March 12, 2018
As Robert Samuelson tells us in his weekly column in the Washington Post, there is a big market for people saying that things are great. Samuelson cites a number of authors and statistics telling readers that things are getting better.
He then speculates about why we have so much pessimism. He suggests that the media is at fault for using the word “crisis” too frequently and tells us:
“But some of today’s pessimism is simply a political fad. It ‘became fashionable, starting in academia and expanding to the public square, brought there by politicians [and] social media,’ Easterbrook [economist Gregg Easterbrook] writes. ‘Today the conventional wisdom is that any informed person should feel the world is falling apart.'”
Of course, the other plausible explanation is that most of the workforce in the United States has seen stagnating wages over the last four decades even as those at the top have become incredibly rich. And, the incredibly rich don’t like to highlight this fact, so there is a big market for people saying that everything is great.
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