Secular economic stagnation beginning in the 1970s drives immediacy as a novel cultural style

Evidence

Even though crisis has been conventionalized for centuries, present macroeconomic conditions show unusual stress—which sparks immediacy as a novel cultural style. Economists, historians, Marxist theorists, and even former treasury secretary Larry Summers all now concede that a serious crisis grips: capitalist growth began to lag irreversibly in the 1970s, although it took until the late 1990s for this lag to be acknowledged as a long-term trend. … Fifty years later, these declines show no signs of reversing. Objective indicators of decline on the labor side include unemployment, wage stagnation, and diminishing benefits (or responsibilization of workers, rather than companies or governments, for their own health care and retirement); indicators on the capital side include the decreasing rate of founding new firms, decreasing daily number of New York Stock Exchange transactions, corporate stock buybacks, slow rate of computer-chip and equipment improvements, and, most importantly, the deeply slackening rate of business investment. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 52

Categorization

• XREF: The 1970s crisis starting point is a Jamesonian move (Postmodernism bookends the same decades); central to the reader’s goal of judging the author’s structural debt to Jameson. — connects to: The 1970s economic crisis fundamentally changed urban development patterns — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 579; Rising property prices caused the cultural conservatism of recent decades. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1637
• QUESTION: The list of capital-side indicators (buybacks, NYSE transaction counts, chip improvement slowdown) is worth scrutinizing as evidence quality — how robust is the empirical case that growth irreversibly lagged?