The future ain’t what it used to be.

Yogi Berra

Old folks like me love to reminisce, especially when we’re with people who have experienced the same things. Oldies but goodies now form an entire branch of the music industry, and what is called nostalgia is part of many marketing strategies for selling things to people like us. But reminiscing is not nostalgia. Reminiscing is pleasurable, even when what is remembered was awful at the time or so wonderful that it can be bittersweet to recall. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is a condition, an emotional state that is hard to shake off once it has taken hold. Modern usage of the term “nostalgia,” from a Greek root meaning a “painful longing for home” that motivated Odysseus, originally denoted a psychological condition of homesickness (Heimweh in German), an uncontrollable aching for something that’s been lost. Reminiscence is a relaxed indulgence. Nostalgia hurts and is demanding.

Some of my relatives like to reminisce about the smell of hot oil in a factory or the whiff of sulfur mixed with dead leaves in the autumn air, and I still take pleasure in remembering nights sitting on the first-base side of Point Stadium watching the blue-orange flame from the Lower Cambria Works dance behind the third-base side. Judie and her sisters love to recount the fear they experienced as their father drove drunk on Sunday evenings from their grandparents’ house to their home thirty miles away; what terrified them at the time makes them giggle now as they swap remembrances of things well past. By my lights, none of that is nostalgia because it does not hurt enough to want to avoid it. In Johnstown both men and women will sometimes evoke the good times “when the mills were working,” but there is an active effort to avoid wallowing in it. Typically, someone will say “yeah, those were the days” as a signal to move on to another subject, and amazingly, with a collective sigh, everybody does, with nobody giggling. That’s nostalgia, and you can feel its power to get away from you like a coal truck losing its brakes coming down a hill.

Nostalgia, like grief, loses some of its power over time. But we can’t help looking back, telling younger and younger people that it doesn’t have to be this way, that once upon a time life was open and exploratory for almost everybody in a way that it is not for them. Typically the young find our nostalgia irrelevant, either because they don’t believe us or because they’re convinced that whatever good times we experienced cannot be repeated. And in truth, we tend to be sloppy in mixing our reminiscences with what could be a rational, restorative nostalgia.

It’s true the mills are not coming back. Nor can the exciting period of class formation of a new kind of professional middle class be repeated, as we’re already well formed and rather fixed in our ways. Besides, we would not want to restore most of the Glorious Thirty with its taken-for-granted racism and sexism and its other forms of backwardness compared to the present. What we should want to restore from those days seems much more abstract than the sights, sounds, and smells that trigger our reminiscences. I have argued that what needs to be restored is simply those steady across-the-board increases in money and time, increases in discretionary income and time for what you will. These seem abstract because society-wide trajectories are revealed only through statistical measurement, but they have social and psychological, political and cultural impacts that are real and immediate, that move hearts and minds and allow us to be more generous and adventuresome. Like any kind of freedom, discretionary time and money bring out both the more devilish and the better angels of our nature, but the limited record we have supports Benjamin Friedman’s worldwide conclusion that the through line of good times leads to more open hearts and stronger, more supple minds.

Though clearly desirable, is it possible to restore the Glorious Thirty’s sustained upward trajectories of discretionary money and time? Just because something happened once does not mean it can happen again. Former Economist editor Marc Levinson argues that the Glorious Thirty was an “economic miracle” that far exceeded “reasonable expectations,” the result of the convergence of an extraordinary set of economic circumstances that can never occur again; it was not “normal,” and we need to lower our expectations for the future.¹ Historian Jefferson Cowie doesn’t buy that economic argument but contends that the political circumstances that allowed the creation and development of a New Deal order from 1935 to 1965 are highly unlikely to ever occur again.²

The economic argument against a glorious restoration is much less formidable than the political one, as a wide array of solid evidence and argument has established the renewed viability of New Deal–style economic remedies. As referenced earlier, this policy literature is explicitly nostalgic in the restorative way I advocate: it looks back to the Glorious Thirty not for inspiration but instead for evidence of what worked and could work again in our very different circumstances. Though I have nothing to add to it, I want to highlight two foundational policy goals derived from looking back to our golden age—sharing the gains from productivity growth and restoring steeply progressive taxes—as ways of reducing our growing inequality of income and wealth and funding a greatly expanded social wage.

During the Glorious Thirty the top 10 percent of taxpayers got about one-third of all gross (or market) income, and I remember thinking how unfair that was without ever asking myself what level of unequal incomes would be fair. Today, the top 10 percent get about half of all income before taxes, with the bottom 90 percent sharing the other half. It’s funny how that old-time two-thirds share for the bottom 90 percent now seems so just and fair and what should be normal!³ Today, what was is a good benchmark for what could and should be. Getting back to a Glorious Thirty distribution of market income would provide nearly $3 trillion every year to be distributed among about 142 million full- and part-time workers in that bottom 90 percent—that’s nearly $20,000 a year for each and every one of them.⁴ Someone earning $60,000 now would instead make $80,000, someone making $15,000 now would make $35,000, and so on. That’s a simplistic illustration, but it should give you an idea of how much discretionary income—and the freedom that goes with it—would be available to the vast majority of people if we could just go back to the good old days of 1945–1975.

The reasons for our growing inequality of income and wealth are complex, highly contested, and, of course, politically charged. But one of the candidates for the primary cause seems particularly compelling: the financial gains from the growth of productivity (output per hour) were shared with production and nonsupervisory workers during the Glorious Thirty, and they have not been shared since, as indicated in figure 4.1.

The rise in real hourly compensation from 1948 into the 1970s is, of course, what I’ve been arguing is the core glory of the Glorious Thirty. The fact that it tracked pretty closely to the growth in economy-wide productivity means that this unprecedented rise in living standards did not threaten inflation and thus economic growth. In fact, it sustained and even supercharged historically high levels of economic growth, as detailed in chapter 1. The 1970s economy had its problems with “stagflation,” possibly caused in part by a “profit squeeze” and resulting “capital shortages.”⁵ It might have been justified back then to decouple the growth of wages from productivity for a while in order to beat back the inflation part of stagflation so the economy could grow healthily again. But whatever justification there might have been for such a pause has long since vanished. Today there is a capital surplus and a wage squeeze. If compensation had caught up with the gains from productivity growth, production and nonsupervisory workers would share about $2 trillion more each year than they did in 2018, or about $21,000 a year each.⁶ Thus, the disappearance of productivity sharing can account for most of the enormous growth in the inequality of market incomes since the 1970s.

Market income is income before taxes, and while federal income taxes are still mildly progressive, payroll, state, and local taxes are not. In general, combining all taxes, each income group now pays about the same percentage in taxes as their share of all income. The top 1 percent, for example, now gets about 22 percent of all income and pays an average of about 23 percent of that income in taxes of every sort.⁷ It was very different during the Glorious Thirty, as corporations paid much more and the richest of the rich got truly soaked. Federal income taxes were steeply progressive, requiring those with the highest incomes to pay much larger percentages of their incomes than those at the bottom and in the middle. The top marginal rate, for example, was over 80 percent (twice what it is now), and inherited wealth of more than $10 million was taxed at 77 percent for the entirety of the period.⁸ These very high top rates, which Thomas Piketty admiringly calls “confiscatory,” were not intended to raise a lot of revenue; rather, they were quite explicitly meant to discourage the highest market incomes and thereby leave more money available to be gained by workers in their wages and other compensation.⁹ According to Sam Pizzigati’s history of US tax policy, a wide array of steeply progressive taxes were amazingly effective in equalizing incomes (and opportunities), and these tax policies deserve a lot of the credit for creating what he calls a “middle-class golden age” in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.¹⁰ Progressive economists love to recall how radical President Dwight Eisenhower’s tax policy seems in comparison to today’s jerry-rigged system that is systematically weighted against working people and work itself. But progressive tax policy is more than just a political talking point. Serious work is being done based on historical research across many different countries. Many golden age tax policies didn’t work or had unintended negative consequences, but it has not been hard for researchers to locate hundreds of billions of dollars available to fund green infrastructure, education, health care, and other crying needs simply by restoring those Glorious Thirty tax policies that we know worked and whose unintended consequences were all positive.¹¹ This is restorative nostalgia with scope, point, and purpose.

I’ve chosen to highlight these two policy areas—productivity sharing and progressive taxes—for two kinds of reasons. First, while globalization and dramatic technological change do indeed, as so often claimed, make it impossible to restore many of the glories of the Glorious Thirty (including some nonglories we would not wish to restore), there is nothing in our current economic circumstances that restricts us from restoring productivity sharing and progressive taxes like we had back in the day—nothing, that is, but our politics, and that’s my second reason. Jeff Cowie’s historical argument against a glorious restoration is based in showing how the New Deal order that created the first Glorious Thirty was forged in economic depressions and wars as well as within some other contingent circumstances that allowed us to temporarily (as it turned out) break with our long history of oligarchic rule indirectly supported by a deep culture of radical individualism. It is the solidity of that oligarchic rule today, an oligarchy of wealth that appears to be strengthening its hold on our politics as I write, that makes it so very difficult to insert either productivity sharing or progressive tax policy into our public discourse, let alone into law.

I very much fear that Cowie may be right—that the Glorious Thirty was a great onetime exception to the mainstream of American history and culture. But I also know there are other streams in addition to the main one, that middle-class culture is not the only one available. What’s more, there are contradictions within both middle-class and working-class cultures, contradictions that if brought into interaction with each other, as has happened in the past, could create new circumstances and new possibilities. I’m not sure how this might play out in our politics, but as in many other areas of life, the increasing isolation of these class cultures and the characteristic middle-class dismissal of working-class ways as a deficit culture rob us of prospects and possibilities that might otherwise be there. As a people, we are not realizing our potential.

The beginning of wisdom in this regard is for the mainstream, dominant culture to simply recognize that there is an alternative class culture that it dominates, possibly unintentionally. That should be the easy part and is the basic task of chapter 5. More difficult is recognizing how different ways of doing things, different ways of seeing and being in the world, not only challenge your own way but also complement and enhance it by being ready-to-hand to draw on when necessary or even just for the hell of it. Hopefully, the rest of the book will suggest numerous such possibilities.

I want to end this chapter with a broad characterization of the Glorious Thirty’s zeitgeist, glimmers of which appear from time to time in our own political and other public discourse still today. Henry Wallace’s “century of the common man” was never as popular and widespread a guideline for understanding and living in the post–World War II period as Henry Luce’s “American century” meme. But as Joshua Freeman points out, Wallace’s guideline did have quite a run during the Cold War even as the “man” part (and his whiteness) were being decisively challenged.¹² Tony Judt, looking more broadly at both the United States and Europe, saw the Glorious Thirty as a “social democratic moment” when “the hitherto neglected interests of large sections of the population would now be addressed.”¹³ Well, yes, there was that, but in the United States the all-too-brief century of the common was a lot more robust than simply “addressing” the interests of large sections of the population. It had a cultural punch that affected politics and social life. As Pizzagati details,

The squeeze on the midcentury rich wouldn’t be just financial. The wealthy … felt a growing middle class invading ever more of their physical and cultural space. The rich were losing their social preeminence.… [T]he chattering class … no longer fawned over the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They explored instead the interests and exploits of average-income men and women. The rich had lost their role as cultural pacesetters.¹⁴

There was a robust “cultural disdain for great wealth” and a healthy fear of its economic and political power. And there was a strong prejudice that “average people mattered most,” a consensus that the goal should be to achieve that general happy Mediocrity Benjamin Franklin had prematurely admired so much.¹⁵

The “middle class” crowding the wealthy’s physical and cultural space back then was a diverse, complicated, and ill-defined bunch—not just middle managers but also autoworkers and postal clerks, secretaries and nurses, teachers and professors, truck drivers, social workers, carpenters, therapists, and more middle managers, some of them executive secretaries. We were all pretty average in those days, days when steelworkers could earn more than professors. Compared to the malefactors of great wealth, we were all pretty common, the vast majority of us simply free wage labor as of old but with more time and money and better working conditions. There were important cultural differences among us—regional, religious, racial/ethnic, and gender and sexual differences—but also a broad class difference. Part of us became those “cultural pacesetters” the rich used to be, a communications/education wing of the professional middle class, a chattering group if not exactly a class of our own. We have cultural power—not just the stars and superstars among us but also us rank-and-file mediocrities—that can be politically powerful if we know how to use it. One insufficient but necessary condition is to become much more class conscious than we have been, more conscious of ourselves and others of how we can and do complement each other and of how we could be stronger together if we recognized and appreciated our different ways of seeing and being in the world.