1/Younger Millennials – people now 23 through 29 – don't really understand the 1990s, and how amazing they were. So I want to explain.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
2/Yes, in the 90s we had no cell phones, gay marriage, digital cameras, social networks, or black president. What we had were expectations.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
3/Crazy as this sounds, I grew up thinking that a nuclear holocaust was inevitable. In August 1991 that suddenly changed when the USSR fell.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
4/Suddenly *we would live on*. And a wave of freedom spread around the globe. It really was the End of History.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
5/Then in the mid-90s, the web browser came into being. And the whole world suddenly opened up – like discovering a fourth dimension.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
6/Before 1994, if you wanted to know something, you had to ask someone, or look in a *paper encyclopedia*. Can you imagine that?
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
7/Now with a few button presses you could chat with millions of strangers, all over the world. That changed in 1 or 2 years!!
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
8/At the same time, society changed rapidly. My mom was a housewife in the 80s. By 2000, women were executives, managers, lawyers, doctors!
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
9/The 80s were the peak of the Great Crime Wave. Cities were no-go zones. My year had the highest teen crime rate ever recorded.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
10/Then suddenly in half a decade, the siege lifted. Crime fell by more than half. You could live in cities again.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
11/And the increase in material prosperity – partly from women going to work – was just incredible from the mid-80s through 2000.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
12/The productivity slowdown vanished. Everyone was a technology optimist. We were living in a Vinge novel – this was the Singularity!
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
13/Of course, the tech bubble took this to new heights. Kids in my freshman dorm got rich over the summer interning for Amazon.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
14/We barely worried about what kind of job we would get. Something would turn up. We would be rich as soon as we got tired of video games.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
15/We thought that this new rate of improvement was The New Normal. In economics terms, we had extrapolative expectations.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
16/And as Miles Kimball would tell you, happiness comes from improvements in future prospects. https://t.co/8BkYHa9GEj
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
17/The capitalized value of those extrapolative expectations, and the happiness we derived from them, were what made the 90s amazing.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
18/Then we had Bush, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Putin, the rise of China, Lehman, the Great Recession, the Tea Party, and now…f*****g Trump?!!
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
19/15 years of flat incomes, the breakup of the family, slowing productivity, inequality, polarization, and the end of Pax Americana. 😛
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
20/All the good dreams of the 90s might still come true, but now we know it will be a longer, harder, bumpier road to reach them. (end)
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 29, 2016
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3 Responses to Hey, Hey, It’s the 90’s!
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It sure wasn’t as if the entire decade was a Golden Age. There was a nasty recession at the beginning of the decade, fueled in part by real estate hyperinflation (a lesson completely forgot in 15 years). It wasn’t until 1993 that things clearly were better.
Crime followed a similar pattern, very bad in the first years and not appreciably better until mid-decade. And there was Islamic terrorism too, the Black Hawk Down incident and the East African embassy bombings.
Yeah, “The 90’s” as we think of them began around 1993 or so, and didn’t end until 9/11 (though the cracks started showing with the economic downturn).
Culturally, the early 90’s are often looked at as being closer to the 80’s. The things that made the 80’s the 80’s didn’t quite fizzle out on schedule. (Not just “Republican in the White House” but music and hair and whatnot also.)
I admit to thinking “man, right around the time I hit my 40’s, the Baby Boomers will start retiring!” somewhere around 1997-1998.