Everybody Must Get Stoned (Two cultural revolutions)

[Most readers will want to skip this annoying exercise in boomer nostalgia.  If you are a Zhangke Jia fan then go see “Mountains May Depart” instead, my favorite film of the past year.]

I sometimes think the last half of the 1960s was the most interesting period in my lifetime.  I was a bit too young to have “been there” in a Woodstock sense, but I do recall quite a bit of what happened, especially in 1968.  Since the post will be almost entirely subjective, let me start with a few objective facts.  Here’s a graph of world population growth rates:

Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 2.33.42 PMUnfortunately I was not able to find a much more interesting graph that I once saw, which went from 10,000 years BC to 10,000 years AD.  It was flat as a pancake near 0% growth for thousands of years, then a very narrow spike up to 2.1% in the late 1960s, and then flat as a pancake near 0% growth for thousands of years into the future.  When people from 10,000 AD look back at this period, it will be seen as the demographic explosion.  (I believe the “notch” right before the peak is the Chinese Great Leap Forward, when 30 million starved to death.  Otherwise the early 1960s would have been the peak 5-year period.)

The late 1960s was also interesting from a political perspective.  Student movements erupted all over the world in 1968.  Back at home, the worst race riots in US history occurred during 1967 and 1968.  The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King occurred in 1968.  The Tet Offensive in Vietnam occurred in 1968, and pushed LBJ out of office.  Man first visited the moon in 1968, and the first moon landing would have occurred that year, if not for the tragic fire of 1966.  The best sci-fi movie was made in 1968.  The biggest airplane that most of you have ever flown on was first produced in 1968.

The political craziness of 1968 didn’t just come out of nowhere.  I believe that 1966 was the year of “peak idealism” in American history.  A whole raft of highly influential liberal Republicans were elected in 1966, just two years after the Goldwater debacle (Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, Percy, Lindsey (in 1965), Chafee, Brooke, etc.)  Middle class white men, in both parties, actually believed liberal ideas provided the answer to America’s problems.

We could end poverty, go to the moon, and make Southern California a paradise for drivers.  Truly anything seemed possible.

Today is the 50th anniversary of two important cultural revolutions.  At least important to me and my wife, maybe not to you.  (OK, tomorrow is the anniversary, but it’s already tomorrow in China.)

The late 1960s saw a flood of very innovative pop music albums (Sergeant Pepper, Pet Sounds, Beggars Banquet, Are You Experienced, Led Zeppelin, and an album with a banana on the cover, among others.)  One of the most important, and my all-time favorite studio album, is Blonde on Blonde, released May 16, 1966.  Between 1962 and 1966 Dylan created a lifetime’s worth of musical styles, in 7 studio albums, plus non-album hits (Positively 4th Street) plus unreleased masterpieces (She’s Your Lover Now).

I didn’t start seriously listening to music until the early 1970s, when I was in high school.  What surprised me is that you could generally figure out when a song was produced to within a year of so, just based on the sound.  Styles were changing that fast.  And Dylan’s music always seemed to come out a bit before the rest of the world caught up. I actually think his earlier “Bringing it all Back Home” was his most influential album, and perhaps his best—compare it to other pop music from early 1965—but I love the sound of Blonde on Blonde. (Dylan suggested “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”)

BTW, Dylan created that lifetime worth of music before he turned 25.

At the same time that Americans were producing great pop music while getting stoned, the Chinese people were literally getting stoned, at least if they were well educated or if their ancestors were landlords. On the very same day that Blonde on Blonde was released, the Chinese Cultural Revolution began. The eventual death toll is unknown, but certainly an order of magnitude lower than the Great Leap Forward. Nonetheless, in “utility terms” it was one of the most awful things to ever happen. Mao created perhaps the worst society imaginable—at least in urban China.  People were put under enormous psychological stress to inflict great cruelty on their friends and family.  Society doesn’t get much more perverse than that. Even today, China has not fully recovered, and remains a low trust society relative to the US, although things are certainly improving.

Earlier I talked about 1966 representing “peak idealism” in America.  In China, 1966 represented a year when idealism was raised to such a pitch that it ended up being twisted into the exact opposite.  In Chinese culture, losing face is about the worst thing that can happen, and the Cultural Revolution was all about public humiliation.

While my wife was suffering through that period, I was listening to Dylan, who shaped my adolescent mind more than any other artist, in any medium:

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

PS.  I vividly recall wanting to move to California after reading the following National Geographic article, in 1966.  I hated the cold weather in Wisconsin.  When I dug up the article today I was surprised by the date:

Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 3.39.26 PMOh yeah, this is supposed to be a monetary blog.  OK, 1966 is when the Great Inflation began, the defining economic event of my life.

The 1960s and 1970s made me a monetarist, and the 1980s made me a market monetarist.

Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 4.04.06 PM


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27 Responses to “Everybody Must Get Stoned (Two cultural revolutions)”

  1. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    15. May 2016 at 18:27

    “Mao created perhaps the worst society imaginable—at least in urban China.”

    -Nonsense. Life expectancy skyrocketed under Mao, and malnutrition, though still high by his death, declined. China in the 1870s was worse, though the government was much weaker. And the Taiping Rebellion was probably just as bad as Mao’s China, if not worse.

    “China has not fully recovered, and remains a low trust society relative to the US”

    -China was a low-trust society relative to the U.S. before the Chinese Exclusion Act.

    “I hated the cold weather in Wisconsin.”

    -And I’d hate to live in Nevada, Florida, or Mississippi. California has its own set of problems, including earthquakes.

    Who knows how much world population will grow over the next ten thousand years? Someday, childcare will be really cheap.

    Yes, the 1960s was interesting. Especially it being the last hurrah of the great post-WWII RGDP/worker boom.

  2. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    15. May 2016 at 18:32

    Ha-ha. Some of us, exact same vintage as Scott Sumner, grew up in Southern California specifically Altadena-Pasadena. Instead of sailboats and the Golden Gate Bridge we saw a nearly solid scrim of smog, day after day.

    On clear days, in the middle of winter after a rainstorm, you might wave a re-introductory hello to your neighbors across the street.

    L.A. beaches featured not blue waters, but a fishless brown-grey.

    It is amazing I have libertarian sentiments.

  3. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    15. May 2016 at 18:56

    Heck, the Japanese occupation was worse than Mao’s China.

  4. Gravatar of PG PG
    15. May 2016 at 19:13

    There’s something I don’t understand about the first graph (population growth rate and total population). If the growth rate is the derivative of the population wrt time, then the maximum of the growth rate (at ~1970) should correspond to the inflection point of the population curve. But the inflection point of the population curve is at ~2010.

  5. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    15. May 2016 at 19:31

    @PG

    -No, it’s not. The number of people born per year peaked in the 1990s. As a percentage of the existing population, that was in the late 1960s.

  6. Gravatar of Postkey Postkey
    16. May 2016 at 01:05

    “The 1960s and 1970s made me a monetarist, and the 1980s made me a market monetarist.”

    This is the ‘theoretical reality’ re the “quantity theory of money”?

    “Yet you say (above) that inflation only occurs when money supply is in excess of money demand. . . .
    , but I think this is a key question and one that I have never found a monetarist able to answer: how is it in the real world that the central bank raises money supply above money demand? Can you please tell me this and in the context of actual Federal reserve policy tools?
    This is not a trivial question. The entire monetarist superstructure rests on it. If the answer is that in reality this cannot happen, then I’m not sure how the rest of the monetarist analysis survives.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2011/05/14/money-growth-does-not-cause-inflation/4/#730f82101ef9

  7. Gravatar of daguix daguix
    16. May 2016 at 02:12

    I think the projections are wrong. The population growth is very likely to become negative. We already see it in all advanced countries: Japan, Europe.

  8. Gravatar of JMCSF JMCSF
    16. May 2016 at 05:02

    We’ve certainly made progress. Today a 16billion dollar company makes an app that lets you send disappearing video clips and photos with cool and innovative filters.

  9. Gravatar of Patrick R. Sullivan Patrick R. Sullivan
    16. May 2016 at 05:18

    ‘1966 is when the Great Inflation began, the defining economic event of my life.’

    Though it took me a few years to realize it (I remember reading Friedman’s ‘Dollars and Deficits’ in a laundromat while my clothes dried, in the mid-70s when I had my epiphany; ‘Oh, now I get it!’).

    Now that knowledge is like some lost secret of the Incas, as far as most people are concerned.

  10. Gravatar of PG PG
    16. May 2016 at 05:21

    E. Harding,

    My confusion was due to the fact that growth rate is represented as a percentage of the existing population, so you have to multiply by the value of the population curve. Thanks.

  11. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    16. May 2016 at 05:30

    Harding, Life expectancy? I think you completely missed the point. There is much more to life than numbers.

    And yes, other than intentionally murdering 30 million Chinese in the GLF, Mao wasn’t so bad on the life expectancy issue.

    You said:

    “Who knows how much world population will grow over the next ten thousand years? Someday, childcare will be really cheap.”

    There is no plausible future global population growth rate that would significantly impact my claim. (Unless global population were to soar to currently unimaginable levels, and do so quickly. Here I defer to Robin Hanson.)

    You said:

    “Heck, the Japanese occupation was worse than Mao’s China.”

    Yes, under peacetime Mao did slightly better than China under a horrific foreign invasion that killed perhaps 20 million. Whoopee!

    PG, It would be the inflection point (I think) with a log scale. But it’s an arithmetric scale.

    Postkey, Unlike other monetarists, I don’t believe that the Fed does raise the money supply above money demand. I think they raise it above the current money demand, ceteris paribus. But ceteris isn’t paribus and things change to insure equality between Ms and Md. In the short run asset prices change, and in the long run NGDP rises.

    daguix, In the distant future population growth may become negative, although the truth is that no one knows. In any case it’s only likely to be slightly negative, and hence global population growth will still be close to zero, even if slightly negative. Even if global population fell by 90% over the next 10,000 years, the average growth rate would be roughly zero.

  12. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    16. May 2016 at 05:31

    Patrick, Unfortunately you are right.

  13. Gravatar of Brian Donohue Brian Donohue
    16. May 2016 at 06:44

    Hey Scott, I wonder how you and your fellow baby boomers feel about the mountain of debt y’all plan to leave behind. You can’t really say it was like that when you got here. Any twinge of guilt?

  14. Gravatar of collin collin
    16. May 2016 at 07:00

    And 50 years after Peak American Idealism, we have Donald Trump has main strength is he reminds many Americans of where the 1966 future would look like. (The Trump supporters I know imagine a different 2016 American.)

    1) I have come to understand the 1950 – 1966 income growth came from the global labor shortage of the Post WW2 years (and the baby bust of Early Depression). So union power increased in order to gain workers with a control on wages. US manufacturing could pay higher wages without less international competition from bombed out Europe and Japan with the Iron Curtain from other nations.

    2) The 1970s inflation came from the high increase of labor supply due to the Boomers, increase of women and minorities in the work force. Additionally this is when the Japanese and German manufacturing started beating US manufacturing.

    3) With increased automation and robots, do we need as many people for production? It does appear the richer we are the less we can afford having children.

    4) Realize that graph does not show how much the birth rates have dropped the last 25 years. Japan’s birth dropped in the early 1970s and only now do we see the falling population totals. In fact is there a very competitive capitalistic society today that has a high birth rate outside of Israel?

  15. Gravatar of collin collin
    16. May 2016 at 07:17

    In reality, the greatest music organization, Motown, of the 1960s reached its high point in 1966 as well! Actually I still the worst music breakup in history is the production and songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Berry Gordy in 1967/1968. (They staged slowdowns in 1967 and left in 1968.)

  16. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    16. May 2016 at 08:35

    “I have come to understand the 1950 – 1966 income growth came from the global labor shortage of the Post WW2 years (and the baby bust of Early Depression).”

    -That works for the Black Plague; not the 1950-1966 era. The latter must be explained mostly by the increasing use of fossil-fuel related technology. Why didn’t such an enormous global boom take place during the 1918-1929 era?

    “The 1970s inflation came from the high increase of labor supply due to the Boomers, increase of women and minorities in the work force.”

    -The 1970s stagnation, maybe. The 1970s inflation must be blamed on loose money.

    “other than intentionally murdering 30 million Chinese”

    -Not intentionally.

    “Unless global population were to soar to currently unimaginable levels, and do so quickly.”

    -Why not? Bangladesh is the same size as Kansas.

  17. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    16. May 2016 at 09:19

    “The Anglo-Saxon worries about Irish immigrants in the 1800s look ridiculous today.”

    -Uh, no they don’t. Irish Catholics

    1. Were instrumental in helping capture the Democratic party from the South (which transformed the Party of Adlai Stevenson into the Party of John Kerry).

    2. Have a very strong tendency to support the Donald. Italian and Polish Americans also tend to be big Trump supporters.

    BTW, Texas is a massive outlier:

    https://goo.gl/a9eyt0

    and the outlier is not the rule. For an example of a fully Hispanicized society, look at Puerto Rico.

  18. Gravatar of Tom Brown Tom Brown
    16. May 2016 at 09:33

    1966 … yes, truly a momentous year. The one I was born in. I was born in that same California you dreamed about, but in the desert. I always wanted to live in a place where plants grew on their own, and where the Summer heat stayed under 100 degrees (we often had days > 110), and where you might get some actual fog rather than just dust storms that seemed a little like fog. Lol.

  19. Gravatar of collin collin
    16. May 2016 at 09:42

    -That works for the Black Plague; not the 1950-1966 era. The latter must be explained mostly by the increasing use of fossil-fuel related technology. Why didn’t such an enormous global boom take place during the 1918-1929 era?

    There wasn’t a huge boom in the United States during the 1920s? In reality, was there ever an economy that was as productive as the United States in the 1920s. That economy was the definition of Boom times! So the US leadership in the West (probably because of Soviet threats) focused more on pro-US Europe as opposed the battles of the WW1 years.

    Of course there were a lot factors to inflation of the 1970s in terms of oil prices, Fed policies, etc. However, when looking at the job creation of the 1970s, it was not historically low. (To the point that more jobs were created per year were created under Carter versus created per year with Reagan.) So I do think we are underestimating the demographic bubble of the Boomers in the 1970s. Additionally, we are on the other end of that bubble and notice inflation in the developed world is not a threat.

  20. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    16. May 2016 at 09:51

    “There wasn’t a huge boom in the United States during the 1920s?”

    -In the U.S., yes, but the U.S. didn’t lose all that many people during WWI. I suggest looking at places like France, Germany, and the U.K.

    Yes, demographics did contribute to per worker real income stagnation during the 1970s.

    Inflation is not a threat due to more cautious monetary policy.

  21. Gravatar of Engineer Engineer
    16. May 2016 at 11:52

    Ah yes the 60’s and 70’s… back before O’bama…when boys were boys and girls were girls…and there was no confusion about which locker room you should enter…..really makes you wonder what is the next executive order going to be….I’m so glad we are have a president working on the urgent issues that face us and is willing you use his authority to get around those other inconvenient branches of government.

  22. Gravatar of Postkey Postkey
    16. May 2016 at 13:19

    “Postkey, Unlike other monetarists, I don’t believe that the Fed does raise the money supply above money demand. I think they raise it above the current money demand, ceteris paribus. But ceteris isn’t paribus . .. ”

    More cognitive dissonance?

  23. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    16. May 2016 at 16:24

    Brian, You said:

    “Any twinge of guilt?”

    No, because I’m a really high saver, and hence not part of the problem. The other boomers should feel guilty, however.

    Collin, You said:

    “The 1970s inflation came from the high increase of labor supply due to the Boomers”

    Wrong, More supply means lower prices. The Fed caused the 1970s inflation, it’s not even debatable.

  24. Gravatar of Art Deco Art Deco
    17. May 2016 at 10:10

    “I have come to understand the 1950 – 1966 income growth came from the global labor shortage of the Post WW2 years (and the baby bust of Early Depression).”

    There was no baby bust during the Depression. Annual birth cohorts, which had risen rapidly in size during the earlier part of the century, bounced around a set point of just north of 2 million for about a decade. From 1939 to 1952, there was a rapid net increase in cohort sizes amounting to a doubling (with jagged year to year variations during the war), followed by a mild upward trajectory from 1952 to 1957, followed by a true bust running from 1957 to 1976 (during which birth cohorts fell in size by about 30%, from 4.3 million to 2.9 million), followed by a recovery.

  25. Gravatar of Art Deco Art Deco
    17. May 2016 at 10:21

    Were instrumental in helping capture the Democratic party from the South (which transformed the Party of Adlai Stevenson into the Party of John Kerry).

    Come again? Adlai Stevenson was a Unitarian lawyer born into the small-city gentry of downstate Illinois. Someone once remarked that he was the first presidential politician notable as a critic of American culture rather than it’s celebrant. He was quite distinct from Truman and from Alfred E. Smith. Irish Catholics were crucial in assembling the city machines from the remains of the northern Democratic Party and immigrant segments. The South did not begin to head for the exits until around 1952 (with some foreshadowing in 1928). By that time, the machines which the Irish had assembled were dissipating. The last was Mayor Daley’s in Chicago. Mayor Daley was never an ally of either professional class twits or rentiers (John Kerry manifesting one in part and the other in part). While we’re at it, John Kerry’s Bohemian-Jewish on the paternal side and blueblood on the maternal side (with the maternal side much more influential); his grandfather and great uncle decided on a new surname upon immigrating and picked Kerry at random using an atlas. The Irish pols in Boston did not much care for him and backed his opponent James Shannon when Kerry made his first run for federal office.

  26. Gravatar of collin collin
    18. May 2016 at 08:48

    Collin, You said:

    “The 1970s inflation came from the high increase of labor supply due to the Boomers”

    Wrong, More supply means lower prices. The Fed caused the 1970s inflation, it’s not even debatable.

    Maybe, we don’t have inflation if we were able to cut 10 – 15% of real wages for the working class in 1974. Or if we had consistent 8 – 10 % unemployment between 1974 – 1982 with higher Fed rates. (I have come to understand 1974 – 1982 was an extended recessionary period.) And didn’t the hourly wage of the working class decline about ~10% from 1974 to 1992?

  27. Gravatar of Floccina Floccina
    18. May 2016 at 12:42

    The 1960s and 1970s made me a monetarist, and the 1980s made me a market monetarist.

    I remember in 1978 or 1979 an economics professor telling us, right in class, that if the Fed Government balanced the budget, it would result in a Depression that would “make the great depression seem like a tea party”.

    Also doom was announced to students about population growth and environmental collapse. One Resource Economics professor told us he did not know what we should do about all that so perhaps we might as well have a “orgy of consumption” because the crash was unavoidable.

    We were assigned to read Paul Ehrlich’s books as if they were serious. All was doom and gloom.

    I think of that when people can me denier for not panicking about AGW. The likes of Paul Ehrlich and our professors plus experience trained us well to be sceptical of profits of environmental doom.

    Interesting time indeed.

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