The Man Who Can Taste Sounds

by Chrissie Giles


Every time James Wannerton hears or reads a word, he can taste it in his mouth. What is it like living with this extremely rare form of synaesthesia? He talks to Chrissie Giles about difficult menu choices, having to abandon French lessons and the importance of great-tasting friends.

Who are you?
I work in IT and have lexical-guastatory synaethesia, an extra connection between two areas of my brain. It means that whenever I hear, see or read something, I get a specific taste. Even though I’m not eating something – and I know I’m not – it seems pretty real to me.

Unless I spoke about it, there’s no way you’d know I was a synaesthete. I did bring it up a couple of times at school and home but it never went anywhere. My ex-girlfriend didn’t know for years and years. My parents found out because I was on an episode of Horizon. They were quite put out about it at the time and still are now.

When did you first realise you had this ability?
You have to bear in mind that this is perfectly normal for me, so it’s a bit like asking when was the first time you smelt something and what did it smell like – you can’t remember. I can certainly remember picking up tastes when I was at school, around the age of four and a half. I have very strong memories of sitting in assemblies. We were read the Lord’s prayer every morning: it had a taste of very thin crispy bacon.

Talking about it now, can you taste it?
Yeah. It’s quite strong as well.

Can you describe synaethesia?
It’s not an extra sense, but it does give me an extra perception. It’s like getting an eye-dropper of taste dripped on my tongue. I get a taste, temperature and texture. One of the ways I stop this affecting my concentration on a day-to-day basis is to eat strong-tasting sweets like Wine Gums, and drinking coffee.

Do you ever synaesthetically taste something you’ve never eaten before?It can be difficult to articulate a particular sensation and compare it to a foodstuff. These things are specific and very, very complex. When I’ve taken part in research, I could write maybe half a page of A4 on a particular word’s effects.

Ever since I was young, I had a taste for the word ‘expect’ and I could never quite put my finger on what it was. One day, I bought a packet of Marmite-flavoured crisps. When I had one, it clicked – that’s the taste of “expect”! If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a bit tangy, slightly thick but crunchy.

I get lots of metallic tastes that I can’t describe, other than saying it’s smooth or rough. The name David gives me a very strong taste of cloth, a bit like sucking on a sleeve.

How has it affected your life?
When I was younger, I used to choose friends according to whether they tasted nice or not. When I got older, it used to affect my choice of girlfriend. Their name would be just as attractive to me as the way they looked or their personality.

You couldn’t go out with somebody who didn’t taste right?
Oh no. There are ways of coping with that, though. If I don’t like the sound or taste of somebody’s name then I’ll try and call them something else in my head. If that doesn’t work then I can’t live with it. A good analogy is meeting somebody who you really like, who looks great and who has a fantastic personality, but has a horrible smell about them. It would affect your perception of them – and it’s always there in the background.

Punk Fish by Rafael Bastos

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Cyril E. Power, English, 1872–1951, The Eight,

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Live and Learn

[ed.  This is a great read.  Please take the time if you have it.]

by  Louis Menand

My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.

At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.

I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I assigned my new students the same readings I had assigned the old ones. I understood that the new students would not be as well prepared, but, out of faith or ego, I thought that I could tell them what they needed to know, and open up the texts for them. Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?”

I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

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How the "Penny Farthing" Got It's Name

I never knew this until reading about it in an awesome post at Poemas del rio Wang about the history of early bicycles -

The Michaux bicycle, whose name in France was velocipède, while in the USA the eloquent boneshaker, was further improved in by Eugène Meyer in France and James Starley in Britain. As a result, by the 1870s they created the well-known velocipede which had wire-spoke tension wheels instead of wooden spokes, and pneumatic rubber tires instead of iron, and whose front wheel was much higher, for the sake of speed, than the rear ones, and so it is called “penny-farthing” in the literature on after the proportion of the contemporary British coins. Starley’s nephew, John Kemp Starley will be the one who in 1885 would create the prototype of a rear-wheel-drive, chain-driven cycle with two similar-sized wheels, known as „safety bicycle”, thus reaching the height of the knowledge of the Knights of the Sun and the Moon – but this is already another story.

Much MUCH more at the link with lots and LOTS of interesting photos.  A must read for bicycle enthusiasts.

via:  TYWKIWDBI

The Promise

by Joe Posnanski  

Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown.
Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound.

Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don't go.
Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home.
-- Bruce Springsteen. The Promise.

I remember the first time I heard The Promise. It was about a decade ago. The song had been around for a long time before I first heard it -- Bruce Springsteen would say it was the first song he wrote after Born To Run made him a rock and roll star in 1975. It figures that this was the first song. Born to Run, the whole album, was about longing, open highway, the amusement park rising bold and stark, the poets who write nothing at all, the ghosts in the eyes of all the boys Mary sent away. Born to Run is about that brilliant age when you know dreams don't come true, but you still believe they might come true FOR YOU.

And The Promise is about the every day numbing of those dreams. It is a follow-up to Thunder Road, that song about the guy who learned how to make his guitar talk, and the girl who ain't a beauty (but hey, she's all right), both of them, pulling out of that town full of losers, pulling out of there to win. Now, that guy's got a job. It's a night job. Some nights he don't go. A friend told me, "You have to listen to this song. I can't believe you haven't heard this song."

I listened to the version of The Promise on 18 Tracks. It's not the version Springsteen recorded more than 30 years ago. This version is stripped down to almost nothing, just Springsteen and a piano.

And the weirdest thing happened, something I can never remember happening before or since when I listened to a song. I felt myself crying.

I followed that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen.
Drove my Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes.
When the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my own dreams

If I had to pick a single memory, the memory that best summarizes my teenage years, the memory that best expresses the kind of man I hoped to become ... well, it is 6 a.m., and my bed shakes. That's how my father wakes me up. He mildly bumps the bed with his knee. It is summertime, but rain pours, so it is still dark, a harsh gray. My father walks out of the room without saying a word. There is nothing to say. It is time to get up.

I dress quickly. There are no morning showers. We have timed our morning to the minute so that we can get as much sleep as possible ... or, more to the point, so I can get as much sleep as possible. Dad doesn't sleep much except for the naps he gets in front of the television. I meet my father downstairs. He is already there -- he is always there first, dressed, ready to go. He is always waiting on me. He wakes up long before 6 a.m. on his own. His lunch is packed in a brown paper sack. It is probably a salami sandwich. It is usually a salami sandwich.

We trudge out to the car, a declining Pontiac T-1000 that I hope to buy at the end of the summer. The rain hits our necks, but there's no running. We ride in silence for a few minutes. Then, we start to talk about small things. We stop at Popeyes for a breakfast biscuit. The morning gains light slowly, like an old television picture tube coming to life. The ride is 30 minutes or so. There is little traffic this early in the morning.

And then, we get out ... and go into the factory. Alisa is the name of the place. It is a knitting factory. We make sweaters, I guess, though I never actually see any sweaters. Everything is yarn. It is hard to breathe because of the heat and the humidity and the dust and the cardboard boxes, and because the yarn chokes the air. I feel sure that a sweater is being knitted in my lungs.

My father's job is to make sure the knitting machines run. He unclogs jams, quiets the guttural sounds, tightens bolts that break free, loosens bolts that choke the machine. His hands are unnaturally strong; I have known this since I was a boy. Now I see that he uses his fingers to loosen bolts that are wedged tight. There is no time to find a wrench. Sometimes, when the machines run smoothly, I see him drawing Xs on graph paper as he works out a sweater color design. When kids in school used to ask me what my father did for a living, I would tell them he designs sweaters. It wasn't because I was ashamed of what he did; quite the opposite. That was how I saw him.

My job is to stay in the warehouse, move boxes of yarn in and out, and, one day a week, Thursday, unloaded barrels of dye from a truck. I am doing this to raise enough money buy that old car, that Pontiac. I'm 18 years old and thoroughly without purpose, except for that, I desperately want my own car. I am an accounting major at college though even the most basic accounting concepts baffle me. I can't help but think of debits as good and credits as bad. The professors keep telling me that they are not good or bad, but I don't believe them. I already know I won't be an accountant, but have not admitted it to myself yet. I don't have any idea what I will do -- or what I can do. Everything feels out of reach.

I work six days a week at Alisa, and the pay, if I remember correctly, is $4 an hour. The minimum wage at the time is $3.35 an hour, so this is the second-highest paying job of my young life. The highest paying job, at $4.50 an hour, involved calling people who were past due on their mortgage. My job there was to set up a payment schedule with those people. I wasn't good at this; I didn't understand the fury and desperation of the voices on the end of dial tones. I got threatened a lot. I don't get threatened at the factory. Yelled at, yes. Threatened, no. There's no point in threats, not here. It's understood by everyone how easy I am to replace. I'm scrawny and weak and viewed as a non-prospect. I'm only here as a favor to my father, the only guy who knows how to fix the machines if they break down.

Well now I built that challenger by myself.
But I needed money and so I sold it.
Lived a secret I should'a kept to myself.
But I got drunk one night and I told it.

Springsteen wrote The Promise for the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" album. People who follow the Springsteen story know that the time when he wrote The Promise, that time after Born To Run made him a star and before Darkness made him an adult, that was a strange time for him. He was locked in a searing legal battle with his manager Mike Appel over creative freedom -- the thing Springsteen called his musical soul -- and he was also struggling with what it meant to be a huge success for the first time in his life. He hated success and loved it, and hated himself for loving it.

And the music poured out of him like sweat. He was 27 and hungry, still hungry, but he was not entirely sure for what. He was listening to punk music. He was listening to Hank Williams. The Born to Run sessions were legendary for Springsteen's refusal to compromise, his 14-month insistence on making every single song sound exactly like what he was hearing in his head no matter how many different ways he had to stretch the songs. But at least with Born To Run, there was a clear vision everyone could understand. Springsteen simply wanted to make the greatest rock and roll album that had ever been made. That's was 25 year old musicians did. The kid had ambition.

But nobody quite knew what Springsteen was trying to do with Darkness, maybe not even Springsteen himself. The band learned song after song after song. Some of the songs sounded like hits, but Springsteen seemed uninterested in those. This was the time when he would give "Because The Night" to the punk star Patti Smith -- her biggest hit. This was the time when he gave "Fire" to The Pointer Sisters -- their biggest hit. He gave "This Little Girl" to Gary U.S. Bonds ... and it would become Bonds' first hit in almost 20 years. He gave an older song, "The Fever," and "Talk to Me" to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He gave "Rendezvous" to Greg Kihn. In the documentary about Darkness, Springsteen's guitarist and foil and alter-ego Stevie Van Zandt would say, seemingly without irony, "It's a bit tragic in a way. Because he would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time."

The Costly War on Cancer

CANCER is not one disease. It is many. Yet oncologists have long used the same blunt weapons to fight different types of cancer: cut the tumour out, zap it with radiation or blast it with chemotherapy that kills good cells as well as bad ones.

New cancer drugs are changing this. Scientists are now attacking specific mutations that drive specific forms of cancer. A breakthrough came more than a decade ago when Genentech, a Californian biotech firm, launched a drug that attacks breast-cancer cells with too much of a certain protein, HER2. In 2001 Novartis, a Swiss drugmaker, won approval for Gleevec, which treats chronic myeloid leukaemia by attacking another abnormal protein. Other drugs take different tacks. Avastin, introduced in America in 2004 by Genentech, starves tumours by striking the blood vessels that feed them. (Roche, another Swiss drug giant, bought Genentech and its busy cancer pipeline in 2009.)

These new drugs sell well. Last year Gleevec grossed $4.3 billion. Roche’s Herceptin (the HER2 drug) and Avastin did even better: $6 billion and $7.4 billion respectively. Cancer drugs could rescue big drugmakers from a tricky situation: more than $50 billion-worth of wares will lose patent protection in the next three years.



This month Pfizer, an American company, announced that America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would speed up its review of a cancer drug called crizotinib. Roche submitted an FDA application for a new medicine, vemurafenib. The industry is pouring money into clinical trials for cancer drugs (see chart).

This is part of a shift in how big drug firms do business. For years they have relied on blockbusters that treat many people. Now they are investing in more personalised medicine: biotech drugs that treat small groups of patients more effectively.

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Sniffing Out a Menace

by Julia O'Malley

At a low-rate motel on the edge of Spenard recently, I noticed a guy smoking outside who was covered with scabs. Initially, I thought he might have a disease. Then I realized it was probably bed-bug bites. That was, after all, why I was there.

It took me four months to get Randy Beuter, who owns Eagle Pest Control, to take me out with him and his bedbug-sniffing dog, Rudolph. It wasn't because he didn't want to take me. It was because the places with the bed bugs didn't want any witnesses.

Beuter himself enjoys the limelight. You might recognize his salt-and-pepper bowl cut and gravelly voice from the television news. His consistent message: creeping bed-bug catastrophe is poised to envelop the city.

"It's like a tidal wave," Beuter told me. "And you're trying to tell people to get out of the way, it's coming. And now it's rolling up the beach."

Bed-bug complaints are on the rise in Anchorage, according to municipal and state health departments. The bugs usually don't transfer illnesses and have not be identified as a public health issue. For that reason, there aren't lots of resources focused on them. Exterminators across the city backed Beuter's claim. They told me the bugs used to generate a call or two a year; now they bring several calls a week.

I heard stories from them about bugs at high-end hotels and subsidized housing, Hillside palaces and trailers, dorms, schools and health-care facilities. None would say exactly where. Sometimes they are asked to arrive at odd hours, they said, or park their vans where they can't be seen from the street. A bedbug rumor at a hotel can cost a lot of money. Discretion is the better part of pest management. All the secrecy is probably one reason the problem isn't really on the public's radar.

"It's a dirty secret, but if people could only see it's not about how cleanly you are," Beuter said. "The more vigilant people can be when they check in to hotels and notice strange bites, the better."

I wound up at the Spenard motel because I'd been observing Beuter for a couple of weeks and we'd been skunked every time. I hadn't seen a bug, nor had I seen his dog give a positive response. The hotel was supposed to be a hot zone. It was where Beuter went when he needed sample bugs to train the dog.

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Removing the Windows XP Security 2011 malware

[ed.  My computer got infected by this very annoying and persistent piece of malware yesterday.  Initially, a Windows Security screen pops up telling you that you've been infected by 32 different viruses, then it proceeds to scan and list them before asking you to click a button to remove them or purchase a professional removal program.  Numerous other pop up warning screens occur after that.  I was dubious so I tried getting rid of the infections using Malwarebytes.  Here's the thing: this malware blocks not only access to the internet but all executable files, so programs won't load.  Fortunately, for some reason, it didn't affect Spybot Search and Destroy, so I removed what I could with that program (about nine files), got Malwarebytes running, and took care of the rest (another three files).  Rebooted clean.  Here's another approach:]

XP Home Security 2011 is a misleading security application that commonly spread by means of a Trojan that can penetrate the computer without being detected by anti-virus application. XP Home Security 2011 virus will be installed remotely when a prompt displayed by the Trojan is executed. Normally users may get infected when a malicious web site is visited. If installed on the computer, this rogue program will provide virus scan results that tells users to obtain the licensed version to be able to remove detected threats. In fact, there will be a dozens of threats detected. These threats do not really exists on the system and are just a fabrication of XP Home Security 2011 to deceive its victims. On some machines, this can be installed as Vista Home Security 2011 or Win7  Home Security 2011, defending on victim’s operating system.

To be able to remove all the irregularities brought on the PC, users must remove XP Home Security 2011. As mentioned, this is just a rogue program pretending to be a useful application to scam money from computer users. It can be remove by a legitimate anti-malware application included on this page. It is also advise to protect the computer with a legitimate and full version of anti-malware program to prevent any attacks coming from rogue programs like XP Home Security 2011.
Alias: Vista Home Security 2011, Win7  Home Security 2011

Love In Vain

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Trade

by Simon Rich

Josh always knew, on some level, that it was possible for him to get traded. He’d seen it happen to dozens of guys over the years, including some of his closest friends. It was part of the game. Still, he had never been traded himself, and he was having some trouble accepting it. He kept expecting someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him the whole thing was a joke.

“Here’s your stuff,” Kate said, dropping a duffelbag at his feet. “Goodbye.”

Josh stared at her for a moment, expecting some kind of encouragement or sympathy. But Kate just stood there, her eyelids fluttering with impatience.

“So that’s it, then,” Josh said. “After three and a half years.”

“What do you want me to say?” Kate snapped.

He picked up the bag and slung it wearily over his shoulder. There was nothing he could do. When your girlfriend decides to trade you, you’re through.

“I just don’t get it!” Josh shouted, over the din of the jukebox. “I thought things were going really well.”

“They weren’t,” his brother Craig said. “The writing was on the wall.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Your record’s been sinking all year. You told me yourself you had a five-argument losing streak. And then there were all those errors.”

Josh nodded ruefully. There had been a lot of errors this year. Forty-five Missed Compliments, three Forgotten Events, twelve Accidental Insults—he’d been playing like a rookie.

Craig squeezed his little brother’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Josh,” he said. “Believe me, I know what you’re going through. Remember in ’04-’05? When Zoe traded me?”

Josh nodded. They’d come to the same bar then.

“I was devastated,” Craig said. “I’d just taken her to Henry’s Inn for her birthday—you know, that fancy place with all the candles? Got her a steak, gave her a necklace, took her to a show, massaged her feet . . .”

“You hit for the cycle?”

“Uh-huh. Then I wake up the next day and she’s giving me my marching orders. Tells me she needs to ‘shake things up’ if she wants to remain a contender.”

“Unbelievable.”

“It was right before Valentine’s Day.”

“Of course,” Josh said. “The Trade Deadline.”

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Basta Bunga Bunga

by Ariel Levy

In 2008, during his fourth campaign to become Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Meno male che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s about to erupt into carnality. The finale depicts a passionate young swimming instructor singing to a pool full of women in bathing suits: “Say it with the strength possessed only by those who have a pure mind: Presidente, we are with you!”

These days, you would have to possess an unusually pure mind to look at that pool full of young women without picturing the pool at Berlusconi’s estate, Arcore, just outside Milan. Along with the basement disco and the upstairs bedrooms, the pool is featured almost daily in Italian newspapers as one of the sites where the Presidente reportedly hosted scores of orgies—or, as they have become known around the world, Bunga Bungas. (There is heated debate about the origin of the term. Some say Berlusconi picked it up from Muammar Qaddafi—his friend, until recently. Others cite an off-color joke set in Africa.) The Bunga Bungas are a source of humiliation for many Italians, and of humor for others, including the Presidente, as Berlusconi is called. Not long ago, he told a convention of the Movement for National Responsibility, upon hearing its theme song, “My compliments on your anthem. I will use it as one of my songs for a Bunga Bunga!”

Berlusconi has always seemed pleased with himself. In 2006, he offered some advice to Italians living below the poverty line: “Do it my way and earn more money!” (His net worth is estimated at nine billion dollars.) He has described himself as “the best in the world—all the other world leaders wish they could be as good as I am.” Lately, however, his bravado has sounded increasingly misplaced. The Italian economy is stalled, and unemployment is at 8.4 per cent. In 2009, he was lambasted for his inadequate response to earthquakes in Abruzzo, which killed more than three hundred people and left seventy thousand homeless. Last July, Gianfranco Fini, the president of the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, who had been a crucial ally for sixteen years, broke away to form his own party. And then came Ruby.

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photo: markk

Mexico City

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A Billion Wicked Thoughts

by Maia Szalavitz

What internet searches reveal about human desire.

Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway.

For their new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other — at least sexually. I spoke recently with Ogas.

Why did you decide to analyze online porn searches?

I'm a computational neuroscientist. I view the mind as software. Most computational neuroscientists study higher functions like memory, language and vision. We wanted to apply the same techniques to a lower part of the brain, the sexual part.

So is "Rule 34" true — that if you can imagine it, there's porn of it?

When we first started, Rule 34 was almost a guiding idea. The Internet has every kind of imaginable porn; searches are going to reflect immense diversity. We quickly realized that [the data] didn't really support that.

Even though you can find an instance of any kind of porn you can imagine, people search for and spend money and time on 20 sexual interests, which account for 80% of all porn. The top five are youth, gays, [sexy mothers], breasts and cheating wives.

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The Long Weekend

by Alex Balk

What are you doing this weekend? Drinking, sure. Maybe you will attend some kind of "barbecue" or "cookout" with "friends" or "family," during which you will probably eat some charred animal flesh, unless you are a vegan, in which case you will stand there with an impossibly smug look on your face but will be secretly angry inside because all you've had to eat all day are chips and salsa and possibly carrots if they served some kind of vegetable platter. Maybe you'll stay in and blast the A/C and watch six seasons of whatever show you always wanted to get into that is now streaming on Netflix. Maybe you're sad and alone and you have no one to share the weekend with, in which case you'll probably spend most of your time sleeping or crying. There is a world of possibilities out there! But know this for sure: Because the Internet has completely rewired your brain and jacked up the level of stimulus you now constantly require, there will come a point at which you are completely bored and want something to read, but you will not want to turn on your computer because it's a three-day weekend and you feel like turning your computer says something bad about your ability to disconnect. Well, good news! Here are a few of the longer pieces we've run over the last six months or so. Print them out now and take them with you, wherever you go. When the urge strikes, pull 'em out and read 'em. It'll be just like being online, without the guilty feeling that actually being online provides. Enjoy! And have as good a time as you can. It's going to be Tuesday soon enough.

• Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert
• My Two Days as a Russian Tabloid Sensation
• The Last Two Veterans of World War I
• When Your Shrink Dies
• Chris Kanyon's Doomed Quest To Be Wrestling's First Openly Gay Star
• Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters
• Humanity's Endless Quest to Invent a Death Ray: A History
• Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun
• Gordon Likes to Think He is the Most Underrated of All Mythical Heroes
• A Q&A With A Vacuum Cleaner Salesman

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Photo by Niklas Hellerstedt, from Flickr.

The Truth About the American Economy

By Robert Reich

The U.S. economy continues to stagnate. It’s growing at the rate of 1.8 percent, which is barely growing at all. Consumer spending is down.

It’s vital that we understand the truth about the American economy.

How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?

The Great Prosperity

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.

During these three decades everyone’s wages grew — not just those at or near the top.

Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.

The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).

Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family’s income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.

The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.

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