Economic trends have a greater effect on the human spirit than we often recognize. Commercial life, and signs of it, bolsters the human spirit, and the reverse is also true.
As an example, my mother’s hometown in Texas often went through waves of booms and busts. When the boom times were there, everyone seemed happy to be surrounded by evidence of material progress. But when the busts came, it was the opposite. People were saddened and struggling. You could see it on their faces and hear it in their voices.
The tenor of the town changed dramatically with each cycle. It’s probably true in your town, too.
I once tried a mental experiment just to test my intuition on this point. I would go to the city center of any town and reimagine the place without shops and shoppers, without things to buy and people to buy them. Eliminate from your mind all evidence of commercial activity, and what do you end up with? It’s a ghost town, not a place where anyone would want to be. It’s just buildings with no signs of forward action.
Maybe you can find evidence of such a place in, for instance, San Francisco or Chicago. They aren’t dystopian yet, but they seem to be headed that way. It’s not even the existing realities so much as the trendline that affects the way we respond to economic trends. When there are new businesses and new opportunities, we are imbued with a sense that life can be better. When businesses are closing and opportunities drying up, we feel the opposite.
Let’s think about this generationally. In the 1950s, Americans were flush with savings and the economy was growing at rates near 5 percent. Homes were popping up everywhere. Interest rates made them affordable. The war was over, and peace and prosperity seemed possible. The American Dream seemed to be realizable for everyone. It was obvious in the music and dress of the period.
After the chaos of the 1960s following the Kennedy and King assassinations, then the political and economic demoralization of the 1970s, the decade of the 1980s revived the promise of a City on a Hill. The music and fashions were ebullient. In politics, deregulation and tax cuts took hold and inspired renewed economic growth. Then the great triumph happened: The enemy regime overseas completely collapsed, leaving the United States perfectly positioned to entrench the U.S. model everywhere.
This, of course, led to appalling arrogance on the part of U.S. leaders, who deployed that power in strange ways, attempting to remake the world by force. This culminated in a post-9/11 attempt to redraw the whole map of the Middle East, with disastrous results. The refugee crisis destabilized Europe, and a once-great civilization in Iraq is still in ruins.
U.S. elites squandered the victory of the Cold War with awful economic and social policies. Now, the country languishes with 1 percent growth, but that’s just on paper. We are actually in a long recession and being kept alive with paper money and credit, with businesses struggling to navigate bureaucracy and being pillaged by government at all levels.
All of us, depending on which decade captivated our youth, have been shaped by the timbre of the times. I only recently discovered, for example, just how much the “end of history” feeling of 1989 affected my writing for the next decades. I wrongly assumed the inevitability of progress.
All of this brings us to the lockdown generation. People who came of age during the pandemic response were traumatized by the closures, the masking, the promised solution of the vaccine that went bust, and the endless time stuck to their laptops and phones. Their communities were shattered. More than that, their dreams were wrecked.
Life was made meaningless by acts of folly from above. Every manner of crazy has followed, including grave gender dysphoria and profound psychological maladies, from debilitating loneliness to deep depression.
I can’t imagine myself in the shoes of anyone who came of age during this amazing fiasco, but it is evident that this has changed everything for them. The only real hope was to find an escape from the doom with a high-end education, good connections, and a Zoom job that overpaid for doing nothing. But now, even those are going away, as companies continue slicing off the top layers of their labor force to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, they are wallowing in a social soup of addiction, sadness, loss of meaning, confusion, and aimlessness, with all the promises of the past shredded and revealed as complete lies. Those who make it through will be better for the experience—broken, to be sure, but hardened in ways that no generation since World War II has been.
Consider a massive demographic difference between the generations raised in the 1950s and the 2020s. Back then, most women didn’t work. This isn’t because they couldn’t get a foothold in the job marketplace, but because one paycheck covered all that was needed for a family. Marriage was the key. Why slog away at remunerative employment unless you had to?
Meanwhile, back then, most teens did work, and that was crucial. It gave them job experiences that shaped what we called the work ethic and got them out in the world when it mattered most.
I’m noticing that the only demographic that seems to have recovered and exceeded its pre-lockdown employment levels is teens. It seems that after a very long slide in teenage employment, this is starting to change. Why? To help family finances? To get out of the house? To escape the dull routine of school? Just to make extra spending money? I don’t have the answers, but the trends are interesting, even encouraging.
![(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F05%2F10%2Fid5254886-1-JAT-2023.05.10-1200x917.png&w=1200&q=75)
Meanwhile, married women with children still haven’t gone back to work at the same levels. This is because child care is hard to come by, many are homeschooling, and the office just isn’t everything it was cracked up to be. It’s possible that we may never again see the peak employment levels among women that we saw 20 years ago. Times have really changed.
As for the young, employment among teens seems to have bottomed out 10 years ago and is now on the rise rather rapidly. We are nowhere near the levels of the 1970s, when 55 percent were working, but matters here really are improving. With wages rising for service and retail employees, even as job loss is increasing among professional positions, we could be watching an epic change in how people think of the intersection between life and career.
The truth is that people under the age of 25 have been to hell and back. They are incredulous toward their seniors, distrustful of elites, disrespectful toward government, and nonbelievers when it comes to media.
They are also survivors. The digital nonsense with which they were raised isn’t a novelty, which is why they have come to value authenticity and proof of truth. It so happens, too, that they are going back to church.
They have seen the worst of times, even whole towns forcibly locked down and a world of masks and fear. Such events make for strong people. People want to know when this country will begin to recover. My current estimate is in 20 years when this generation of kids enters full-blown adulthood.
Let’s hope there is something remaining for them to inherit and rebuild.
