Interesting article on future

[gary webb]

You can see the arc described in the article attached in Pynchon's work...
Starting from ATD then Gravity's Rainbow then into his work set in more
contemporary settings like Vineland/Inherent Vice and BE, where in ATD the
early saga of the Traverse family in the Labor Wars in Colorado then in GR
the creation of the Cartel-ized State in GR, the bureaucratization and
rationalization where the illusion was control, and that system seemed to
work, unencumbered by its fatal flaws until its dismemberment in the late
60s-early 70s, moving forward to the Reagan years and into the Tech
Bubble/11 September in BE...

Writing about this seemingly strange consensus,

"Berle’s pro-regulatory stance won him an introduction to Franklin D.
Roosevelt <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Parker-t.html>,
and he became an influential New Dealer. But his vision truly triumphed
after World War II, when regulation of corporate behavior was supplemented
by the rise of labor unions. In the winter of 1945–46, more than 300,000
members of the United Auto Workers union staged a successful strike at
General Motors that lasted 113 days, and a few years later, in 1950, the
company resolved that further confrontations would be too painful. In what
became known as “the Treaty of Detroit,” GM’s bosses granted workers
regular cost-of-living pay increases, a measure of job security, health
insurance, and a pension—benefits that were almost unheard-of. General
Motors had “set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its
workers,” in Lemann’s succinct formulation. "

compared to the general view now,

"The upshot was the whirlwind of the past decade: the greatest financial
crash in recent memory, and a crisis of legitimacy in the world’s advanced
democracies. After decades in which economists’ influence expanded rapidly,
the striking thing about the Trump administration and its foreign analogues
is that they have largely dispensed with economic advisers. The United
States has lived through the era of corporatism, the era of
transactionalism, and the economists’ hour. The intellectual marketplace
awaits a fresh approach to the structuring of work and the good society."


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/nicolas-lemann-binyamin-appelbaum-economics/594718/?utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2019-08-07T12%3A00%3A21&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=twitter