What really happened in the 1980s and where are we now?
From a personal perspective, the 1980s was an alarming decade. It was that time when our family sought to buy a small rural block of land in the North West of Tasmania, Australia. It was our first major purchase. Within the space of two years however we felt the awful financial consequences of the doubling of land prices combined with extraordinarily high real interest rates on our mortgage. There were few jobs at the time - and low-paid at that - to cushion this dramatic decline in our standard of living and the debt burden that went with it. [1] So what happened? Why have we gradually moved into a world where it's taken for granted that both parents go out to work, that a normal household lives under the burden of (often) unprecedented levels of debt and where Fukushima logic in the industrial sphere has left many people with a dreaded fear of humanity's extinction event in the short run? The following economic and social narrative may partly explain what I see as our fr...