Ours Was the Shining Future Quotes

“Today, these forces have reversed. Our investments in the future have stagnated. Our workers have strikingly little influence over the economy and the political system. Our culture is individualist and angry rather than community oriented and hopeful. As a result, American exceptionalism often has a bleak meaning.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“The principal contradiction in the whole system comes about because of the inability of men to forego immediate gain for a longtime good,” he once said. “We do not yet have a sufficient number of people who are ready to make the immediate sacrifice in favor of a long-term investment.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“Democracy, he told the students, was fighting a losing battle with dictatorship because democracy had not been working well for the previous two decades.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“When a political movement can attract dedicated organizers and win over public opinion -- when it can tell a persuasive story -- it can often change society. Think about how different American society might be if there were also strong movements to reduce corporate concentration, create universal pre-K education, and increase middle-class pay.

For Progressives interested in building these kinds of movements, there is one important step that is also hard. It involves listening more to the views of working-class Americans. It requires making the left less upscale than it is now and more inclusive of people who are not white-collar professionals.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“If there is a central reason for the decline of the American dream over the past half century, it has been the lack of a strong political movement dedicated to protecting that dream. Without such a movement, our country has abandoned democratic capitalism, the most successful strategy for lifting mass living standards.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“The great successes of the postwar economy -- the rapid increase in living standards, with the fastest progress for less advantaged groups -- depended on interaction of the forces that I have described in this book. Investments made possible a better future. A shift in political power enabled more Americans to claim their fair share of the economy's gains. A change in the culture allowed the country to retain some of the best parts of its individualist ethos, like the willingness to take risks, while also avoiding the excesses of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties.

As the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, 'The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.' In the middle years of the twentieth century, the United States moved closer to ahappy medium among these competing objectives. It discovered a system that avoided both the inefficiencies of socialism and the excesses of rough-and-tumble capitalism. The country was still terribly flawed and unjust during those decades, but it was moving in the right direction. No other country was doing a better job of providing decent living standards to its citizens and raising those living standards over time.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“An American born in the early twentieth century witnessed transformational changes not only in transportation and schooling, but also in cooking, house cleaning, and many other areas of daily life. The changes of recent decades have been considerably smaller, even with the creation of the internet and the potential of artificial intelligence. As Gordon, the economist, explained in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, recent advances have been concentrated in a few areas of human endeavor, mostly involving communication, entertainment, and information. 'For the rest of what humans care about -- food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health and working conditions both inside and outside the home -- progress slowed down after 1970,' Gordon wrote. That has been especially true in the United States.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“The full picture is of a country that devotes an increasing share of its resources to programs that will not improve life for our children, grandchildren, and beyond. By contrast, investments in education generally create a better future, as do investments in scientific research and a country's productive capacity. The United States has instead shifted money toward the world's most bloated healthcare sector, its largest prison network, and a safety net that often benefits the affluent. . . . We have a budget for a declining nation.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“Programs for healthcare and retirement are obviously important. They reduce poverty, provide needed medical care, and allow people to retire. But retirement programs are not an investment that will pay for itself through future economic growth, as education typically does. A society that allows spending on old age to crowd out spending on schools will eventually have less money to spend on both.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“The United States could ensure a decent retirement for its elderly without allowing Medicare and Social Security to overwhelm the federal budget. To do so, though, the country would need to address two issues with the programs. First, the American healthcare system is unusually wasteful. The United States today spends about $13,000 per person annually on healthcare, a far higher total than any other country. Canada spends about $8,ooo per person, while France, Germany, and Japan spend closer to $6,000. Some of the American spending has ancillary benefits -- high drug prices effectively subsidize drug development for the rest of the world -- but much of the spending does not. It instead pays for inefficient bureaucracy and care that does not make people healthier.

Second, Medicare, Social Security, and other programs that purport to be part of the safety net devote a significant portion of their budgets to helping well-off Americans. (Housing subsidies are another example.) The universality of the programs was a deliberate part of their design and increased their popularity. But as the country has aged and the programs have grown, universality comes with a big downside: Increasingly, the federal government is prioritizing older adults over children. Even the affluent elderly can receive more government help than impoverished children.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“Several economists, including Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Marco Tabellini, have offered a useful framework for understanding why high levels of immigration have helped the political right. When immigration is a salient issue, it serves to remind many working-class voters that they agree with conservative parties on questions of patriotism, nationhood, and security. When immigration fades as an issue, voters think less about these questions and more about a society's economic divisions. Those class divisions, in turn, remind workers that they generally agree with progressive parties on economic policies, such as tax rates and government benefits.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“By many measures, [Reagan's] presidency was a turning point for the American economy -- in a negative way. Starting in the 1980s, an increasing share of the nation's economic bounty began flowing to a relatively small and affluent segment of the population. Incomes for everyone else grew quite slowly. To put it another way, Reagan helped end the weak overall growth of the 1970s, but he ushered in a new era of unbalanced growth.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“For decades after the Great Depression, the prevailing culture of corporate America called for restraining self-interest in the name of the national interest. That ethos explained why corporate executives helped build a high-wage economy and accepted high taxes on their incomes. They were willing to sacrifice their own short-term interests for what they considered to be larger causes, including political stability and American power.

By 1980, their outlook had changed. In the new culture, executives came to believe that there was no difference between their own personal interests and the national interest.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“For us, the role of critical intellectuals in the media and n politics was not to replace the working class, but to help them understand that their private grievances had political causes, [Michael] Vester later wrote. The left could only leave its complacent ghetto when it tried to mobilize people by raising issues germane to their everyday experiences and grievances.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“Many workers, along with the unions that represented them, were satisfied with the status quo. . . . They did not understand what Chavez, Reuther, and Wurf did: The status quo was not an option. The choice was between growing and withering.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“The final version of the manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was a sixty-six page, single-spaced pamphlet that both described an emerging movement -- the New Left -- and sought to shape it. The document was up front about its origins. The opening sentence read, 'We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.' The tone of the document was almost spiritual. It celebrated human independence and authenticity, arguing that reason, freedom, and love could overcome loneliness, estrangement, ad isolation. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in a sympathetic history of the SDS, the statement 'was unabashedly middle class, concerned with poverty of vision rather than poverty of life.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“By the end of the [1960s] decade, the alliance between political progressives and working-class Americans would split apart. Labor unions grew self-satisfied and self-interested. The political left focused increasingly on the preferences of college graduates and professionals. The civil rights movement became more insular. With memories of the Depression fading, business executives and conservative politicians began to embrace a rough-and-tumble version of capitalism that harked back to the 1920s.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“[After World War II] Around the country, a Black middle class began to grow -- in Harlem and South Philadelphia, along the U Street corridor in Washington, on the South Side of Chicago, in Detroit suburbs like Inkster, in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The early civil rights movement, allied with labor unions and with [A. Phillip] Randolph at the forefront, had cracks open the door of the country's industrial sector to Black Americans just as that sector was lifting living standards for the masses.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream

“By the end of the 1960s, the United States had become the most broadly prosperous country the world had known. Its success was a reflection of both the size of the economic pie and the way it was being divided. The economy had become less unequal than it had been at the start of the twentieth century as a result of the acquisition of political power by workers and the changed culture of corporate America. And economic growth had surged, with help from an investment program that began during World War II and continued for almost two more decades. Americans had faith that the future could be better than the past, and they then forged that future.”
― David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream