Is American Exceptionalism A Historical Quirk?

New York Magazine:

If you buy Gordon’s story, then the effect of the second industrial revolution was to replace the specific entitlement of the Gilded Age (of family, of place of birth) with a powerful general entitlement, earned simply through citizenship. “Just the fact of being an American male and graduating from high school meant you could have a good-paying job and expect that you could have children who would double your own standard of living,” Gordon says. This certainty, that the future would be so much better than the past that it could be detected in the space of a generation, is what we call the American Dream. The phrase itself was coined only in 1931, once the gains of the second industrial revolution had dispersed and inequality had begun to dissipate. There is a whole set of manners, which we have come to think of as part of our national identity, that depends upon this expectation that things will always get better: Our laissez-faire-ism; our can-do-ism; the optimistic cast of our religiosity, which persisted even when other Western nations turned toward atheism; our cult of the individual. We think of the darkening social turn that happened around 1972 as having something to do with the energies of the sixties collapsing in on themselves, but in Gordon’s description something more mechanistic was happening. “The second industrial revolution had run its course,” he says, and so, in many ways, had its social implications.

What happened around 1972 (actually 1971)?   U.S. oil production peaked.  The days of easy energy are over, and we'll pay an economic cost for that going forward.  For all our productivity gains with technology, the drag of lowered return on investment for energy production will be a drain on our economy.  A lot of other things also figure into our stagnation, including a reversion to mean for our standard of living.  Right now the folks at the top are improving their standard of living at the expense of everyone else, while the rest of us slowly start to slide toward the rest of the world population.  I don't think that arrangement can continue for long.  Like Gordon, I do believe that our post-war prosperity was a fluke event.  How we handle the implications of that will be very interesting.