Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

The 1960s fueled the wealth engine with a stock market boom. And then “The Great Society.” A new marketing slogan! When the stock market stalled, the 1970s introduced massive inflation in order to keep people’s incomes going up. The term “Keeping up with the Joneses” was introduced into popular culture in 1976 to refer to the idea that we are never satisfied anymore. No matter how many material goods we accumulate, there’s always the mysterious “Jones family” who has more. So we need more. In the 1980s we again had a stock market boom. And when that leveled off, we had the junk bond debt boom to keep Americans flush in cash. The ’90s brought us both the “peace dividend” from the downfall of the Soviet Bloc and the Internet boom. Even when Asia crashed, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, kept the party going by artificially pumping money into the system—not only to stave off the effects of a potential “Asian Contagion” but out of fear that the show would be over if Y2K shut off all the lights. The party had to continue! Despite the fact that median earnings for male workers had been going down since 1970 and it was only going to get worse. Don’t believe me? Believe the data: