The Refragmentation

January 2016

One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in
your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US
politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we
have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful
of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic
inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too.
I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances
of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some
force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces
that had been pushing us together.

Worse still, for those who worry about these trends, the forces
that were pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination
of circumstances that's unlikely to be repeated — and indeed, that
we would not want to repeat.

The two forces were war (above all World War II), and the rise of
large corporations.

The effects of World War II were both economic and social.
Economically, it decreased variation in income. Like all modern
armed forces, America's were socialist economically. From each
according to his ability, to each according to his need. More or
less. Higher ranking members of the military got more (as higher
ranking members of socialist societies always do), but what they
got was fixed according to their rank. And the flattening effect
wasn't limited to those under arms, because the US economy was
conscripted too. Between 1942 and 1945 all wages were set by the
National War Labor Board. Like the military, they defaulted to
flatness. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive
that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended.
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