Fading optimism in “new normal” America

[marmar]

from Reuters:



Fading optimism in “new normal” America
Dec 23, 2010 10:19 EST


Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own


Optimism is so deeply embedded in the American national psyche that it withstood the Great Depression in the 1930s and a string of recessions since then. But in the era some economists call “the new normal” in America, optimism is fading.

So say public opinion polls that ask Americans how they see the future, theirs and their country’s. One recent survey, by the respected Pew Research Center, found that depression era Americans were more optimistic about economic recovery in the near future than people questioned in a Pew poll this October, when only 35 percent said they expected better economic conditions in a year’s time. In response to a similar question in 1936 and 1937, about half expected general business conditions to improve over the next six months.

The phrase “new normal” was coined by PIMCO, one of the world’s biggest investment funds, and is shorthand for an American future that includes lowered living standards, slow growth and high unemployment. Joblessness now stands at 9.8 percent, up from 9.6 percent in October. Add workers who have given up looking for jobs and people forced to work part time and the rate climbs to 17 percent, a powerful reason for declining optimism.

But it’s not the only one. A slew of studies, surveys and reports show that a growing number of Americans – some surveys say more than half – no longer believe that their country is a land of unlimited opportunity, where all it takes to rise to success is hard work and determination.

“The end of American optimism,” as a headline over an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal proclaimed this summer, has not quite arrived. But Americans increasingly believe that the rich just get richer and the poor just get poorer. They have good reason to think so. The rich-poor gap in the United States is wider than in any other developed country. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.reuters.com/bernddebusmann/2010/12/23/fading-optimism-in-new-normal-america/

[HughBeaumont]

1. I love that Americans are finally stabbing this Horatio Alger crap in the gut.

While considerable attention has been focused on the gap between rich and poor, wider than at any time since just before the Great Depression, there is perhaps an even weightier reason for Americans to lose their optimistic, can-do spirit — for many millions, the notion that they can climb up the economic ladder is more myth than reality.

Half of those starting at the bottom 20 percent never leave that level. “The…American economy tends to help those at the top stay there while making it difficult for those at the bottom to move up,” according to a study by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

That is true despite the rags-to-riches stories that underpin the American dream and have fired the imagination of countless immigrants. President Obama himself could be a poster child for upward mobility, a black man reaching the pinnacle of power after an unconventional childhood that included a spell of subsisting on his mother’s food stamps.

THANK you. Horatio Alger is a lottery, not the rule, and always HAS been.

[prolesunited]

2. My son, who is not very political at all

was just saying this country is doomed. He has a good job, great girlfriend and is almost finished with a college degree (long haul, but debt free). I think personally, he feels optimistic and is still pursuing his goals. But, then he looks at me, a person who did the same and worked hard all of my life, get discarded on the junk pile because I'm too old and in the wrong field, and realizes it's just a crap shoot.

[patrice]

3. It's not just Un-employemnt. It's also At-Will Employment that enthrones mediocrity above

all other traits through work processes that place obeisance to power-structure above ALL else, processes that REFUSE to place the best possible product/outcomes/goals first. American workers who do have jobs live in a schizophrenic environment in which they are told to do their best, but NOT really. Can you imagine anything more depressing?

[dana_b]

4. none of the folks in my generation of my family are

doing as well as our grandparents did. They had a nice house, and money for vacations and retirement (on one income). We are losing jobs, losing businesses, and have very little for retirement. I can't see it getting any better for our kids. What is there to be optimistic about?

[patrice]

5. In our family, even those in your generation who went ahead and did the great "American" dream thing

,like my daughter (who got a college degree & has worked her ass off creating her own quite successful little business), are having perhaps insurmountable difficulties with one of the intrinsic goals of that dream, owning their own real estate, not to mention the costs and risks of children when you're self-employed.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. Americans are finally figuring out that the Rat Race really is a Rat Race.