It's Official: Harvard Professor Declares It The Lost Decade

Update

"Lost Decade": the phrase is now mainstream. I started calling it the "lost decade" about two years ago.

And yet another writer talks about the "Lost Decade."

Original Post

I have a label/tag "Lost Decade" at the bottom of the blog, where the labels/tags are. I don't know when I first started referring to the past ten years as the "Lost Decade" but it was before I first tagged one of my posts back in January, 2011.

Be that as it may, it's interesting that there is yet another writer who refers to the last ten years as the "Lost Decade."

And the past 10 years? Shoes off in the airport. Bruising unemployment. Slipping from first to 12th in college graduation. Even classic loser decades, like the 1930s and 1970s, were more productive than the oughts.

Census figures released this week show that for the first time since the Great Depression median household income, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t risen at all in over a decade. More than 15 percent of Americans now live in poverty, and the income of the bottom 10th has fallen alarmingly. Even the suburban poverty rate is at its highest since the 1960s. The economist Lawrence Katz of Harvard University is now calling it the “Lost Decade.”

Beyond No Child Left Behind (now in the process of being dismantled), President George W. Bush did nothing on the fundamentals. No rebuilding the country, no tax reform (unless you include monster tax cuts), no entitlement reform (unless you include adding a new prescription-drug benefit without paying for it), no energy independence, no immigration reform, no long- term deficit reduction (to the contrary, moving the budget from surplus to deep deficits).

In short, nothing to show for his time in office beyond doing good work on AIDS internationally and the wholly defensive claim that we were not attacked a second time on his watch. Besides Apple products and social networking, what new and exciting developments did the decade give us?

If Obama loses the next election, he won’t be associated with a decade (like George H.W. Bush). If he wins, and serves until 2017, the next 10 years will probably be seen as the Obama decade. Only then will we know if history will view him as something more than the first black U.S. president.

Yup, it's official. If a Harvard professor is calling this the "Lost Decade," then it's the "Lost Decade." And I've been referring to it as such for at least the past two years.