History's Lessons, When the American Elites 'Royally' Screw Up (generation, radical, Obama)

[ParkTwain]

America's history shows that the People allow the rich (top 3% in income and wealth) and other political and social elites to run the country as long as they don't "royally" screw up the economy. That degree of foul-up has occurred a couple of times in past American history, most recently during the Great Depression. It has likely happened again right before our very eyes. This new arrival is not all that unexpected, due to the depressing fact of "multigenerational amnesia" about certain fundamental economic principles, made worse under the American preferences of favoring the new over the old, and the fast buck to the slow one.

What happened politically as a result of the Great Depression? A member of the Establishment of his time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a career politician with the benefit of his family's old money, took the reins and put into place political institutions (some of which still exist into our day) that radically changed the relationships between the private sector and the public sector, namely he grew the latter while placing new kinds of limitations of the former. He endeavored to put into practice some of the latest and best knowledge of the economists and other technocrats of his day.

I expect a similar response to be floated by the Obama Administration. However, the likelihood and the means of any success of the Obama Administration's overall agenda won't follow the lines of development taken by FDR in the 1930s. Why is this?

1. internationalization of the American economy, far beyond what existed in the 1930s

2. relative narrowness (including lesser capacity) of today's American industrial base, compared to the 1930s; restructuring America's economy in the direction of having a more diversified industrial capacity again will take a good number of years, probably most of a generation

3. high concentration of domestic wealth, with higher international mobility of domestic capital than ever before in world history; this means that a failure (such as due to ideological rigidity by either or both sides) by Obama to engage American capital in a new restructuring of the American economy poses even greater risks of economic contraction than in the 1930s.

4. America's population is more concentrated into metropolitan areas than ever before in American history; the governability of the major (and typically multicultural) American cities has become an open question, even during the economically good times of the last couple of decades; throw in a major recession and the cities could become zones of very significant social instability and thus major sinkholes of stimulus spending

Please discuss amongst yourselves ...