Comment by reconnecting a day ago
And what if this isn't nostalgia, but rather a feeling in people that correlates with external pressure?
U.S. debt in the 1950s was well below $1T, in the 1990s it was something around $3T, now it's $36T.
I'm not talking about old computers themselves, but rather something that's mistakenly taken as nostalgia.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
In other words, I believe at some point there will be a social study explaining that what was mistakenly taken as nostalgia in previous generations is not the same feeling in post-90s generations, simply because the world started collapsing faster and some major economic indicators are objective proof of this - actual accelerating decline rather than just romanticizing the past.
The US debt is, for the most part, a symbol of how large our economy is instead of a representation of how deliriously in debt we are in.
It explicitly excludes the values of the assets that we hold in security of the debt, and is frequently trotted out to remind the little people how terribly large all of the problems in the world are and how hopeless it would be for any of us to try to solve them.
But!
No where in the world is the adage about, "If you owe the bank $100,000 you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $100,000,000 the bank has a problem" more evident than in the US National debt.
America could pay off this debt at any time, but doing so would cause our economy to massively deflate and cause a lot of harm and unhappiness for people all over the world, including Americans.
Not telling us these things gives America a way to inflict fear and control on its populace with no measurable downsides.
I seriously doubt nostalgia for old computers correlates to perceptions of U.S. debt.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.