What happened here?

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    A lot happened around 1970, roughly at the same time (this is a list from my memory, so dates could be off by a year or two)

    • computers enter the market for the end consumer: the PC is born (1971)
    • the Internet really takes off (1972)
    • 1969 Hippie music festival
    • end of the gold standard (1971)
    • some oil crisis (1973 especially, which lead to a significant shift that Western countries approach economy on a global scale)

    The 1973 oil crisis is especially interesting. Before that, oil consumption grew exponentially. You can see it also very well in this picture:

    After the crisis, countries thought “ok, oil consumption cannot grow exponentially much further. We have to shift our economy away from increasing quantity, towards increasing quality” and that marked the shift from hard-economics (heavy industries) towards computer and software economics, which led to the IT industry between 1970 - today.

    Edit: oh and i forgot a couple of important things, but i’m not sure whether they’re causally connected:

    • vietnam war (around 1970)
    • women right’s movement / women employment started around 1970.
  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    56·
    3 days ago

    End of Bretton-Woods allows the US to just export financial capital to the rest of the world at an incredible rate, accelerating imperialism to a new stage where production inside the core is much less important.

    • blackberryEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      this is the correct answer. the floating fiat currencies allowed printing to skyrocket in every country with a central bank. and the people closest to the central bank benefited the most from this practice (the US federal reserve has stated this), which allows them to acquire hard assets while the lower classes must compete over fewer resources with an inflating currency.

      creating Bretton-Woods was a silver lining after the great depression and WW2, ridiculous the US broke the agreement

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      In the 2nd Edition Hudson says that lots of capitalists and feds read his book, and they began obfuscating economic statistics because of this book.

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        39·
        3 days ago

        If we’re being honest, it really is lol. If someone invents a time machine in the future, one of the missions will be to stop Hudson from publishing his book.

        According to Hudson himself, the US establishment fell into panic mode when Nixon abruptly ended the Bretton Woods in 1971, and presses reported that the American century is about to be over (amidst the other crises like Vietnam War, civil rights movement, trade union movements, the international isolation of the US that would follow in the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the oil price shock and stagflation from 1973 onwards etc…)

        If you read the Foreword from the 2nd edition onward, Hudson wrote that the State Department bought two thousand copies of the book to study how to get out of the empire’s own contradictions. Super imperialism allows the US to export its industries to the rest of the world while crushing the domestic working class movements at home, and real wages began to stagnate since.

        • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          21 hours ago

          I’m a bit confused how people actually feel about Michael Hudson. Can’t tell if he’s loved or hated. He has made undeniable contributions, though.

        • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          28·
          2 days ago

          Communist publishes book explaining capitalism, capitalists read it and learn from it while workers barely touch it

          I’m beginning to see a pattern here

    • JDPONDON [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      if this guy was an actual socialist and believes what he says (i.e. US has used this book for 50+ years to continue its brutal empire), how has he not killed himself yet? like seriously, i get he’s a trot so he probably thinks some psychotic shit like “helping the US to bring down the worst perversion of socialism ever, the USSR, was actually a very very good thing” smuglord.

      but like this is maybe understandable if you havent seen all the horrific suffering since the collapse of the USSR, including possible irreversible climate change induced extinction, let alone all of the other horrible shit the USA has done. to head off “great man theory accusations”, ill just say that even someone else taking 5 year to study and explain this could have potentially led to a diffreent outcome to the cold war. it also ultimately shouldnt allieviate the guilt for you yourself donig this instead of someone else 10 years down the line. we dont really give the same kind of grace to US veterans: you were a willing foot soldier of the US empire, so you should feel horrific about yourself, and if you were to end your own life, we would laugh at you. instead, it more so seems like hudson is bragging about it to me, which is very very very gross. you should be mortified over this shit man, wtf are you doing

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    302·
    3 days ago

    this is the point when the US stopped being afraid of communism. they’d decided they’d won the cold war, essentially.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Disagreed. I think this is the point where the US was the most scared, and made its very dangerous gambit as a last resort because they knew the alternative was dying out (or nuclear war). This is the time when Kissinger asks the advisors what to do about the US starting to accrue a trade deficit, noting that historically when an empire becomes a net importer it marks the start of imperial decline; they were scared as hell! But of course, one of the advisors tells him “triple the national debt and make the rest of the world pay for it” and the rest is history.

  • UnkTheUnkEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    political-economic changes enabled by reactionary backlash against the civil rights movement that coincided with the introduction of spreadsheets as a management tool

  • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    26·
    3 days ago

    The end of any semblance of Keynesian economic ideology shifting into Milton Friedman style economic dictatorship of capital ideology. This eroded any power of that labor had achieved, hence the loss of wage growth in comparison to productivity.