Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (57 page)

Trends in education further threatened equality of opportunity in America. In the “knowledge economy” of globalization and computerization that spread in the 1990s, specialized expertise became particularly important in the professions, the sciences, and the business world, yet the cost of tuition and fees at most colleges and universities increased at a considerably more rapid rate than wages and salaries. Although a handful of wealthy private universities managed to offer substantial financial aid to students, very few could afford to establish “need-blind” admissions programs or to set aside the large sums necessary to support graduate students. The sons and daughters of wealthy parents, enabled to attend expensive private schools and elite universities, were gaining an increasingly enviable edge over their economically less fortunate competitors. By 2000, many critics, including university presidents, worried that an intergenerational educational elite was taking shape, which in the future would dangerously expand the power of class privilege in the United States.

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OTWITHSTANDING THE POSSIBLE
consequences of these troubling long-range trends, most middle-class Americans in the mid- and late 1990s did not seem to be terribly exercised. As earlier, they did not worry much about inequality: As at most times in the history of the United States, class resentments continued to be relatively muted. Instead, most people focused on their own situations, and those of their friends and families. In so doing, they had reason to be pleased with a great many developments at the time. Take, for instance, the environment. Serious concerns, to be sure, persisted. The surge of immigration, which more than any other development caused America’s population to rise (from 203.3 million in 1970 to 281.4 million in 2000, or by 38 percent) continued to alarm a number of environmentalists who lamented the impact of population increase on resources and on the quality of American life.
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Thanks in part to population growth, battles over access to water and land still provoked bitter controversy in the West. Fights over commercial and residential development polarized communities all about the country. Most scientists agreed that global warming presented serious problems. Chemical runoff from agricultural fertilizers and pesticides polluted a number of lakes, rivers, and bays, such as Chesapeake Bay.
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Hundreds of toxic sites remained to be cleaned up. Millions of Americans lived in areas where soot and smog threatened air standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency.
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In a great many ways, though, the environmental movement that had surged ahead in the 1970s had become a mainstream phenomenon by the 1990s.
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By then, pressure from activists, including “eco-feminists,” had prompted increasing public awareness about the dangers from toxic chemicals and lead poisoning. Other activists had stopped the authorization of environmentally controversial dams.
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Recycling became the norm in most communities. Acid rain decreased by one-half between 1970 and 2000.
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The ongoing development of high-yield agriculture led to the reforestation of a great deal of once cultivated land. Though runoff from agricultural chemicals was damaging, tougher controls on the dumping of sewage and industrial waste enabled many streams and lakes—including Lake Erie, where pollution had been near catastrophic—to regenerate.

Curbs on emissions from cars and smokestacks had helped clean the air. Despite population growth and a doubling of car miles traveled between 1970 and 2000, smog declined by one-third over those thirty years. The spread of energy-efficient household appliances, significant since the 1970s, slowed the rise in use of electricity. SUVs aside, most automobiles were more fuel-efficient than they had been in the 1970s. Thanks to improvements such as these, and to lower oil prices, energy costs, which had peaked at 13 percent of GDP during the oil crisis of 1979, declined to between 6 and 7 percent between 1995 and 1999.
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Per capita consumption of energy in America, though increasing since the mid-1980s, rose more gradually than did population, or than economic output per capita. The Very Bad Old Days of the 1970s, when extraordinarily wasteful uses of energy had helped to provoke national crises, appeared by 2000 to have ended.
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In other ways, too, the quality of life in the late 1990s was better for most people than it had been in the 1970s and 1980s. One such change involved food. Though the massive consumption of junk food (and the sedentary life of riding around in cars and watching television) helped to drive a rise in obesity, the majority of Americans were also enjoying considerably greater choice in deciding what and where to eat.
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In supermarkets as well as in urban and suburban restaurants, which proliferated greatly during the late 1990s, a wide variety of fresh, local, and seasonal foods, as well as ethnic and organic foods, was becoming more readily available. Television chefs—Julia Child had been a pioneer in the field—captured growing audiences. Wealthy patrons of restaurants in major cities such as New York could feast on all manner of imaginative appetizers, salads, entrées, and desserts. Consumption of fine wines rose enormously. No longer could it dismissively be said, as it often had been, that most American people soldiered on in a bland and unimaginative gastronomic culture of casseroles, turkey and stuffing, and (for those who could afford it) Sunday dinners of roast beef, potatoes, and apple pie.

Another improvement for most people was more basic: in health. Though 14 percent of Americans—roughly 40 million—still suffered from a lack of health insurance at the turn of the century, a host of technological advances in medicine continued to better the quality of life for the majority of people who had adequate coverage.
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The introduction of more effective anti-retroviral drugs was at last moderating the epidemic of AIDS in the United States. Preventive measures were becoming effective in improving personal health: Per capita smoking continued to decline, lessening mortality from tobacco, and bans on smoking began to cleanse the air in public places.
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Rates of infant mortality slowly decreased. Thanks especially to improvements in dealing with cardiovascular disease, life expectancy at birth, which had averaged 70.8 years in 1970, rose to 76.9 by 2000.
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Better roads (and seat belt laws and tougher penalties for drunk driving) made it safer to drive: Though the number of miles driven greatly increased, fatalities from motor vehicle accidents declined absolutely, from 51,090 in 1980 to 41,820 in 2000.
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Insofar as household possessions were concerned, Americans had never had it so good. In 2001, a record-high percentage of houses—68 percent—were owner-occupied, up from 64 percent in 1990.
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The living spaces of the housing units built in the 1990s were even larger on the average than earlier (and households were smaller in size), thereby offering more personal comfort and privacy and making room for a wide variety of goods and gadgets. Many other goods, such as automobiles, were of higher quality than in earlier years and cost less in inflation-adjusted dollars. The Web site eBay was becoming an extraordinarily popular destination for bargain hunters. Wal-Mart was a special boon to low- and middle-income shoppers. It was estimated that sales at Wal-Mart stores helped to lower the rate of inflation nationally by as much as 1 percent per year.
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At the turn of the century, the United States was truly a utopia of consumer goods, conveniences, and personal comforts. Of the 107 million households in the country in 2001, 106 million had color television (76 million had two or more sets); 96 million, VCR and/or DVD players; 92 million, microwave ovens; 84 million, electric clothes washers; 82 million, cable TV; 81 million, either room or central air-conditioning; 79 million, electric or gas clothes dryers; 60 million, personal computers; and 51 million, access to the Internet. More than 85 million households had one or more cars or trucks.
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Americans had the means to enjoy travel as never before—for a total of 1,602 billion miles in 2000, as compared to 1,418 billion miles in 1990 and 1,126 billion miles in 1980.
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Consumer choice was even more dazzling than earlier, to the point of prompting shoppers to complain of “catalog-induced anxiety.” Comforts and possessions once only dreamed of—two or three cars, sail and power boats, frequent and faraway travel, second homes—were becoming affordable for steadily higher numbers of people who had ascended to the ranks of the upper-middle and upper classes.

A key force behind these developments was the rapidly improving economy of the late 1990s, which enabled the United States to emerge from the decade as even more incontestably the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. In 2001, the United States produced 22 percent of the world’s output, a considerably higher percentage than Britain had managed (8 percent) at the peak of its empire in 1913.
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America’s per capita GDP in constant dollars increased at an average rate of more than 3 percent per year between 1996 and 2000.
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By 2000, charitable giving (via individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations) reached an all-time high as a percentage of GDP, 2.3 percent.
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Unemployment declined, bottoming out at 4 percent in 2000, the lowest in many years. Notwithstanding complaints about outsourcing, joblessness was considerably lower in the United States than in the more troubled economies of most other western nations at the time.
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Defenders of outsourcing maintained—probably accurately—that the practice, though devastating to those who were fired, improved the long-run competitiveness of many American producers, thereby protecting or enhancing employment over time. The cost of living in the United States, meanwhile, increased only a little during these bountiful years.

Though the very wealthy reaped the greatest benefits from these changes, the majority of other Americans had more to spend in real dollars in 2000 than they had in the mid-1990s. Much of the rise in income inequality in the 1990s seems to have reflected the very large gains that were enjoyed by a relatively small number of hyper-rich people at the top of the income pyramid; shares of total income changed modestly in the vastly more populous middle and lower levels.
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Per capita disposable income (in constant 1996 dollars), which had risen only slowly between 1991 and 1995, increased from $20,795 in 1995 to $23,687 in 2001.
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Median household money income (in constant 2000 dollars) rose from $38,262 in 1995 to $42,151 in 2000.
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As in previous decades, dual-income households fared especially well economically.
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Poverty began to plummet—down to 11.3 percent of the population in 2000. That meant that 31.1 million people, 7 million fewer than in 1994, lived in households below the government’s official poverty line.
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The real per capita income of Native Americans, though still only one-half of the national average in 2000, improved by roughly one-third during the decade.
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Americans still enjoyed the highest per capita incomes in real buying power of any people on the planet.
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Contemporaries marveled that America’s low inflation and low unemployment could coexist. This was a “Goldilocks economy”—hot enough to advance prosperity yet cool enough to prevent inflation.

Pro-American observers from Europe swelled the chorus of hosannas about economic life in the United States in the late 1990s, stressing what they correctly perceived as the positive openness, creativity, and risk-taking dynamism of American culture. Small wonder, they said, that millions of people around the world continued to flock to the New World’s land of opportunity. In the United States, they emphasized, abundant resources stimulated large visions of possibility: People who scrambled and gambled still had a good chance of advancing in life. Josef Joffe, a conservative German commentator, remarked of the American scene in 1997, “Traditions are being cracked right and left. The trend is toward individualization, nonhierarchical cooperation and breathless innovation. Creativity rather than order rules. These values have always defined American culture, but today they are shaping Europe and Asia willy-nilly because otherwise they could not keep up.” Jonathan Freedland, a British writer, added in 1998, “On a bad day Britain can feel so fixed in the past, change seems all but impossible.” He added, “Put crudely, the ambitious Brit hopes to find his place in a system that already exists and seems to have existed for ever, while the ambitious American hopes to change it—or even to build a new one.”
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