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> opulence of America in the 90s I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline sin

• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we’ve seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers. Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there. But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.) Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.