
Last year, writing about the artificial shortage of spots at elite colleges, which have not really grown since 1970, I made this observation:
The year 1970 keeps popping up in this kind of context. For all the clamor of that era’s counterculture about “change” and “revolution,” there are an awful lot of things that began to stagnate at about 1970. It is America’s Year of Stasis: the year our per capita energy usage peaked, the year many towns erected zoning barriers against growth, and apparently the year elite colleges decided they had grown as much as they ever needed to and would stay that way forever.
What we need to confront is the wider cultural malaise of a country that in significant ways gave up on growth as a goal—for universities, for towns, for energy, for everything—50 years ago.
I have a new piece up at Discourse this morning on “The Year of Stasis,” which expands on that observation.
Incidentally, after writing this, I came upon a website titled simply, “WTF Happened in 1971,” which consists of graph after graph showing this phenomenon from many different angles. It seems to be a grab bag of complaints about everything going wrong starting in 1971, but there is an underlying trend to it: a slowdown of growth and economic progress.
One of the things we need to realize is how deliberate this all is. We didn’t stumble onto stasis, we pursued it. In examining the Henry Adams Curve—a leveling off of energy consumption per capita starting in 1970—I came across a great illustration of this in the strangling of nuclear power.
The first nuclear power plant in the U.S. went online in 1957, and by 1973, there were nearly 200 nuclear plants across the country at various stages of permitting, construction, and operation. Then it all came to a grinding halt: In 1970, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which imposed extensive new permitting requirements on any large project, and the 1971 Calvert Cliffs case applied this law to require stricter licensing of nuclear power.
The judges’ ruling declares their dedication to upholding “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’” Well, mission accomplished.
Complaints about nuclear energy are familiar. The one that was new to me is this: “I was astonished to discover recently that New York City’s subway system has not been extended since 1940—that’s 85 years of stagnation.”
Some of this is associated with the left, but I point out how thoroughly it is infused in today’s right.
[P]erhaps the purest expression of this viewpoint is Donald Trump courting the longshoremen’s union. The president of the International Longshoremen’s Association has been threatening a nationwide dockworkers’ strike to prevent ports from automating the unloading of shipping containers. According to a New York Times report:
Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that he had met with ILA leaders and was sympathetic to their concerns. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” he wrote. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”
But the “traditional” method of shipping that Trump is trying to protect is not all that old. It dates to—you guessed it—about 1970. The modern intermodal shipping container was invented in 1956 and standardized by the International Organization for Standardization in 1968. And the unions fought it every step of the way because it deprived longshoremen of the extra work of moving and arranging non-standardized boxes and barrels.
Though after watching Elon Musk last night, I think there are some conservatives who want us to go back to 1933.
We need to remember that stasis is not, in fact, sustainable. It is usually a prelude to collapse.
“From ‘Throw Your Body on the Gears’ to ‘Build the Future’”
After I wrote that piece but before it was published, I came across an even more perfect example of the mania for stasis.
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