“The standard of living of the average worker has to decline.”
— Paul Volcker, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair, 1980
Welcome back to Dangerous Memory — the podcast where we reconsider everything we thought we knew about the 1980s.
I’m your host Charlie Angus author of the book Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, published by the House of Anansi Press and soon on audio books with Tantor Media. Each episode, we’ll crack open a chapter of the 1980s and ask: what really happened and why does it matter today?
In this next chapter, we take a look at who killed the American dream?
Spoiler alert, it wasn’t Madonna or The Ghostbusters. It was a radical new capitalism led by Milton Friedman and unleashed through the shock doctrine of the 1980s.
“The destruction of the American Dream wasn’t an accident. It was a strategy — engineered at the highest levels of power and sold to the public as freedom.”
We’re going back to the 80’s — let’s get into it.
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