the Soviet Union, it was a quiet triumph; people including me couldn’t really believe their eyes and ears as they saw the Soviet Union just “Wither Away”, but not in the way Mark anticipated; though it was a triumph of capitalism, free markets, and free people, it was somewhat reminiscent of what happened to Winston Churchill after the incredible triumph against all odds—after World War II the people focused on their own financial circumstances, and demanded that the state provide them with things like national health, and move to socialism much to the detriment of the empire.
Clinton came in, promising the healthcare fix much as the socialists did in the UK; that of course, never happened, which was shocking— in the event, Clinton did end up balancing the budget, which was amazing, and also provided one of the biggest economic booms in my lifetime, which I believe was his benefiting from the Reagan Revolution and, of course, the digital transformation.
The irony is Clinton couldn’t get elected dog catcher, even nominated in the current DSA-dominated Democratic Party. He was a deficit hawk, a law-and-order guy, and not particularly interested in raising taxes because bullshit already done that dirty work for him.
I did have a high school teacher who taught economics, law, and business and he told us, in the mid-1970s, how good things really were. He would read books and tell us the general insights from the books. I thought he was unusual then and I now think we was even more unusual.
I am 74. I assure you that, at least among whites, the optimism of Americans was deep, pervasive, impossible to not share unless you were a student at Berkeley. It was utterly broken by the decade extending from televised back and white (apt) scenes from Selma to the gas station line-ups in 1973. All that happened in between those years was an unrelenting destruction of that deep optimism. As if a parasitic wasp has inserted an egg into a cocoon and it hatched in the early sixties.
Good post. Broken down, I suspect that a significant contributor to 'mood' is ideological: Dems unhappy during Reagan years, etc.
"Materially, Americans are far better off than they were during the Cold War."
If you're talking about the median real wages of men employed full-time, they are no better off than they were in 1980 (or perhaps significantly worse off if you take into account how the rate of CPI increase understates the rate at which the real-world cost of living increases by about two percent). Labor force participation rates for men are down, while the fraction employed part-time has generally been higher. Younger men have been hit particularly hard by these trends.
There is also a growing class division in America, which I would attribute to the shift to massive fiat money creation since 1971. The sectors that have flourished tend to be institutions that are on the fiat money gravy train and thus can afford to pay higher wages and benefits (the latter of course including Social Security and Medicare, which have grown enormously since the mid-1960s), while tangible capital-intensive portions of the productive sector have withered away. America now has only 60% of the manufacturing jobs it had in 1980 in spite of the total working age population rising to 175% of what it was in 1980.
There are also many other interesting effects of the shift to fiat money, like the increases in the prices of durable goods relative to non-durables, creating windfall paper capital gains for those who can afford to purchase things like homes. However, the physical stock of capital goods hasn't been soaring in proportion to the increases in net worth--while overall material prosperity is readily apparent if you only refer to measures of present consumption and overlook the growing class differences in wealth and income; a very different picture emerges if you focus on America's ability to grow its future productivity out of its own privately-invested net savings. Once you take the future into account, there is good reason to fear what the future holds in store for the American economy.
Net savings as a fraction of national income has been steadily declining since the enactment of Medicare and the shift to fiat money, and recently this fraction has hit zero percent. I have been among the doomsayers warning about this anti-thrift trend over the past thirty years, but most people find the slogan "Medicare for all!" much more pleasant to contemplate than honestly facing up to the fact that the welfare state has been deindustrializing America over the past sixty years and that reducing "entitlement" benefits and reviving private thrift is the only way to reverse this trend.
From a national events basis, I would say the 1960s mood was worse than 1970s. We had three major political assassinations in the five years between 1963 and 1968. Political and antiwar protests culminated in the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970. In its wake hundreds of colleges suspended classes and ended the school year early, including Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard. Thirty ROTC buildings were bombed or burned during that first week of May. I was inspired by your question, "So what's going on?" to listen to the Marvin Gaye song of the same name. I recommend it for a sense of what the mood was at the time (1971).
Scott Alexander has a good related post today (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal-happiness) about how "happiness scales with log(income), not with income". I think that's a big part of it. It's kind of inevitable that a society trying to perfect itself obsesses on the few small remaining pockets of brokenness, and ignores the vast and growing realm of things that work.
Plus, of course you know your illustration shows a sexual assault in progress - that poor woman was undoubtedly scarred for life by it, if she survived at all. We are now trained from childhood to object explosively to assaults that earlier generations shrugged off as too infinitesimal to complain about. Perhaps a side effect of helicopter parenting.
It sounds like you believe that leftists, academics, and journalists were sad, but that’s just calling the sky blue.
My Dad was pretty optimistic about America throughout the time period your mentioning, and most people seem to consider 1945-1965 as a kind of golden age.