We have become sadder and more disconnected

David Brooks

Most of us came of age in the last half of the 20th century and had our perceptions of “normal” formed in that era. It was, all things considered, an unusually happy period. No world wars, no Great Depressions, fewer civil wars, fewer plagues.

It’s looking like we’re not going to get to enjoy one of those times again. The 21st century is looking much nastier and bumpier: rising ethnic nationalism, falling faith in democracy, a dissolving world order.

At the bottom of all this, perhaps, is declining economic growth. As Nicholas Eberstadt points out in his powerful essay “Our Miserable 21st Century,” in the current issue of Commentary, between 1948 and 2000 the U.S. economy grew at a per-capita rate of about 2.3 percent a year. But then around 2000, something shifted. In this century, per-capita growth has been less than 1 percent a year on average.

Slow growth strains everything else — meaning less opportunity, less optimism. The slowdown has devastated American workers. For every one American man aged 25 to 55 looking for work, there are three who have dropped out of the labor force.

That means there’s an army of Americans semi-attached to their communities, who struggle to contribute, to realize their capacities and find their dignity.

Fifty-seven percent of white males who have dropped out get by on some form of government disability check. About half of the men who have dropped out take pain medication on a daily basis.

This is no way for our fellow citizens to live. The Eberstadt piece confirms one thought: The central task for many of us now is not to resist President Donald Trump. He’ll seal his own fate. It’s to figure out how to replace him — how to respond to the slow growth and social disaffection that gave rise to him with some radically different policy mix.

The hard part is that America has to become more dynamic and more protective. In the past, American reformers were working with a dynamic society that was always gen- erating the energy required to solve the nation’s woes. But as Tyler Cowen demonstrates in his new book, “The Complacent Class,” contemporary Americans have lost their mojo.

Cowen shows that in sphere after sphere, Americans have become less adventurous and more static. For example, Americans used to move a lot to seize opportunities. But the rate of Americans who are migrating across state lines has plummeted by 51 percent from the levels of the 1950s and 1960s.

Americans used to be entrepreneurial, but there has been a decline in startups as a share of all business activity over the last generation. The share of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen 65 percent since the 1980s.

There are signs that America is less innovative. Accounting for population growth, Americans create 25 percent fewer major international patents than in 1999.

In different ways Eberstadt and Cowen are describing a country that is decelerating, detaching, losing hope, getting sadder. Economic slowdown, social disaffection and risk aversion reinforce one another.

Of course nothing is foreordained. But where is the social movement that is thinking about the fundamentals of this century’s bad start and envisions an alternate path? Who has a compelling plan to boost economic growth? If Trump is not the answer, what is?