Welcome to 2018 History Buffs.
Like many of the viewers on this channel I, am a MILLENNIAL.
And like many MILLENNIALS I’ve been told many times by those born in the 40s, and 50s
that we’re ruining every industry, and swapping home ownership for avocado toast.
However, the worst sin of all is that we can’t just pick up the newspaper, turn to the classifieds
and get a decent job anymore due to our laziness.
Today, I’m going to go into why your parents think this way, and why the world they grew
up in is very different than ours when it comes to opportunity.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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So what makes the age the baby boom generation grew into special?
Well, a few things.
This period is often given nicknames like the long boom or a golden age that began around
the year 1950.
It’s an ongoing economic boom unlike any other seen in history and lasted all the way
until the mid-70s.
Some call it the , or the glorious thirty.
I think we need to begin with the obvious culprit, the Second World War.
It was possibly the most destructive thing in human history, and weirdly enough, capitalism
thrives when it’s producing, regardless if it’s making new things or replacing destroyed
things.
They had to rebuild a good chunk of the planet, and that meant a lot of people working.
There was also quite a technology race in everyone’s effort to murder each other,
so a lot of new technologies entered the economic system.
That’s where the big boom came from, productivity.
On farms, tractors, fertilizer, and new high yield crops were making farming more efficient
than ever before.
New automation technologies made factories produce more and more goods every year, but
not enough automation that factories didn’t require lots and lots of people making steady
paychecks and excellent benefits to give a stable home life to their kids.
Many countries took this period to invest in infrastructure like highway systems that
spread across their lands and helped make retail businesses expand and thrive.
Coal was also on the decline, and oil was cheap as hell, and so it was easy to own a
car, a ship, or a fleet of trucks, and that made everything much less expensive.
This technology and resource boom allowed for new industries to rise, and for new products
like TVs, and services like commercial flights to skyrocket.
Many governments also practised a form of Keynesian economics, in which the government
used to invest in things to make them grow.
It’s an economic philosophy that believes that in times of economic downturns, the government
should invest in things like infrastructure and development programs to get the wheels
turning again with juicy government jobs.
In this period, you didn’t even need your customers to have money.
The US just flat out gave European countries $12 billion to rebuild, and then made a killing
as they spent all that money on American companies to restore their infrastructure.
This is different from our current model of neoliberal economics which believes in cutting
taxes for the rich in hopes that they’ll pretty please do something with it and not
just sit on it like they're some sort of dragon.
Either way, unlike Neoliberal economics, Keynesian economics shows results, and you saw it in
this period.
There is of course also the militarisation of the world in this period.
Before the second world war, a permanent military was a little strange and usually small.
However, after the Second World War when the ruthless capitalists or the ruthless communists
threatened your sacred way of life, countries started to build up their militaries massively.
It’s almost like a form of Keynesian economics, except instead of making items people need,
you make bigger and bigger murder machines for a war that might happen.
Pretty much the same.
There was also a pretty lovely borrowing situation in this period.
Interest rates were really low, sometimes even negative.
That made it easy to borrow money in case you wanted to buy a house or a car, or start
your own general store, or whatever happened in the 50s and 60s.
One of the effects of this explosion was the demographic bulge of the baby boom.
A group of people who grew up in the middle of this golden age.
So, you can thank or blame this economic explosion for consumerism, welfare, space exploration,
the 60s counterculture, the civil rights movement, and second wave feminism.
And of course white picket fences, and suburbs.
So why did it end?
Why did a person your age in the early 70s get a permanent full-time job with benefits
they could live off as an entry position, and you are begging for contracts or a (maybe)
paid internship today?
Well, the economy began to change.
In 1973, OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries started to embargo countries that
supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
Oil prices skyrocketed, stalling the economy in its tracks.
This exacerbated an already trending movement away from industrial economies in the west.
Why make stuff when a corporation could just pay near-slaves halfway across the planet
to make it instead?
Unions lost their teeth, and we moved towards a service economy.
For some, that means more lawyers, doctors, and bankers, but for most, it means regular,
dependable, high paying jobs that require little education would be gone.
Now, even many jobs that do require skilled work can be exported to regions with lax labour
laws.
As Mexie so elegantly pointed out in her video.
Capital is fluid and can move anywhere, but labour cannot.
It’s much harder for a person to move to where the jobs are good, than for jobs to
move where the expected pay is bad.
And this is where I come to the last significant thing about this period that we don’t talk
about enough.
The 50s and 60s were an unprecedented period of income equality.
It wasn’t anywhere just or perfect, but it was a narrower gap between rich and poor
than ever seen before or since.
It seems our current moment is more similar to the economic conditions of the 20s than
the 60s… and we know what happened after the 20s.
So why aren’t millennials buying houses or diamonds?
Well, it's because we’re broke, and a little historical literacy teaches us that it isn’t
because we did anything wrong.
But if we wanted to we could change it.
I get a lot of book recommendations.
That and Amazon decided to give me a place in their influencer program.
I hope that’s the last time I ever have to say that word.
Either way, I made a little place where I put books I’ve used in the research for
step back videos and a few of my favourites.
If you wanna check it out, there’s a link in the description, and if you buy any of
those books, you actually send a few coins my way at no extra cost to you.
I want to thank 12 tone for the theme song and these wonderful people, especially Don
and Kerry Johnson sorry about this video by the way, for their support on Patreon.
If you wanna help the channel and keep this ship afloat, go to Patreon.com/StepBackHistory
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Now, take care and come back soon for more Step Back.