My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been sidelined, by catastrophe. 1/7

And so we had several glorious decades of prosperity and peace, sometimes bizarrely called ‘the golden age of capitalism’. Bizarre because what brought that prosperity and peace was the heaviest government intervention in ordinary life in history. It created ‘the public’. 2/7

Mentioning it here because Cameron Murray’s book on housing refers to this same period, and draws the same conclusions, for housing. To quote: “…the ‘golden age’ of economic expansion—the end of World War II until the mid-1970s.” 3/7

“That age not only saw a great demographic change due to the baby boom, but it ended with a peak in many social indicators. That age, for example, saw the highest rate of public housing construction in Australia and the United Kingdom…Considered over a longer time frame,…4/7

…the housing market of the last four decades looks like a return to the normal operation of private property markets after an abnormal break in the mid-twentieth century…Historically, housing markets were always divided between the haves and have-nots. What we are seeing… 5/7

…since the 1980s is a return to the normal operation of housing markets after the post-Word War II decades of heavy government intervention.” This is also what we’re experiencing for Covid, a return to public health (or rather absence of) approaches from earlier centuries. 6/7

Because the politics from the late-1970s to today has been most fundamentally an all-out assault on public everything. Old (and new) elites attacking the State, to restore old hierarchies. That’s what ‘the economy’ and its markets are. Not economic, they’re political. /end