What was society like in the 1980s

In November , it emerged that the White House had secretly sold arms to Iran in an effort to win the freedom of U. Oliver North , a member of the National Security Council. By early , the United States was experiencing its worst recession since the Great Depression. Nine million people were unemployed in November of that year.

Businesses closed, families lost their homes and farmers lost their land. Despite its mixed track record, a majority of Americans still believed in the conservative agenda by the late s. When Ronald Reagan left office in , he had the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Bush, soundly defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the presidential election.

In some respects, the popular culture of the s reflected the era's political conservatism. For many people, the symbol of the decade was the "yuppie": a baby boomer with a college education, a well-paying job and expensive taste. Many people derided yuppies for being self-centered and materialistic, and surveys of young urban professionals across the country showed that they were, indeed, more concerned with making money and buying consumer goods than their parents and grandparents had been.

However, in some ways yuppiedom was less shallow and superficial than it appeared. They were successful, but they weren't sure they were happy.

At the movie theater, the s was the age of the blockbuster. The s was also the heyday of the teen movie. By the end of the s, 60 percent of American television owners got cable service—and the most revolutionary cable network of all was MTV, which made its debut on August 1, The music videos the network played made stars out of bands like Duran Duran and Culture Club and made megastars out of artists like Michael Jackson , whose elaborate "Thriller" video helped sell , albums in the five days after its first broadcast.

MTV also influenced fashion: People across the country and around the world did their best to copy the hairstyles and fashions they saw in music videos. In this way, artists like Madonna became and remain fashion icons. As the decade wore on, MTV also became a forum for those who went against the grain or were left out of the yuppie ideal.

Even as Reagan maintained his popularity, popular culture continued to be an arena for dissatisfaction and debate throughout the s. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Operation Rescue demonstrated that the fight over abortion would grow only more heated in the s. When AIDS appeared in the early s, most of its victims were gay men.

The epidemic rekindled older pseudo-scientific ideas about inherently diseased nature of homosexual bodies. Some turned to confrontation—like New York playwright Larry Kramer. By the middle of the decade the federal government began to address the issue haltingly. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, called for more federal funding on AIDS-related research, much to the dismay of critics on the religious right.

The shift encouraged activists. Nevertheless, on issues of abortion and gay rights—as with the push for racial equality—activists spent the s preserving the status quo rather than building on previous gains. This amounted to a significant victory for the New Right. Poster, c. Skip to main content. The Rise of the Right. Sure enough, about a generation after the introduction of personal computers in the workplace, work processes begin mutating enough to take full advantage of the tool. Soon after, economists figure out how to accurately measure the true gains in productivity—and take into account the nebulous concept of improvement in quality rather than just quantity.

By , the US government adopts a new information-age standard of measuring economic growth. Unsurprisingly, actual growth rates are higher than what had registered on the industrial-age meter.

The US economy is growing at sustained rates of around 4 percent—rates not seen since the s. The turn of the century marks another major shift in government policy, as the hidebound analysis of inflation is finally abandoned in light of the behavior of the new economy. While the Vietnam War, oil shocks, and relatively closed national labor markets had caused genuine inflationary pressures that wreaked havoc on the economy through the s, the tight monetary policies of the s soon harness the inflation rate and lead to a solid decade with essentially no wage or price rises.

By the s, globalization and international competition add to the downward pressure. By , policymakers finally come around to the idea that you can grow the economy at much higher rates and still avoid the spiral of inflation.

The millennium also marks a symbolic changing of the guard at the Federal Reserve Bank: Alan Greenspan retires, the Fed lifts its foot off the brake, and the US economy really begins to take off. Right about the turn of the century, the third of the five waves of technology kicks in. After a couple false starts in the s and s, biotechnology begins to transform the medical field.

One benchmark comes in with the completion of the Human Genome Project, the effort to map out all human genes. That understanding of our genetic makeup triggers a series of breakthroughs in stopping genetic disease.

Around , a gene therapy for cancer is perfected. Five years later, almost one-third of the 4, known genetic diseases can be avoided through genetic manipulation. Throughout the early part of the century, the combination of a deeper understanding of genetics, human biology, and organic chemistry leads to a vast array of powerful medications and therapies.

The health care system, having faced a crossroads in with President Clinton's proposed national plan, continues restructuring along the more decentralized, privatized model of HMOs.

The industry is already booming when biotech advances begin clicking in the first decade of the century. It receives a further stimulus when the baby boomers begin retiring en masse in The industry becomes a big jobs provider for years to come. The biotech revolution profoundly affects another economic sector—agriculture.

The same deeper understanding of genetics leads to much more precise breeding of plants. By about , most US produce is being genetically engineered by these new direct techniques. The same process takes place with livestock. In , the cloning of sheep in the United Kingdom startles the world and kicks off a flurry of activity in this field. By the turn of the century, prize livestock is being genetically tweaked as often as traditionally bred. By about , animals are used for developing organs that can be donated to humans.

Superproductive animals and ultrahardy, high-yielding plants bring another veritable green revolution to countries sustaining large populations.

By the end of the transitional era, around , real advances begin to be made in the field of biological computation, where billions of relatively slow computations, done at the level of DNA, can be run simultaneously and brought together in the aggregate to create the ultimate in parallel processing.

So-called DNA computing looks as though it will bring about big advances in the speed of processing sometime after —certainly by the middle of the century.

Then comes the fourth technology wave—nanotechnology. Once the realm of science fiction, this microscopic method of construction becomes a reality in Scientists and engineers figure out reliable methods to construct objects one atom at a time. Among the first commercially viable products are tiny sensors that can enter a person's bloodstream and bring back information about its composition. By , these micromachines are able to do basic cell repair.

However, nanotechnology promises to have a much more profound impact on traditional manufacturing as the century rolls on. Theoretically, most products could be produced much more efficiently through nanotech techniques. By , the theory is still far from proven, but small desktop factories for producing simple products arrive. By about , nanotech techniques begin to be applied to the development of computing at the atomic level.

Quantum computing, rather than DNA computing, proves to be the heir to microprocessors in the short run. In working up to the billion-transistor microprocessor in , engineers seem to hit insurmountable technical barriers: the scale of integrated circuits has shrunk so small that optical-lithography techniques fail to function. Fortunately, just as the pace of microprocessing power begins to wane, quantum computing clicks in.

Frequent increases in computing power once again promise to continue unabated for the foreseeable future. All four waves of technology coursing through this era—computers, telecom, biotech, and nanotech—contribute to a surge of economic activity. In the industrial era, a booming economy would have put a severe strain on the environment: basically everything we made, we cooked, and such high-temperature cooking creates a lot of waste by-products.

The logic of the era also tended toward larger and larger factories, which created pollution at even greater scales. Biotech, on the other hand, uses more moderate temperature realms and emulates the processes of nature, creating much less pollution. Infotech, which moves information electronically rather than physically, also makes much less impact on the natural world. Moving information across the United States through the relatively simple infotechnology of the fax, for example, proves to be seven times more energy efficient than sending it through Federal Express.

Furthermore, these technologies are on an escalating track of constant refinement, with each new generation becoming more and more energy efficient, with lower and lower environmental impact. Even so, these increasing efficiencies are not enough to counteract the juggernaut of a booming global economy.

Fortunately, the fifth wave of new technology—alternative energy—arrives right around the turn of the century with the introduction of the hybrid electric car. Stage one begins in the late s when automobile companies such as Toyota roll out vehicles using small diesel- or gasoline-fueled internal-combustion engines to power an onboard generator that then drives small electric motors at each wheel. The car runs on electric power at low RPMs but uses the internal-combustion engine at highway speeds, avoiding the problem of completely battery-powered electric vehicles that run out of juice after 60 miles.

The early hybrids are also much more efficient than regular gas-powered cars, often getting 80 miles to a gallon. Stage two quickly follows, this time spurred by aerospace companies such as Allied Signal, which leverage their knowledge of jet engines to build hybrids powered by gas turbines. By , technology previously confined to aircraft's onboard electric systems successfully migrates to automobiles. These cars use natural gas to power the onboard generators, which then drive the electric motors at the wheels.

They also make use of superstrong, ultralight new materials that take the place of steel and allow big savings on mileage. Then comes the third and final stage: hybrids using hydrogen fuel cells.

The simplest and most abundant atom in the universe, hydrogen becomes the source of power for electric generators—with the only waste product being water. No exhaust. No carbon monoxide. Just water. The basic hydrogen-power technology had been developed as far back as the Apollo space program, though then it was still extremely expensive and had a nasty tendency to blow up. By the late s, research labs such as British Columbia-based Ballard Power Systems are steadily developing the technology with little public fanfare.

Within 10 years, there are transitional hydrogen car models that extract fuel from ordinary gasoline, using the existing network of pumps. By , hydrogen is being processed in refinery-like plants and loaded onto cars that can go thousands of miles—and many months—before refueling. The technology is vastly cheaper and safer than in the s and well on its way to widespread use. These technological developments drive nothing less than a wholesale transformation of the automobile industry through the first quarter of the new century.

Initially prodded by government decrees such as California's zero-emission mandate—which called for 10 percent of new cars sold to have zero emissions by —the industrial behemoths begin to pick up speed when an actual market for hybrid cars opens up.

People buy them not because they are the environmentally correct option but because they're sporty, fast, and fun. And the auto companies build them because executives see green—as in money, not trees. This to year industrial retooling sends reverberations throughout the global economy.

The petrochemical giants begin switching from maintaining vast networks that bring oil from remote Middle Eastern deserts to building similarly vast networks that supply the new elements of electrical power. Fossil fuels will continue to be a primary source of power into the middle of the 21st century—but they will be clean fossil fuels. By , almost all new cars are hybrid vehicles, mostly using hydrogen power.

That development alone defuses much of the pressure on the global environment. The world may be able to support quite a few additional automobile drivers—including nearly 2 billion Chinese.

While the end of the Cold War initiates the waves of technology rippling through our year era, that's only half the story. The other half has to do with an equally powerful force: globalization.

While it is spurred by new technologies, the emergence of an interconnected planet is propelled more by the power of an idea—the idea of an open society. From a historical vantage point, globalization also begins right around One of the souls who best articulates this idea of the open society is Mikhail Gorbachev. It's Gorbachev who helps bring about some of its most dramatic manifestations: the fall of the Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the end of the Cold War.

He helps inititate a vast wave of political change that includes the democratization of eastern Europe and Russia itself. To kick it off, Gorbachev introduces two key concepts to his pals in the Politburo in , two ideas that will resonate not just in the Soviet Union but through all the world. One is glasnost. The other is perestroika. Openness and restructuring—the formula for the age, the key ingredients of the long boom.

An equally important character is China's Deng Xiaoping. His actions don't bring about the same dramatic political change, but right around the same time as Gorbachev, Deng initiates a similarly profound shift of policies, applying the concepts of openness and restructuring to the economy.

This process of opening up—creating free trade and free markets—ultimately makes just as large a global impact. No place is this more apparent than in Asia. Japan grasps the gist of this economic formula long before the buzz begins, pulling a group of Asian early adopter countries in its wake.

By the s, Japan has nearly perfected the industrial-age manufacturing economy. But by , the rules of the global economy have changed to favor more nimble, innovative processes, rather than meticulous, methodical economies of scale. Many of the attributes that favored Japan in the previous era, such as a commitment to lifelong employment and protected domestic markets, work against the country this time around.

Japan enters the long slump of the s. By the end of the decade, Japan has watched the United States crack the formula for success in the networked economy and begins to adopt the model in earnest. In , it radically liberalizes many of its previously protected domestic markets—a big stimulus for the world economy at large.

Japan's rise, however, is but a prelude to the ascendance of China. In , Deng takes the first steps toward liberalizing the communist economy. China slowly gathers force through the s, until the annual growth in the gross national product consistently tops 10 percent. By the s, the economy is growing at a torrid pace, with the entire coast of China convulsed with business activity and boomtowns sprouting all over the place.

Nineteen ninety-seven—a year marked by both the death of Deng and the long-awaited return of Hong Kong—symbolizes the end of China's ideological transition and the birth of a real economic world power.

The first decade of the new century poses many problems for China domestically—and for the rest of the world. The overheated economy puts severe strain on the fabric of Chinese society, particularly between the increasingly affluent urban areas on the coast and the million impoverished peasants in the interior. The nation's relatively low tech smokestack economy also threatens to single-handedly push the global environment over the edge.

The Chinese initially do little to reduce their level of dependence on coal, which in the late s still supplies three-quarters of the country's energy needs.

Only sustained efforts by the rest of the world to ensure that China has access to the very best transportation and industrial technology avert an environmental catastrophe. Occasionally using draconian measures, China manages to avoid severe internal disturbance.

By , the sense of crisis has dissipated. China is generally acknowledged to be on a path toward more democratic politics—though not in the image of the West. With the reemergence of China's economic might, the 3,year-old civilization begins to assert itself and play a larger part in shaping the world.

Chinese clan-based culture happens to work very well within the fluid demands of the networked global economy. Singapore and Hong Kong prove the point through the s and s, when the two city-states with almost no land mass or natural resources become economic powers through pure human capital, primarily brainpower. For years, Chinese expatriates have established intricate financial networks throughout Western countries, but especially in Asia.

Many Southeast Asian economies—if not governments—are completely dominated by the overseas Chinese. By about , the mainland Chinese decide to capitalize on this by formalizing the Chinese diaspora. Though the entity has no legal status vis-a-vis other governments, it has substantial economic clout.

That date also marks the absorption of Taiwan into China proper. By , the Chinese economy has grown to be the largest in the world. Though the US economy is more technologically sophisticated, and its population more affluent, China and the United States are basically on a par. China has also drawn much of Asia in its economic wake—Hong Kong and Shanghai are the key financial nodes for this intricate Asian world. Asia is jammed with countries that are economic powerhouses in their own right.

India builds on its top-notch technical training and mastery of the lingua franca of the high tech world, English, to challenge many Western countries in software development. Malaysia's audacious attempt to jump-start an indigenous high tech sector through massive investments in a multimedia supercorridor pays off.

The former communist countries Vietnam and Cambodia turn out to be among the most adept at capitalism. The entire region—from the reunited Koreas to Indonesia to the subcontinent—is booming. In just 20 years, 2 billion people have made the transition into what can be considered a middle-class lifestyle.

In the space of one full year life span, Asia has gone from almost uninterrupted poverty to widespread wealth. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the new principles of openness and restructuring are applied first in politics, then economics. In the aftermath of the spectacular implosion of the Soviet Union, most energy is spent promoting democracy and dismantling the vestiges of the Cold War. With time, an equal amount of energy is applied to restructuring and retooling economies—in some obvious and not so obvious ways.

First, Europe at large has to reintegrate itself, both economically and politically. Much of the s is spent trying to integrate eastern and western Europe. All eyes first focus on the new Germany, which powers through the process on the basis of sheer financial might. The more problematic countries of eastern Europe aren't accepted into the union for another couple years. Alongside this East-West integration comes a more subtle integration between the western European countries.

With fits and starts, Europe moves toward the establishment of one truly integrated entity. The European currency—the euro—is adopted in , with a few laggards, like Britain, holding out a few more years. Though the UK may have dragged its feet on the European currency measure, in an overall sense it's far ahead of the pack. The economic imperative of the era is not just to integrate externally but to restructure internally. Right around , Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan begin putting together the formula that eventually leads toward the new economy.

At the time it looks brutal: busting unions, selling off state-owned industries, and dismantling the welfare state. In hindsight, the pain pays off. By the mids, the US unemployment rate is near 5 percent, and the British rate has dropped to almost 6 percent. In contrast, unemployment on the European continent hovers at 11 percent, with some individual countries even higher. Indeed, through the s, the rest of Europe remains trapped in the legacy of its welfare states, which maintain their political attractiveness long after they outlive their economic worth.

By , chronic unemployment and mounting government deficits finally force leaders on the continent to act. Despite widespread popular protests, especially in France, Europe goes through a painful economic restructuring much like the United States did a decade before.

As part of this perestroika, it retools its economy using the new information technologies. This restructuring, both of corporations and governments, has much the same effect it had on the US economy. The European economy begins to surge and create many new jobs. By about , Europe—particularly in the northern countries like Germany—even has the beginnings of a serious labor shortage as aging populations begin to retire. Then the Russian economy kicks in.

For 15 years, Russia had been stumbling along in its transition to a capitalist economy, periodically frightening the West with overtures that it might return to its old militaristic ways.

But after almost two decades of wide-open Mafia-style capitalism, Russia emerges in about with the basic underpinnings of a solid economy. Enough people are invested in the new system, and enough of the population has absorbed the new work ethic, that the economy can function quite well—with few reasons to fear a retrenchment. This normalization finally spurs massive foreign investment that helps the Russians exploit their immense natural resources, and the skills of a highly educated populace.

These people also provide a huge market for Europe and the rest of the world. By the close of the 20th century, the more developed Western nations are forging ahead on a path of technology-led growth, and booming Asia is showing the unambiguous benefits of developing market economies and free trade.

The path for the rest of the world seems clear. Openness and restructuring. Restructuring and openness. Individually, nations begin adopting the formula of deregulating, privatizing, opening up to foreign investment, and cutting government deficits. Collectively, they sign onto international agreements that accelerate the process of global integration—and fuel the long boom. Two milestones come in the Information Technology Agreement, in which almost all countries trading in IT agree to abolish tariffs by , and the Global Telecommunications Accord, in which almost 70 leading nations agree to rapidly deregulate their domestic telecom markets.

These two developments quickly spread the two key technologies of the era: computers and telecommunications. Everyone benefits, particularly the underdeveloped economies, which take advantage of the leapfrog effect, adopting the newest, cheapest, best technology rather than settling for obsolete junk.

IT creates a remarkable dynamic that brings increasing power, performance, and quality to each new generation of the technology—plus big drops in price. Also, wireless telecommunications allow countries to avoid the huge effort and expense of building wired infrastructures through crowded cities and diffuse countrysides. This all bodes well for the world economy. Through most of the s, all the s, and the early s, the real growth rate in the world's gross domestic product averages 3 percent.

By , the rate tops a robust 4 percent. By , it hits an astounding 6 percent. Continued growth at this rate will double the size of the world economy in just 12 years, doubling it twice in just 25 years. This level of growth surpasses the rates of the last global economic boom, the years following World War II, which averaged 4. And this growth comes off a much broader economic base, making it more remarkable still.

Unlike the last time, almost every region of the planet, even in the undeveloped world, participates in the bonanza. Latin America takes off. These countries, after experiencing the nightmare of debt in the s, do much to vigorously restructure their economies in the s.

Chile and Argentina are particularly innovative, and Brazil builds on an extensive indigenous high tech sector. But the real boost from onward comes from capitalizing on Latin America's strategic location on the booming Pacific Rim and on its proximity to the United States. The region becomes increasingly drawn into the booming US economy. By about , an All American Free Trade Agreement is signed—integrating the entire hemisphere into one unified market.

The Middle East, meanwhile, enters crisis. Two main factors drive the region's problems. One, the fundamentalist Muslim mind-set is particularly unsuited to the fluid demands of the digital age.

The new economy rewards experimentation, constant innovation, and challenging the status quo—these attributes, however, are shunned in many countries throughout the Middle East. Many actually get more traditional in response to the furious pace of change. The other factor driving the crisis is outside their control. The advent of hydrogen power clearly undermines the centrality of oil in the world economy. By , with the auto industry in a mad dash to convert, the bottom falls out of the oil market.

The Middle Eastern crisis comes to a head. Some of the old monarchies and religious regimes begin to topple. An even more disturbing crisis hits Africa. While some parts of the continent, such as greater South Africa, are doing fine, central Africa devolves into a swirl of brutal ethnic conflict, desperate poverty, widespread famine and disease.

In the introduction of biological weapons in an ethnic conflict, combined with the outbreak of a terrifying new natural disease, brings the death count to unimagined levels: an estimated 5 million people die in the space of six months—this on top of a cumulative death toll of roughly million who perished prematurely over the previous two decades.

The contrast between such destitution and the spreading prosperity elsewhere finally prods the planet into collective action. Every nation, the world comes to understand, ultimately can only benefit from a thriving Africa, which will occupy economic niches that other nations are outgrowing. It makes as much practical as humanitarian sense.