Adrift

Picture America in 1945: a nation emerging victorious from the world's greatest conflict, faced with the daunting task of transforming a wartime economy into something entirely new. Ten million servicemen were returning home, seeking jobs and futures in a country that had spent nearly half its resources on war. Many feared a return to the Great Depression, but instead, something remarkable happened. America didn't just rebuild—it created the most prosperous middle class in human history.

This transformation didn't occur by accident. It was the result of deliberate choices about how to structure society, allocate resources, and balance the forces of capitalism with the needs of ordinary citizens. The middle class became America's ballast, providing stability in turbulent times and ensuring that economic growth translated into widespread prosperity. Yet over the following decades, that ballast has steadily eroded, leaving us adrift in a sea of inequality, division, and uncertainty. Understanding how we built that stability—and how we lost it—reveals not just where we've been, but where we might be heading.

The decades following World War II witnessed perhaps the most remarkable economic transformation in human history. As America transitioned from Roosevelt's "Arsenal of Democracy" to what would become the engine of global capitalism, it created something unprecedented: a broad, inclusive middle class that served as the foundation for sustained prosperity. This wasn't merely an economic achievement—it was a social revolution that redefined what it meant to be American.

The architecture of this transformation was deliberately constructed through bold government investment and progressive policies. The GI Bill funded college education for two million soldiers and provided home and business loans to hundreds of thousands more. President Truman expanded federal housing programs, while Eisenhower launched the Interstate Highway System—a forty-year, half-trillion-dollar infrastructure project that connected the nation. With top marginal tax rates at 91%, wealth was systematically redistributed through social programs, education, and scientific research. This wasn't accidental prosperity—it was engineered equality.

The genius of this era lay not in the individual innovations it produced, but in creating a system where the benefits of capitalism were broadly shared. When companies had good years, both management and workers prospered. When times were tough, both shared the burden. A factory worker could afford a two-car garage, summer vacations, and send children to college—luxuries that seemed impossible just a generation earlier. The middle class became more than an economic category; it was a shared identity that transcended traditional class boundaries and created social cohesion.

Yet even during this golden age, cracks were beginning to show. The prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, while historically unprecedented, remained incomplete. High-earning professions stayed overwhelmingly white and male, and poverty persisted across generations in many communities. Environmental costs mounted, American manufacturing lost its competitive edge to foreign competitors, and the limits of the civil rights movement's progress became painfully apparent. By the 1970s, the postwar consensus was fracturing, setting the stage for a fundamental reimagining of America's economic philosophy.

As the 1980s dawned, America stood at a crossroads. The economic malaise of the 1970s—marked by stagflation, energy crises, and declining productivity—had shaken confidence in the postwar model. Ronald Reagan's election represented more than a change in political leadership; it marked the ascendance of a new economic religion: shareholder value. Under this doctrine, corporate success would be measured by a single, unforgiving metric—stock price—and everything else, from worker welfare to community investment, became secondary considerations.

Reagan's inaugural declaration that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" signaled a fundamental shift in American thinking. The new philosophy championed rugged individualism over collective responsibility, celebrating entrepreneurs and innovators while viewing unions and regulators as obstacles to prosperity. Tax cuts became the primary policy tool, with the top marginal rate falling from 70 percent to 28 percent. The promise was simple: reduce taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, and the benefits would trickle down to everyone else through increased investment and job creation.

The immediate results seemed to validate this approach. The economy roared to life, growing in all but one year of Reagan's presidency, while inflation dropped dramatically. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, stagnant since the mid-1960s, doubled during his tenure. Leveraged buyouts transformed corporate America as raiders used debt to acquire companies, strip away inefficiencies, and maximize returns for shareholders. The financial sector exploded in size and influence, with investment banking becoming a prestigious career path for the nation's brightest graduates.

Yet this transformation came with hidden costs that would compound over time. While productivity continued to rise steadily, worker compensation began to stagnate, breaking a pattern that had held for decades. The benefits of economic growth increasingly flowed to those who owned capital rather than those who provided labor. Infrastructure investment declined sharply as a share of GDP, union membership plummeted, and the social safety net was systematically weakened. Perhaps most ominously, Reagan's tax cuts created unprecedented peacetime deficits, establishing a pattern of fiscal irresponsibility that would plague the nation for decades to come. The seeds of modern inequality were planted in this fertile ground of deregulation and wealth concentration.

The dawn of the new millennium brought technological marvels that previous generations could barely imagine, yet it also accelerated the economic divisions that had been building since the 1980s. Steve Jobs' introduction of the iPhone in 2007 symbolized this paradox perfectly—a revolutionary device that would transform human communication and commerce, while simultaneously creating unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few technology giants.

The digital revolution fundamentally altered the relationship between productivity and prosperity that had defined earlier eras. As companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple reached trillion-dollar valuations with relatively modest workforces, it became clear that the old rules no longer applied. These platforms created immense value by harvesting and monetizing human attention, turning users into products sold to advertisers. The result was a winner-take-all economy where a handful of companies captured enormous shares of entire industries, while traditional businesses struggled to compete against algorithms designed for maximum engagement.

This concentration of wealth reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. By 2021, the richest 1 percent of Americans controlled nearly a third of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owned just 2 percent. The minimum wage, when adjusted for productivity gains, should have been over $22 per hour, yet it remained stuck at $7.25. College costs soared 169 percent between 1980 and 2019, while earnings for young workers rose just 19 percent. The American Dream of upward mobility began to fade as, for the first time in history, thirty-year-olds were less likely to earn more than their parents had at the same age.

The technological promise of connection and democratization instead delivered isolation and polarization. Social media algorithms, optimized for engagement, discovered that nothing captured attention quite like outrage and division. Misinformation spread six times faster than truth on platforms designed to keep users scrolling, watching, and clicking. Traditional journalism collapsed as advertising dollars flowed to tech platforms, eliminating thousands of newsroom jobs and creating vast information deserts. The very technologies that were supposed to bring us together were tearing us apart, undermining the shared sense of reality necessary for democratic governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived like a stress test for American society, revealing the full extent of the structural weaknesses that had been building for decades. A virus one four-hundredth the width of a human hair brought the world's most powerful economy to its knees, exposing the hollow core beneath our impressive facade. While the Pentagon commanded a budget larger than the next ten countries combined, the Centers for Disease Control operated with just 1 percent of that amount—a mismatch that would prove catastrophic when the real threat materialized.

The pandemic accelerated existing inequalities to breaking points. While wealthy Americans saw their stock portfolios soar as the Federal Reserve pumped trillions into financial markets, essential workers risked their lives for wages that couldn't cover basic living expenses. Remote work became a luxury available primarily to college-educated professionals, while service workers faced impossible choices between health and income. Educational losses were devastating, with students at majority-Black and majority-Hispanic schools falling a full year behind their peers at majority-white schools, potentially affecting lifetime achievement for millions of children.

Perhaps most troubling was the collapse of social cohesion that the crisis revealed. Instead of uniting against a common threat, Americans fractured along political lines, turning even basic public health measures into partisan battlegrounds. Trust in government, media, and fellow citizens reached historic lows. Young men, in particular, faced a crisis of purpose and belonging, with declining college enrollment, fewer economic opportunities, and increasing social isolation creating what could only be described as a dangerous cohort of the disconnected and disillusioned.

Yet crisis has always been America's catalyst for renewal. The same technological forces that enabled division and concentration of wealth also created new possibilities for connection and opportunity. The pandemic sparked a historic surge in business formation as entrepreneurs sought to solve emerging problems and serve changing needs. Remote work opened new possibilities for geographic dispersion and work-life balance. Most importantly, the visible failures of the past four decades created space for new approaches to old problems—from infrastructure investment to antitrust enforcement to social support systems. The question facing America isn't whether change will come, but whether it will choose the direction of that change or simply drift with the currents.

The story of America since 1945 reveals a powerful truth: prosperity without shared purpose leads inevitably to drift and division. The postwar era succeeded not because government was absent, but because it actively worked to ensure that the benefits of economic growth reached the broad middle class. When that commitment weakened in favor of shareholder capitalism and individual wealth maximization, the social ballast that had provided stability began to erode, leaving the nation vulnerable to the crises that followed.

The path forward requires reconnecting productivity gains with broadly shared prosperity, much as America did after World War II. This means rebuilding the institutions that create opportunity—from education and infrastructure to antitrust enforcement and progressive taxation. It means recognizing that technology's potential to connect and empower people has been subverted by business models that profit from division and distraction. Most fundamentally, it requires rejecting the false choice between dynamic capitalism and social cohesion, instead choosing policies that harness market forces for the common good. The tools exist; what remains is the collective will to use them in service of an America that works for everyone, not just the fortunate few.