Chapter 7 Prospects AND FOR THE 1980s The public philosophy is addressed to the government of our appetites and passions by the reason of a second, civilized, and acquired nature. Therefore, the public philosophy cannot be popular. For it aims to resist and to regulate those very desires and opinions which are most popular. I -Walter Lippmann In this final chapter our purpose is not so much to 1980s. Our task has been partly descriptive, partly prescriptive. The nation has experienced a series of abrupt changes-in our economic circumstances, our international position, our cultural outlook. These changes have generated confusion and a basic shift in the public mood. In order to assess the nation's prospects for the 1980s, it is important to describe what has changed in our condition. When this Commission was formed, there was a good deal of concern about what appeared to be a pervasive change in the nation's mood-an increased sense of pessimism about the nation's prospects and an erosion of confidence in the future. This is a shift of considerable significance, one that makes our situation very different from what it was a decade ago, and one that has shaped the task of this Commission in various ways. The insistent questions are why this change of mood has taken place, whether it is a reflection of real changes in our circumstances, and what it reveals about our well-being as individuals and as a society. Since our focus as a panel has been on individuals rather than institutions, these are questions to which we have returned time and again in our deliberations over the past 8 months. In this final chapter we will address these questions directly and, in doing so, try to elucidate a theme that runs throughout much of this report. One way of accounting for the change in the nation's mood is to look back to the dramatic changes that have taken place in this country since the postwar period. By comparing the circumstances of the postwar generation—a period that ended about 1970-with those of the 1980s, we can better understand the tensions between expectations and current realities, as well as the adjustments this nation will have to make to those new realities and their implications for the nation's leaders. In 1960, when the Goals for Americans report was being prepared, despite the impression of anxious concern about national purpose that was conveyed by the media, opinion polls indicated considerable complacency and optimism among most Americans about their personal future and about that of the nation as a whole. During the early 1960s, there was also considerable confidence in the leaders of major institutions—including Congress and the Presidency. There was good reason for that mood, for in the postwar generation the nation was riding a growth wave that was propelled by a set of benign and unprecedented circumstances. Throughout the postwar period and until the early 1970s, the nation had, as Daniel Yankelovich writes, grown accustomed to rising economy, a relatively low rate of inflation, a greater concern with managing demand rather than worrying about supply, world leadership in the economic and political sphere, steady advances in productivity gains, and a set of political "rules" geared to a rising economy. . . .' Most people perceived those developments not as abstractions remote from the circumstances of everyday life, but as factors that enabled individuals to live better, to get better housing and more education, and to look forward to security and dignity in retirement. The average American enjoyed not only increasing real wages and the consumer goods they bought, but also more fringe benefits, more paid holidays, longer vacations, better health and pension plans, and less physically onerous work. If, in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans had been asked whether things were better for them and their families than they had been 4 years earlier, most would have agreed that things had improved; that improvement provided the foundation for their optimism about the future. If they had been asked whether things were better for them and their families than they had been for their parents, there would have been no question about their response: Most Americans who reached maturity in the 1950s grew up during the Depression. They wanted for themselves and their children the kind of economic security that could not be taken for granted during their childhood. What they experienced exceeded their expectations-a generation of impressive and sustained economic growth. 122 The average annual growth rate from 1950 to 1972 was an unprecedented 3.8 percent. What that meant for Americans was a steady increase in the standard of living. Between 1947 and 1973, the income of the average American family (after adjusting for inflation) had doubled. This had indeed become an affluent society for many Americans. The nation enjoyed an ever-increasing stock of consumer goods and the freedom that constant increases in discretionary income provided. During that period, higher education became a prominent part of the American dream of material progress and individual advancement. It was an era of upward mobility, and a college degree opened the door to an abundance of jobs. It was not simply that jobs were abundant and the unemployment rate relatively low. More important, the most rapidly expanding part of the labor force-in such professions as medicine, law, science, engineering, and teaching-was also the most prestigious. Thus, it was realistic for middle-class Americans in that generation to aspire to positions higher than the ones their fathers had held. For America's poor and underprivileged, this pattern of upward mobility held out the promise that their aspirations too might be met. There were other ways in which the postwar growth wave set up new expectations that quickly came to be regarded as entitlements. In previous generations, most urban dwellers had lived in rental properties. The postwar generation became the first in which a large majority of middle-class families owned their own home. The detached house on a suburban property provided far more than shelter; it became the main symbol of success and personal security. Another new entitlement that many Americans began to take for granted by the end of that postwar generation was the right to an early retirement, free from economic insecurities. The confidence that most Americans felt about their personal futures, as well as about the direction of the nation as a whole, was based upon these real and impressive achievements of the postwar generation. Given those achievements, it is not surprising there was general optimism about the future and confidence in major institutions. Most people felt that if government provided a helping hand, science and technology would "find the answers"; that education would continue to provide the road to opportunity and equality; and that sustained rapid economic growth would provide the means for ever-increasing affluence. Under those circumstances, the main tasks of national leadership were to sustain economic growth, and as illustrated by the initiatives of the Great Society programsto move forward to accomplish the nation's "unfinished business," to extend rights and expand opportunities. 123 |