But it didn’t last. In the 1970s, a new generation of elites began replacing the “great civic generation.”[27] The new elites, who didn’t experience the turbulence of the previous age of discord, forgot its lessons and started to gradually dismantle the pillars on which the postwar prosperity era was based. The ideas of neoclassical economics, previously held by fringe economists, now became mainstream.[28] The Reagan presidency of the 1980s was the turning point when the idea of cooperation between workers and businesses was abandoned. Instead, we entered the age of “greed is good.”
