Earl-Of-IMDb
War Child
that picture with the white stripes and the elephant is creepy..
You can find both horror and great beauty and joyfulness in any decade. Just depends where you choose to look.
But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.
-Paul Krugman, December 27, 2009
You can find both horror and great beauty and joyfulness in any decade. Just depends where you choose to look.
perhaps "decade from Hell" is pretty America-centric. i think it was the worst decade for the US since the 1930s, and though there was far greater mass death for the US in the 1940s, one could argue that the loss of life defeated fascism.
India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa -- all had a very good decade, and Europe has certainly been through worse.
but for the US, it's been shameful in many ways, and as nathan pointed out, at least the everyday heroes did rise to the occasion.
perhaps "decade from Hell" is pretty America-centric. i think it was the worst decade for the US since the 1930s, and though there was far greater mass death for the US in the 1940s, one could argue that the loss of life defeated fascism.
India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa -- all had a very good decade, and Europe has certainly been through worse.
but for the US, it's been shameful in many ways, and as nathan pointed out, at least the everyday heroes did rise to the occasion.
02. The 00s poverty rate was lower than ANY decade in US history with exception of the 1970s.
Strangely enough, the naughties also so men displaying chest hair more freely than any decade other than the 1970's. Coincidence? I think not.
To paraphrase the question Ronald Reagan posed years ago, Are you better off today than you were at the beginning of the decade? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. Let us count the ways. For one thing, the stock market is down 26% since 2000, making this the worst decade for stocks. (Inflation-adjusted, it's even worse.) I remember Warren Buffett telling me at the beginning of the decade that there was no way the go-go returns of the 1990s were going to continue and that we had better get used to meager returns going forward. Buffett saw it coming.
For the average working stiff, it was a pretty lousy 10 years. The median household income in 2000 was $52,500. Last year (the most recent year available) it was $50,303. And given that the unemployment rate has climbed to 10.2%, income will almost certainly drop again this year. Low-income Americans fared even worse. In 2000, 11.3% of Americans were living below the poverty line. By 2008, that number had risen to 13.2%. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans without health insurance increased from 13.7% to 15.4%.
Surprisingly, housing prices were not such a debacle — that is, if you bought early and stayed put. The median price of an existing home was $143,600 in 2000. Today the median is nearly $175,000. But remember, millions of Americans splurged for homes in the middle of the decade when prices were high: in July 2006 the median selling price peaked at $230,300. If you bought then — assuming you haven't lost your house to foreclosure — your home has lost some 25% of its value. Nothing to cheer about there.
Our national psyche has been damaged as much as our national economy by the record number of corporate bankruptcies, many of them household names: Kmart, United Airlines, Circuit City, Lehman Brothers, GM and Chrysler. The price of oil more than tripled this decade, settling at more than $70 a barrel, straining our economy.
Read more: The End of the 2000s: Goodbye to a Decade from Hell - TIME
Worst decade for the US since the 1930s? I don't think so.
01. The 00s average unemployment rate and inflation rate were lower than the 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s!
02. The 00s poverty rate was lower than ANY decade in US history with exception of the 1970s.
03. GDP growth throughout the decade was not radically lower than any previous US decade and higher in several cases.
04. The average national debt as a percentage of GDP was higher in the 1990s and 1950s and 1940s.
05. Overall US standard of living increased over the past 10 years.
06. More US citizens go to college and graduate than 10 years ago.
07. The average life expectancy for US citizens has increased.
08. There have been many advances in medicine and technology that have improved the lives of many people in excess of previous decades.
09. Wars in the 1770s, 1780s, 1840s, 1860s, 1910s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, took FAR more US lives than the ones in the 2000s.
10. Ask people in Rawanda and Bosnia and they will tell you the decade from hell was the 1990s and with good reason. Those conflicts killed more people in a shorter amount of time than anything seen worldwide over the past decade.
Bottom line, claiming that the past decade was the decade from hell or the worst decade in US history since the 1930s, perhaps because George Bush was president during most of it, is nothing more than wishful thinking.
You have no concept of basic statistics. The problem with this decade is that we started well and ended shitty. Thus, the problem is in decline, not in average. Any average analysis makes this decade look better because it started off well back during the Clinton administration in 2000.
All this is doing is cherry picking data from 2000 and comparing it to 2009. Thats not representitive of the entire decade by a long shot.
You have no concept of basic statistics. The problem with this decade is that we started well and ended shitty. Thus, the problem is in decline, not in average. Any average analysis makes this decade look better because it started off well back during the Clinton administration in 2000.
Not representative? It's the perfect representation! That's what this decade was: a massive economic tailspin.
Strongbow has no concept of anything, never mind basic statistics.
She has a long history of proving this.
The amazing thing is that you spent all of your posts cherrypicking stats and then accuse us of cherrypicking. Faaaaaantastic.
I didn't cherry pick anything from the 00s. I looked at all the major economic statistics for the decade(EVERY MONTH, EVERY YEAR) and compared it to the other decades.