After the Party

After the Party

Since the depths of the Volcker-Reagan recession of the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has followed a course of economic expansion that has heartened supporters of the Reagan administration and put its critics on the defensive. In terms of the broad macroeconomic indicators that loom large in national elections—e.g., unemployment, inflation, output growth—U.S. economic performance since the end of 1982 has looked quite good, especially in comparison with that of the Western European economies. The fact is that a majority of Americans are now economically better off than they were six years ago.

Yet, aside from a few hardy Reaganauts, there is scarcely an economic observer who has watched the developments of the past several years without an increasing sense of foreboding. It is not simply that the Reagan recovery has been extraordinarily inequitable, bringing vast benefits to a privileged few while providing modest gains for many and inflicting real losses on a significant minority—thereby increasing inequalities of class, race, gender, and region. Nor is it the manifest growth of the culture of greed, the rejection of social needs in favor of private wants, which has been so prominent a feature of the Reagan era. This seamy side of U.S. economic growth in the 1980s has been amply documented and forcefully criticized by the left.