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Summary
Summary
"This is the end of the world as we've known it," Kurt Andersen writes in Reset . "But it isn't the end of the world." In this smart and refreshingly hopeful book, Andersen--a brilliant analyst and synthesizer of historical and cultural trends, as well as a bestselling novelist and host of public radio's Studio 360 --shows us why the current economic crisis is actually a moment of great opportunity to get ourselves and our nation back on track.
Historically, America has always shifted between wild, exuberant speculation and steady, sober hard work, as well as back and forth between economic booms and busts, and between right and left politically. This is one of the rare moments when all these cycles shift dramatically and simultaneously--a moment when complacency ends, ossified structures loosen up, and enormous positive change is possible.
The shock to the system can enable each of us to rethink certain habits and focus more on the things that make us authentically happy. The present flux can enable us as a society to consolidate the enormous gains of the last several decades in areas such as technology, crime prevention, women's and civil rights, and the democratization of the planet. We can reap the fruits of a revival of realism and pragmatism at home and abroad. As we enter a new era of post-party-line common sense, we can start to reinvent hopelessly broken systems--in health care, education, climate change, and more--and rediscover some of the old-fashioned American values of which we've lost sight.
In Reset , Andersen explains how we've done it before and why we are about to do it again--and better than ever.
Author Notes
Kurt Anderson is an American author, born in Nebraska in 1954. He is a graduate of Harvard College and was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon. He is the host and co-creator of the radio show and podcast, Studio 360 for which he won a Peabody Award. He is a co-founder of Spy Magazine. He has also worked as editor-in-chief for New York, and a cultural columnist and critic for Time magazine and New Yorker. He writes for television, film and stage. His most recent book is entitled, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One We Let the Good Times Roll Let's be honest: we all saw this coming for a long, long time. In the early 1980s, right around when Ronald Reagan became president and Wall Street's great modern bull market began, we Americans gave ourselves over to gambling (and winning ). We started thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007 the price of the average new American home quadrupled, and almost doubled even after adjusting for inflation. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007-a 500 percent increase after inflation. From the beginning of the 1980s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent paying off its mortgage and consumer debt increased by 35 percent. Back in 1982, the average American household saved 11 percent of its disposable income, but then the percentage steadily dropped, to less than 1 percent in 2007. Not coincidentally, it was during this same period that state- sanctioned and state- run gambling became ubiquitous in America. Until the late 1980s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now twelve states do, and forty- eight of the fifty have some form of legalized betting. It's as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun we ought to make them year- round ways of life. We started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new American house increased by half, even as the average family became smaller. During the two decades ending 2007, the average new American car got 29 percent heavier, 89 percent more powerful, and 2 percent less efficient. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least twenty pounds heavier than someone of the same age during the 1970s. Back in the late 1970s, 15 percent of Americans were obese; more than a third of us are now. We saw what was happening for years, for decades, but we ignored it or shrugged it off, not quite believing that push would really, finally come to shove. The U.S. automobile industry has been in deep trouble for decades. Detroit's unprofitability this last year has been breathtaking, but as long ago as 1980 (the year the federal government first bailed out Chrysler) newspapers were regularly carrying headlines about "record losses" at the car companies. Ever since then, cheap oil and occasional upticks-minivans and pickup trucks and SUVs! Saturn! the PT Cruiser!- have prolonged the great denial, sustaining an increasingly desperate wishfulness that the good old days might somehow return. For a decade now, ever since the web really took off, almost every part of the old- media industry-newspapers, magazines, network TV, local TV, records-has been in trouble, with only the rate, speed, and severity of shrinkage in question. But until very recently, most of them were managed as though their businesses wouldn't, couldn't ever really, finally die. But newspapers' circulations are now evaporating at a stupendously accelerating rate-by 5 and 10 and 20 percent a year-and last year Americans bought fewer than half as many CDs as they did in 2000. We watched the median household income steadily decline since the end of the twentieth century . . . but, but, but our houses and our 401(k)s were ballooning in value, right? Even (and sometimes especially) smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the miraculous power of th Excerpted from Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America by Kurt Andersen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
